I just was accepted.. [Work included]

[anepitome]

Into the Juniper Institute for Young Writers, I just recieved my acceptance email and I'm getting a packet in the mail within the next few days.

I didn't get to recieve any scholarships though, so I have no idea how I'm going to come up with $375 in the next two weeks to cover my tuition fund, but it was still a great surprise and honor to me. This was the piece of work I submitted, from a novel I'm working on...

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Was I losing my mind, on the fast track to insanity? It was all becoming blurry, an unbelievably deep fog that was impossible to see the way out of. It was a feeling of absolute suffocation, of being helpless. Needless to say, I hated it. I was not the girl to become the damsel in distress in even the worst of situations, I was not the girl to bow to any man, I was not the girl who would give in and break down easily. I had been through so much in my life already that I thought I had become impervious to such emotions. However, as I sat on the floor surrounded by mountains of boxes with heart wrenching bitter sweet memories, all what I really desired to do was cry and scream and hope that somebody would answer my pleads, answer my questions that were still all left unanswered. All but one; my safe harbors, the two people that were always able to pull me out of bouts of insecurity and doubts of success with a simple gentle smile were gone without a trace. That I knew for sure. And of course, nobody that I had told believed me. The local police force had promised me that they would look into it, and they hadn’t spent more than a week on the case before they reported back to me, writing my story off as a hoax. A hoax! If only they were in my eyes, if only they could see what I see. Then again, why should they believe my story? Maybe I am going psycho, maybe I should cry, maybe I should scream, but a strong masculine voice on the other end of the phone line reminded me why I wouldn’t loose my mind entirely just yet. The voice reminded me why I refused to give up, it gave me the courage to push through until I found the break of this fog, until I am able to breath clearly again. There was something about it that captivated me from the first day I met him, a voice that relaxed my joints and cleared my head. However, as his voice broke through the barrier to my mind, it was anything but the wonderful voice that could relax me in such a manner. If anything, it only made my muscles tighten in a dull, persistent ache.

“You still there, Liz?” He sounded worried and the mere aspects of that made me purse my lips in distaste. Even if part of me wanted to baby for all of the attention I could receive the other half did not crave or require the pity of others, especially not him. Nicholas did not know of my situation and that was probably a good thing, I wouldn’t want one of my closest friends to think that I needed to be locked up in an institution as far away from the city as possible. My first attempt at mustering up some kind of reply failed horribly, my voice dry and hoarse and I realized that I hadn’t had a drink since the nearly sour strawberry milk at lunch that day. The thought of it made my stomach churn as I adjusted the phone against my shoulder, tilting my head to the side to accommodate such a position for it. I cleared my throat and tried at speaking once again, “I’m here. Sorry Nick,” I noticed just how absent my voice sounded and it frightened me. I was never the type of girl to hold enough pep to become a cheerleader, I never had enough school spirit to attend any football games or to stay at one of the loud obnoxious pep rally’s for more than five minutes, but I was never one to sound like the walking dead; and right now that was just how I sounded. Nicholas must of noticed it, because even though he offered a casual reply I could hear the unsure tone of his voice and could practically hear what he must be thinking. I was never good at hiding anything and although I had only met him two weeks prior to the disappearance of my spouses, he seemed to be able to read me better than anyone, like a perfectly understandable children’s story where there was nothing left to the imagination, the story was just given to you with it’s clichéd happy ending. Yeah, well, where was my happy ending? It didn’t seem to be in the clear but it was something I would work for, struggle if I had to. Before I could get to my ending, I needed to find the reasons, the answers, and I couldn’t do that with Nicholas practically breathing his worry all over me through the phone line. It unnerved me, made me feel unsure of even myself momentarily. I needed to distract him. Luckily, that’s one thing I am and always will be good at.
“Don’t worry about me, Nick. I’m just tired, that’s all. Let’s talk about you. You seem to be becoming Mr. Popular quickly. Tell me, how’s that like?” I tried to make a joke out of it, as I was never popular and never had more than two or three close friends and maybe that was why I jumped and clung at the chances of new friendships immediately, but his reluctance in answering told me that my attempt hadn’t pulled through. It did pay off however and after a minute or two, his voice picked up more enthusiastically as he talked on about the experiences. Some sounded like they might just require restraining orders but I stayed quiet and listened, merely mumbling out agreements and reacting half-heartedly as I fell back into my own range of thought, back into the abyss that threatened to swallow me whole if I dared give in for even a second. A part of me yearned to do that, to give in and allow myself to be swept away with the wind, how could it be up to one teenaged girl to discover the mysteries of her disappearing parents? I wasn’t entirely sure, but if the police were not going to do anything, I had to do something. I had to do everything. They were always there for me, and now it was my turn to return all of the favors over the past sixteen years. It all started here in the hundreds of memories in shapes of school projects, scrapbooks full to the brim, and all other kinds of nick-knacks. Maybe, just maybe, I did need help. But if not the police, then whom? I did have a grand total of six new friends including Nicholas, and my grade did have a lovely new guidance counselor who seemed like a kind-hearted, generous woman but I had no idea who to trust. I had no idea how to separate the people who would write me off as crazy and the people who would believe me and offer a helping hand in the situation.

