Young Writers Society

The boy sat on the bed, waiting for the nurse to come get him to go to his first therapy lesson. The girl named Crystal had gone the hour before with much grumbling about someone named Ciara. Is Ciara the therapist? I’ve never heard of her; I’ll ask Bradley.

The kid swung his legs onto the bedside, possibly liking the thumping noise that it made. The bed shuddered beneath him with every kick, which seriously annoyed the creature underneath it. She didn’t think that this kid was her age. The file that Bradley stole said that the kid was seventeen. Super old.

“Hey, can you stop that?” she asked him, even though she knew that he couldn’t hear her. He was too old, after all.

The boy’s blue eyes widened and he jumped off of the bed, grabbing a book that the nurses left there the night before (“The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”. Apparently, it was for Crystal, but Crystal refused because it was apparently “racist”. The boy, after reading some of it, disagreed). He held it in front of him. “Who are you? How did you get in here?” he called out, speaking fast. His voice, which sounded like someone that Sara saw on a cartoon show, wavered with panic. “Why are you under my bed? Are you Crystal? No, it can’t be,” he mumbled, shaking his head to himself. The red hair that he possessed threw a few hairs away, with a little bit of dandruff. “I would have noticed if she came in.”

“Wait,” the creature said. “You can hear me?”

“Of course,” he said, looking even more paranoid. “Why can’t I?”

Sara crawled out from under the bed. The ginger boy gasped. It was a shadow, with a cross-type thing for a head and white orbs that looked like eyes in the middle and on each of the sides. It had six arms and four legs, ending with sharp-looking things (he remembered looking at a picture that one of the kids drew of a hand with sharp claws. What was what he guessed were supposed to be hands looked like just one gigantic claw). The shadow’s orbs blinked. “I’m Sara,” she said with a high, but heavy voice. Sara tried to extend her claw-like hands, but it blended with the rest of her shadow body and she pulled it back. “I’m sorry. I can’t shake your hand. I don’t think that I can touch you. You’re special, for sure, but-”

The kid put the book down (this girl seems like a child, even if she is a monster, he thought. But she’s also lonely, like me. Maybe she’s a friend. Even if she tries to kill me, she’s not better than most humans.) and grabbed what was supposed to be her wrist and shook it. Sara’s orbs widened. None of the other kids could touch me. Only talk and see. The kid didn’t smile and looked up at her warily, but didn’t attack her like half of the other kids did.

“I’m Thomas,” he said politely, with an untrusting undertone. “Nice to meet you.”

Sara wanted to grin, but couldn't, due to the fact that she was, quite literally, a shadow. A noise emitted out of her that sounded like a sigh. "I-I can't believe that you can do that."

"Do what?" Thomas asked, curious.

"Are you seventeen?" Sara asked. When Thomas nodded, she continued. "Usually, only kids that are under fifteen can see... us. The shadow people that roam the halls. And, even then, none of them can touch us. You're something different." She made a happy gesture with her claws.

"Can Crystal see you?" Thomas asked. But of course that was the first thing that he asked, Sara thought to herself. She is his roommate, after all.

Sara waved her claws in a "no"-like gesture. "Bradley thinks that she can, but I don't think so. It must have been a lucky guess, especially since we've followed her around and have never noticed anything."

"You followed her around?" Thomas asked, taking a step back from Sara. "That's very stalkerish." He shivered, probably from a memory. "You weren't planning to... do anything, right?"

Sara gasped. "Of course not! I would never do that! I'm only-" She stopped. "Actually, I don't know how old I am. Time flies when you're an undead shadow on the walls," she said lightly, as if making it a joke.

But Thomas didn't smile. "I don't get it. I'm sure that you're making a joke," he amended. "But I don't get it."

"Nevermind," Sara said. Suddenly, she had an idea (Thomas had the feeling that she didn’t have much of an attention span). "Do you want to test something? It might be fun!" She sang the last phrase, as if speaking to a child younger than her (and, for the record, Sara sounded a bit like a ten-year-old—both mature and innocent to life).

"Sure," Thomas said. "It will kill my boredom."

Sara 'clapped' her hands. "I'm going to test to see if it's only me, or if you can see other shadow-people." She suddenly raced out of the room, blowing wind in Thomas's seemingly gelled-up hair.

Five minutes later, she came back with another shadow. This time, this one resembled a bit like a warped dinosaur on profile (later, Crystal would draw it like a T-Rex, which Thomas would confirm). He only had one orb on the side of his head where an eyeball would normally be. "This is Bradley. Can you see him?"

