“Eric?”
“What?”
“Spider.”
Giggling.
What if others could see you for what you really are? Not what you think you are. Not how others perceive you. Not what you want to be. But the truth.
The dead can do that. I believed it as a child, and I still believe it now. Whenever I’m asked to explain what about ghosts makes me so afraid, I always point to A Christmas Carol. I have a very Dickensian view of the dead. I believe the dead see clearly—they know the truth of our past, present, and future. I think that when we die, all our questions are answered and all mysteries are revealed. If you believe that ghosts are dead souls trapped here for various unknown reasons, that means a ghost knows all. A ghost may know more about you than you do.
“Michael?”
“What?”
More giggling.
Like any kid, I spent my early childhood desperately wanting to fit in, but I really didn’t have a lot to build on. Some kids dressed funny, acted like geeks, had crooked teeth, sucked at athletics, weren’t popular, wore glasses, were generally awkward, or did poorly in class. I was a perfect storm of all these, a tsunami of dork. Early on, I resigned myself to being “the weird kid”—a mantle that, while not ideal, gave me some kind of anchor in the world, a place, a role to fill.
In many ways, I grew up a pretty typical kid. Specifically, a pretty typical boy. Young boys are creatures of intense, loyal, and deep passion. When I was a young child, I was passionate about exactly four things: the TV series The Six Million Dollar Man, Kiss, Star Wars, and writing to elected officials.
To the other kids at school, I was just a fairly unremarkable kid who was occasionally funny but did and said a lot of weird stuff. Even though I loved to learn, school ended up becoming a bum deal for me before I’d even hit the third grade, squeaking by with just enough C’s to keep from being held back. Whenever I was interested in or curious about something, I had an ability to quickly learn and absorb everything about it. The problem was, I was rarely interested in or curious about my classmates or the things they were learning in school. So I’d sneak my way into drawing or writing or daydreaming—or phase out entirely.
From an early age I was an expert at pushing boundaries without actually crossing them—almost constantly on the verge of getting into trouble. My teachers tried everything, isolating my desk behind a divider, sending me to counselors, and even humiliating me in front of my classmates. Nothing worked. At my parents’ insistence, I went through a regime of tutoring, testing, and specialists. At one point I was sent to a neurologist who thought I was hyperactive and put me on large doses of Ritalin. None of it really made much of a difference. I’d already made the decision, conscious or not, that it might be a better strategy to give up. It felt like it was futile to care. I’d already resigned myself to being a square peg. I wasn’t meant to be part of things, I thought. I didn’t like the same things others liked. I didn’t care about the things they cared about. I didn’t find the same things funny. Perhaps it can be romanticized in hindsight: that I was independent or that I was a unique personality—whatever. Those rationalizations would be great if they weren’t driven by always feeling like a sojourner, a visitor in my own world.
The letter writing to elected officials started, more or less, as something to do with an old manual typewriter I’d found in my grandparents’ basement. I was really drawn to this thing, to the idea of legitimizing my thoughts and ideas by typing them on paper. Problem was, at ten years old, I really didn’t have many thoughts to legitimize. After a few sessions of staring at the keys or typing my name and address over and over again, I just started writing letters. I really didn’t have anyone to write to—or write about—so I started writing to politicians. I did it out of curiosity, to see if I would ever hear anything back. I would watch the evening news with my parents, notice something in the fourteen seconds I would spend looking at the non-comics part of the newspaper, or hear adults talking about some important issue. Then I would sit down in front of the typewriter, write a letter expressing my view on the subject, and send it off. A while later, I’d receive a reply, thanking me for sharing my opinion. After the first few exchanges, I came to the quick conclusion that my letters were an important contribution to democracy and society.
My congressman, Ralph Regula, was a patient man, or at least his staff was, as he often answered four or five letters per month from me on topics ranging from military-weapons programs to relations with the Soviet Union to the federal budget. I wrote him routinely for years and received a thorough reply to each letter, which I kept in a folder along with answers to all the other letters I wrote—to city council members, local police and fire chiefs, United States senators, and even, on several occasions, the president of the United States.
I saved my opinions on the big issues—about the rising price of oil or inflation—for President Carter. Letters to the president are often answered, if they are answered at all, by a generic postcard thanking the writer for taking the time and assuring him that his opinion matters to the president. But on one occasion I received a letter from some suit at the Office of Management and Budget, thanking me for the list that I’d sent to President Carter of federal programs I felt should be cut or reduced. Little did this guy realize that he was writing to a preteen who’d just learned what deficit spending meant a few weeks earlier in civics class.
