A Song of Yuletide
Before I could follow any further, the dog galloped over me, taking up the entire hallway. “Are you ready for your next memory?”
I almost said no to see what he’d do – none of the other “guides” had bothered to ask what I wanted – but shrugged instead. The hallway blinked out, replaced by the cafeteria, where I was wandering about, seemingly aimlessly, Maria trailing behind. We were wearing different clothes than we had been, so it was at least the next day, though if memory served me, it was more like three days later.
I looked much less like I was going to have a heart attack at any moment, but there was still a hint of nerves there, probably brought about largely by the fact that I had yet to make any friends there, other than a girl who wore diapers, and was tagging along behind me. She looked much happier, though there was still some temporary worry there, a little less deep than my own, likely triggered by our survey of the cafeteria that had revealed a complete lack of empty tables.
“Well, there’s only two people over there… I guess that’s our best bet.” I didn’t turn back to see if Maria agreed, though I saw now that she nodded in response.
“I don’t need to see this,” I told the dog, who didn’t reply, so I just started to walk away, only to find the whole room spinning around me. I stumbled, starting to feel dizzy, and by the time I had regained my balance, Maria and I were sitting with Laurell and Ivy, as I heard them introduce themselves after I’d done the same. They were juniors, and seemed to be infinitely entertained by watching the two of us nervously eating, uncertain whether we should try to make some polite conversation or just pretend we weren’t there.
It wasn’t long before I “solved” that problem, by accidently knocking my glass down and across the table. The two older girls jumped to their feet as the water began to spread over to their side of the table, while I did the same to start gathering napkins, apologizing profusely, cheeks burning red.
“Look, I know what happened!” I pleaded with the dog.
“Sometimes, we have to see things more than once,” he said sagely.
Laurell and Ivy were laughing now, while I scrambled around the table, trying to gather up the napkins I’d just ended up throwing all around like gigantic flakes of snow. Later, I’d told myself it was all good-natured, friendly ribbing, but at the time, it hadn’t sounded that way. And looking at it now, I wasn’t so sure.
“It wasn’t my fault!” I growled at the dog. “I didn’t do it on purpose! People are allowed to make mistakes, you know!”
Then I heard Maria’s giggles joining the other two girls’, and felt my hands spasm into fists, like I saw the younger me’s doing across the cafeteria. My face was redder than I think I’ve seen anybody’s before, and though I wasn’t close enough to see, I was pretty sure I was at the very least on the verge of crying.
“Maybe we should just get you a bottle to drink out of, if cups are too difficult,” Maria laughed.
The color drained from my face as I turned towards her. “Well at least,” I said, my voice louder than it really needed to be, just like hers had sounded to me, “I don’t wear diapers!”
They all went silent at that. Laurell and Ivy seemed set to start laughing again, amused at a weird little joke, except for the look Maria gave me, so full of betrayal and hurt that it was obvious that there was no joking going on.
“See?” I pointed out to the dog. “It was her fault! If she had just stayed cool, it would’ve been fine, but she had to go and freak out about it!”
“And she didn’t have to make fun of you to begin with, did she?” the dog asked. It sounded pretty rhetoric, but I nodded anyway. “And if she hadn’t been so clumsy the first day, you never would’ve found out to begin with.”
“Exactly! Finally, someone understands!”
He didn’t answer before blinking us a few weeks further into the school year, into the hallway outside of my, and Maria’s, Algebra class. It was the first memory the dog had shown me so far that I hadn’t immediately recognized, so I was kinda curious, in a cautious sort of way.
It took a moment to find myself in the throng of people – I actually found Maria first, and then saw myself approaching. Obviously, it was either right before or right after class, probably before. Maria was clutching her backpack, eyes nervously scanning the crowd.
“Maria,” I told her in a stage whisper. “You might want to get a quick change. You’re leaking.”