Bradley held up two out of five fingers (Phew, this one actually has fingers, Thomas thought. This one won't be nearly as dangerous). "How many fingers am I holding up?" Bradley sounded a bit older than Sara, but not much.

"You're holding up two, but I can't see your other hand since it blends in with the rest of you," Thomas answered. Bradley's "orbs" widened. "Nice." He held up his other hand, which had all five fingers held up. "Usually, the kids don't get that."

"Bradley," Sara gently said, to remind him. "He's seventeen. Of course he's going to get it."

Bradley whirled around, or as close as he could do that action. "Excuse me?" Bradley's voice raised up an octave. "He's seventeen?" Another octave. "Dang, I forgot." The voice dropped down to the original octave.

"Of course. You must have read my file. Otherwise, you wouldn't have known that I was seventeen before," Thomas deducted, inducing a shocked 'face' from Bradley.

"Holy crap, this kid's smart! I like him," he said, making the same arm gesture that Sara did. "He's like that dude that I read about in the library... Sherly Homes?"

"Sherlock Holmes," Thomas automatically said. His eyebrows furrowed. "Hmm..."

"Yeah, that," Bradley confirmed. "Sherlock Holmes."

They stood in awkward silence for a moment, Sara glancing at Thomas and Bradley randomly. Then, suddenly, they burst out laughing, Thomas included. Sara hooked her (hand? Thomas still wasn't sure) around Bradley and pulled him closer to her. "I think that we're going to get along," Sara said.

(Thomas wasn't as sure as that, but he agreed anyway. Of course, these people, or shadows, or whatever they were, might prove useful in the future. However, he shoved those thoughts away, horrified at how much he sounded like Crystal).

Bradley glanced down the hallway and gasped. "She's coming back." He tore himself out of Sara's embrace and bolted out of the room (Speak of the devil, and the devil shall appear). Sara laughed.

"She scared him, and he's been squeamish ever since," she explained, running after him not long after. Thomas smiled after her. Maybe, just maybe, he could have friends that weren’t completely insane.

--

The woman gulped as she faced her boss, who was giving her not the nicest glare in the worlds. “I-I’m sorry! I didn’t guess that he would actually survive! I did many tests and I thought that-”

“I don’t give a flip what you thought,” his boss sneered. Toffee, a brown, anthropomorphic crocodile-like creature, looked at his employee through the Interdimensional Mirror. “But Thomas is alive, well, and can possibly get his memories back.” Toffee pinched his snout with what was left of his remaining hand. “I can work with this. Did he tell you anything?”

“N-no, not directly, but according to my source, he’s smart,” the woman mumbled. “He told my source his name and age, but the source could tell from his face that he knew that my source was trying to pry information from him, so the source asked him directly. However, he didn’t answer th-”

“SILENCE!” Toffee screamed. “I don’t want to hear your pathetic excuses and your jibber-jabber about this ‘source’ of yours! So much of another excuse slips out of your mouth, and I swear to God that I’ll crawl through that mirror and give you an excuse for more plastic surgery!”

The woman nodded fervently but couldn’t help but a thought slip through about wishing that Toffee was as cool and collected as he was before. Now, Toffee was just a raging bottle of fire, intent on destroying anyone who got in his way. Actually, she had the opinion that her boss was quite cliche.

Toffee glared at her like he was staring at the woman’s soul, and she had one terrifying moment when she thought that Toffee had somehow read her mind. Sweat dripped down her face. Even if he’s a cliche, he’s a very scary cliche. However, a clatter off-screen caught Toffee’s attention. “IDIOT!” Toffee screamed, and stomped off. He screamed something at the poor minion that the woman couldn’t make out. Toffee stamped back, face flushed and ready to burst. However, most of his short-lived anger had faded from the other minion, so the woman figured that she was safe.

“Your job is to make sure that he doesn’t leave the asylum. At all. Keep him inside at all times and make sure that he doesn’t escape. Oswald Asylum hasn’t had an escapee in years, I do know, but you need to make sure that he doesn’t escape,” the boss ordered. “Or else everything that we did over the past two years are ruined.”

The woman nodded her head. “Yes, sir.”

“And keep an eye on your ‘source,’ shall you? I wouldn’t like it if he suddenly decided to not help you, even after all you’ve apparently done for him,” Toffee growled. “Don’t screw up, Ciara, or else you’re going to be without a job.”

Ciara understood the threat perfectly. “Yes, sir.”

Toffee whirled around and began stomping off to another room. He waved his hand and the screen began to turn black. “Dismissed.”