Follow The Raven

"OMG, this is hard, Mr. Martinez," Katie whined to our gym teacher. She was barely a foot up the rope, and already she was complaining. I absolutely hate her voice, its squeaky and unnaturally high-pitched, but its even worse when she's stretching it out to whine.

"Get over it Katie, climb the rope or get down," Mr. Martinez sighed, rolling his eyes. Katie pouted and hopped down from the rope, tripping and almost falling...from less than a foot in the air. Sad. The same thing probably went through Mr. Martinez's mind as he rolled his eyes again. He looked around the gymnasium and his eyes fell on me. Let me guess.

"Lara, you're up!" He yelled, waving for me to come over. I walked up to the looming rope, the crusher of dreams! the killer of hopes! *Cough* Okay, maybe that's being a little too dramatic, but that thing is tricky...just not as tricky as Katie seems to find it.

"Alright, no one has gotten up so far, so you can take all the time you want, just get up there, 'kay?" Mr. Martinez said, getting his stopwatch ready. As pathetic as it sounds, no one has gotten up that rope yet, boys included. Sad, no? When he blew his whistle, I jumped onto the rope, immediately getting farther than Katie and the rest of the girls in this class, making the rope move back and forth like a swing. I started pushing myself up, mainly using my legs. Rope-climbing actually isn't all that hard, you just need a good grip, decently strengthened legs, and you can never look down, that's actually one of the more important things.

Before I knew it, I was at the top, ringing the bell that they somehow got attached to the beam. Hmmm, how do they get this stuff up here anyway? Does someone have to climb a temporary rope to attach the permanent one, then someone has to climb the permanent one to attach the bell? How does that work out? There was very subtle applause, most of it coming from Mr. Martinez for getting at least one student, much less a girl, to go all the way up. I shimmied back down and jumped the last few feet to the ground, giving Mr. M a high five, might as well make his day at least.

"Nice going Lara, and on record time too! 47.3 seconds! You can go back to what you were doing now," he said, marking the time down and calling his next victim up. I walked back to the bleachers and picked my book up. I'm usually off in my little corner reading a book. My teachers don't really have much of a problem with it, they call on me once in a while and seeing that I answered their question or whatever they asked correctly, they just let me be.

"OMG Lara, you did, like, such a good job up there," Katie sneered as she and her little posy of skanks came over. The kids though, they don't let me be, ever.

"Thanks," I said, not even bothering to look up from my book. War and Peace is much more interesting than what these people could possibly have to say. Wait, what am I saying? Anything, is more interesting that what these people could possibly have to say. There we go, that's much better.

"OMG, pay attention when we're talking to you, freckles," Katie said, the painful noise coming out of her mouth getting louder. Do you see the general stupidity of this lot? Discriminating on freckles, can't even come up with a decent insult. No, have to attack the freckles.

"I have freckles? I didn't know that, thank you so much for informing me, Katie," I said, imitating her high-pitched squeal, making her angrier. You can probably tell that I don't get along with these people, hell, I don't get along with this town. I don't really know why, but I think that the day I was born, this town was in search of a new scapegoat (the former one probably died...or moved away; the first is the most probable though, these Nazi people are capable of anything) and they decided that I would fill the position. Thanks, what a lovely birthday present, no?

"Do you have anything to say? Or are you going to stand there all day?" I said, standing up to go to the locker room. Five minutes had passed, and not one had moved. Not only are they absolute idiots, they're absolute idiots with very slow reaction time. I waited a moment for another sad attempt at insulting me, but when nothing came out, I just walked away. Gym is my last class of the day, so I didn't even bother changing, I just grabbed my stuff and started walking home.

I really don't know what they have against me. Maybe its the fact that I'm intelligent, perhaps. I know for a fact that these kids do not pick up books unless they absolutely have to; and when I say absolutely have to, I mean when they try to salvage their grade point averages at the end of term when their grades are frightful because they never did any of the readings. I don't see why they even try, there's not much to salvage anyway. It's obvious that the teachers too have a problem with me; they just tolerate me, that's all. I would get a lot more crap from them if my grades weren't as high as they are.

I walked as fast as I could, without running, to get home as quickly as possible. I don't have work today, so I'm gonna do the exact same thing as I always do when I have a day off: stay in my room and read or draw or listen to music or watch tv or watch movies, whatever I feel like doing. My room is as close to a sanctuary as I can possibly get, it seems. Let me put it simply: school is hell, work is hell, home is hell. And I'm not exaggerating, I'm not one of those self-pitying prats that's miserable because they only have a BMW instead of a Mercedes, $500 shoes instead of $600 ones, and all the rest of that bull.

Perhaps we should start from the top. I live in Sherwood, Connecticut. It is a town in the middle of nowhere, right in the middle of Connecticut forestry. To illustrate how far-off Sherwood is to the rest of the world, it takes six different roads to get there once you get off the freeway. It is completely surrounded by woods; it is amazing to me that we receive internet, cell-phone service, cable, and electricity. You can probably imagine how closed in the residents of Sherwood are, very narrow-minded and never going to change.

My parents, Karen and Dave, are elementary sweethearts (meaning they met in elementary school, did all their schooling together, didn't bother to go to college, and got married); they run a diner over on Main Street and are barely ever home. How these simple people came up with my name is completely beyond me. My full name is Lara Verina Crevan. There's oddity number 1, my name. In 1990, there were 26 Brittneys, 14 Michaels, 29 Davids, and 10 Ashleys born in Sherwood (imagine the mayhem).