One morning I was summoned to the vice principal’s office. When I got there, I saw a uniformed police officer sitting there, apparently waiting for me. My mind immediately ran through any potential felonious hijinks I may have participated in that would result in a cop coming after me at school. The only thing that came to mind was an egg I threw at Jim Galapaco’s house because he’d tried to steal my bicycle seat.
It turned out that the officer had been dispatched by the police chief to pass along his personal thanks for my recent letter offering my thoughts concerning his public-safety initiatives I’d read about in the paper. The visiting cop told me I seemed like a model citizen and invited me to join some kind of Nazi Youth–like junior police group.
“You’ll get a badge and a certificate,” he offered.
I politely declined. I felt I was most productive working outside the system, I told him.
Kiss was the soundtrack to my life. Even though they sold millions of records, I kind of felt like they belonged to me exclusively. It may have been that not many other kids at my school had discovered Kiss, or perhaps it was because they seemed so excitingly foreign to the rest of the world I’d experienced so far, but it almost felt as if they had existed in obscurity until I became a fan—an obsessed fan. By that time, I already listened to a lot of pop music, but Kiss was different. Kiss was weird. I was weird. In my mind, we were a perfect match.
While I longed to play electric guitar or bass, my parents had decided that piano lessons were a better option. After practicing “Für Elise” for the nine thousandth time, I would peck out the melody lines of Kiss songs. Eventually, I came to see my keyboard skills as a potential asset. If, someday, Kiss decided to add a piano player, I would be ready to step in. I even had a character/persona picked out. I could be “the Viper” and stand behind my piano with a costume and makeup to morph me into something vaguely snakelike, in a Kiss kind of way. I had notebook pages filled with potential costume and makeup designs, complete with plans for how we could outfit our family’s baby grand piano with rhinestones, reptile-like leather demon heads, and claws (even though vipers don’t have claws). I also had a character/instrument-related gimmick ready to go. At the appropriate point in the song, I could press a button with my seven-inch leather heels and the top would explode off my piano in a mushroom cloud of smoke and fire, revealing a large mechanical snake. The viper would continue to rise up and up out of the piano, presenting itself to the crowd’s amazement and cheers. Then, when it came time for my Big Piano Solo (placed in between the Big Guitar Solo and the Big Drum Solo), I would drop a little “Für Elise” into the middle of “Hotter Than Hell” and blow people’s minds.
Kiss was something that adults hated, which was fantastic. But the real attraction to me was freedom. People expected Kiss to be outlandish, so they could pretty much get away with anything they wanted to do, say, and wear—as long as it was over-the-top. It would never be odd if Kiss wore black tights and codpieces—it would be odd if they didn’t. To a young boy just about to enter his teens, who was already beginning to feel like an outcast because of what he did, wore, and said, the idea that people would accept this kind of behavior, let alone encourage it, was an absolute magnet.
Along with a few other kids who drew Kiss-related art in notebooks and on our blue jeans, I decided to create the ultimate tribute to my heroes: a band.
After a significant amount of debate, we eventually decided on a name: Kiss Junior.
The ensemble consisted of my friend Terry on guitar and vocals, his sister Tammy (who I had a terrible crush on) on tambourine, and me on electric organ. I had come into a small tabletop organ and—seeing that it was more portable than the family baby grand—took it to Terry and Tammy’s house for band practice. It had a half-sized keyboard and one four-inch speaker mounted on the side of the cabinet.
Terry had no idea how to play guitar; he didn’t even know how to tune it. He had received a cheap guitar-and-amp combo for Christmas. After noodling with it for about half an hour he’d figured out how to make it give feedback. That was where his guitar self-instruction ended. Further, Terry was completely tone-deaf, and even his feedback was arrhythmic. His playing and singing amounted to screaming lyrics and beating his guitar quickly during fast passages, then screaming lyrics and beating his guitar slowly during softer moments.
Our repertoire consisted entirely of Kiss songs. This complicated matters, because no Kiss songs contained arrangements for electric organ, tambourine, and untuned guitar. However, despite our handicaps, we fully intended to rock.
Whenever we’d get the chance, we’d gather in Terry and Tammy’s basement in front of an old bedsheet that Terry had decorated with a Kiss logo with a “Junior” slapped underneath it.
Terry would put a Kiss record on the turntable and drop the needle, and we’d flail away. We did this almost every afternoon for the entire summer. To us, Kiss Junior wasn’t just a salute to our favorite band—Kiss Junior was our preteen version of pure joy.
