Rough Draft Chapter 1 - Nina Jackson

 I've been writing about this character for several years now and I finally think that I have the confidence to actually place her in the publishing world in a small series of novellas to introduce to readers before I really do a deep dive into her end-game story. That being said, this character is still very much my baby and sometimes, the terrible things I do to her still makes me cry and I have to walk away. In this first novella, which currently has not been titled yet - the reader is being introduce to a fourteen year old Nina struggling with her changing body, the ghosts that haunt her past, and her budding unwanted sexuality.

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I’m below average, in every conceivable way.

Except one.

It started a few months ago; I woke up, and they were there. Boobs. I’d happily floated through eighth grade as the invisible one and I was happy with that, but these… things, these foreign growths on my chest weren’t a part of me. They were something new. A novelty. Something… noticeable. I don’t want people to notice me. I learned that being noticeable, interesting, wasn’t good. If being invisible to the public was a profession, I’d be at the top of my field. Interactions lead to complications. One the one hand, I enjoy watching people.

They are interesting to me.

I’m not good at the whole people, thing.

These… stupid baubles on my chest are going to cause problems. Trouble that I can’t afford.

The last school year passed by in exquisite misery, but I got through it. I didn’t get into trouble. Except for my grades, those are always a volatile topic at my house, but I didn’t get expelled. I did not get sent home for fighting either. I shut up; I kept my head down.

I tried to be invisible.

It was much easier than I expected. Of course, being invisible doesn’t stop people from talking—they act like you aren’t there when they do it. That was fine. I could handle their talking because there wasn’t much that they said about me that wasn’t true.

I’m a freak.

I have no friends, and I am an orphan.

Though, sometimes I wonder if they knew the story behind my orphanhood, would they be so comfortable talking about me? Would they even glance my way?

Quietly stopping at the bottom of the stairs in the living room with its beige everything theme, I looked at the back of my grandpa’s head sitting on the couch. When I was younger, his hair had less gray in it, now it’s completely snow white except for his mustache and eyebrows. Those are still black.

“Pop?” I asked, fidgeting nervously with my fingernails. I have a habit of running the tip of one nail under the nail bed, pushing the membrane back until sometimes it’s painful.

After I finished my nightly chores in the kitchen when supper finished, I went straight to my room under the guise that I wanted to pick out my clothes for tomorrow. I was going to be a Freshman. It all started here, the high school gateway to freedom. But now, I needed to take a shower and there was a theory I desperately wanted to test.

“Hmm?” My grandpa murmured with the smallest fraction of a head tilt in my direction.

I love my grandpa, he’s not like my Nana. He’s easy to talk to, he doesn’t judge, and he is slow to anger. At night he likes to watch game shoes, normally it’s Jeopardy and then Wheel of Fortune. Nana was already in bed—she thinks she can hide it, but there is always a little something extra in her glass at dinner and it’s easy to spot the sluggish, drugged movement of her feet up the stairs. Nana likes her over-the-counter sleep aids. Sometimes I think Pop waits until he knows she is asleep to go to bed.

How those two, so completely different, are still together, is confusing.

I’ve lived with my grandparents in Montreal for eight years and three out of the eight I spent mortally terrified of my grandfather. Afraid that one night he’d come to my bedroom like Jimmy did before him, when I and my twin Eric lived together with my mom and her boyfriend.

Sometimes, at night, I still get down on my knees and pray to whatever god that will listen that Jimmy is not my real dad.

How could he be? After the things he did to me and Eric, the things he made us do to him and each other. How can a man do that to his own children?

After three years of my grandpa, diligently working for my affection, showing me that every man did not share the same mind as Jimmy, I finally let him into my heart. Now we share a bond that I have nothing else to compare to. He’s the most honorable, loving man that I’ve ever known in my life. It took so long for my grandpa to gain my love, every single day showing me he would never touch me, he would never ever lay his hands on me in such a filthy way, that not every man thought the way Jimmy did.

