Cursed (Book 1, The Watchers; Young Adult Paranormal Romance) (6 page)

 “Hold on,” Brand
said.  It was then I learned what a Porsche 911 could really do.  It wasn’t
long before we left Will far behind us.  I looked back to see if I could make
out his car.

 It was then I saw
it.

 A small commuter
plane buzzed directly over our heads.  If I had just reached my hand up at its
passing, I could have touched its fuselage.  I felt Brand push the Porsche to
its limits as a wave of heat hit my skin when the plane crashed into a ball of
fire behind us.  Once we were well out of danger, Brand slowed down and parked
on the side of the road. 

 “Are you all right?”
he asked turning to me.

 I was shaking so
hard I could hear my teeth clattering in my mouth.  Brand got out of the car,
opened my door and drew me into his protective embrace.  I laid my face against
his warm chest and watched as the fire consumed the plane behind us.  People
had stopped and were walking around the wreckage looking for survivors.

 “Lilly,” Brand
looked down at me with concern.  “Are you all right?”

 I nodded and
started to cry.  Brand drew me in close and let me stain the front of his shirt
with my tears.

 “I think I’m
cursed,” I whimpered.

 I could feel his
hand in my hair gently rubbing my head to soothe my jagged nerves.

 “Why would you
think that?”  He asked in disbelief.

 There on the side
of the highway I told Brand the story of my life and why Fate seemed determined
to shorten it…

It all started
when I was eight years old.  My mom had gone to a concert with one of her
numerous boyfriends.  I forget which one it was.  She’s had so many over the
years it was hard to keep track.  She left me with Tara and Utha Mae for the
night.  Since they lived right beside us in the same trailer park, it was
inevitable that Tara and I would become best friends.  Her grandmother called
us “two peas in a pod”.  I always thought that was a strange way to describe us
since I was the palest white person on the block and Tara the darkest black
person I had ever seen.  We may have been opposites when it came to our looks,
but our friendship transcended the divide our skin might have made.  I’ve often
thought it funny how most Northerners think all white people in the South
dislike blacks or look down on them.  For the most part, we all get along
together.  But it always seems to be the few rabble rousers who get all the
attention.

Will had come over
to play twister and watch a movie with us that night.  William Allen Kilpatrick
lived up the road from our trailer park in a nice middle class neighborhood. 
Utha Mae had practically raised him since he was a baby.  Heck, she had
basically raised all three of us really.  Tara’s father had left her in her
grandmother’s care when he was shipped off to Parchman for attempted murder. 
No one knew where Tara’s mother was and no one cared.  She had been a drug addict
and fallen in with a bad crowd after Tara was born.  We just hoped she would
stay away indefinitely.

My mother, well,
she was a free spirit.  She moved from job to job and man to man.  She always
told me she just couldn’t find her calling in life and no man would ever
replace my father, even though she kept on trying.

My father.  I had
to smile at that one.  His identity was a mystery to me.  All Cora could
remember was that he was the most handsome man she had ever seen.  He had made
her heart and knees melt like butter the first time he said “Hello” to her. 
She said she met him when she was eighteen years old vacationing out in San Francisco with her family.  She ended up getting pregnant with me and ran away from
home because her parents wanted her to have an abortion.  She never looked back
and never told me who my grandparents were. 

 “We don’t need
them, Lilly,” she would always say when I brought them up. 

 After a while, I
stopped asking about them.  All the family I needed was Tara, Will, and Utha
Mae anyway. 

 Utha Mae would
call us kids the “three musketeers”.  She was like that, always making
nicknames.  When we were young, you would never see one of us without the other
two.  If I were honest with myself, I would have to admit I miss those days.

 That night we had
all made a secret plan to meet up at the half bridge out on the lake.  Part of
the bridge had simply collapsed into the lake one day.  Luckily no one was on
it at the time.  It was an old wood bridge so no one was too surprised about
it.  Hardly anyone drove on it anymore except for a few old timers who refused
to use the new highway. 

 By the time Utha
Mae went to bed, Tara had fallen asleep too.  Let me tell you something: trying
to wake Tara up is like trying to wake the dead.  Actually, it might be easier
to wake a dead person.  After trying for ten minutes to get her to wake up, I
just left without her.  I rode my bike down to the lake where Will was already
waiting sitting at the end of the bridge with his legs dangling off the edge.