She gave a light gasp, tried to get a look at the back of her pants, which was, of course, difficult, and resulted in a scene that looked remarkably like a cat chasing its own tail. I watched myself go back through the crowd, over to where Laurell and Ivy were waiting, barely containing themselves. Laurell slapped me on the back and they gave up, their laughter filling the hall. I was a touch behind them, and a little uncertain at first, but it happened just the same.
“It’s not as bad as it looks,” I tried to explain.
Blink to Halloween. “Here we go,” I smiled. I guess the dog knew I wasn’t such a bad person after all.
“Come on, Laurell, quit it,” I was saying, sounding even more authoritative than I remembered. “This is stupid.”
We were in the girls’ bathroom, alone – we’d locked the door, if my memory was correct – and Laurell and Ivy were busy unloading plastic bags.
“You agreed, Cheyenne,” Ivy reminded me. “Don’t back out on us now.”
Laurell stepped away from me, surveying the big, adult diaper she’d just taped on over my jeans. “That looks pretty good,” she nodded. “Do you have the pacifier?”
Ivy nodded and handed it to her. It was one of those costume ones, humongous and obviously fake, which made me wonder why they hadn’t used the fake diaper that came with those instead of buying a whole package of real ones.
“Nobody’s gonna know what this is,” I pointed out.
“Nobody but Maria,” I added in, letting the dog in on my internal monologue.
“This is pointless.”
Ivy put the pacifier around my neck. “Of course nobody would get it like this,” she agreed. “We’re not done yet, dummy.”
Laurell was the one who had the package of name tags, which she was opening then, while I fidgeted, not noticing her, trying to keep my pants legs from bunching up in the diaper.
“This is what’ll do it!” Laurell proclaimed, slapping the finished tag onto my chest. I didn’t have to look down to see what it said, nor did I really have to then, and yet both mes did.
I’m not sure what it had been about seeing Maria’s name on me that had set me off – perhaps some deep, repressed memory of my own teasing, back at the hands of that little boy, or maybe a fresher memory of when she had actually considered me her friend – but something did.
I ripped the sticker off my shirt, glaring angrily at Laurell. “I told you to stop it!” I yelled at her. “I don’t want to do this!” Not being particularly familiar with how diapers worked, it took me a try or two to get free, thus making the tearing off of it much less dramatic than I had anticipated. “What is your problem?!”
“What’s yours?” Laurell shot back. “Why are you throwing a tantrum? It isn’t like we’re forcing you to do this; you volunteered!”
“I don’t care!” I threw the diaper at her. “I’ve had enough of this!”
“God, don’t get your panties in a wad,” Ivy rolled her eyes. “We get the point.”
“Yeah, you don’t want to make fun of your best friend. We get it.” Laurell’s voice was cold and low, and I could feel goose-bumps racing up my arm.
Even so, I couldn’t help but feel a little shocked at how quickly I said, “She’s not my friend!”
“Really?” Laurell raised an eyebrow. Her “Prove it,” was silent, yet no less clear for it.
I took the pacifier from around my neck and stormed out of the bathroom. Maria wasn’t hard to find – in a school this size, nobody ever really was.
“Happy Halloween,” I told her, but by then, she’d already learned to avoid me as soon as she noticed me. I doubt she even saw the pacifier dangling from my hand before she turned around. I might not be the sneakiest person in the world, but Maria is also not the most observant, and sticking the ribbon around the pacifier to her backpack with the name-tag proved to be pretty quick and easy.
And Laurell and Ivy were there waiting for me, just like they always were, smiling as if the scene in the bathroom had never happened. I’d never noticed just how much like a couple of wolves they could look like.
“See?” I said to the dog, a little uncertain, not least of all because he seemed to be getting bigger. “I could’ve gone out in that costume, but I didn’t.”
“No, you didn’t,” he agreed, but I could tell he still wasn’t impressed. He was blocking out most everything now, obscuring all but a few of the students milling about, giggling behind Maria’s back as she walked, oblivious, towards her next class.
