Chapter 1: Part one
My grandmother always said that mirrors were the root of vanity and therefore evil. I never knew it could be anything other than a reflecting glass until that last night on the lake. That night the lake was still, waiting in anticipation. So still, that you could see your reflection in it, as well as damn near to the floor. Johnny and I had been out on the lake for no more than ten minutes before the fog rapidly set in around us--swallowing us into the veil; away from prying eyes. Johnny and I had to grow up that night, and grow up quickly.
We had been friends since he moved into the old broken down house at the end of our shared street. When he moved in, he had just lost both of his parents to mysterious circumstances. Initially, it was reported that they had died in a car crash. Brutal, and bloody, yet when first responders arrived, the burning husk of their vehicle did not contain either of the bodies. However, Johnny was unfortunately left to live with his uncle, Mr. Davis. From what Johnny told me over the years, I have learned that Mr. Davis was like the black sheep of his family, completely opposite of Johnny’s mother, Davis’s sister.
Mr. Davis was not a kind or good man, and he was definitely not a good father. He was a man who spent every last bit of his measly earnings on a bottle or a pill. You could see this much just by looking at the old bastard. He was tall, but thin enough his cheeks sunk in around the curves of his skull. He walked hunched over like an old man, with the outline of his spine visible through his dirty work clothes. He had wirey, greasy, black hair that came down to his shoulders but fell out in clumps on the daily. He only had a few teeth left in the front of his mouth. He had a favorite, right in front, because it was large, pointed, and had a specific purpose--popping the caps off of bottles. But, what made Mr. Davis a bad man? Well what made him bad was what he did after a few glasses of his favorite brown water.
Mr. Davis was vile when he drank, so much so that he would hurt Johnny for the sole reason that he was alive instead of his late parents--Davis’s main source of income. Johnny’s parents had always been kind enough to help Davis, even when they knew he would never pay them back. When they died, a large portion of Davis’s income died with them. Because of this, Davis had made his mind up that it was somehow Johnny’s fault that his parents did in that car crash.
When Johnny first arrived, it was in the middle of June. When he first arrived at Davis’s house, he only had one bag, and a fishing rod. His uncle usually worked during the day when Johnny first arrived, so Johnny and I, and all the other children on our street, would go to the edge of the lake to catch the little silver fish that swam near the banks. That didn’t last long, because the other children liked to push Johnny around. They knew how Davis was before Johnny did, calling his uncle a drunk, and other negative titles. Their mothers eventually told them not to hang around us, because of Johnny’s uncle.
Between that June and the start of school Johnny came to realize that the other children were right. My house became his home away from home, and my parents tried all they could to make him comfortable before Davis called him home for the night. It was never enough, though.
Before long, Johnny began wearing sweaters, even in the scorching heat of summer. He always claimed to be cold, even when visibly sweating due to the extra fabric around his arms. One night, on the rare occasion that he was allowed to sleep over at my house, he finally broke down. It began with silent, hot tears running down his thin cheeks. His face screwed into unholy pain as he leapt into my arms and sobbed against my chest. I was shocked. I had never seen him cry, not even when the older boys of the neighborhood pushed him around and then ditched us when he first arrived. But, he cried that night. He cried and cried and cried until his tears ran out and hiccups took the place of his sobbing. When he finally peeled his face from my now tear and snot soaked shirt, he looked at me with such sadness, that I had wanted to cry. I didn’t even know what was wrong at that point, other than it must have been something horrible.
I asked him if he wanted to talk about whatever it was that was bothering him, and he simply shook his head no and wrapped his tiny arms around his small frame. I went to touch his shoulder to try and comfort my friend, but as soon as my hand started to advance towards him, he shrunk away from me, squeezing his eyes shut in a large, visible flinch. We were only 10 then, but I think I knew deep down why Johnny reacted how he did, so I just asked him.
“Johnny, what happened?” That one question was enough for Johnny to tell me everything that had occurred in the past several months. He ended his long list of assaults by removing his shirt for the first time since June. The last time he had done so, he had a little bit of a tummy, he was tanned, and there was only a small scar on his shoulder from falling off of his bike, he told me. However, what I saw then almost 3 months after meeting him, shattered my heart. His back was covered in cuts and bruises in various stages of healing. Scabs, scars, and fresh wounds were surrounded by black, blue, purple, and yellow bruising in shapes that looked like they could have come from being hit with a truck. But, that wasn’t all that Johnny had to show from his time with his uncle. He took off his pants, leaving him in just boxers and socks, showing me what his uncle had done to his legs. Burns of varying degrees littered Johnny’s legs. Some were perfectly circular, probably from the cigarettes Davis smoked constantly. Others, were from unknown origin, but varied in size and shape. His once plump little body was now sharp and bony. His ribs were visible and littered with bruising on their own, and his tan was gone. I had noticed that the bones in his cheeks stood out a little more than usual, and his hands had looked more like spiders than usual, but I had never dreamed that this was happening to my best friend, just two doors down from me.
After Johnny’s confession I wanted to tell my mom. However, Johnny pled with me to tell no one and to take his secret to the grave, for if I did tell someone, we would no longer be best friends. How naive of us. A few years later, when we were freshmen in high school, Johnny still only wore sleeves and long pants. But, we were no longer best friends. I watched Johnny every day during lunch, wondering what had gone wrong between us.
I knew we were falling apart the summer before freshman year. I would go over to Johnny’s house to see if he wanted to go catch frogs or silver fishes by the lake, and every time for the first two weeks of summer vacation, he said no. Instead, I later learned, he began hanging out with the older boys in our neighborhood--we were going to be freshmen and they would be juniors. They would hang out down the shore of the lake from me, smoking and playing loud, rude music. I could hear them from where I sat fishing and catching frogs, saying that I was the weird one, that I was the loser who had no friends. They were right. After Johnny and I had been exiled from the neighborhood kids, he was my only friend, and I thought I was his. I am still unsure to this day as to how Johnny became reinstated to the neighborhood group, but he looked like he fit right in. He was tall for his age, taller than his junior friends. But not me. I was always bigger than he was in height and width. I was on the boxing team. Johnny, however, was tall and lanky with large feet and hands, with long, thick, artificially black hair that covered his forehead and the tips of his ears. I could see from where I sat sparkles of metal littering his face, his nose and ears both had small hunks of metal stabbed through them, and thick heavy chains hung around his neck and from his pockets. He had colored his nails black. He looked just like the others in his group, he fit right in with the group of junior outcasts.
So, you can imagine how shocked I was on the night that he came to me. June 10, the summer before our sophomore year of high school, was and will forever be one of the most terrifying nights of my free life. The sun had set and the temperature had begun to drop for the night, there was almost an electric chill to the air by the time things got interesting. The weather had predicted clear skies and a full moon for that night, but he only got half of it right. The rain started as a light drizzle, like the mist that the veggies receive when they sit on supermarket shelves--fine and cool. Thunder rolled off in the distance. At this point in my life I had not spoken to my old friend in just over a year, funny how he chose to act on the anniversary of his arrival in Sandy Cove.
