The Possession of Anna Drake

3 - Sentencing to Divorce

The first few years went by pretty slowly. It was the time where I felt the cold grasp of depression creep into me. I was never worried about my lack of friends, but my mother had isolated me from the entire Coven. I wasn’t expecting her to do it, but once members began to get word over what happened to Nidia Thompson, other mothers felt safer if I was not around their child while in our house (well, anywhere if you want to get specific).

Anna seemed uncomfortable most of the time, as if the ankle monitor cut off more than just our magical abilities. Maybe she didn’t like the fact she couldn’t speak to me telepathically. Maybe she figured I was still to blame for our predicament. And maybe I was. If it hadn’t been for me trying to give the police officers the truth, maybe we wouldn’t be here right now. We would be in a jail cell rotting without the support of our family. Though I was sure, she had far more support than I did.

My mother commissioned Griselda Plumsworth to be our tutor. Griselda was an older woman who smelled far too much like frog and toads’ feet. She taught us our lessons and then sat quietly at her desk, spying at us through narrow beady eyes. She knew what we had done, so I had a feeling she was making sure we had no intention of repeating history.

We learned more basic lessons and not so much on witchcraft, potions, charms, or hexes. We learned math, science, writing, and other human studies. Because as the great Griselda told us herself – “we would never amount to anything and therefore should forgo magic and pursue a life in the human world as waitresses.” I wish I knew why she thought a waitress was a good job in the human world, but then again, coming from a witch, I’m sure she had no idea what was on the other side of the tracks from magic. She kept Anna and me separate most of the time. It wasn’t until we hit high school level where we had to start working together on projects. The work was too much for just one student, so we would spend half the day in lessons and the other half in labs learning chemistry, anatomy, biology, and whatever science Grizelda threw at us.

After some time, the uncomfortable feeling with Anna wore off, and she was a smiling girl with tons to laugh and talk about. I assumed puberty forced her to grow out of the phase of grumpiness she was in when we were ten. Hormones can be quite taxing from what we learned about human health.

From our Freshmen to the end of our Junior year, Anna kept track of how many days were left in our sentence. Each of us would have our monitors removed on our eighteenth birthday in a place where we could not hurt anyone else. For me, this place was my basement. Where my mother suspected I would go on an electric frenzy and try to burn the house down with all of us inside. I had a feeling it wasn’t going to work that way. The magic had already exploded once and hurt someone. Why would it do it a second time?

“Miss Dupree, keep your eye on your test,” Grizelda warned.

I had no idea my mind was wandering or that I was even sitting at a desk taking a test. To me, everything had happened so quickly. It felt like only yesterday I had sat down at the desk for my first day. It was hard to think six years had passed in the blink of an eye.

Then again, my days were regulated. Up at five for morning exercise because my mother refused to have a lethargic child, even if I was on house arrest. At first, she would work with me, but she left me to complete it every morning once she got a good routine going. If I tried to skip it, she knew. She knew everything. That is one of the flaws of having a High Priestess as a mother. Nothing gets past them.

Then it was breakfast in the kitchen while she dined with the ladies in the formal room. I ate my fair share of burnt omelets while she daintily cut up ham steak, sausage, and grits. From there, Anna would come over, and we would quietly meander down the stairs at the back of the house to our classroom.

When I say classroom, I mean a concrete room with no windows. The walls are void of any color, the floor is stained with red blotches of who knows what, and in the middle of the room were two desks. The teacher’s desk came later. Once my mother realized Griselda wasn’t going to be able to stand for prolonged periods. I was even shocked she lived through the last year of primary and all of junior high. I was shocked even further when she was still living at the start of my Junior year. I wondered if my mother had created Griselda in a laboratory somewhere and put her in our basement so she could torment Anna and me with questions of no importance.

“Sorry, Ms. Plumsworth,” I muttered as I looked down at the test.

I heard Anna chuckle, and I had to bite my lip to hold back a smile.

I had a feeling my mother thought putting Anna and I together in a tiny room for eight years would force us apart. Personally, I think it brought us closer together. I still wanted to do everything she asked, but at least then, when I said no, she would nod her head and tell me I was a nerd for not wanting to disobey just a little.

You see, Anna had found a loophole to our sentencing arrangement. We were not allowed to leave our homes or associate with any other person other than one another. Suppose we did happen to go outside our home. This seemed redundant because if we went so far past our driveways, a horrible alarm would go off, and the whole town would know the Dupree and Drake girls were trying to run away and commit another gruesome murder.