I fumbled around all of the different memories, hardly remembering Nick’s presence on the phone once again, trying to use up the allotted time to the best of my abilities. My macaroni Christmas ornament from preschool, something so small and untidy now that I looked back to it but it was able to put a big smile on my parents faces and receive endearing kisses all over my face. It was a good Christmas, I remember that, and perhaps the reasoning was that it had been my first Christmas that I could still recall. The first time I watched the radar for Santa Clause on the television, the first time my parents and I all sang together to good old classics like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Jingle Bell Rock, the first time I saw the brilliant colored wrapping paper and scintillating red and green lights tied around a nice oak. I smiled tenderly down at the makeshift ornament, doing my best not to allow my emotions to choke me up and cause Nick to stop his own story to once more worry about mine. I flipped it carefully to peer at it’s back, my child like unfamiliar handwriting wrote out a misspelled cute little generic message, and still they had loved it.
I set the macaroni project aside among many other piles of what could easily be thrown off into a classification of junk from some lonely pack rat though to me they were treasures that could not be replaced by any amount of money in the world. They were my memories, my life, and I knew that somewhere within the heaps of them would lay my final answer to everything. Every time I found a new object that happened to catch my eye, my hands trembled in anticipation to see if this would be the one, but instead the ones I came across so far had only given me a smile or a bit of laughter or a frown at what I wished I could of changed. There are many things I wish I could change about my life, but perhaps staying home from school on that day would have been the biggest one. No, this had to be some kind of twisted fate. A part of me felt that even if I had been home the day of their disappearance nothing would of changed, and I couldn’t put my reasoning behind it, it was just a gut feeling inside of me. And awkwardly enough, my gut feelings were usually right. I continued digging through the boxes, only finding more photographs, more school projects, and more reasons to reminisce if it weren’t for the company of my good friend. Who, once more, had slipped my mind until I realized that he had stopped speaking to me about those numerous . . . odd situations he had been through already. That had to be horrible, and I was actually glad that I was anything but popular from what I heard of his experiences, though he was probably waiting for some kind of reaction. “Liz?” His voice again, as soft as silk but as sharp as lightening. It made me shudder involuntarily as I nodded in my head in response, realizing that he wouldn’t be able to see the movement and so I spoke once more into the phone, my voice lacking much enthusiasm, “Mhmm?”
“You really seem to be… absent lately, you know? Like you’re not really here,” Nicholas pinned me in that one statement which he had been suspicious of all along, and it brought me to a tough spot as I momentarily dropped the scrapbook I had been flipping through. “Is everything okay at home?” A cringe. How could he guess this so easily? It was as if he could read my mind. But that would be impossible, right?
“Everything’s fine Nick,” my voice proved to be much more form and defiant this time, if only because I did not want to be questioned any further, “I told you I’m just tired. Studying for the exams coming up is driving me nuts.” This time, his persistence wasn’t letting down as easily. I did not understand it. It was almost obvious that he knew exactly what was going on with me, and he seemed to want me to come out and tell him despite his infinite amount of knowledge about the situation… or maybe I’ve just seen one too many horror thrillers. I wouldn’t doubt that for a moment, I was a thriller movie freak, or maybe I had to revisit that psychopath theory. Becoming overly paranoid was the first sign, wasn’t it?
“If you say so Liz… I just worry about you, you know? You do have friends to talk to, don’t keep everything bottled up inside and.” I sucked my breath in, nothing that followed ‘and’ or ‘but’ could ever be good when there was a pause, “I’ve noticed that you’ve been spending a lot of time around Lysander lately.”
My brows furrowed in confusion at the statement. Lysander was another one of the new students who had just been enrolled a few weeks ago, and him and Nicholas were polar opposites. While Nicholas was the calm, polite, gentlemen-type that girls loved, Lysander was the dark, bad, and mysterious type that drew girls to him like a magnet. I was one of them admittedly, but what did that have to do with anything? I should have never picked up the phone; I wasn’t getting much of anything done now. “Yes. I have, what does that have to do with anything?” I was confused and surprisingly my mouth had to of collected some kind of saliva from my throat to be able to make my voice sound more audible and alive, though not positively.
There was a long pause, a hesitation, on the other side of the phone. It was as if he had told me too much and needed to find a way to change the subject or as if he had told me too little and was contemplating letting me in on more. I think I deserved that much, all of these new students were a bit out of the normal and I knew that Nicholas and Lysander did not get along but for some reason my mind was fixed on the idea that there had to be more to it than just a petty dislike for one another. “Nick?” It was my turn to question his name, my voice impatient and expecting of an answer. He knew that.
“It’s nothing, Liz. Just be careful around him, okay?” Nick paused there and I let out an audible groan of frustration that did not go unnoticed, he let out something of a laugh. What a rip off if that was really all he would tell me. I never watched those mystery or detective shows, they always bored me to the point of tears although that was all my parents would ever watch, but something didn’t seem to fit right in this entire situation. And I couldn’t place it, not that I needed another mystery on top of a more important one.
“What do you mean --” I was cut off.
“I’ll be right back, alright? I need to go help Alice with something.”
“… Alright, let me know when you get back.” I heard the sound of a phone being placed on a table and admitted defeat for now. Alice was yet another one of the new students, the daughter of the new guidance counselor and her and Nicholas seemed to be close. She was an undeniably beautiful girl, with rich golden brown hair and such pure blue eye that any person would die for. Her figure was small and petite, then again so was Nick’s, and her skin was flawless. Nicholas and her could be more like twins; they even seemed to share the same caring personality towards me. I squinted my eyes to make out the faded ‘speak’ button on the phone and pressed it, placing the phone on the floor so that I would be able to hear when Nick picked back up the phone. That meant that, for now, I could return to the current mystery at hand.