 “Where’s Tara?” He asked when I sat beside him looking down into the deep black water of the lake. 
The only light to see by was the moonlight.  Luckily, it was a full moon that
night.

 “She fell
asleep,” I told him rolling my eyes in exasperation.

 “Oh, well,” he
said looking at me with a mischievous glint in his eyes I had seen one too many
times.

 “What are you
planning, Will Allen?”  I stood up from the edge of the bridge and slowly
started to walk backwards.

 Will stood too
and tried to act nonchalant.  “Oh nothing,” he said before he pulled out a
long, thin snake from his pocket.  “I saw this in my Mom’s garden and thought
you might want to see it.”

 “Don’t you dare,
Will Allen Kilpatrick!”  He knew I hated snakes.  Anything that didn’t have
legs but could out run me was not something I wanted to be around.

 “Oh come on,
Lilly, you know you want to pet him.”

 Will started to
chase me around the bridge with that stupid snake.  And as luck, Fate, whatever
you want to call it, would have it I tripped, conked my head against an old
wooden post on the side railing and fell into the water unconscious.  The next
thing I remembered was lying on the bank spitting out water from my lungs with
Will cradling me in his arms.

 “Lilly!  Lilly!”
Will was so frantic, I thought he was having a fit.  “Are you ok?  Is anything
hurt?  How many fingers am I holding up?”

 Rubbing the sore
spot on the back of my head, I looked at him like he had lost his mind.  “Two,
stupid.  I’m not blind.  What happened?”

 “You fell and hit
your head.”

 “I know that
much. How’d you get me out of the water?  It’s pitch black out there!”

 Will sat back on
the grassy bank and didn’t speak for a while.  I sat with him and waited for
him to tell me what happened.

 “When I saw you
go in, I dove in after you.  I found you and brought you back up.”  He said it
so simply, like it was no big deal.  He was my savior, and he sat there like it
was just something that happened everyday.  

 I hugged him and
whispered, “Thank you.”

 That was the day
Fate noticed me and changed one of my best friends forever.  From that moment
on the Will I had known since I was a baby didn’t exist anymore.  I don’t know
how I knew this, I just did.  Tara and Utha Mae knew it too, though we didn’t
talk about it.  Talking about our family behind their back wasn’t something we
did.  We still loved Will, but knew the Will we had known wasn’t coming back. 
Gone was the child who played with us with abandon.  In his place was a more
serious Will who watched us closely, like he was afraid the boogeyman was going
to jump out of the dark at any moment and take us away.  There were moments
when we could see glimpses of our Will, but they grew to be fewer and fewer as
time went by.

 It almost seemed
like Will knew Fate was trying to do me in after that night.  Maybe that’s why
he was always there when I needed him.

 When I was ten
years old and Will eleven, I remember being called into the principle’s office
right before school was to let out for the weekend.  The office secretary, Ms.
Cane, took me out of the softball game we were playing down by the lagoon and
asked me to follow her.  It made me nervous, and I wished Utha Mae hadn’t taken
Tara out of school early for her dentist appointment.

 “Am I in trouble?”
I finally asked her, scrambling my brain for something I had done wrong.  The
only thing I could think of was the pile of green M&M’s Tara and I had
stashed under the bookshelf in Mr. Price’s science class.  One of the older
kids had told us they would make us horny.  Well, we had enough problems.  We
didn’t need horns growing out of our heads.  At least that’s what we thought
that meant back then.  Now it just makes me laugh at how naïve we were.

 “No, Ms.
Nightingale, you are not in trouble.” 

 Dear Ms. Cane,
she was the proverbial old maid:  never married and no children of her own,
just her and her ten Persian cats in an old house she inherited from her
mother.  She was always dressed in a paisley dress of some color and fashion,
high heels and her white hair coiffed just so on top of her head.  I often
wondered as a child how she slept.  I figured she had to sleep upright.  There
was no way that head of hair would lay flat against pillow.

 When we got to
the principal’s office, I found Will sitting in front of Principal Wright’s
desk with a trash can in his lap and a face as pale as a piece of chalk.  His
blue eyes looked at me beseechingly as I stepped inside.  Though, as soon as I
did I regretted it.  The stench surrounding Will was like a wall hitting me in
the face.

