Hybrid

SEVEN

⫷ ARIA ⫸

The Bad Thing No. 1 was a doozy. I spent the last four years of my life keeping this thing locked tightly away in the recesses of my mind. Back there, where it belonged, so I didn't have to deal with the memories. If I let that lock go loose, then the memories would flood me, along with the nightmares and paranoia and inability to eat, sleep, or live.

So, yeah, I made that box and I made it tight.

Seeing that wolf, seeing its hunger, it didn't just break the box. It smashed it with a michette, so hard that bits and pieces sliced into my hypothetical skin.

This pain I feel, I'm not sure if it's physical or mental. Maybe both. Maybe that wolf did kill me, or my memories are forcing the reminder of the pain I felt four years ago to resurface on my skin.

Pain is something I can't run from. Not with that box, not by hiding in my parent's house, not by shaking my head and saying it didn't happen. Not even by labeling situations I don't like as The Bad Thing No. #. None of it works. Pain always wins.

The memory pools in as smoothly as rubber on rubber.

"Remember, Aria," my mother's voice echoes in my brain, from that broken box. "Come straight home. Do you promise me?"

I was ten, but I wasn't an idiot. Over the past few months, my mother's paranoia grew. No matter how hard I tried to make her smile, she would only turn the other cheek. Something was wrong. "Okay. Why do you look so worried?"

She suppressed a smile. It was obvious there was something she was hiding.

Flash. My memory is changing itself. It always happens that way; they are never linear.

Age twelve.

"Come on!" Charles called back to me with an innocent grin on his face.

"Coming!" I yelled back as I wiped the sweat off of my forehead. "How high is this hill, anyway?"

"Not far! Promise."

I pulled myself up more boulders and winced as a sharp edge sliced through my skin. I rested on the top of the boulder and held it with shaking hands. "Charles! I'm bleeding!"

He was much higher than me. I noticed a head poke from the edge. "Oh my gosh... That's a lot of blood."

"What do I do?"

"Hang on! I'm coming!" I heard him shuffle his way down at a speed double what he'd been doing before.

"Don't go too fast!" I warned him. "You'll fa-" I was cut off by a piercing scream. Blurry eyes flickered to my right and I saw my best friend crash into a pile of boulders beside me. The next shriek came from me. "Charles!"

Ignoring my own pain, I scrambled over to him. His entire body was so still. Not a twitch of a muscle. Limbs bent in awkward angles.

A sob tore through me. "Charles." I couldn't stop the shaking in my hands as I placed them on his body. His skin was cold. Too cold.

Then everything went black.

Flash.

Age thirteen.

A rough hand yanked me out of the forest into our backyard. "You know better than to go into the forest, Aria!" My father's rage caused me to flinch. He was never one to raise his voice.

"I-I'm sorry! I was taking a shortcut home!"

"I don't care if it takes you ten times as long to go the other way. You stay out of that forest, you hear me?"