I heard noises from the phone every few seconds, only the sound of a girl’s voice who had to be Alice and noises of steps nearby the phone. I sucked in my breath every time steps became too loud, thinking that Nick was already coming back onto the phone, only to let it out with a great deal of relief when I didn’t hear my name or any other greeting in his voice. I did want to know more about what he seemed to be hiding from me, and I would figure that out, but I had too many things to contemplate and find the answers for as it was, I did not need anymore. I did not want any more problems.
My searches once more picked up without haste, emptying boxes by boxes of everything that I had left to remind me of my loved ones. Everything else was gone which only added to this mystery, a murderer would not steal everything that they owned, and they had been elderly. There was nothing to steal if the culprit had wanted to, though they had to be sick for wanting to do off with two kind senior citizens. It still did not add up, never before in my life with them could I recall a time when there was any conflict with another family member or a business partner, and besides the tiny fits I threw when I was younger there was hardly a single argument that went on in the house. There had to be something that I was missing, and something that I had to figure out soon if I wanted to find my parents and all and hopefully rescue them. I was probably thinking too hard, maybe the answer was right under my nose and I was just missing it. I really should of paid more attention to the detective series that used to play on the television almost twenty four seven besides the cartoons I’d demand to watch a few years ago, I might know what to do here. I had to figure out what to do.
With that thought, I tossed aside all complicated things such as my birth certificate that had been given to them, my adoption papers that always struck a hard spot for me that my true parents couldn’t of wanted me and so my savior parents meant that much more to me, and different awards for school. I had Girl Scout papers, a series of perfect attendance awards that stopped coming as soon as I entered high school, and other papers from various competitions I had entered. My talent always lied in art, art that expressed the human soul and emotion and I could grasp it so easily, I never quite understood that but I wasn’t one to complain about such a talent. I shuffled those papers around in my hands once before setting them off to the side as useless.
Come on, come on… I found more school projects, more photographs, and more old toys from past Christmases, nothing that was of any use to me. Wasn’t there anything here that could help me? There was no possible way to start from complete scratch, I would be trying to figure this out until I was elderly myself, and I did not want to give up. I felt the tears of frustration threatening to run down my face, that abyss of despair looming over me in a threat, but as I ran my hand in a box and felt something smooth and hard that abyss scurried away from me in a hurry and I sniffed in earnest and blinked my tears away.

