Seeker

“What am I?” I whisper, running my fingertips across the cool surface of the mirror, across the clear reflection of the girl gazing back at me. She’s familiar, the same girl and the same face I see every time I look in a mirror or in a glass window. But I don’t know who she is. I don’t know what she was.
“What am I?” I whisper again, my voice getting louder as the frustration settles back in, growing and growing until I’m clutching at the surface of the mirror, franticly trying to grab hold of the girl inside, to pull her out and shake her loose of the answers I so desperately need… the answers I know she has. Every time I look in the mirror, every time I see my reflection, I feel as though the girl knows, my reflection knows. She knows everything. The secrets and the answers, and she’s taunting me and teasing me, torturing me, forcing me to stay out here, in the real world, to search for answers I most likely will never find.
I’m insane.
For sixteen years I’ve done this. I’ve stood in front of a mirror and just watched myself, looked as far into my eyes as I could, searching for something. Anything. Anything that would give me even a hint to who I am and what I’m capable of.
But I never find anything.
It’s frustrating. Day in and day out, I wake up, hoping that today will be different, that maybe today I’ll finally get some answers, something that can help me, something that can make the pain and anger and darkness go away, even a little bit. I never do.
Sometimes, because of this frustration, I fall off the edge. Sometimes I get angry.
“What am I?!” I scream this time, clawing at the mirror, clawing at the girl who is so familiar, yet still a complete stranger. I didn’t want to see her anymore. I didn’t want to see the world inside this mirror, taunting me. It needed to go away.
“Kassidy!” I hear a voice screeching loudly from the other side of the bathroom door, then the banging on the hard wood. “What was that?! Open up! Let me in!”
It was Danny. Why was she screaming? What had happened?
“Ah,” I hiss loudly, the pain bringing me back to reality, away from the girl in the mirror. I look down at my hand, searching for the source, looking for the reasoning behind the painful sting in my hand, but all I see is blood covering my pale skin. Then I see the cuts, long gashes running across my knuckles, small shards of glass still stick in the wounds.
“Shit,” I mumble, reaching for the towel hanging on the metal ring. Beneath the towel, spread across the floor is discarded pieces of razor sharp glass, the frame from the mirror laying next to it.
“What’s going on in there?!” Danny yelled, pounding aimlessly on the locked door.
“I’m fine,” I assure her, rapping the towel around my bleeding hand. “Just an accident.”



“April 13th, 2013,” I mumble, drumming my fingers on the cushiony armrest attached to the passenger seat inside Danny’s car. She was sitting beside me, going through her over-sized purse, searching for money for me. I didn’t have time for lunch this morning, I was too busy trying to decide if my hand was bad enough for stitches. Danny said she would take me to the hospital, hell, she works there. It’s not like it would be going out of her way to take me there. I told her it was fine, the cuts weren’t that bad, a couple band-aids would to the trick. Besides, I didn’t want to miss the first day back to school, now, did I?
Sarcasm noted.
“What did you say?” Danny asks me, pulling out a crisp, purple Canadian ten dollar bill, handing it over to me. I don’t move to take it from her hand, I just continue to stare out my window at the group of four girls standing in a group, giggling and gossiping and complimenting each other on their skin-tight, overly-revealing clothing.
“April 13th, 2013,” I repeat, louder this time so Danny can hear. I point to the tall yet petit blonde girl, twirling her hair in her fingers, giggling.
“Kassidy, you don’t need to-”
“Car crash. She’s the driver. She’ll die on impact… snaps her neck… like a twig.”
I continue drumming my fingers as I look over to the next girl in the group, a shorter girl with the same blonde hair, the same face. Her sister, it has to be.
“Her,” I point, “she dies exactly three minutes later, from blood loss. She’s sitting in the passenger seat, and she gets crushed. She bleeds out and dies, screaming and crying, begging for help that will never come.”
“Kassidy,” Danny says, her voice loud yet warm. She tightly wraps her hand around my fingers, immediately bringing the loud drumming to a halt. “Stop, please.”
I bite my lip hard, shutting my eyes as I replay the scene over in my head.
The laughing, the jokes, the oblivion to the red light ahead. The screeching of the breaks, the screams, the crash. The pain, the blood, the empty eye sockets, and finally, the deaths. Teenagers. Two girls who will never outlive their teenage years.
“Kassidy,” Danny squeezes my hand, bring me back to the car. “Today will be a good day. I promise.”
I shake my head, snatching the purple bill from Danny’s hand, mumbling a quick thank you before jumping out of her car and making my way up the sidewalk, towards the school and another year in misery.