That’s the other thing. The story became even more ridiculous once people began to talk about it. No matter how much I wanted to remind everyone, it was an accident. They still told the story as if I was this sadistic little girl who only wanted to harm another little girl. It wasn’t like that at all. If I wanted to harm Nidia, I wouldn’t have had so many issues hiding her body, so nobody knew it was an accident.

Anyway, I was telling everyone about Anna’s loophole. It was a computer. Her parents felt bad that she was spending all this time alone. They bought her a computer so she could communicate with the outside world. There were rules, of course. But as Anna has repeated time and time over the years, rules are meant to be broken.

Anna had many suitors in high school. She would meet boys her age and slightly older. I’m not sure it was so much seduction as the fact she was drop-dead gorgeous. Either way, it went these boys always believed they were the only ones when they were the flavor of the month.

I only heard about them during our brief moments during the day. Such as lunch, when we were allowed to eat our sandwiches and drink our juices together in the classroom, and Griselda would step outside to catch my mother up on our progress.

She talked about boys, and I talked about the failing relationship I had with my parents.

They fought a lot at first, then the fighting turned to silence, and finally, my father moved into the guest room, and I only saw him here and there when he wasn’t studying or doing research outside of the home. They didn’t take meals together unless it was a Coven function and it felt like I was living in a house of ice.

He had even stopped coming into my room in the evenings to discuss his research. I felt even more isolated from the magic community and the Coven. Not that being in Coven meant the world to me or anything, but when it came to my dad, I would join any group he was in to be closer to him.

So between the talks of boys and gifts as well as my father and loveless marriages, we had a pretty intense life. Anna had her first kiss and several boyfriends before I even had a chance to mutter the word hello to a member of the opposite s*x. I couldn’t even remember the last boy I saw. My father didn’t count because he was blood, but I had not seen a boy my age in years. Maybe that was part of the sentencing my mother felt was best. Keep me locked away like a princess in a tower, and maybe my prince charming will come and whisk me away on my eighteenth birthday, and she could be done with me.

“You brood too much,” Anna teased me as we picked at the crusts of our sandwiches.

“I don’t brood,” I objected with a shrug.

“You should sneak out and come over,” she suggested with a wink.

“Yeah, and risk another eight to ten years with this thing on my ankle.” I raised an eyebrow. “I think not.”

“I can’t wait to get this thing off.” She laughed as she tugged at the straps.

“I don’t know if I want to think about it,” I admitted.

At the time, we had two years left in our sentence. Two years was a far cry from the six we had already worn the anklets. They were adjusted quarterly to allow for our bodies to grow naturally with the strapping. I thought it was their sick way of making sure we understood the government had us by the ankle. Then again, I’m not sure it’s them I would have been embarrassed for; it was us. They would handcuff and put us in a restraining chair. Like we were going to jump up and slit their throats. People were getting even more creative with the story. I was being portrayed as a blood-sucking demon who prayed on the souls of little girls.

“I wonder if we will get new identities.” Anna chuckled.

Her optimism was almost nauseating. I was already depressed enough with the basement classroom. I didn’t need her finding the good in everything.

“Doubtful. I’m supposed to take over the Coven when my mother retires,” I grumbled and tossed the sandwich back on the tray.

“You sure that’s still going to happen? You know with the way the members think of you,” Anna asked me with a frown.

“She hasn’t said otherwise. And it’s not like I have any surprise siblings to fight against to take the title from me.” I shrugged.

“Why do you want to be the stuffy High Priestess?” She made a sour face and leaned against the wall.

“Why do you want to have a new identity?” I retorted.

I had no reason not to answer her question. I didn’t want to be the High Priestess, but it was required to be a Dupree. Here’s a fun fact – my father took my mother’s name when they married because it’s the Dupree blood that runs the Coven. I honestly didn’t know my father’s last name. He had always been a Dupree to me. I didn’t know much of anything about my father. His family never came to visit, and we never went to see them. It was always my mother’s mother who came for the holidays.

When she had retired and passed the title on to my mother, she moved to Europe. There are some pretty hardcore covens there. She wasn’t a member of the Evergreen Falls chapter, but she was more of an ambassador to the other covens around the European continent.

“Don’t tell me you don’t want one? I mean, you have a horrible reputation. People have blown up that Nidia Thompson story into some boogeyman and possession fairytale.” She reached over and touched my shoulder. “I think we deserve to have new starts.”

“And do what, Anna?” I raised an eyebrow. “Move to a big city and hide the fact we are witches?”

Anna bit her bottom lip and shook her head. “What’s so wrong with that? We wouldn’t have to worry about anything like this happening again. They turned off our magic. Do you think once these anklets come off, all this bound-up magic is going to appear? I think it’s dormant. We will be lucky if we can ever do a tracking spell.”