Something that I had not come across yet in my searches, and in the last box I had to check, what was it? My curiosity got the best of me and with a shaking hand I grabbed a hold of the chain that followed the smooth hard surface and slowly lifted it out of the box and let it dangle in front of my face, the gold glinting from the flickers of light that came in from the large window. My eyes slowly widened with the realization of what I was holding and I nearly jumped, dropping it on accident as it clattered without any harm done back into the cardboard confinements. My hands were really shaking now, my eyes wide and blank as I shook my head to myself. “No,” I kept repeating like some delusional fool, but I couldn’t think of any other word from my vocabulary. It would be physically impossible for me at that moment. I was in a state of shock; I knew just what that was. The gorgeous 24karot gold chain held the egg-shaped pendant at the center. It was what I had just received no more than three weeks ago, and what I thought I had safely locked away in my dresser. My breathing growing uneven as I was left with no choice but to blink the tears once more from my eyes, once more lifting the necklace from the box and holding it tenderly in my hands as if it might break at any moment.
You must guard this necklace here, Liz; you must guard it with more than you guard your own life. Never let it fall into the wrong hands, we love you, her grandfather’s soft but serious words rung in her ears as if he were saying them to her now and she clutched at the amulet that met at the center all the more tightly. The faded image of two angels stood back to back against the golden color. This necklace connected to everything else going on somehow, I just knew it. I carefully traced the outline of the two angels with my index finger, doing it slowly with the purpose of being sure not to scratch the gold in anyway. I felt that it would break into a hundred pieces if I wasn’t careful enough, and then all my hopes of ever finding out anything would be gone with the wind and I wouldn’t have another starting point. This was it. My eyes glued back onto the cardboard box without blinking for a full minute, and I finally set the necklace upon the floor. I reached out an arm with exaggerated slowness, feeling around the bottom of the box until I felt a prick on my finger and on instinct I pulled my hand back out as if I had been touched by fire. I stuck my pinky finger, now bleeding, into my mouth and licked at it for a moment to stop the bleeding. “What’s that?” I felt myself question without a voice, merely mouthing the words to myself. I used my other hand to reach into the box, carefully taking out the neatly folded piece of paper and once the bleeding had stopped used both hands to open it up. My father’s crisp cursive handwriting against the worn paper caught my eye and I was sure that I felt the color drain from my face and I could not look much more lively than the white of the bedroom walls. My head spinning, all what I could think was ‘how’. How did this match up to the disappearance of my parents? How did this match up to Nicholas and Lysander’s odd rivalry? How did this match up to the six new students at school who all seemed to be immensely connected to me in some way? And most importantly, how could this paper be in my hands? All of my thoughts were lost upon deaf ears trailed until they were all lost. This was it, the one thing that would hold my answers, and the one thing that could give me any insight to all of the situations going on around me. Too bad it was the last thing that I wanted to see, “Nick.” I choked out his name, the distress clear in my voice as I heard him return on the other line.
“Liz? Liz, what is it? Is something wrong?” His voice grew urgency, and I heard Alice questioning frantically in the background at the sudden change in tone of his voice. I drowned Alice out. I drowned Nicholas out. I drowned myself out. All what I could focus on was the words on the piece of paper, the same words of advice my father had given to me. Everything was wrong, everything, how could he even ask me such a thing?

“Nothing. I- I have to go.” I hung up without another word and the phone clattered to the floor, I heard the battery pack inside fall out and clatter off to the side, but I could care less. I clutched the piece of paper in my hands as if it was a lifeline and felt the tears beginning to well up in my eyes as I laid back on the floor, body heaving and sobs racking until everything around me dimmed to black.