I sigh, looking down at the piece of ripped paper in my hand, four numbers scribbled on it. My locker number, and the combination to get in.
“Okay,” I whisper, taking a breath before looking up, avoiding the staring eyes. I don’t want to be sucked into any visions right now, I just want to find my locker so I can sit and relax before attending my first period. To do this, I have to make sure I don’t meet anyone’s eyes, and in a school with over three thousand people, sometimes that’s hard to do.
For now though, I keep my gaze stuck on the lockers, looking for my number: 814.
When I see it, I smile. End lockers are always best. It’s easier to get away from the crowds of people, plus, there’s more room for me to sit.
I drop my black shoulder bag to the ground, reaching for the dial on the lock.
4, 57, 16.
There’s a quiet ‘click’, and then I’m pulling the locker door out to reveal the inside: a disgusting, ABC-gum-and-writing-littered mess. The door has been dented and there’s only one hook inside, but that’s fine with me. The only things I keep in my locker are my books and binders. I never let my bag leave my shoulder. I never risk my sketchbooks being publicised.
I take off my black jacket, hanging it on the single hook. The hook turns, my coat immediately falls to the bottom of the locker, landing in old pink gum and a sticky purple substance in the bottom of the locker.
“Dammit!” I say, louder than I anticipated. I grab my jacket, now covered in the sticky goo. The hook above was dangling from a loose screw which was threatening to fall out any moment now. I’d have to see if I could get a janitor to come fix it for me, but until then, I was stuck holding my jacket.
I click the lock shut again, sinking to the floor in front of the locker and leaning against the cool metal behind me. I lean my head back, shutting my eyes, trying to fight off sleep. I don’t want to fall asleep here, not with everybody around. I don’t want to wake up screaming and shaking and drenched in sweat, clinging onto anything I can get my hands on, anything that is real.
When I begin to feel the weightless feeling settle in, I force my eyes open, force myself to move.
I will not fall asleep here.
Instead of sleeping, I pull out my sketchbook from my bag, opening it to a fresh new page. In the rings holding the book together is a pencil, my favourite pencil. They’re really good pencils, dark and rich graphite, yet not too dark that it won’t erase. They’re hard to come across, Danny says. Only certain stores sell them, so when Danny sees them when she’s shopping, she’s sure to pick up a couple packages of them.
I hold the pencil in my hand, pressing the tip to the edge of the paper and I begin to draw. What I begin to draw, I don’t know at first. Usually I just let my hands move, let the pictures from my mind flow through my fingers and onto the page, and in the end I come up with a practically flawless picture of the disgusting things locked away in my mind.
Today, I find myself drawing a picture I’ve drawn so many times in the past. It’s a vision I had when I was younger, a man I had seen when I was just a child, one of the first few I can remember. It was one of the first disturbing ones I’d had, one of the first ones that had etched their way into my sleep, forming the nightmares.
In the picture, a man stands on a chair, high above the ground in an almost empty room. All is empty but the chair, the man, and the rope hanging above his head wrapped tightly around his throat. His face is so perfect, so attractive and so young. His grey stubble that was sharp to the touch, but it fit so perfect on his face. He was a truly beautiful man, but his expression threw everything off. In the picture, in the drawing, this man was not smiling like he should have been. He must have once had a perfect smile. But the smile was washed away, only to be replaced my agony and grief and dark bruises under his eyes.
In his hand was a picture of three girls: A women about his age and two little girls around the ages of five or six. In the man’s other hand was an empty beer bottle, hanging limply from his fingertips.
In a matter of minutes, this drawing is finished and sitting in my lap. Just like every other picture in the book sitting in my lap, this one is flawless, a perfect portrait of what was inside my head.
Although the picture does not move on the paper, in my mind it does. In my mind, the next moments of this man’s life is play out, over and over again. His noises, his fear and his regret, it’s all carved into my brain, into my memory, and into my nightmares.
The man took another swig from the beer bottle before tossing it onto the ground, the brown glass shattering on impact. He held the picture of his girls in his hand, clutching at it as tears streamed steadily down his dirty, bruised cheeks.
“I’m so sorry, girls,” he had cried. “Daddy can’t help you anymore. I’m useless to you now. It’s better that I’m gone.”
The man kisses the picture one last time, before taking a final step off the chair, gravity taking over and tugging him towards to ground, only to be caught my the noose wrapped tightly around his neck.
His neck did not break, because at last moment, the man had second thoughts. The man reached out, dropping the picture from his fingers. He gasped and gurgled, trying to get the air back into his lungs. He reached up, frantically tugging at the rope tied tightly around his throat, cutting off all the air from his brain. He tried to pull up, but the man was not strong. He had little muscle in his arms. He was weak.
He had tried to call for help, tried to find a way to get himself down, but it was too late. His face had turned from a peachy tanned colour to a dark purple, and quickly, unconsciousness took over. The man was left hanging there for six minutes, before his heart finally stopped beating, and I was brought back to the real world.

I had witnessed this man’s death when I was at the age of two. I was too young to even realize what was going on, much less what I was witnessing. But that death, that man has haunted my mind since.
Danny says when I first began to speak was when I first began to complain about my problem, about the people getting hurt. That’s what my toddler brain had concluded it to be, just people getting hurt, because I hadn’t realized what was going on until I was older.
“People getting hurt!” I would cry, frantically pointing at people. “Ouchy! Please! Make it stop!”
When I was just two, I would do this in public. Danny would bring me out grocery shopping or to the toy store, and I would be completely fine, a normal, happy little child, until she looked me in the eye, or until women came up and pinched my cheeks, and stared at my beautiful eyes. Then I would turn into a mess.
But I didn’t know what was going on. I was an innocent child who had seen so much horror at such a young age, horror that I couldn’t even begin to understand.
Danny took me to multiple doctors. She told them of my predicament, and they had ran numerous tests on me, scanning my brain, searching for something that was making me act up this way.
They didn’t find anything.
“She’s a normal two year old child,” they had said. “Nothing odd about her at all.”
Except for the screaming periods when I would lash out, pointing at the people who were getting hurt inside my head.
Soon, Danny picked up on some things. She realized that I was fine, until someone looked in my eyes. She tested it out a couple times, and she came to a conclusion that I only acted this way when I saw someone’s eyes.
She kept this information to herself. The doctors refused to go any further with me, they said that she needed to stop letting me watch so much television, that it was rotting my brain. She wasn’t happy about that comment.
Later, when I grew older and my vocabulary began to expand, Danny would have me explain everything I was seeing, everything I was feeling. She would make me point to where the person was bleeding from, touch the spot where it hurt. She would have me start to draw things out and go into detail, and soon we both realized that I wasn’t just some child craving for attention. No, this was much worse than a bratty, needy child.
I was witnessing people’s deaths, simply by making eye contact.
The doctors had been wrong.
I was not a normal child.
Not even close.