We had one fan, a slightly retarded boy who lived next door, Brian, who always smelled like pee and had an obsession with blowing up fruit and vegetables with firecrackers. Brian would come by whenever he heard us practicing and sit watching on the stairs with his mouth wide open.
We only performed for others once, at Tammy’s birthday party. Tammy had about eight girls from school over for cake, presents, screaming, and giggling. Banned from the house, Terry and I hung out in the backyard with a few friends, pretending not to care yet desperate to know what was going on inside.
At one point we were allowed in to get some leftover pizza and Terry saw an opportunity to impress the gaggle.
“You know, we have a rock band,” he offered. “And Tammy is in it.”
They stared at Terry, then at Tammy.
“You have to play for us,” one girl suggested.
Bait taken.
Tammy wanted nothing to do with it and tried to talk us and her friends out of it. But Terry was already corraling everyone into the basement and ordered me to set up our equipment. Before I knew what was happening, he dropped the needle during the crowd roar before the live version of “God of Thunder,” and we were off.
The hi-fi started belching out thumpy noise, Terry started screaming and banging his guitar, I hit tiny organ keys, and Tammy just stood there with her eyes fixed on the floor. Our assembled audience seemed somewhat frozen, occasionally wincing at the noise and wondering what they were supposed to make of this. After a minute or so, someone giggled, then a few others started laughing.
Tammy threw down her tambourine and ran upstairs crying. I stood there unsure if I was supposed to go comfort one bandmate or stay and perform with the other. My first thought was to run after Tammy. In my mind, just as I’d catch up with her, the next song would start, I’d belt out an impassioned rendition of “Beth,” and Tammy would fall into my arms.
But, as much as I ached to comfort Tammy, I knew Terry would either kick my ass for leaving or make fun of me for eternity because I had the hots for his sister. So I stayed. The show had to go on, I rationalized. Despite missing one-third of our band, Terry had no intention of stopping. After each song, he’d make his guitar feed back, throw his hands in the air, repeatedly yell, “Thank you” to the assembled children, and then get ready for the next song. No one applauded. No one did anything.
One by one, the kids quietly left the basement and went upstairs. By the end of the album side, it was down to just Terry and me, plus Brian.
Terry and I were not deterred; we were hell-bent on rocking, ferociously.
A few days later, Terry observed that while we had played Kiss music, we lacked any Kiss-related costumes or makeup. Since painting our faces would be a lot easier than finding seven-inch leather boots with skulls on them (especially in a size four), we decided to invest in some cheap Halloween makeup. We found our opportunity one evening while Terry’s family had gone out to a movie.
We were about halfway finished with Kiss-inspired makeup when we heard his family pull in the driveway. We panicked. Terry started to run water in the bathtub and told me to scrub my face. Of course, the cheap greasepaint wouldn’t come off and our efforts to clean it off just spread it further over our faces.
Eventually, we were discovered.
“What are you two doing in there?” Terry’s mother asked.
“We’re taking a bath,” Terry quickly offered.
“Together?” she asked.
“Yeah, we’re almost finished,” Terry said, hoping that it would placate his mother long enough for him to clean off the makeup.
As soon as we stepped out of the bathroom, Terry’s parents called us downstairs. We sat nonchalantly on the couch with a look of confused-yet-politely-inquisitive wonder on our faces, as if we were worried what possibly could be wrong.
“What were you doing taking a bath together?” Terry’s mother asked.
“When no one else is home,” his father added.
In the middle of Terry’s rambling answer, Terry’s father looked at me and squinted.
“What’s that around your eyes?” he asked.
I paused for a moment, then answered: “Makeup.”
Terry placed his head in his hands and sighed.
I could see Terry’s father starting to boil.
“Are you guys gay?” he asked, containing his obvious anger and trying to maintain an air of sincere concern.
I was sent home and Terry was grounded.
The incident drove a permanent wedge in Kiss Junior—the band broke up the next day.
Afterward, Terry and I grew apart, as young kids do. Terry was two years older than me, which started to make a difference as we became teens. I lost track of him after high school, though I knew he was playing in a heavy-metal band and was pretty serious about it (and, obviously, he had finally learned to play his guitar).
One evening last year, I was lazily scrolling through Facebook when I saw a link an old classmate had shared. It was an article about a guitarist who had been killed by a punch from one of his own bandmates. The dead guitarist was Terry.
Terry had gone on to live a pretty extraordinary life. He played in a number of metal bands, cut two albums, and started a business focused on bringing rock bands to play for overseas troops. With his own band, he played USO shows in more than thirty countries. He even taught guitar to troops stationed in Korea for a few years.