It was enticing Anna’s idea. I would have liked to start over in a place that didn’t know what happened. But people have ways of finding out. It would only be a matter of time before my past caught up with me. They promised our records would be sealed when we turned eighteen, but I had a feeling even the least talented hacker would be able to pull up the information. Or even the newspaper story published about Coldblooded murder in the Midwest clearly stated my full name. There was even a portrait printed of me. It was no shocker the Dupree kid was messed up.

“I wish I could wake up in the morning and all of this be a dream,” I mentioned wistfully.

I wanted to experience what other girls were doing. I didn’t want to live my life vicariously through Anna. It sucked to have my entire life changed because I ascended earlier than I was supposed to.

It was a Thursday, and I was lying in bed when I heard my father stomping up the stairs not long after hearing him screaming.

“The only good thing that ever came from this arrangement was Lizbeth.” He stomped toward the guest room.

“You think that’s the only good thing you got out of this? You are my husband; you are to serve the Coven and me. Instead, you are trying to find loopholes to long-lost magic in hopes of saving her.” My mother was right behind him.

She was wearing her nightclothes, and her hair was pulled up in curlers on the top of her head. She looked like the perfect southern debutante. I remember sitting up and walking toward my door. They never considered I could hear their arguments. They always felt I was smart enough not to pay attention. That ideology might have worked when I was ten, but it wasn’t the same as sixteen. If I heard my name, I was going to pay attention.

“You think I did all of this for you?” He laughed. “I didn’t have a choice in the matter. It was your mother who made the deal. I held my end of the bargain. You have an heir.” I heard him opening drawers and the sound of items hitting the bottom of a suitcase.

Things were cold then. My father was planning on leaving. I knew what that meant. He was going to leave, and then he was never going to come back, and I would be stuck in that big house with my mother. My feet took over and carried me across the hallway to the room. Tears began to stream down my face as I noticed my father packing all of his things into three suitcases. I never realized how little he had in comparison to my mother.

“Please don’t leave me,” I pleaded with him.

“Let him go, Lizbeth. It’s not like he wanted to be here anyway.” My mother slurred.

I could tell she had drunk all of her wine again with dinner. Her drunken rage is probably what set him off in the first place. Then again, he had three bags in his room for a reason. He had been planning this if not for that night, but for the next time, she pushed him too far.

“Do you ever shut up?” he sneered. “I am her father, and the lord knows a hell of a better parent than you have ever been.”

“Oh, please.” She brayed. “Who is it that got her off from a first-degree murder charge?”

“How quickly you forget the power of my persuasion. Yes, you were able to conjure up enough magical backing to keep our daughter from prison. But all these years have shown me, Lizbeth might have been better off living in a juvenile home until she turned eighteen. At least then, she would have had somewhat of a normal life. Not being cooped up in this house every day.” He clicked the latch on the largest bag and began to put things in the medium-sized one.

“Your persuasion,” she muttered with a gasp.

“Please, Daddy.” I pled again. Trying to drown her out before she forced the one good thing in my life to walk out the door.

“Sweetheart. When you are older, you will understand. When you can finally leave this place, I will have a room ready for you.” He kissed me on the cheek, clicked the next bag closed, and carried both out of the room.

“What are you talking about?” My mother demanded. “Have a room ready for her. Where do you think you are going to get the money?”

“I love how you conveniently forget who I am and where I’m from. I don’t need your damned money to survive.” He pushed past her and flew down the stairs.

I followed as quickly as I could. Before I knew it, I was out the door and throwing myself on the hood of his car.

“I love you, princess. Don’t you let her distort you. I mean it, though; in two years, you need to come to find me. I will tell you everything you need to know about your mother and the Dupree family.” He kissed me on the forehead, pulled me off the car, and glared at the woman standing on the porch.

“That’s right, Donald, go crawling back to your messed-up family. Forget the twenty years we’ve been married. I don’t need you.” My mother drunkenly called out after him.

I whirled around with anger in my eyes.

“This is all your fault!” I screamed at her as I stomped up the stairs.

My mother let out a roar of laughter and leaned against the front porch banister.

“On the contrary, little girl. This is most definitely your fault. If you hadn’t killed that wee girl six years ago, none of this would ever have happened.” She gave me a wicked smile. “I guess I should thank you. I’ve been trying to dump that man for the last fifteen years.”

Anger seared through my body, and while I wished those electrical currents would return for just one night, I knew then anklet would hold that power in place. I had to bide my time to get even with my mother.