“Maybe I could’ve done more, but why should I have?” I demanded. “It isn’t my fault she’s in diapers!”
“Was it your brother’s fault when you had that accident in the sandbox?”
“No! That’s completely different!” I fumed. He obviously didn’t get me after all. “There’s a difference between a little kid having an accident and a teenager wearing diapers all the time! Besides, I’m not her sister! That’s not my job!”
“Does that mean she doesn’t deserve someone to look after her?” By then the dog had grown so large that I couldn’t even see his eyes anymore, just a mass of white. By the time I thought of an answer, I had the feeling that he couldn’t hear me.
I tried anyway. “She should be able to take care of herself,” I told him, staring up into the whiteness. He didn’t answer, and when I looked back down, I saw that the walls and floor of the school had been consumed by the white as well, and everyone else had vanished. “She’s a big girl,” I whispered, beginning to shiver.
If I had been expecting to be taken back to my room – and I did – I would have been quite disappointed. I stared around at the field of white around me, trying to decide if I should go for a walk across it, to see if there was anything there, or to just wait in one place for the next visitor to arrive, or for my room to appear so I could watch my clock and fret over what might be coming when it reached 2:00.
Before I could reach a decision, I noticed the whiteness starting to bleed out in one direction, images coming through, first of what looked like a city, and then the outline of a window framing it, and finally a whole room appearing around it. And in front of those changes, as if its footsteps were bringing them about, came an alien.
It was of the small, gray variety, the kind you saw in fake autopsy videos, so much so that, as it got closer I could see a Y-shaped series of stitches across its chest. As it got even closer than that, I could see that its eyes and mouth were being held closed in a similar manner, black x’s lined up across its face like some messed-up emoticon.
I could honestly say that it wasn’t anything I’d ever had as a pet, nor even thought of wanting as one. “My mind is just running wild with that stupid fortune,” I told myself, speaking out loud to make it sound all the more convincing.
Despite having its eyes closed – if that was, indeed, all that had happened, as from the way the eyelids looked close up, I began to wonder if there was truly anything beneath them, though I was by no means curious enough to try to find out – it walked up to me, making a clean stop right before it bumped against my chest.
I smiled feebly. “N-Nice…” I began, wanting to finish it with “to meet you,” but I could barely get the first word to come out as I stared down at the thing in front of me. Unsurprisingly, it said nothing. At first, I thought it had given no answer at all, until I saw that it had raised one of its hands a fraction of an inch, so that it was pointing behind me.
I wasn’t surprised to find myself standing there, although it was somewhat strange to see a version of myself I had never seen before. I’m not sure how old I was then, but somewhere in my twenties, I think. It was nice to see that I’d lost a bit of weight, and even if my breasts hadn’t decided to grow much more, I thought my legs might have, though it may have just looked that way because I was wearing only a nightshirt, which ended further from my knees than anything I would wear now. I looked about half awake as I stumbled across the kitchen floor to grab a glass from one of the cupboards and fill it with water.
The older me flipped open a door on one of those daily pill boxes and dumped the contents out into her hand. While she was doing that, a man, maybe five years older and looking equally drowsy, opened a door on the other side of the apartment and wandered out with a yawn.
The older me glanced over at him, in the midst of swallowing her pills, giving him an uneven smile in return for his, until he came up to her and gave her a kiss. She pulled away, began scrounging through the cabinets and drawers to pull out the makings of a bowl of cereal.
“I can make you an egg,” he offered. For a moment, I wondered if, by that point in my life, I’d gotten over my intense hatred for the taste of eggs. Then I saw myself roll my eyes, then shake my head.
“I’m fine,” I told him flatly, walking past him, brushing past his open arms, perhaps not noticing, seeing as it was so early, apparently, to sit at the little table and start to eat my cereal.
“I’ll probably be a little late tonight,” the man said, getting out a bowl of his own. “Lenny wants to finish the project today. We have most of the plans done, but we’re going to have to use the older machines, and there’s almost always something that goes wrong with them, you know?”