Pop never gave up on me, not once. He always loved me and constantly reassured me I was safe in his presence and nothing like that would ever happen to me again.

“Do you have any bandages I can use?” I asked, hitting a sore spot on my left thumb with the nail of my right and repressed a flinch by suddenly sweeping my blonde hair over one shoulder to examine the dry-looking split ends.

He’s looking at me now, sharp steel eyes probing over me, “Are you okay? Did you hurt yourself, Needle-bee?” He couldn’t see any visible damage but concern still bled from his base heavy voice.

I hated seeing that pained look in his clear blue eyes. I hated that the pain I saw in them was concern. Concern he felt for me. It doesn’t help that I have horrendous coordination issues and I suffer about a dozen minor accidents a day.

Okay, maybe I take it back. I’m not below average. I am a statistic shattering bag of fragile bones who can trip or fall while standing perfectly still.

I’m a human crash test dummy.

“No. I’m okay. I just… I wondered if I could use one of your wrappy things?” I floundered for what you called them and instead used my hands to communicate what I was talking about.

“Ace bandage?” Michael asked, his black mustache twitching as he placed the filter of his cigarette into his teeth and pulled the drawer of his side table open.

I had a funny feeling he knew why I wanted them.

Tossing a fresh package at me, I wasn’t expecting it and the box bounced off my outstretched fingers and fell onto the floor.

“Thank you,” I bent and snatched the box from the rug and hurried back out of the living room, quietly taking the stairs two at a time so I didn’t wake up my Nana stomping up to my room but reached the last step at the top of the landing and my sock slipped on the carpet, but I caught myself on the banister before I could fall all the way down and take a trip to the emergency room.

“Not too tight, now.” I heard Pop say from the sofa.

Once I was back inside of my haven, my nest as I liked to call it, I turned on the overhead light and made sure that the blinds were down, and the curtain was closed. I didn’t need someone looking out of their window into mine and seeing what the strange girl across the way was doing.

It was bad enough that even alone in my bedroom, the posters on the wall stared out at me with dead eyes. I have this funny theory that the government puts tiny cameras inside the eyes of posters, magazines, and book covers to watch people. I hesitate ten times a day when I am getting dressed or undressed because I am worried the Canadian government has someone parked in a van with blacked-out windows around the corner or even a stage house, watching a myriad of tv screens seeing everything that people are doing inside their homes. I want to take them down from the walls, but I don’t because explaining why I took them down sounds crazy. Tiny cameras? It isn’t a sane thought. But I still can’t stop myself from taking a second glance around at Katy Perry, Lady Gaga and Robert Pattinson, suspicious that somewhere, hidden where I can’t see, someone is there. Even when there is no one, I’m afraid of being seen.

My body isn’t something I am proud of. Instead, I’m ashamed of it. Afraid of the power it has over people. The things that people do to hurt one another.

Stripping my shirt off in the standing mirror hanging from my closet door next to my poster of Cedric Diggory. I pried by eyes away and looked at myself in the reflecting glass.

I figured that if I didn’t have boobs by fourteen, I’d never have them. Some women just never grew. I’d blissfully avoided blooming since puberty started. I had everything else every girl in my eighth-grade class had except the chest. That was fine. I told myself I was fine. Lots of women didn’t have boobs or big boobs. But… I also knew it was one more thing to add to the list of items that made me feel uncomfortable when I compared myself to all of my female classmates. All the other girls who hadn’t already developed early had sprouted breasts during the summer and returned to school wearing spaghetti string tops and tanks with low cut necks just to show them off. While I remained at the back of the class in my largest t-shirt, shoulders hunched forward trying to hide what I didn’t have.

Now, I desperately needed a way to hide what happened between school years. Eighth grade ended with no cup, now, ninth grade was starting in a C.

