Forever Cursed

My name is Lily Evans. People always think that I am a strange girl…but I guess people have it right. I am a strange girl. Ever since I was eight years old I’ve had these…visions I guess you could call them. My mom had them too and so did my grandma. I guess the visions were a Milani trait. That was my grandma’s maiden name.
Her name was Diane and she was a pure Italian, born and raised in Italy. She had dark brown curly hair, brown eyes, tan skin and a rough yet gentle attitude. She married at 16 to my grandpa, David who was 17. They soon had my aunt, Mary, and a couple years later moved to America to start a new life. Grandma stayed at home to cook, clean and watch her daughter while my Grandpa went to work.
They had been in America for about two years, finally starting to actually learn and speak English when my other two aunts, Lisa and Caroline came along, they were twins. Then finally three years after that, they had their youngest daughter, Maria, my mom.
My mom was amazing! She had short brown hair that had soft waves in it, kind of like mine. Her slim figure was short. She was always there for me no matter what happened. She was kind and gentle but always stood up for what she believed in. She was also really cool! We liked a lot of the same music, books and movies! My mom was practically my best friend.
So you see, my grandma, just as my mom and I, had these…visions, visions of things that were about to happen. My grandma would tell my mom stories about times when she would have them. Sometimes they would be about people that were directly related to her life and other times it was people she hardly knew at all.
I will never forget the one story my mom told me about my grandma. It was when she was pregnant with Lisa and Caroline. She had a doctor’s appointment the next day and it would tell the gender of her soon to be child. She tried and tried to get some sleep that night but she just couldn’t. Quietly she padded out of bed and out to the living room, careful not to wake up four year old Mary. Plopping down on the couch, she flicked on the TV. She really wasn’t paying attention to what she was watching and didn’t bother trying to find something she wanted to watch. Her eyes traveled over to the clock, 2 A.M. She sighed; she didn’t even know what was on at two in the morning. Diane rested her head against the back of the old loveseat and eventually she started to slip into sleep.
She was in her kitchen, cooking breakfast for her family. It looked like a pan of scrambled eggs with chopped zucchini, and also a pan of bacon. It must’ve been a Sunday; she only made a big breakfast on Sunday’s.
“Mary!” she called for her daughter to come help her set the table.
“Coming mom!” she called back. Her daughter appeared in the kitchen doorway, and she looked older but that wasn’t the only odd thing about the scene…she was carrying a baby! Diane’s eyes grew about ten times their normal size. “Daddy will be in soon with the other one, she needed her diaper changed” the young girl reported as she pulled out a highchair and set the baby girl down in it. Still in utter shock Grandma stood still trying to make sense of things as the bacon started to burn.
Sure enough, just as Mary had said, her husband traipsed into the room, dark bags under his eyes, carrying yet another baby girl. A huge smile replaced the look of shock and confusion on her face.
She woke with a start, almost falling off the couch. That’s when she just knew that she was going to have twin girls. Pulling herself up from the couch she turned off the TV and the hall light and went to bed.
The next day her husband drove her to the doctor’s office after dropping Mary off at school. Grandma rubbed her hand over her enlarged stomach; she couldn’t believe that there were TWO beautiful baby girls in there. And just as she had seen the night before in her dream, the sonogram showed two heads both belonging to girls. And as mom said “the rest is history”.
Now not all visions are always good. Actually they are more commonly bad, but grandma only liked to remember and re-tell the “good” ones; same with my mom. Although my mother has told me about some of the bad ones…
When she was a little girl she had a friend named Anna. They played all the time and were great friends. When they were about eight years old Anna’s family went on a vacation, but her aunt who lived with them stayed behind to watch the house. However Anna’s family would be coming back the next and my mom was extremely excited to see her friend whom she hadn’t seen in a week. She went to bed that night and quickly fell asleep. Soon she was deep into a dream.