“I think this cereal’s been in there too long,” I sigh, staring into it as I push it around my bowl. I take another bite or two, then push get up and carry my still mostly full bowl over to the sink, turn the faucet on while I start to dump it out.
The man sets the cereal box, turning and taking the half step it takes to get behind me. He wrapped his arms around my stomach, bent over to kiss the top of my ear while I finished rinsing out the bowl, then leaned back, letting his fingers trace around my waist, then, once they met in the back, downward, to the hem of my nightshirt, which he then drew upwards.
The man and I – the current me, just to be clear – let out gasps at the same, though his had just the slightest hint of playfulness to it, while mine was pretty much chock full of shock.
“Well, my, my,” he shook his head. “Guess it’s a good thing you had that accident last night, isn’t it?” The way he said ‘accident’ made it sound as if he didn’t think that was the real story. I could see myself blushing, but it was understandably difficult to deduce whether that was for the night before, or that morning. “I guess you’d better stay in diapers for the rest of the day, too, huh? Just in case.”
“If you think so,” I shrugged meekly.
“Oh, I do,” he replied. “Let’s go get you changed.”
I trudged over to the door he’d come from, obviously knowing what I was supposed to do. I could notice a bit of a waddle then, and began to wonder how I hadn’t noticed the bottom of the diaper drooping out from under the nightshirt. The man was following close behind and, right before they both went into the room, he gave my bottom a playful pat. I could see the grimace forming on my face for all the time it took for the two of them to step inside, and then he reached out and grabbed the doorknob.
“What the hell is going on?! Why am I wearing diapers?! Who is this loser?! What is going on?!” I asked, the flood of questions suddenly pouring out of me, even before the door completely closed. “What happened to me?”
But if the alien had any answers to give, they apparently weren’t important enough for it to reach up and tear out its mouth stitches, nor was I brave enough to try to do it.
I glanced around the apartment, wondering what else I was supposed to see there before the alien took me on to our next destination. I guess it wasn’t -too- bad – it was a little bigger than Ash’s, and a lot cleaner, not that that took much – and yet there was something unsettling about it, something final. I suppose it was that feeling that made me uncomfortable, that thought that this was where I was going to end up, and that was that. It felt like a cage.
I noticed the clock, the old kind with the hands, sitting on top of the television set, and thought something seemed off about it. As I looked closer, I could have sworn the second hand began to spin faster, and faster, until I heard a door open behind me. The older me and the man came out of what I assumed was the bedroom, both dressed, me in an old T-shirt and shorts, him in some kind of uniform. They were moving in fast-motion, not quite enough that they were just blurs, but fast enough that the man could go get his coat from the closet, finish the bowl of cereal he’d left sitting on the kitchen counter, and kiss me goodbye in a manner of seconds.
I, on the other hand, went back to the table and sat down, staring at the newspaper but only picking it up a couple times, then setting it back down. I sat there for a little while after the man left, too, before going over to get a glass of water to take to the sofa, just a few feet from where I was standing and watching. I turned on the television, flipped through the channels, then turned it back off and stared out the window for a while.
Eventually, I got back up, went back to the table to pick up a piece of paper I hadn’t noticed before. I started to walk over to myself, to see what it was, but luckily, I brought it back to the sofa to look at, so I easily managed to get a look over my shoulder to see that it was a grocery list.
The older me stared at it for a long time, though I lost interest fairly quickly. Finally, she gave what probably would have been a slow nod in regular time, went back into what I was now assuming was the bedroom, then came back out in a dress and sandals, with my hair finally looking as if it had seen a brush anytime that day, carrying a purse. I couldn’t tell if I was still diapered or not, which might have been the point.
I walked to the front door, then stopped. It seemed like I stood there, just staring at the door, for a long time, but at some point the hands of the clock must have slowed back down, so I don’t know how long it actually was. Finally, I reached into my purse and pulled out a different piece of paper, one that I could tell, even from across the room, was a lot older, and unfolded it.