I’m torn between liking them, liking them because they made me feel like every other girl and maybe, they were, as far as breasts went, kind of pretty, and hating them because I know what comes with them and, I didn’t want any of those parts.

Exhaling quickly, I opened the box of ace bandage and pulled the beige colored stretching strap from within the box, setting the two clips on the end of my bed. The sports bra helped flatten me out a lot, but even under the biggest t-shirts I own, I can still see them, I can feel them when I move my arms. This would be something new that people will see. Taking the bandage from the roll, I shook it out and haphazardly conducted my experiment.

It worked. Twisting in the mirror, I can’t see one bump or valley protruding underneath the bandages binding my breasts into a flat plain of non-existence. Maybe this would work? The swarming of ants that trembled in my chest ceased their angry movement for the first time since my chest developed. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad. I could hide.

Maybe I could survive the day tomorrow unscathed.

 

 

I was cold and wet; I wet the bed again, and in the morning, mama was going to be angrier than usual. She always was whenever she went to bed with the bottle, but it wasn’t the cold or the wet that woke me up. Someone woke me up, pushing my shoulder, and for an instant I squeezed my eyes shut. Maybe if I pretended, then Jimmy would go away—it never worked before, but I hoped.

“Nina, wake up.”

It wasn’t Jimmy; the voice was too small to be Jimmy and as soon as I heard it, my eyes sprang open in excitement.

“Eric, you’re not supposed to be here.” I didn’t want to see him hurt again, and then I remembered. Eric couldn’t get hurt, not anymore. Jimmy did that the day that Eric closed his eyes, I can still remember the sound it made when his eyes shut for the last time. A snap. Like someone stepped on a fragile twig and it broke under their foot.

“Come on,” Eric was squeezing my hand, pulling me out of my bed. “Follow me.”

Eric always came back for me, he was never afraid of Jimmy or mama when she was angry, I never learned that, how to not be afraid of them but Eric was fearless. I wanted to be where he was instead of him being here with me.

For six, I understood fairly well what the word death meant. It was a place that you went where you slept forever, and no one could ever hurt you again. I wanted to go to that place with Eric. Death was a safe place.

“Where are we going?” Was Eric leading me to the death place? He always came back to protect me no matter what, even if the last time he tried, Jimmy took him away somewhere after he wouldn’t wake up. When Jimmy came back, he said that I didn’t have a brother anymore, but he was wrong. Eric was always there, but I was the only person who could see him. It made mama mad when I talked about Eric, so I stopped because Eric told me it was better if I didn’t say his name anymore—not around mama and Jimmy. He said it made them feel guilty, when I asked him what guilty meant he said it was what grown-ups have when they did something wrong, but they don’t want to admit it. Eric made them feel guilty and scared, but he couldn’t define what they feared, it felt like they were afraid of being taken away.

Eric didn’t explain where we were going until I was standing in the kitchen, staring at the door to the basement. I hate going down there, it’s dark and cold and it’s where Eric stopped waking up after Jimmy shook him so hard and threw him down. It’s also where the room is. Where Jimmy took us together, where Jimmy still takes me now.

“I don’t want to go down there, Eric… it’s scary down there.” I complained, keeping my voice low, though the snores from down the hall reached the filthy kitchen.

“Ok, I’ll go down. Wait for me here.” Eric nodded, squeezing my hand, but without meaning to, I was following him, seeing the dingy basement daycare room with his eyes. Staring around in the darkness, it was always much colder in the basement than on the ground level floor of the house, but it was March and soon it would get warmer and the snow would leave upstate New York for good until it was time for another winter. Through one window, a streetlamp gave off minimal light, but it was enough for me to see Jimmy’s lighter. He left it sitting on a stool down here before. The pain I remembered and still felt to a frightening degree in my lower parts made me want to turn around and run back up the steps of the basement and slam the door shut behind me like there was a monster lurking inside the shadows that crept up the walls.

