Archer Warrick February 20th,20XX

Archer?

I spun around to see my younger sister standing in the dark hallway behind me. Her left hand clung tightly to the ratted pink doll she’d had since she was two and her nightdress, slightly too short and overly grandiose for the occasion, made her look like a ghost out of an old-fashioned horror film.

She liked to dress her up and took her out like a doll when she went out to see her new ‘friends’. Eva hated going, and it was always a struggle to convince her to cooperate.

“Evadne, why aren’t you in bed?”

Water and bathroom.

She gave a brief answer to my attempt to shoo her away and her large grey eyes that she adored so much, fixated onto the silhouette of my large backpack. Her right hand clenched into a fist and I could tell she was angry.

Where are you going?

“I’m not going anywhere! But you should be in bed! You have kindergarten tomorrow!”

She was already eight years old but hadn’t ever gone to an official school. It had taken a lot to convince her to let Eva go to school, instead of being ‘homeschooled’. It took me scrounging up the money on my own and applying to a ‘suitable’ school before she had finally given in.

I was happy that she would finally get to see other people than myself and them, but Eva was significantly less excited than I was. She stayed in her spot and pointed at the bag I’d tried to shift behind me.

You were leaving me here.

My voice, which I’d kept in a whisper until now, nearly broke into a yell as I denied the accusation.

“What? No! I was just going to the post office! It’s a few hours away, so I needed to bring a few things with me. I’d have been back before you got home from kindergarten!”

She shook her head and I could see the small amount of moonlight that streamed into the room bounce off the tears that fell onto the floor. Her small voice that I rarely heard nowadays trembled out of her throat and she hiccupped.

It sucked that she’d already learned how to cry quietly, but I needed to calm her down before we got caught.

“Eva! Eva! Listen, this wouldn’t have been any worse than me going to school! Okay? I was coming back!”

You were going to that ‘page’ thing, right? You were going to leave me here for good! Like Adelaide!

So she’d heard about the page thing…

I finally put the backpack down and went to pick her up. She threw her arms around my neck and the stuffed doll hit my back with a sort of reproach. Her quiet sobs finally escalated to full-on wailing, and I abandoned my plans of heading out tonight.

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“Shhh. Shhh. It’s okay. It’s okay. I’m not going anywhere.”

“Like hell you are. What are you two doing at this time of the night?”

Bleary-eyed and holding a bat like the weapon it was, he stood by the front door and looked at me like I was garbage.

I pushed back the bile in my throat and angled Eva’s face away from him.

“Eva had a nightmare where I left her. I was telling her I wasn’t going anywhere.”

His grip on the wooden bat slightly loosened at my explanation, but then he saw the bag on the floor and lifted it back up. His face twisted into a strange smile I’d long grown used to, and his right foot tapped in a telltale song of anger.

“Archer. Go put Eva back to bed. It looks like we need to have a conversation.”

For a second, my hands tightened around Eva’s trembling body and I felt anger radiate from her small body like a sun. I didn’t even have to tap into her mind to see it.

Before she blew up and attacked our uncle, I pulled her even further behind me and tried to speak as calmly as possible.

“Okay. But you must give me a few minutes to calm her down.”

The bat tapped on the floor thrice, meaning three minutes, and he sauntered back into the living room. I heard the click of a lighter and the putrid scent of smoke slowly filled the house.

“C’mon Eva. Let’s get you to bed.”

Is he going to hurt you again?

“What? No way!”

I put her down so she could walk beside me and put a hand to my chest, feeling thankful she couldn’t read my mind.

“You know me! If he tries anything, I’ll just-“

I made a few wild moves without saying anything and hoped she understood the words I couldn’t say. We finally got to her room, and I tucked her into the fancy princess bed she had bought for her. She was technically too old for me to still be tucking her into bed, but I liked to treat her like a kid as much as I could.

I rifled through my bag and pulled out my headphones, then put them over her ears.

“Here... I recorded a song last night that I want you to listen to. It’s really grown up though, so you have to listen to it at least 10 times, okay? Can you count to ten yet? Show me with your hands.”

She lifted both hands and put up four fingers on each one. She knew how to count to ten, so she was just being clever. I gently lifted her thumb on her left hand and her pinkie on her right.

“Put up one finger every time the song ends and don’t take off the headphones until all of them are up. And no cheating, okay?”

I started playing the five-minute song and dialled up the volume as loud as I could without hurting her ears. Still, she winced and tried to lift them off her head.

It’s loud

She looked annoyed and fought to get them off her head, but I used a bit of strength to keep them on and forced her to make eye contact with me. I paused the song and spoke as clearly as I could.

“Don’t you want to hear my song? I wrote it especially for you.”

Ever since we’d gotten those powers, she’d gotten smarter, and it had become more difficult to lie to her, but she was still a kid. She had become more clever, but I’d become a better liar than I had been before.

Ten times?

“Absolutely. I’ll see you tomorrow morning, okay? Show me ten fingers again.”

This time she did it correctly and smiled as I pressed play on the audio file. I pulled her sleeping mask over her eyes and lightly clapped a few times on either side of her ears to make sure she couldn’t hear, then quietly left her room.

The walk back down the short hallway was treacherously long, and each step made me want to take off as quickly as possible. I couldn’t do that though, not while Eva was still here.

My mind drifted away to my guidance counsellor’s oddly cryptic words and what he had done to ‘help me’. Even now I wondered what reporting my situation to Squire was supposed to do?

Even if I got accepted, it wasn’t like they could or would do anything. And knowing my aunt and uncle, they would deny the acceptance even if I was lucky enough to get it.

Finally, even if I got it, there was no reason I had to take Eva with me, and there was no way I was leaving her here.

The hallway, as long as it had felt, finally ended, and I stood outside the archway, battling my instincts to run away. The harsh scent of smoke drifted out of the doorway to meet me and burned the inside of my nose. I wanted to sneeze but restrained it as best as I could.

As smoggy and repulsive as the smoke he expelled was, my uncle’s voice floated out into the hallway and wrapped around me like a barbed wire.

“What are you doing out there? Get in here.”