A woman, probably in her forties appeared by her bedside. She had a ghostly appearance that sent a shiver down Maria’s back. “Follow me.” Was all that the transparent women said before heading towards the window. Maria followed her platinum blonde hair and soon they disappeared from Maria’s room and ended up outside a house that she recognized to be Anna’s. There was a light on in the bathroom and suddenly an ear-piercing shriek echoed from inside the house. Mom ran towards it, the ghostly woman close behind, and glimpsed into the bathroom window. There she saw a woman who looked oddly similar to the one who had brought her here, lying in the bathtub. Then at a second look she saw the curling iron, still plugged into the wall, floating beside the woman in the bathtub. It must’ve slipped off the counter. Maria started to cry as she realized what had happened and who it was. The woman, who was Anna’s aunt, was electrocuted when the curling iron fell in. It was too late now; there wasn’t anything she could do.
Maria now looked up at the fading woman standing beside her. She had a solemn look in her eyes and whispered “I didn’t know who else to get. Please help me. Please” tears filled the woman’s eyes as she slowly disappeared.
Maria awoke with her face wet from tears. Even though she was only eight she knew that there was something more to her dream than just a dream. Scrambling out of bed she ran towards her parent’s room, tears streaming down her face. She shook her mom awake and as calmly as she could, told her that they needed to get over to Anna’s house. Just by the look in her daughter’s eyes Diane knew she had to do as she said.
It was nearing six in the morning as they approached Anna’s house. The bathroom light was on. Since they didn’t have a key they made their way through the lawn to the window. The scene from Maria’s dream was right there in front of them. Grandma looked down at mom with knowing eyes as she gave her a tight hug and went back to the car to retrieve her cell phone. After digging around in her purse she found it and quickly called the police. Diane told them that she heard a scream and came over to check on things.
She didn’t want to tell them that her eight year old daughter had a dream that it had happened. They would think that she was crazy and send her to a physc ward or something. None of her other daughters had gotten it but she knew that it was inevitable; one of them would. And sure enough her youngest daughter had started “the visions”.
Mom told me that that had been her first vision and that grandma had explained to her what they were after it and she had them ever since. She said that grandma told her that they had started when she was eight years old too. Shortly after though grandma died when my mom was 14 which she says she had foreseen coming but she just didn’t want to admit it. Her father, my grandpa then raised the four girls but so much work made it an early death for him too and he died just one month before I was born.
Sure enough just following the tradition now, I had my first vision when I was eight years old. Just like my mom I was the youngest but I only had one sibling, an older brother, who is five years older than me.
My first vision was that my dog was going to die. He did the next morning. I have never had another pet since then; I was always too scared. As I continued to grow up I continued to see things before they would happen…although I never really saw what would happen to people in my family it was always someone I didn’t know.
What was scary about it though was that by the time I saw what would happen I couldn’t change anything. No matter how hard I tried I just couldn’t change it!
So when I turned fourteen and I had a dream that my neighbors were standing over a coffin in the local funeral home, I feared that it was my mother. I saw the pattern and both of us always expected that it would happen but it didn’t make the blow any less painful.
I was fourteen; I didn’t have a mom anymore, the only grandparents I had lived in Kansas, my dad was slowly falling apart and letting the alcohol take him away, as my mom’s death had been quite hard on him and on top of all of that I kept seeing these bad things happening to people that I didn’t even know and I couldn’t help and it drove me insane.
Well somehow I managed through the next couple of years, probably thanks to my brother. Jason was 19 when our mom died and somehow still kept his grades up in college. He made me feel like if he could go through all of this AND college I could at least make it through high school.
So I tried hard every day in school. Not only in my classes but I also tried hard at avoiding people. I felt like if I got too attached to someone my vision thing would start to affect them or their family and I did not want that to happen. Maybe it was the story about my mom and her friend Anna’s aunt that scared me about getting attached to people. So I don’t really have friends; just acquaintances. Although when my mom died I really think it affected me and I just kinda shut myself out from everyone…except for Jason that is.
Looking back on it now I realized just how much I changed. I started listening to music all the time and wearing darker clothes and I even put purple streaks in my wavy brown hair. I wear glasses and was going to get colored contacts but I don’t know, I kinda like my hazel eyes; that’s about the only thing that was different from me, my mom and my grandma. They both had dark brown eyes but I somehow got hazel ones.
So now here I am, 17 years old, at the end of my junior year just trying to make it through. My music being one of the only things that’s helped me hang on. Although my visions have started getting really bad lately and its really starting to wear down on me…well that and finals.