“What is that?” I asked; the alien gave what might have been a tiny shake of its head, but likely was nothing at all. By the time I started to walk across the apartment to get a look, the other me had folded it back up and turned back around, setting both her purse and the list down on the table.
I kicked my sandals off, scooted them back into the bedroom with my foot, flopped back down onto the couch, the dress fluttering up enough to show that I still had the shorts, and thus, almost definitely, the diaper, on underneath. I picked the remote back up, but didn’t even turn the television on before tossing it back aside and standing up again, wandering over to the window.
The clock’s hands began to spin faster, yet still I stood there, staring out into the city below. When I broke away at last, I marched over to the bedroom and slipped my sandals back on. I didn’t even make it to the door, however, just picked up my purse for a moment and set it back down before meandering back to the window, then over to the bedroom, this time actually going in and closing the door behind me.
When I re-emerge, I’m wearing the shorts and T-shirt again, but the bulge around my waist is gone, and I’m looking at least a little happier. I even start to fill up the dishwasher before the phone rings. I rush over to it, but don’t make any move to answer it.
The answering machine picks up, plays out a standard greeting, then a female voice calls, “Cheyenne! Pick up!” It’s silent for a moment, then continues, “It’s Jane, Cheyenne, just wanted to see if you wanted to come get some lunch with me. Call me!”
I reached out and hit a button almost before the sound of the other phone hanging up echoed through the speakers. “Message deleted,” a mechanical voice confirmed.
I got some butter out of the fridge, made myself a couple pieces of toast, and settled back into the couch, where I shortly fell asleep.
The clock’s hands went wild then, and by the time I began to stir, the sky outside was getting dark. I stumbled off the couch drowsily, giving a yawn and a stretch that transformed into a look of shock and horror. I turned, made a mad dash across the apartment, only to stop halfway, groaning as the back of my shorts began to bulge out and begin to sag.
“Did I just…?” I started to ask the alien, who may have nodded in return.
The older me sank to her knees in the middle of the floor and sniffled softly, burying her face in her hands. She managed to get back on her feet after awhile, chest still hitching as she headed into her bedroom. The bathroom must have been off of there, because a few minutes later, I heard the shower running.
When I came back out, I was wearing a diaper under my new pair of shorts. I walked over to the table and began to sit down before I apparently caught a glimpse of the clock. I went back to the kitchen, opened the next compartment on the pill box, poured its contents into my hand, started to put them into my mouth… and stopped. Instead, I poured the pills onto the counter, examined each one.
The front door opened and the man came through with a smile. “You wouldn’t believe how lucky we got,” he announced. “A freakin’ miracle.” He walked up behind me, gave me a kiss. “Taking your vitamins, huh? A little late, aren’t you?”
I didn’t answer, so he went off to the bedroom. “Cheyenne!” he called a few minutes later, just before coming back out. “Were you out of your diaper?”
I shrugged listlessly, still bent over the counter.
“You know the rules, don’t you? When I put you in a diaper, you’re to stay in it. And now you’ve gone and ruined a pair of your panties, didn’t you?”
I stood suddenly, eyes flaring. “That’s because you’ve been drugging me, haven’t you, you son of a bitch?!” I grabbed the pills and threw them across the apartment at him, though they all fell short. “What have you been giving me?!”
“I haven’t touched your pills,” he stated flatly. “Don’t raise your voice at me.”
“Or what?!” I screamed. “What do you think you can do to me?!”
He reached one hand into the bedroom, pulled something off of the wall or a shelf inside, raised it up in one hand. It was a paddle, wooden, one end shaped like a piece of swiss cheese. “Screw you,” I spat at him.
I’m not sure if the clock sped up again for a moment, or if he really moved that quickly, but the next thing I knew, the man was over in the kitchen, grabbed me around the waist with one arm and dragging me over to one of the chairs at the table, which he pulled out and spun around with his foot, while struggling to keep his grip on me.