“It’s okay, Neens. The monster isn’t here, it’s sleeping, but we will make it so the monster doesn’t wake up anymore.” Eric smiled, his pale blue eyes sparkling in the dark.

“How are we going to do that, Eric?”

“I’ll show you.” Eric nodded quickly before we moved together, as one body to the old stool sitting outside of the room. The lighter was as cold as ice in our hand, big and heavy as we carried it up the stairs.

Together, we closed the door to the basement, and I understood I would never have to go back down there again, but I didn’t yet know why or how this could be possible.

Creeping down the hall, the snores from mama and Jimmy’s bedroom grew louder as we approached, and the golden toned color of the doorknob reflected my face in the shadows of the darkened house before it creaked open.

The two forms on the bed didn’t move, their snores continuing uninterrupted as Eric pointed at the bottle lying on the floor next to mama’s outstretched hand. It was lying on its side as I crawled closer, afraid every second that her eyes would open, and she would see me crawling on the floor closer to the bottle.

It seemed an insurmountable distance from my hand as I reached for it and drug it closer, liquid inside sloshing as Eric nodding quickly, his nubby little fingers helping mine to twist the cap off and spill a little of the stinky amber substance onto the crusty carpet. A drizzle here, a slosh there, the liquid spread out, soaking into the dirty carpet.

“Now the lighter.” Eric instructed, helping me hold it still, something akin to being paralyzed gripping every joint in my body each time the flint struck and it didn’t catch, and then on the fourth try, burning my fingers it lit and Eric showed me what to do, setting the lighter down in the carpet, carefully balanced as we crept back, watching in horror as it tilted and the blue flames wavered only a second and it accompanied a whoosh that lit the shabby, shag carpet. The flames hungrily licking up the offered drink that we left for it.

“What do we do now?” I asked, panicking as Eric pushed me out, closing the door tight behind him.

“Run, Nina… run.”

 

 

The best part about a new school year is that I have an excuse to be awake at six o’clock in the morning. I like waking up early in the morning. I enjoy the routine of starting a new day, people make a big deal about the New Year, but for me, every day is the New Year. I have time to start all over again. The other reason I enjoy waking up early is because it saves me from my sleep and last night was especially difficult.

I haven’t thought about that night in a long time. No one believed me when I told them Eric was there, they looked for a little boy when they found me, but how is a six-year-old supposed to tell emergency workers that a ghost, I guess, is the one who told you to set your parents on fire in their bed?

It’s never been easy trying to explain that night to anyone, not my grandparents or the doctors they sent me to after finding out they had a granddaughter. Authorities figured out the abuse pretty quick, but they couldn’t explain the killer child so easily. Finally, the back and forth stopped and Nana and Pop brought me home to live with them in Montreal, it’s where my mom was originally from before running away from home when she turned eighteen. I guess things didn’t go so well for her once she was on her own. I know certain things because my grandpa has been more liberal about filling in the gaps for me since I’ve gotten older.

Teresa had problems from the time she was my age, and it only got worse as she got older. She did things—and sometimes, I’m afraid Nana is right. I am just like her. Pop says it isn’t true, but how certain can he be?

I’m afraid of turning into my mom, if she was like me, I’m just a few steps away from being that woman.

I’m already scrambling eggs when Pop comes into the kitchen, fluffy headed and looking like he is sleepwalking.

“Morning, Needlebee.”

“Morning.” I turned, flashing a quick smile. I’ve already made a pot of coffee and I’m dressed to dart out of the door as soon as I know it’s safe that I won’t show up outside Rosemont Highschool too early. I don’t want to be outside of that big brick building all alone. Someone will notice it for sure and decide to tease me.

“You look tired.” Michael says, filling a mug full of black coffee and sitting down at the table to watch me under the scrutiny of his thick bushy black eyebrows.

“I’m okay.” I lied, it’s a lie that I tell often enough that it almost feels true.