I unlocked the door to my house, not even bothering to see if my brother was home yet, and immediately climbing the three flights of stairs up to my room, the attic. I was an only child for five years, until my parents decided that perhaps a sibling would help me, and when nothing changed, they just moved me into the attack and stopped caring about me. Why did they stop caring about me? Well, you know that "imaginary friends stage" most children go through around 3-8 years of age then move on? To put it simply, I started having 'imaginary' friends when I was two and I never stopped. You want to know why? Because they aren't imaginary.

"LARA!" Tim yelled, jumping up first as I climbed the last stairs to the attic and pulling the hatch up behind me. The rest of the little group stood up from their game of Monopoly and came to greet me. Yeah, oddity number 2: not only did I not play with real friends, I didn't play with imaginary friends...I played with dead friends. When I was little, no one wanted to play with me in the sandbox (yeah, it started very early), until this group of older kids came up to me. I thought they were going to shove me like the rest of them, but they didn't, they started playing with me, talking to me, treating me like one of them. When the day ended, and I had to go home, they followed. I thought it would be cool to have sleepover so I went to my parents and asked if they could stay. My parents started laughing when I introduced them, saying that I had a great group of imaginary friends. This bothered me for a long time, but the group stayed with me anyway. If my parents couldn't see them, they couldn't say anything about it. As the years went by, I noticed a lot of stuff and began to reason things out. I was getting older, and they weren't. I'm sixteen now, but they're still in the seven-nine range. While walking around, I could see other people too, and when I would point them out, my parents would just say that my imagination was running wild again. The children at school made fun of me for it, and some of my teachers even recommended me to the school psychologists.

When it was obvious that no one believed me, I stopped saying anything, leaving them to believe that all that was a phase that I had just taken longer to grow out of. Am I insane? No, I just see and hang out with dead people.

"How was your day?" Carly asked, as I plopped down on my bed. After it was established that they weren't leaving, I thought it would be fun to have them at school with me. That was a mistake. So, after the use of very delicate wording, they agreed to stay home or at least away from me while I was at school and at work. They aren't annoying, far from it, but they are distracting, because they're children that died for various reasons, and in the afterlife they are still as lively as they were in, well, life.

"Boring, we did rope-climbing in gym and the American Revolution in history. You wouldn't believe how often 'OMG' comes out of somebody's mouth at any given time," I sighed in annoyance just thinking about it. As a note, I absolutely despise 'OMG,' if you use it in chat rooms and for texting, fine, then you're just lazy. But when you use it in actual speech, ugh, what a nightmare. I mean, come on! How hard is it to say, 'oh my gosh,' 'oh my goodness,' 'oh my god.' It's not that much effort is it? I swear, if I hear OMG one more time today, I am going to kill myself.

"I'm sorry. Would you like to play a game with us?" Maximilien asked, going to grab another game. The little group consists of Tim, Carly, Maximilien, Georgina, and Rose. I never asked how it is they died, it feels like that is completely out of my business and I doubt they want to remember how they died in the first place. At one point, I came up with the idea that they were perhaps in denial of being dead. I mean, they never ever talk to others of their kind, even when we cross them outside, and they're never told me anything about the process of becoming what they are, which, I don't even know what to call them because they never told me.

"Maybe later, I have a 'literary analysis' paper for English due in two days and I want to get it out of the way as quickly as possible," I replied, sighing and walking over to my desk. It's a miracle to me that I actually have a computer in my room; it's actually my brother's old one since he was privileged with a full upgrade (he's 11). But hey, at least I can get work done, right? I looked over at the little group starting a new game, Clue this time. I must be so boring to them, always doing work or just reading or watching a movie or whatever. I try to play with them as often as possible, I mean, they're still here, they could have left as easily as they came. Thirteen years and they're still here. Why though? Why hadn't they moved on to another child with the ability to see the dead, be their friend while everyone else made fun of them? Am I perhaps the only one? Or am I perhaps their first one, and like the idea of they're deaths are they in denial about the idea of having to move on?

That night, I had one of my usual 'historical insights.' Since the day I started remembering my dreams, I started having 'visions' of the past, basically. Great moments in history, not so great moments in history, I know the face, the name, the date, the location, etc. of almost every event in history. While I'm sleeping, I'm basically watching the highlights of peoples' lives, Napoleon, Leonardo Da Vinci, Sun Tzu, Alexander the Great, Tutankhamen, Edgar Allen Poe, George Washington, just to name a few. Great events are flashed in front of my closed eyes, Pope Urban II's call to Crusade, gladiator fights in Rome, processions in Egypt and Greece. For a couple of years now, I've seen actual wars: the Crusades, Pelopennesian War, the sackings of Rome, the conquering of once great empires, etc. Yeah, I get to see it all, the pain, the devastation, the slaughtering, the fear; some people would call it a nightmare, I still call it a dream, being able to see the actual events instead of just reading about it. You don't have to stick with historians who can only guess what happened when you saw and when you know what happened. Naturally, I have to be careful when speaking about history though, I can't say anything that isn't written down in some book because people will either think I know nothing about history or that, as usual, I'm crazy. But yeah, history is basically my favorite subject.

Why I have history running through my mind I have no idea though. Perhaps it comes with the whole 'seeing-the-dead' thing. Because I can see dead people, I might as well see how they died, right? Is that how this works? Does that make sense even?