Fear Itself

“Tali!”

I awoke rather abruptly to the sound of my father’s screaming from the living room the next morning. My eyes stung with sleep, or a lack thereof. I blinked a few times to wash last night out of my eyes, and I squinted to focus on my digital clock. It was seven-thirty in the morning. I groaned and shoved my head back into the pillow. No, I thought. I only went to bed two hours ago. It was far too early to be awake, and somehow, I convinced myself that my father’s frantic, frustrated cries were just a figment of my imagination, driven mad with exhaustion. I closed my eyes again and sighed, ready to go back to bed for a few hours, but my father’s voice rang out again.

“Thalia Rosalind Giroux!” he called, clearly angry and not ready to stop yelling until I dragged myself out of bed to go see what in the world he was so distraught over. “Get down here right now and explain yourself, young lady!”

I could have cried. This was some kind of cruel and unusual punishment. He could take all my books, I thought, if only he would let me sleep for another few hours. Despite the fact that I felt like walking death, I rolled myself out of my tangled sheets and shuffled across the carpet, out into the hallway and stopped at the top of the stairs. I rubbed my eyes with my fists and blinked until my father’s figure focused in my line of sight, and when it became clear that he was not happy to see me, I grimaced a little.

“Missing something?” my father asked as he picked a soaking wet, shivering Ralph up from the couch by the scruff of his neck. “I washed your cat this morning, Tali,” he continued, clearly unamused. “Did the creature from the black lagoon visit us last night, or would you care to deliver the much more creative excuse that I’m sure you already have?”

“Well, Dad,” I began, placing my left hand on the railing for balance as I took a few steps down the staircase. “What actually happened was a rather large and strangely intelligent polar bear managed to open both the gate and our front door, and you just slept through all of this noise, but this bear, who was named Archibald, who wore these awful, muddy military boots, came in and wanted me to go outside with him. I got covered in mud because polar bears are not the cleanliest of animals.” My father folded his arms over his chest, eyebrows raised and face blank. “Ralph, who had been watching from my bedroom window, clearly knew that Archibald was not a very good-intentioned polar bear, so Ralph ran down stairs and chased him away, and when I came back, there was mud all over both of us, but I was so exhausted with fright that I just barely managed to shower and collapse in my bed,” I explained, shrugging my shoulders.

“Tali, polar bears don’t live in England,” my father responded dryly.

I shrugged and looked around a moment. “I mean…” I paused. “He must have been migrating?”

My father sighed and rolled his eyes, but he nearly dropped my cat when he noticed the time. “We’ll discuss this later,” he quickly announced. “I’ve got to go now, and please, Tali, get this mess cleaned up before I get home.”

I nodded. “Yes, Dad,” I replied, no longer interested or even paying attention as I watched him run clear out of the house. My tired eyes fell upon my poor, shivering kitten on the couch, and I laughed. “Neither of us are having a good morning,” I joked as I strode over and picked up the pathetic, little thing. “Let’s get you dried off, Ralphie.” I took Ralph into the kitchen and did my best to pat him dry with a nearby dish towel. I tossed the rag back by the sink now that Ralph seemed much more content with the state of his fur. “Okay,” I murmured. “Ralph, I’m going to go clean up the mud in the carpet, and you’ve got stay put because Dad just cleaned you, and he’s going to be quite cross if he has to do it again.”

Ralph mewed, whether a yes or a no, I wasn’t quite sure, but he had heard me. I spent the next few hours on my hands and knees attempting to scrub the mud and dirt out of our beige carpet. It was not any easy task by any stretch of the imagination. I broke a sweat, actually. Not only was the mud caked deep in the threads, I had two separate sets of footprints to attempt to erase. It took a whole lot of soap, water, and stain stick to pry the dirt out, not to mention, I had to vacuum twice, which Ralph was not fond of and told me so by hiding under the living room couch and refusing to come out even twenty minutes after I turned the machine off.

Thankfully, when my father returned for the evening, he was late, and he was stressed; he had also forgotten entirely about the muddy tracks previously engrained in our living room. After eating a late dinner, I retired to my bedroom for the evening, and I sat on the window sill, inspecting the unopened switchblade my friend—I couldn’t quite remember his name, if he had even told me at all—left me last night (or earlier that morning, if one wanted to get technical). I rested my head against the wall and looked at the thing: worn, tattered, obviously used. I perused the mechanics, trying to figure out how in world to open the thing until my thumb accidentally grazed over a tiny button by the bottom. I applied a slight amount of force, and to my pleasant surprise, the blade shot up. I smiled faintly, watching the sharp metal shine in the moonlight.

I tucked the blade away and looked down to see Ralph on the floor, wrestling with a discarded tag from a dress my father had brought home a few weeks ago. I laughed. “You’re so strange,” I teased the kitten, but he was far more concerned with the tag than with me, so I turned my focus back to the window. I needed real people for friends, not just a cat, but it seemed that everyone I had been meeting walked out of my life just as quickly as they had walked in, so I decided: what good were people anyway?

Unreliable. That was all they were, but the appearance of people in my life would get my hopes up, I knew, especially in the next coming days. I had no idea what I was in for.