“Heard you talking in your sleep last night, bad dreams again?” He asked me as I sat a plate of eggs in front of him and heaped the rest into my plate. I didn’t worry about Nana, most mornings she didn’t make it out of bed until nine and I’d be at school by the time she got out of bed.

“You know, I think I’m getting better.” I replied, pulling my chair out to sit. “I have had no dreams in a long time and when I woke up… I wasn’t afraid. I guess because I’ve had that dream so many times, my brain doesn’t think it’s such a big deal anymore.” I’d relived that night over in my head so many times I knew every facet and that dream never frightened me, it freed me. It wasn’t like the rest.

“What do you think brought it on?” Pop was piling the pepper onto his eggs and then turning them blood red with the Frank’s Hot Sauce.

“I think it was just nerves.” That wasn’t a lie. When I have the most nightmares. it’s usually because I am worried about something, which means I probably should have more nightmares than I do, but I am grateful for small blessings. “Start of a new school year and all that, I was just making myself worry needlessly.” Now that was a lie. I had plenty of reasons to worry, I just hoped that some of my pop’s optimism would keep me from spending the rest of the next eight hours on the verge of a panic attack.

“You have nothing to worry about, sweetie. Today is going to go well.”

My grandpa, for the exterior of a grumpy old man, he’s a total softy. Someone in this house has to be, since sometimes it feels like Nana was born from a hornet’s nest.

What so few people seemed to understand, with the exclusion of my grandpa, was that I was doing my best, and it always felt like my best, wasn’t good enough.

“I’ll be fine.” I nodded, stealing the Frank’s Hot Sauce to sprinkle it over my eggs. I was saving face for him. No one else needed to be as miserable as I knew I was going to be today.

I burned my tongue on my eggs. That was a bad omen to start the day with—I just knew it. And then I choked on my milk because I tried to drink it too fast. Nothing was going to go right today.

“Ease up, sweetie.” Michael looked at me over the brim of his coffee mug. There was the same painful concern in his eyes. “Do you want me to drive you to school? First day and all.” He smiled warmly.

How was I supposed to tell him that all his well wishes were for nothing? I couldn’t. I’d rather bare this pain alone.

“No, thank you.” I tried to make my smile bright, to look like it flushed me with excitement instead of fear. “Besides, I’m not going straight to school.”

Michael’s eyes softened. “Ah,” he chuckled. “Your little friend will be eagerly waiting for you.”

“Mm.” I shoveled the last fork full of eggs into my mouth and sat back, chewing, feeling the uncomfortable edge to my stomach because I ate too fast. That’s a problem when you grow up hungry, like a stray dog guarding its food because who knew when it might have another morsel to eat. I ate too fast and then regretted it because I felt sick to my stomach.

Getting up from the table, I took a tum from the medicine cabinet and popped it into my mouth, sucking as I turned back to my book bag in the third chair that surrounded the small square in the kitchen that served as the place where the Jackson household took all of its meals unless it was a special occasion. Then the party moved into the formal dining room that sat between the kitchen and the living room.

I’d already checked my bag twice, I had all of my notebooks, a pen and two spares just in case I lost one, which was an absolute probability. I lose things a lot.

“Crap,” I sighed, realizing that my three-ring binder wasn’t there. I must have left it on my desk. “I’ll be right back.”

My bag was so full already, I wasn’t sure how to fit anymore inside of it, but I hurried up the stairs to fetch the binder and look for anything else left sitting on my desk that I forgot to pack.

My binder was sitting, glaringly obvious on my desk next to the thumb drive that was required for certain classes and I grabbed two extra mechanical pencils in case one of my pens was out of ink or maybe I lost all of them in the space of time it took me to walk out of my front door and make it to the big brick building where Rosemont Highschool sat, looming like a dark giant waiting to devour me.

“Slow down, think. Is there anything else I’m forgetting?” I told myself, standing in the middle of the room. My eyes jumped from one object to another, the stack of books sitting beside my bed, I had my glasses on, the binder in my arms, pencils in hand, thumb drive in my pocket. I couldn’t see anything obvious.

