Margo Fawn & the Contagious Missing Delirium - 1

15. VERENA AREVELO

CHAPTER 15

VERENA AREVALO

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At home, I failed the perfect daughter test as usual that was conducted by my mother. I shut the window, took a warm shower, and changed into a comfy pair of pants, humming and slow dancing. I tied my hair into a bun with a pencil. I was in a good mood. I think it was the weekend vibe. I was humming this song that made me feel like floating. There was something about it that made me feel like I was walking in the wind in a meadow full of grass that wavered in sync, letting the wind play with my hair. The song was Lemons by Nick Leng. I opened the window, granting access for the chill wind to my caress my skin.

It was a quarter past six, and Elec called me from her room. I shut the window, swung the raincoat over my shoulders, and I walked to Elec's home again attending, but failing my mother's test. It wasn't entirely dark outside. I practically slow danced my way to her home. I just couldn't part with that song. It was on repeat in my ears. It was getting dark and the sky looked peculiarly blue. Whatever blue it might be, there was always beauty to blue and sky. I knew I wasn't dressed to the occasion. I didn't even take into account that Aiden would be there. I just threw on a pair of grandma pants, wore the lip stain with my hair up in a pencil. I had some guts walking in there like that.

"Margo, it barely fits you," Irsia commented about my t-shirt. I brought it two years ago and I didn't throw it away just because it was turquoise and it had dog paw prints in black.

"Shut up..." I tried pulling my t-shirt so I wouldn't look plumpy, but I made it worse.

Aiden still had that smile on his face, but it wasn't the mocking kind of one. It was more like 'so this is how you are at home'.

I sat on the chaise lounge next to Elec. Aiden and Irsia on the roll arm sofa, opposite to us.

"I like your house. It's very artsy." Aiden complimented. That was something Elec could have heard a thousand times before.

Elec's home was one of those homes that inspired anyone to go decorate their homes. The Victorian chaise lounge was olive green with a beige pillow. The roll arm sofa Aiden and Irsia were sitting on was a pretty cornflower blue. A mahogany console table at one end of the living room, above which hung the TV. The table had a rustic vintage scooter toy. Near the spiral staircase was my favorite, the resin mold table. The table had a spiral round leg with its top part made of sea shell transparent resin mold. The face of the table looked like a wave washing the shore with sea shells. The table had a shiny glass cube vase, always with a single white rose with a leaf from her garden. If at all there were no white roses, she would use a bunch of blue perennial sage. Elec's favorite part of the day was watering her plants after school and changing the flowers in the vase every morning. Her mom loved it. Above the sea shell table was a rustic, unevenly shaped wooden clock made out of a tree bark.

"Thanks. It's just one of the two best things my dad left."

"What's the other one?" Aiden asked, like a complete nitwit, but I knew the answer.

"Me," she said, beaming.

"Yeah, right..." he dragged, nodding slowly in that measured jesting way.

"Here's an idea, Aiden. Why don't we skip to the topic that you wanted to talk to us and we can all go home before the curfew that my mom had set." Irsia couldn't contain her curiosity anymore.

 "What's your curfew?" Elec and I asked, very curious.

"7:30 PM. Sharp."

"You should be thankful. My mom wants me home by 'all the time'." I laughed at my own joke and the three of them looked at me. Just plain and straight. That was awkward, more than what I was wearing.

"What is it, Aiden?" Elec snapped. "I can't handle unproductive minutes."

He took a deep breath and rubbed his palms together like he was going to narrate some ghost story at a camp fire. He cleared his throat slightly and began.

"I don't know if you are quite ready to hear this. Whatever I say, it's clandestine."

"Did you secretly make out with Fiona? Is that what this is about?" Irsia asked with her bubbly giggles. Aiden shot her a stare laden with blasé.

"Oh! Come on! I promise." I made a gesticulation of zipping up my mouth. "Just go on with whatever you have to say. We won't tell anyone." I had an inkling that it was going to be something enthralling.

"Do you remember Arevalo?"

"You mean Verena Arevalo? The one that you had a big crush on?" Elec reminded.

"Uh... Yes, Verena Arevalo." He nodded. "And for the 100th time, no, I never had a crush on her. She has a peculiar talent. Talent is what she likes to call it."

"Like what?" Irsia put on her query frown because no one knew anything about Verena.

Verena Arevalo went to our school last year. She had no friends. Mainly because she never talked to anyone. She was what you could call a lone wolf. All of a sudden, she and her family moved out of town and we never saw her again.

"Keep an open mind. She is a PSB."

The word PSB kept ringing in my ears. That was preposterous. PSBs were extinct, or that's what I thought. PSB's just existed in stories that were told to children to scare them. They could see and hear ghosts. They are called Parasitic Supernatural Beings as they feed off the energy of humans and ghosts if they want to increase their powers. According to myths and stories, some of their talents included teleporting, telekinesis, pausing time, reading minds, and what not. This was just when they were human. When they died, they could feed on other spirits' energy, and if they had enough power from it, they could come back to life. I had always been scared of stories about them.

The most terrifying story was the one my mom told me when I was a kid. It was about a PSB who came back from the dead. The man who came back from the dead was apparently weak, because dying and then coming back to life had taken some toll on him. That was the secondary effect of doing something against the law of nature. To stay alive, he had to feed on humans. Flesh, blood and soul. He was an animal at night and human at day. The witch in the story knew how to defeat him. The witch deceived him into reading something that she had written in some tricky text that PSBs can't read.

Even an illiterate PSB would flinch at the sound of someone reading that text. Though PSBs were as intelligent as humans and stronger than humans but there were things that they couldn't do, like reading the tricky text like the one the witch made him read, and a resurrected PSB couldn't touch flowing water. Be it a human PSB or a dead PSB or a dead PSB returned to life, they couldn't read that particular tricky text, and a dead PSB returned to life certainly couldn't touch flowing water. Dead PSBs could get a renewed body, but not the pineal gland. When a PSB had fed on someone's energy, a part of the pineal gland shuts down and they are cursed from reading the tricky text. As for why they couldn't touch flowing water, it had to do something with the fact that the soul of the dead PSB or the PSB who came back to life had no flowing soul in them. Their soul was reversed. Water doesn't flow backwards. It either flows in its own direction or runs dry. This also has something to do with the fact that water is the element that makes most of the human body and it is also one of the spiritual elements.

The witch poisoned the PSB man to reduce his bodily power, dunked him in flowing water to lessen his power even more, and stabbed him until he died. Not a bedtime story, but my mom did a good job of scaring me.

"I'm sorry. Could you rewind?" My mind floundered in incredulity and some noxious excitement which I knew would be of no good.

"She is a PSB, Margo." he said in a sangfroid inflection, bolting a stolid look at me, which confirmed he had heard my addled tone and also that he was nowhere in the vicinity of chaffing.

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