Over The Sea Read Free

“Those gowns are actually quite heavy, and you’d feel like a stuffed cushion in this weather.”
    â€œI’d like to try one.. Just once.”
    She grinned. “Maybe someday. Want to go somewhere? I can do transfers.”
    â€œHow about the beach? It’s close, but we hardly ever get to go.”
    â€œPicture it in your mind,” she said.
    I did. She murmured again, touched my arm, and a dizzy-spell splorched behind my eyes. But before I could do anything it passed, and my vision cleared, and I found that we were standing at the water’s edge. The crash and sigh of small breakers, the heavy smell of brine, the feel of wet sand under my toes were all real.
    We ran, kicked sand, made mountains, and time sped by until she jolted me with, “I have to go.”
    She touched my arm again, and we stood outside my room.
    â€œI’ll be back,” she promised, and I went inside.
    I was tired at school the next day, but I didn’t care. I no longer doubted her existence — and I believed her promise.
o0o
    Sometimes it would be a week before she came again. A couple times the weeks stretched into months. Summer passed, and school started again, a new grade, the same old stuff. The first time she let so long a time go by once again I found it difficult to believe that she had been real, or that I would ever see her again, and my mood veered between the hurting kind of hope — when you don’t really believe, you only wish, really hard — and anger. Yet mad as I got, I never wished she hadn’t come. The memory of her visits was much stronger than the pain of hopes dashed yet another dreary day.
    Of course I had to hide my feelings, for I knew that I could never talk about Clair. Oh, just the thought of mentioning a girl with white hair who came from another world and knew magic would make me cringe inside, for I’d either get laughed at for more silly stories, or else called a liar. And if I dared to say that I wished I could go away with her, I’d get the belt for being pouty. You want something to whine about? I’ll give you something to whine about . I can still hear that threat, and the sickening feeling that one could not get away, that one was not safe in one’s own home, and then afterward, Smile! If you pout you’re asking for it . Even though you never, in your whole life, would ever ‘ask’ to be beaten with a wire hanger or a belt, or to have a shoe flung at your head.
    Not that I lived with villains, for I didn’t, really. I know what real villains are. But that was the way people treated kids in those days, and they hit you the harder, convinced that it was somehow good for you — that they were in the right. If you got in trouble at school, you could count on getting in more at home, for having been bad enough to have the first trouble.
    So violence was used to get you to behave, to work harder, to listen — and to think, or at least to pretend to think, like everyone else, to behave the way they told you to. The only safe place was away from adults. And the very idea that someone like Clair could be real would be something the adults would feel they had to beat out of me for my own good.

Sherry 1966

TWO — Over the Sea
    A soft tapping at the door — she was back!
    Soon we sat on the fence. “What’s your favorite color?” I asked.
    â€œMmm ... I keep changing my mind, truth to tell. To see, I like them all. Blue right now. And you?”
    â€œGreen. I love blue too, but the green of trees, of grass, and there couldn’t be anything prettier than green velvet. I saw some once, in a movie.”
    Her lips shaped the word movie?
    I explained. She said it sounded like magic, and I asked her to do another magic trick, to prove to myself again that that, too, was real.
    After that we talked, and played, and traded stories. I told the stories of books that I’d read, sometimes acting them out,