Sally is fifteen, a junior in high school. She’s on the field hockey team and plays viola in the school orchestra. She is a teacher’s pet. She is not well liked by her peers. She is mentally unwell. She does not know this. She thinks all the other girls think the way she does. She will not be diagnosed for another six years.
By then it will be too late.
Her favorite color is pink, and she is dressed head to toe in it. A pink ribbon in her hair, a pink sweater with darker pink triangles, a pink skirt. None of these pinks match each other. Sally doesn’t care. She, in fact, thinks the mismatching pinks makes her look ‘eclectic.’ If Sally was a different girl with a different future, in ten or twenty years she might have looked at her pictures from high school and cringed. Sally won’t be alive in eight years, let alone ten.
Her notebooks are filled with notes written in a bright pink gel pen. So pink, in fact, it’s hard to see exactly what is written. That is by design. Sally does, in fact, have some self awareness. Understands that some things about her should be kept secret. Again, she doesn’t know she isn’t quite right. She thinks all the girls her age have violent fantasies about their crushes. But she also thinks everyone keeps those fantasies to herself.
When Sally was seven she killed the neighbor boy’s puppy and when he came to her to cry about it she cried with him.
She’s sitting on one of the picnic tables outside the cafeteria now, watching that same boy toss a football around with his friends. She’s been obsessed with this boy ever since she killed his puppy. This boy – Dylan Andrew Rayfield, the most perfect name ever given to a human in the history of existence – is aware of Sally’s existence. They have, after all, been neighbors their entire lives. He thinks they are passing acquaintances. School friends at most. They chat on the bus, sometimes. They exchange notes. Once, Dylan realized he had left his pre-calculus text book in his locker when he needed it for homework. He called Sally to borrow hers for the evening and gave it back to her the next morning.
Dylan doesn’t know that Sally still has that textbook, even though that class was last semester. She claimed she lost it and gave the school sixty dollars out of her own money to replace it. It’s in the back of her closet, along with the rest of the Dylan shrine.
Dylan doesn’t know about the shrine.
Dylan doesn’t know that he’s secretly sending Sally signals all the time. Every passing glance, every ‘hey’ or ‘sup’ has a meaning that only the two of the know. Dylan doesn’t know that they are soul mates, that they are dating, that they are already planning their wedding for after graduation.
Dylan doesn’t know why his last girlfriend’s home burned to the ground with her and her parents and little brother inside.
Sally is a straight A student, never misses a day, never speaks out of turn, is on the Honor Roll and student government. She has been overheard muttering to herself by teachers. Several of them have seen the notes she was taking in their classes, seen that they weren’t notes, that the same sentence unrelated to history to To Kill a Mockingbird has been written over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over all down the page in swirly pink handwriting. They dismiss these things the way they never would have if Sally was a C student or liked to dress in black.
When Sally finally goes too far, everyone will say they never saw it coming. They never saw any hints. Some of these teachers will lose sleep over the lie. Only some.
Sally is watching Dylan out of the corner of her eye while her hand washes over the page, leaving disturbing pink swirls in its wake. If she could she’d pull all that gel ink off the wrinkled pages of her notebook and turn it into a long rope. She’d tie it around Dylan and around herself and they’d be together forever. He would look so cute in pink.
It’s what he’ll be wearing when the police find his body, but that’s not for another five years.
Her pink gel pen skips over the page without pause, without slowing, practically tearing into the white paper.
Mrs. Sally Rayfield
Mrs. Sally Rayfield
Mrs. Sally Rayfield
Mrs. Sally Rayfield
Mrs. Sally Rayfield
Mrs. Sally Rayfield
Mrs. Sally Rayfield
Mrs. Sally Rayfield
Mrs. Sally Rayfield
Mrs. Sally Rayfield
Mrs. Sally Rayfield
Mrs. Sally Rayfield
Mrs. Sally Rayfield
Mrs. Sally Rayfield
High Urban Fantasy Jazz 