Hurt people hurt people, a succinct truism that falls on the deaf ears of the Forthright High student body. Perhaps if the expression was scribbled on a whiteboard in homeroom, or if it had been used in any of the episodes of Euphoria or Attack on Titan, or if family vlog youtubers had any ounce of remotely philosophical output, it would have been heard by those that need it most, dampening the pain of Elyse's school life with some clarity.
She would have no idea that her curly hair (being the only one of three total mixed students at the school) was not really as despised as she perceived it to be. She had no idea that the kids who often ridiculed it only did so out of envy. She had no one to tell her how beautiful it really was.
She also had no idea that Jeremy, a vulgar, idle-looking classmate that put her down every opportunity he could, was only doing so out of a lust-driven confusion, subconsciously manifesting the relationship between his trailerbound parents. Elyse did not know, because how could she? No one in her classes would have the psychological insight to soothe her mind. Perhaps her father would, but she dared not mention a single word about school. God forbid she dragged any ounce of misery from there into her home. She wouldn't have friends over, and didn't even like doing homework at home, always staying after in the library to finish any worksheets. Walking past the detention kids after staying several hours to get a week's worth of study papers done and feeling that sweet, chilly breeze through the front door as the sun warmed her face was the one thing she looked forward to every day. In her trance, a question;
"Ellie, did you fall in mud?"
Flattered that an unknown voice was showing her concern, she turned around with some pep, only to disappointedly reveal Jeremy.
"Oh, wait... no, sorry, that's just your face." He flashed a ratty smile with dry rosy cheeks, his short brown hair had a cowlick in the back. He exhaled air in a nervous laugh before turning away, gripping his backpack straps with an unnecessarily aggressive amount of tightness.
She rolled her eyes, turned away and continued walking the other direction. She always wanted to deliver an insult that would level his ego. She'd dwell about it the entire thirty minutes walking home. It would occupy her mind randomly throughout the rest of the day, especially during showers, brooding beneath lathered soap and steam, until finally, something substantial to respond with. She'd pray for him to be unoriginal and slip up one day, and while off guard, she'd level him. But he was always too quick. As soon as she was prepared, he'd throw a curveball.
She hated him. He exemplified everything wrong with the school system, with people, with the world. In her darkest fantasies, she'd scare herself with how great of detail the gruesome acts appeared; his swollen face, encrusted with snot, sweat, and spit, mouth extruding blood and teeth onto the pavement as she delivered debilitating blows to his torso and face. She imagined his shaky hand lifting up in a meager attempt to block a blow, before snapping his arm bone with a football punt.
She felt twisted. Snapping out of the fantasy revealed her room, dim lit by cascading sunset, smelling of faux berries and autumn from a flickering candle. The track switched from Drake to SZA on her portable speaker. Cool nostalgic gusts gently flipped the floral curtains up. Outside the window, an excellent view of a busy district from half a mile down the hill. She loved the lights and cars from this apartment floor. She dragged over a novelty plush chair that she imagined people would sit in when she had them over, but it was utilized very rarely. It was angled toward the window. She sat and had a view of the sun disappearing beneath the horizon, the stars making their appearance above the soothing dusk breeze. A local pizza chain was just close enough for her to barely catch a whiff of greasy cheese from time to time.
A bedside lamp illuminated the rough pages of a tattered paperback on the mythology of Greek Goddesses. Their aesthetic perfection haunted her. They would never tolerate a Jeremy, smiting any who dared not bow before them. Elyse was at an impressionable age where she truly believed that a mystical feminine presence would guide her someday; desperate for a super power, a trip to a wizard school, or getting caught between a vampire and werewolf's love, her imagination was too big for the cold practicality of mundane existence.
She dozed off with visions of beauty in her mind; close friends, idyllic hillside towns, a community, a water park on the fourth of July, fireworks and screams occupy the senses as she would make her way through crowds of Hawaiian shirts and bikinis. Sleep.
A dark forest illuminated by the moon. Stone pillars stretching in impossible loops, in worship of something of grave significance. Between them, a warm light. A silhouette of arms outstretched, long hair. Elyse paced slowly, crackling twigs with each barefoot step. A hum grew as she approached, at first industrial, then angelic.
Light backlit the mysterious being. From what features Elyse could make out, she resembled a model; everything from her skin to her proportions seemed unreal, as if her aura had never been observed before. Elyse had met a lot of people, but no other being gave off this energy; dark, yet beautiful. She felt understood in her presence. Words came through and pierced the heavenly ambience of hums.
"I know you. You ache. Your soul is burning."
Elyse stood paralyzed before the now obvious beauty of the woman before her, tears streaming down, light intensifying with warmth, awestruck.
An apple, impossibly as bright as the sun, blinded her as it manifested in the palm of the woman.
"Your foes are mirrors, your beauty is internal, yet you are blind. A gift. You will awake, and your shadow will become clear."
Elyse felt that these words were of immense poignance, yet failed to understand it. All that was clear was that she should embrace the apple. Lightning seemed to burst from the apple as her hand met it. She was blind again, convulsing orgasmically, a fever, a seizure, birth, Heaven.
And in spite of the intensity, her eyes gently opened with a calm heart, the ethereal strings of Radiohead pierced through the tinny speakers of her phone as it flashed 6:00 AM. She breathed cool morning air with a newfound peace, an unfamiliar sense of preparedness, confidence. The alarm and dread of school often stressed her heartbeats, oftentimes her chest felt sunken, head tiredly sore, brows furrowed, but today's beginning was inexplicably different.
In the midst of her morning routine somewhere between the pantry raid for fruit or careful shirt selection, an esoteric byproduct of the newfound determination induced by the dream, a strange feeling, as if a neural pathway had been unblocked after years of dormancy. She stared at herself in her body length bedroom mirror only donning undergarments. She stretched and posed confidently. For the first time, she knew she was perfect.
Brushing her teeth, something in her screamed for itself to manifest. She stopped brushing. What is this intrusive thought? It's nothing like a typical, self-deprecative one. It's seemingly alien in origin. She looked at the Basil and Lemon handsoap and concentrated, not sure what about at first. It took ten seconds for the light to switch, the neural pathway to activate, the manifestation process begun. The handsoap, inexplicably, miraculously, dwindled in size to a quarter of what it was.
Elyse jumped in terror and bruised her ass on the cigarette stained tile floor, desperately slipping around to get her footing to sprint as fast as possible to her bedroom.
She breathed and kept her cool, toothbrush still in mouth. Her heart settled down. Had to be fake. She walked back brushing it off as a tired hallucination. First look at the sink indicated it wasn't.
A random scientific occurrence? Stranger things have happened. She considered it to be a fluke, before conducting the same experiment on a hair brush, cardboard toilet paper roll, and Q-tip. Her panic evolved into excitement before hiding all of the now dollhouse sized objects under her bed before skipping gleefully out the door.