He sat, setting me down over his lap, and pulled down the shorts and diaper with one, quick tug, revealing my bright red bottom. He raised the paddle, and the me on his lap suddenly stopped screaming obscenities at him and began begging him to stop. I saw the paddle come down once, saw it smack against my flesh, and then I couldn’t help but cover my eyes.
I heard the paddle fall, over and over, heard it hitting the other me, so loud I could practically feel it on my own skin, heard myself pleading and crying, eventually reduced to just the latter. It seemed to go on forever.
Then I heard it stop as the man’s exasperated voice said, “Cheyenne!” I peeked out through my fingers, saw the wet spot underneath me. “See, this is why I keep having to put you in diapers,” he lectured, shaking his head. “I don’t have to give you any drugs – you do it on your own.”
I was crying too hard to disagree with him. He pushed me off of his lap, left me crumpled on the floor while he went back to the bedroom and cleaned himself up, then turned on the water in the bathroom.
“Come on,” he called. “I’m drawing you a bath.”
But I didn’t move, and after the water turned off, he came out and picked me up, carrying me back to the tub. After the clock started speeding back up, he came out and cleaned the wet spot on the floor, grabbed a couple frozen dinners out of the microwave.
I came out, slowly, by the time he had run them both through the microwave, back in my nightshirt and diaper. He grabbed the smaller of the two dinners, a kiddy one by the looks of it, with its chicken nuggets cut up into the shape of some cartoon character I didn’t recognize, and took it over to the table. I followed him to that seat, let him kiss the top of my head, and sat down with a wince.
He brought his own dinner over and started to eat, while I pushed the food around with my fork. He went on about his job, not noticing or caring that I didn’t seem to even be listening, until he noticed my purse.
“Did you go to the store?” he asked. I shook my head. He shrugged. “I can go tomorrow after work.”
“I know,” I told him. “That’s what you said.”
He nodded dismissively, chewing his food, then spotted something else. “What’s this?” He reached for the other piece of paper I’d looked at.
I jumped up, snatched it away from his prying fingers at the last moment. “It’s nothing,” I snapped at him.
He shrugged, turned his attention back to eating as time sped up once again. We went over to the couch once he was done with his food, and I’d gotten tired of staring at mine, and stayed there until we were getting ready to nod off, and then we headed back to the bedroom.
The clock had run through an hour or two before I came back out, rubbing my eyes. “Forgot again,” I grumbled, shuffling across to the kitchen. I flipped open all the compartments of the pill box, then opened one of the cabinets and pulled down almost a dozen bottles of pills, and started to fill the box.
I stopped on the way back to the bedroom, stared longingly through the window, and then at the front door, and, lastly, down at the piece of paper from my purse, not even bothering to unfold it. Then I went back to the bedroom, and the apartment was still.
The hands of the clock sped up, moving faster and faster, until I could’ve sworn I saw smoke coming from them. I came back out of the bedroom a few more times, just walking around, but it wasn’t until the sun started to come up that I stayed out, going over to the kitchen and getting a glass of water. The man came out of the room as well as I took my pills out of the box and swallowed them, sneaking up behind me to give me an all but ignored kiss.
I pulled a bowl from the cabinet, set it down, then started hunting through the other cupboards, while behind me, the bowl began to melt. I flipped through all the cupboards in a manner of seconds, seemingly oblivious that all of their contents also seemed to be melting.
The real me looked over at the alien in alarm, not particularly comforted when I saw that the clock had finally caught on fire. “Is it over?” I asked him. “What was that supposed to mean? Why am I staying with this guy? Why did you show me this?”
The alien’s hand started to rise, pointing towards the table. The paper! Of course! That’s where the answer was, it had to be! I ran across the apartment, while, having found no cereal, the older me and the man started looking through the rapidly sagging fridge.
By the time I got to the table, its contents had vanished, turning into one huge pool of sludge. I stuck my hand in where the paper had last been, came out with nothing.