 “Hi, Lilly,” Mr.
Wright greeted me.  I always liked Mr. Wright.  He was short, fat, bald and the
nicest guy on the planet.  He had five children of his own so he always knew
how to talk to us kids.  “Poor Will here has the stomach flu.  We’ve called his
parents but he requested that you sit with him until they get here.”

 “Do I have to?” I
asked, trying to hold my breath so I wouldn’t have to smell what was in the
trash can.

 “Please, Lilly,”
Will looked at me with those bright blue eyes and I couldn’t say no.  I sucked
it up and sat there with him until his Mom came.  Will’s Dad was out of town on
business so we had to wait until Will’s Mom got off of work at the hospital. 
She couldn’t leave before her shift was over since they were short staffed. 
So, we ended up staying until almost an hour after school let out.  That’s when
the news came. 

 Our school bus
had been in an accident.  Apparently a man on a motorcycle had a heart attack
and crashed head-on into the bus.  The bus driver swerved to miss him but ended
up tipping the bus off the road and flipping it a few times into an empty
field.  Luckily only one person was hurt: little Emily May.  She had always
wanted to sit up by the bus driver like I did when I rode the bus.  She ended
up flying out the window and being crushed as the bus flipped.  If I had been
on the bus that day, I would have died. 

 After that,
nothing happened for five whole years.  I thought Fate had forgotten about
me.   But, apparently she has a long memory.

 Will had just
“forced” me to join the Beta club at school.  I didn’t want to because I
thought their initiation was stupid.  The girls had to wear rollers in their
hair, a bathrobe, and a sign saying “Beta Club” around their neck for a whole
day.  It was stupid.  I wasn’t going to do it.

 “Don’t you want
to get into college?”  He had asked me while we were sitting in the library for
study period.  “This will look good on a college application.  It might even
help you get a scholarship.”

 “She don’t have
to do nothin’ she don’t want to, Will Allen” Tara said in my defense.  “Why
should she have to dress up like some kinda white trash to join an ‘honors’
club anyway?”

 Will rolled his
eyes at Tara.  “It’s not that bad.  I did it last year and you two got plenty
of laughs at my expense.”

 It was true. 
Tara and I had laughed our heads off the first time we saw Will in his
initiation outfit.  The boys had to dress up as “nerds”.  He had slicked back
his pretty blond hair, borrowed a pair of his Dad’s old horn rimmed glassed and
put white tape at the center of the nosepiece, folded up a pair of baggy old
man pants like high waters with suspenders and worn calf high black socks with
tan sandals.  I’m pretty sure I still have a picture of him in the get up.  It
was a framer.  I would have gotten it blown up into a poster, but my Mom
wouldn’t pay for it.

 “Come on, it’ll
be fun,” he said with that sweet little smile of his I could never refuse.  “We
get to go to Biloxi next month for the state convention.  Don’t you want to
take a walk on the beach?”

 Ok, I have to
admit.  By the time I reach puberty, I developed a serious crush on Will.  I
couldn’t tell Tara.  I couldn’t tell anyone!  It was just too embarrassing. 
He’d been my best friend for so many years.  How could I have romantic feelings
for him now?  In a way I almost felt dirty about it, like it was incestuous in
someway.  You know how non-southerners are always talking about people in the
south marrying their sister or brother or first cousin?  We had grown up together. 
Weren’t we almost like brother and sister?  But as soon as I turned thirteen, I
started to see Will in a totally different light.  All the girls at school
fawned over him.  He didn’t seem to care though.  He still spent all his time
with me and Tara.  I began to wonder if he felt the same way about me too. 
Perhaps having me join the Beta Club with a promise of a walk on the beach was
his way of saying it indirectly.

 So, I plucked up
my nerve so I could have that walk on the beach with Will and see where things
went after that.

 It was early
March when we had our convention in Biloxi.  It was the first time I had ever
stayed so far away from Tara in my whole life!  We left that Friday afternoon
from school and made it to Biloxi by dinner time.  We stayed at the Super 8
across from the beach.  The rooms were packed.  There were four people to each
room and let me tell you, four girls in one room is three girls too many.  I
convinced Will to let me get ready for the night’s festivities in his room.  It
was only him and Jake Pugh in there anyway.  Plus, they were guys.  It’s not
like they had to do much to get ready.  Shower and put some clothes on.  Why do
boys have it so easy?