My Eyes On You

I don't want you!

The room was dim,seemed to be the place of one of her dream with clouds of smoke rising, the room swaying with her

alcohol-distorted vision.

It was all so surreal.

She remembered Brendan touching her body, running his hands along her hips dancing seductively to the music

breathing against her skin.

she remembered lying down on the bed, but she didn‟t

know why—it could have been that she was dizzy, it could

have been that Brendan pushed her or cornered her.

This time, she was holding a beer bottle. What had happened to the solo cup?

How much have I had to drink? She thought. And how long have I really been here?

Time seemed to be in a vacuum, either lengthening or shortening, she didn‟t know which. Memories from the past

as well as visions of her future started tumbling towards her eyes as stars zoomed towards her at a million miles an hour. She was suspended in space, and then she was moving,

rushing towards an unknown destination.

It all happened in an instant, and it all happened in an eternity. He was still caressing her hips—those hips

curvaceous for a twelve-year-old girl and suddenly she realized that she was not wearing the dress that she had originally thought that she was wearing but an entirely

different one.

She jumped outside of her body for a moment and saw him running his hands along her hips, and saw that the

boughs of the dark trees outside were bending and swaying

under the wind, and the stars were frozen still in the sky,tiny pinpricks of light in an otherwise black sky, blacker than her hair, blacker than Brendan‟s eyes.

She wondered if he was really seventeen, and he lied because he had had to stay back a few years in school. No stupid twelve-year-old should kiss like that—like he‟d done it many times before.

He was still running his hands along her hips and her pupils were fully dilated; she heard banging on the door but then realized it was only the music. She realized the

door was locked. She realized she didn‟t have the energy

to stand, to push him away, to even speak.

She felt the beer bottle drop from her hand but then saw it across the room, atop a wooden chest of drawers.

She saw herself in the mirror, and she looked like a vampire.

“I don‟t want you,” she said.

He leaned against one of his arms. “Is that so?” He was so charming and suave that even when he spoke those words, he sounded like a good guy. At that moment,something deep within her recognized the sinister evil that lay beneath the surface.It could have been the evil within herself that allowed her to see it that night; but at that moment, her skin crawled and the hair on the back of her neck stood up

and a bracing shiver shook her body so hard that there was

no mistaking it in Leah‟s mind.

It was subtle, but it was there.

It was that night that Brendan Caldwell r***d her.

She woke up in the morning to a room that was bathed in pale light. The window, partially open, allowed a slight breeze to billow the white linen drapes and to

quietly knock the plastic end of the pull-cord against the wooden frame.

Leah stayed in her bed. She examined her room, so

still and undisturbed that it was unlikely that anyone had

/been in here last night. The door to her closet was half-open, revealing a display of neatly arranged tops and

skirts, and her bedroom door was closed, locked from the

inside.

Her room was completely neat. All the bureau drawers

were closed and all the clothes had been picked up off the

floor. The wall-to-wall carpet had been recently vacuumed, and the area rug had been recently beaten out. The air

smelled faintly like lilacs. In one corner, there lay a wicker basket full of quilts, blankets, and stuffed animals. In another sat a

cherry-wood rocking chair with roses painted on the back of

the seat.

The color scheme was all blues, pinks and creams; and the furniture was all cherry-wood, even her bed: a feminine design that her mother had picked out. An oval mirror and a rectangular mirror were mounted on the walls, and the ceilings were slanted, the room being as it was on the top floor. The walls and the counter-tops were decorated with pictures and figurines of unicorns and fantasy princesses, and a pair of ballet slippers hung over the doorknob.

She was wearing a lavender nightshirt and bare legs.

The humungous bed seemed to swallow her up in its soft folds, even as the bed did not overpower the large room.

Leah folded back the comforter and sheets and blinked her eyes against the ceiling. Not a sound, save the

whisper of the breeze and the distant chirping of a few birds, could be heard.

Memories flooded back to her. She had been sleeping, almost constantly, for days now. The party had been on a

Friday, and, looking at her clock, she saw that it was now Monday morning.

Though time had passed and much of that night had been clouded by the stupefying effects of

alcohol, she remembered everything that happened in that small, stuffy bedroom with perfect clarity.And how could she forget? She would remember forever the tacky design of the bedspread, the ugly milk lamps on the two nightstands, and even the Gideon‟s Bible, half-

open, on the oak desk.

And what happened in the space of only a few minutes, as it turned out, ended up being the last thing on Leah‟s

mind right now.

She got up shakily from the bed and walked carefully over to her closet. It was filled with an elaborate assortment of complementing colors and designs, all neatly arranged, pressed, hung, and recently cleaned. The shirts were all plain-cut and starched, and the colors were basic and subdued. Nothing flashy; nothing outrageous—just simple and elegant.

She collapsed onto her knees,grasping handfuls of the

beautiful clothes—so many of them, so much care taken to

preserve them.She cried softly, weeping into the fabric. And how long had all this been important to her? She wondered. And

how long would it be?

She had a queen‟s room in a nobleman‟s house. For so long she had been so comfortable, sitting on her bed dreaming up elaborate fantasies in her fairy-tale world.

Her parents treated her like royalty, and even though her life had not been perfect by any means, she had always had her fantasy life to return to, that safe place in her dreams where no one could touch her or make fun of her or call her names. There, life was safe. There, life was

perfect.