Inhaling deeply, I closed my eyes for a few seconds. Keys!

I needed my keys.

Grabbing them from the desk, I slung the lanyard around my neck. Pop gave it to me after I got locked out of the house four times last year because I kept forgetting my key to the back door.

Ok, I was absolutely sure that this time; I was ready now.

Slowly creeping back down the stairs, I heard Nana roll over once in bed, but she didn’t get up—the familiar squeak in the floorboards on her side of the bed was always a sign that Karen Jackson had awoken. But the floor didn’t squeak, and I heaved a sigh of relief once I reached the living room and saw into the kitchen.

Pop was standing at the counter; dish water was foaming in the sink and he was busy sticking something inside of a plastic bag.

“I made your lunch for you.”

Pop was like that, all those things you expected from your grandma, or that I saw in the few movies and television shows that I watched, it was always the grandma who was the one who was doting, but for me—the person who looked out for me the most was grandpa.

“You did?” I asked, surprised and… touched. It was stupid to get emotional because someone made you lunch.

“Yup. Roast beef sandwich with a little extra mayo, some chips, and I know the school is cracking down on sugar, but I put a mountain dew in the box and a little chocolate. I know the extra caffeine helps you focus.” Michael explained. He’d been the one to figure out that when he helped me study, giving me a cup of coffee seemed to keep me from drifting as much, it didn’t matter that I was awake most of the night because I have a tough time sleeping most nights, anyway. “I was afraid you were going to turn into a bologna sandwich last year.” He teased me, placing the rest of my afternoon meal into the same lunch box I carried to school with me since I began my educational career. The colorful pink material crinkled, and Cheer-A-Lot smiled at me from the front. I like the Carebears even though I’m not supposed to watch cartoons. Or when I was small, Nana didn’t think I should.

Nana thinks cartoons give children unrealistic expectations unless it’s biblically themed.

The lunch box is a source of ridicule at school, this is the one thing I put my foot down on. I wouldn’t change something I so obviously enjoyed and wasn’t hurting anyone just because others thought it was dumb.

“Thank you, I know it will be delicious.” I didn’t mention that I spent my mealtime hiding in the girls’ bathroom. It was just easier that way.

Setting my lunch next to my overstuffed backpack, I arranged the binder and extra pencils plus my thumb drive inside of it before I went to the cabinet and looked behind the boxes on the back shelf for a can of tuna, smiling as I shook it.

“I will wander out to the store sometime this morning and replace it.” Pop smiled.

Another one thing Nana doesn’t like is me feeding stray animals, but against her better wishes, I do it anyway. I like animals, cats, dogs, I really like ferrets, but Nana will never let me have any animal in the house. Not even a goldfish. She just claims I will kill it, and maybe I would. An animal is an enormous responsibility, one that Nana says I’m not dependable enough for.

Maybe she is right.

“Ok, I’m off.” I said, pulling my overweight backpack on my shoulders and grabbing my lunch, my fingers hugging the can of tuna with the pop top lid. They always have to be pop top lids otherwise, I’d have to keep a can opener in my book bag and the school has metal detectors. That might be difficult to explain to campus security.

“I love you, baby.” Pop intercepted me on the way to the front door, stopping me to put his arms around my shoulders and squeeze. These touches are so rare, and it took me a really long time to trust him when I came to live with them in Montreal, but now, the hugs, the forehead kisses—those innocent physical gestures of love, they mean so much to me.

Nana never touches me, as if doing so would burn her skin. She even flinches away from me when I get too close to pass the salt.

“I love you too, Pop.”

“Have a good day, try your best, no one can fault you if you just try your best.”

“I know,” I tried to smile at him, but I decided that was a mistake. He’d see how much I hated this, how much I didn’t want to walk out that door, but there wasn’t any other choice.

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