But I don’t go out to nightclubs anymore, where they sell drinks and drugs—the kind you never heard of, let alone imagined. I don’t dress in masquerade, a mask behind a mask, and dance with men who touch me and then vanish without even a kiss. I don’t break into bookshops, and I don’t steal. I don’t leave messages in weird places for people to find. Except in the back of people’s diaries sometimes…
Ari reminds me of what I lost when I lost the Viking… John. You know, he used to bring me seeds and call me his bird—his pesky falcon hawk…
Distract yourself. Distract me, Dee.
I miss him. John. I don’t want to talk about him. He’s the proof that I can’t have friends. He’s the proof that getting close is dangerous—it just ends up hurting.
It hurts.
But I do…
Be honest. Be honest.
I miss the Viking. I could really use one of his wisecracks. It’s been a while since I’ve seen him—not since Carly and I were dragged to Claydon. I’ve looked for him—an email address, anything. I sent a letter to his house, but I guess they moved.
He was responsible for all these changes. He’s the reason I got out of the habit of practicing my suicide note—which I left for strangers to find. At bus stops, late-night cafés, pubs, clubs. Everywhere. Anywhere. Nowhere.
I remember it line for line: “Tell the living that I was never one of you. When you find this note, my throat will be a bloody red smile.”
You can say it. I have a flair for melodrama. But it really was a cry for help. It still is. I’m just too scared to reach out even that much anymore. Thank you, Lansing.
I met the Viking at one of these masquerade clubs—Masqued, I think it was. It was all blackness with strobes, green, white, and blue. The music made the glass shiver and the floor beneath our feet hammer as if attempting to get us to quit stomping on it.
He towered over everyone and looked as if he was with everyone, but he was alone, like me. His mask concealed a face I instinctively knew would be a mask in itself. He was veneers upon veneers upon hidden secrets. I think I recognized myself there, and I wanted him to be my secret. Something only mine. Something real.
Suddenly he was beside me, his Viking helmet glinting under the strobes.
We started to dance, and he didn’t touch me. Not once. We lost ourselves in the music, in the obscurity it gave us, where no words could survive, making them even more unnecessary. I took off my mask. He took off his. And we both saw, for one fleeting moment, the true self beneath before we shuttered down the iron layers we had grown over our skin.
We left without a word. He with a girl from the bar, me alone.
The following night, he was there again, same mask, just like mine. We danced, and I didn’t feel or see the other masked figures gyrating around me, only him. It wasn’t sexual. It wasn’t anything except a small connection to another human, and even that I was skeptical of.
He left his mask down as he said, “Will we exchange names?” These words did survive.
“True or fake?” I asked.
“True.”
“Dark Half.”
“Barbarian.”
I shook my head. No. “Viking.”
And it was not an untruth. Dark Half and the Viking. That’s all we were to each other. He went home with a new girl, and I went home alone.
Every night we’d dance and exchange a sentence or two. Eventually our relationship evolved out of Masqued and into the streets of Chester. We’d walk around aimlessly, among the freaks and the rejected, who all come out at night.
“Don’t you have somewhere to be?” I’d ask.
“Yes,” he always replied. “Here.”
“Which girl tonight?”
He’d shrug. “No idea.”
“You like your damsels.”
“No Viking is ever without one. Pillage and plunder. How about you? A Dark Half… implies another half. A Light one.”
I hesitated. “True.”
“Want to eat?”
He always knew when I didn’t want to talk about something. He never asked too many questions. At least, he never asked important ones. He’d state a truth and move on to the trivial, and I liked him for it.
We ate greasy chips from a chippy off Guildford Road.
“Got to go,” I said, flipping down my mask once we were done.
He nodded and put on his helmet-with-mask, and was once again Barbarian the Viking. He turned and left. No long, drawn-out good-byes. No hugs or air kisses. I think I loved him because of that.
It became a regular thing.
I kept him out of the Message Book. For a full half year, he was just mine. I accidentally mentioned him once, and after that—after the tiny slip—he wasn’t my secret anymore. It was after the slip that I asked Carly if I could tell him about us. She agreed, and I did, and for a time, everything seemed sort of… perfect.
I should have memorized his number, maybe, instead of just saving it in my phone. They took it away. Took him away. I never even knew his surname.
I hate that I miss him. My brother. My friend. I hate that I’ve been looking for signs of him on the Internet. I hate that I’m so easy to let go.
I guess it’s easy to abandon forget someone once she’s out of sight. Still. I can’t believe the Viking would do that. Or I couldn’t, for a long, stupid time. Some days I still can’t.
And here I sit, writing about him as though he’s just a ghost from my past that still haunts me. And I guess that is all he is now. Just some guy I used to know.
Midnight, Courtyard
I’m too proud to email Ari first.
Sunday, 12 September 2004, 12:30 am
I spy on Naida sometimes too. She’s going to be a serial killer for sure. Right now I’m outside her window, up in the giant beech tree. Juliet also has a beech outside her window, and Brenda too, and I’m pretty well hidden. In late autumn, when the leaves fall, I won’t be able to use it to spy, but I have other methods—besides, I have this weird notion that I’m one with the darkness and that I’m really nothing more than a shadow myself.
Well, it’s true, Dee, isn’t it?
Right now, Naida’s kneeling beside her bed, facing the window—facing me—but there’s a candle burning (probably some acacia-turnip-catnip ritual concoction), so she’s blind to my presence, I think. As far as I know, she sneaks these candles and paraphernalia into the dorms without permission. Where she hides them I have no idea. In her arsecrack for all I care.
To the casual observer, it would appear (apart from the scarves—tapestries?—on the walls and the strangely symbolic carpets on her floor) that her room follows school regulations. I know, however, that the bottles that look like perfumes are actually oils she uses for conjurations and ritual baths and that the little pouches that look like purses are actually full of herbs and weird stuff like that. What do they call them? Douche charms? Hope charms? Whatever. The cards on her dresser are kind of like tarot cards, and she has all kinds of weird spell kits that I’ve seen her riffling through under her bed (covered with long bedclothes, of course)—**cough** Witch **cough**.
When I watch her murmur under her breath, hold a lighter under the incense (banned incense, I might add), and beat on a little drum she stashes under her bed—when I watch her draw symbols on her walls in fragrant water that no one can see and then dance around her room—I almost feel like a part of it.