I turned frantically to the alien, whose face was beginning to contort strangely. For a moment, I couldn’t figure out what was going on, but then I realized he was trying to speak. I dashed into the kitchen, where the cabinets were dripping down onto the counters, started to pull open drawers until I found a knife.
I could tell I didn’t have time to be scared, so I just sucked it up, and drew the already dripping-away knife across the stitches in the alien’s mouth. It still didn’t speak, but it opened its mouth, and I saw that there was something there. The paper.
It was melting as well, and, since the alien was making no move to get it for me, I steeled my nerves, reached in and grabbed it.
It was from a newspaper, I saw, and old – one of the seams was taped where it had been un- and re-folded too many times. My hands were shaking as I opened it, putting a few more rips in it, but none so bad I shouldn’t be able to read it, if the words themselves weren’t trying to vanish.
And there, staring back at me, was Maria. She didn’t look much older than she does now, or it didn’t seem so, before the paper turned to a puddle in my hand. I can’t be entirely certain what the type under it said, but it looked suspiciously look an obituary, a lot like the one my aunt had printed for my uncle, when she hadn’t wanted people to know the cause of his death was suicide.
I looked up at the alien, my heart racing, only to find him gone. The apartment itself was melting away now, in strips, so that it seemed as if I were looking into it from a cage. Or like looking into a cage from the outside. I turned away, closed my eyes, unable to take it anymore.
“Just take me home,” I prayed, to the alien, to Fido, to whoever was behind this whole thing, to anyone that would listen. “Just let me make it back. I’ll make it better, somehow. Just give me a chance.”
“You see?” I asked anxiously, staring into Maria’s eyes, hoping she didn’t think I was completely insane. “I’m so sorry, Maria. Please, please, you have to forgive me; I’ve been so terrible. You have to give me a chance to make it right, somehow.”
She stared at me for a long while before answering. “Yes, you have been,” she said. “You have no idea what I’ve been through. What -you- put me through.”
“I know!” I nodded. “Please, let me make it up to you.”
She shook her head. “No.”
I blinked, stopped dead by that, not having any sort of plan as to what to say in reply, should she answer with that.
“No, I don’t have to forgive you,” she continued. “And I don’t. You’re not sorry.”
That I did know how to respond to. “Yes, I am! I’m a horrible, horrible person, but I understand that now, and…”
“And you’re sorry?” she sneered with a mocking tone. “-No-, you’re -not-. You’re just scared. You’re afraid that if you don’t make things up to me, you’re going to end up like you did in that dream. You don’t give a damn about me. You’re just looking out for yourself, like you always do.”
“That’s not it!” I pleaded, falling to my knees in the snow. “I really do feel bad! I’m going to stand up to Laurell and Ivy, you’ll see, and I’ll make them leave you alone!”
“And then what? Then you’ll be pals with me again, until something better comes along and you sell me out again?”
“I won’t,” I shook my head. “I won’t.”
“It doesn’t matter. You’re never going to have the courage to go against Laurell and Ivy. You’re too scared of being alone, and if you disagree with them, you think they’ll toss you out like last week’s garbage, and it isn’t like you have any other friends, do you?”
“They aren’t that bad,” I tried to defend them weakly. “If you just get to know them…”
She didn’t seem to hear me. I may not have even managed to say it out loud. “Well, guess what, Cheyenne? That’s what they’re going to do anyway. One day, they’ll get bored with having their own little freshman lapdog. And then you -will- be alone.” She bent down, closer to my face, and her voice got quiet. “And I still won’t forgive you.”
“Maria…” I was surprised at how broken my voice sounded, until I realized I had started to cry. “Maria, please…”
“Merry Christmas,” she said, standing back up. “Now get off my property, please.”
I stared up at her, tears dripping down my cheeks. She rolled her eyes, slammed the door in my face, and I stared at that for a while. Finally, I struggled to my feet and started to walk home, raising one hand to cover my mouth as I began to cough.
The End.