Following a gig in his adopted hometown of Colorado Springs, two of his bandmates got into a fight over carrying equipment out of the club. Terry stepped in to break it up and took a punch to the back of the head. He spent twelve days in a coma, then died.
He left behind a young daughter.
Kiss Junior was not listed on his resume.
“Eric?”
“What?”
“Spider.”
Giggling.
I’m not sure how that spider joke started. I’m not even sure it counts as a joke. It was just one of those things between brothers that’s kind of funny the first time it happens. It was probably a practical joke—saying “spider” to someone (implying that there’s a spider on or near him), then watching him go into a freak-out spasm, brushing and swatting to get rid of the nonexistent spider. Since so few things that little boys say are legitimately funny, you work with the material you have, repeating it over and over again, laughing even though you aren’t sure why it’s funny anymore.
In addition to “spider,” my brother and I regularly cracked each other up with other comedy gold mines, like farting in the sleeping dog’s face, imitating Mr. Hendler next door, and pretending to be scared by the noises coming from the attic.
We’d notice them every few weeks. Basically, it was just a loud thud coming from upstairs. Whenever we’d hear one, we’d look at each other with mock terror.
“Michael?”
“It’s a ghost!”
Then we’d both put our hands up to our faces and pretend to scream.
Hilarious.
We noticed the thuds shortly after we moved into the house and never gave them much thought. It was an old house; it made lots of noises. At first, we assumed it was our cat, who loved to climb on top of tall furniture, then leap to the floor and run away. Eventually I started noticing the thuds occurring when the cat was sitting in the same room with us.
Around that time, I started taking the bus back and forth to junior high. Our bus driver always liked to keep us guessing. He seemed to change his route and stop order almost daily. We’d never be certain from which direction he’d arrive or at what time.
This resulted in a lot of downtime, during which I would stand with an assortment of kids from my neighborhood, trying to guess when our shifty bus driver would arrive. The inevitable boredom of standing around waiting usually resulted in one of two things happening: (a) some of the kids would start teasing me about something; or (b) I would make some kind of desperate attempt to entertain them in order to divert their attention. This was a lot of pressure—always having some conversation topics or jokes ready to go and having no idea when the bus would arrive to keep them from turning on me. Sometimes I even brought candy or some show-and-tell-type item.
One morning a kid named Jason walked up to me and asked if I was retarded.
“Pardon me?”
“Are you a retard?” he asked. Some of the other kids were starting to gather around us. I gritted my teeth. I knew what was coming.
“No, I’m not retarded,” I said.
“Well, you look like a retard,” countered Jason. “You act like a retard, too.”
I already knew the futility of trying to argue about subjects like suggested retardation. It was just impossible to win.
“I guess I’m whatever you want to see,” I said. “I guess I’m like a TV.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I guess I’m like a TV,” I repeated. “You can see whatever you want on TV. If you don’t like it, you can just change the channel.”
“Only a retard would think they were a TV,” Jason offered.
“No, here,” I said, placing my hand in front of him, palm upward. “Here is my remote control,” I said, gesturing to my empty hand.
“You are retarded!” Jason exclaimed.
“No, here,” I said, pantomiming reaching for an invisible remote and then offering it to Jason with my other hand. “Here, take it,” I said.
Jason cautiously put his hand forward to receive my invisible remote.
“Now press the channel button,” I said.
Jason just huffed as the other kids silently watched.
“Press the channel button,” I repeated.
Jason made an unnecessarily dramatic pressing gesture with his finger. I jerked forward and pretended to be a newscaster delivering news.
Jason pressed it again.
I changed into a sportscaster announcing a baseball game.
I was a soldier fighting to save his buddies on the battlefield.
Jason kept clicking and I kept changing.
In my mind, the other kids would bust out laughing and find every character more hilarious than the last. But none of them laughed. Actually, none of them did anything. They just stood there, mouths open, watching me. I prayed that the bus would finally show up and save me from this. It seemed like it was never coming. Jason just kept clicking and I kept changing: Mork from Ork, then a damsel crying over a fallen lover, then Fred Astaire dancing and singing in the rain.
“Hey, man, see if it has a Pause button,” one kid shouted.
“Sure it does,” Jason said. “Right here.”
He pantomimed one final button press—and I froze.
And stayed frozen.
The kids started laughing.
I could hear the bus pulling up behind me. The kids lost interest in me and started to line up. I stayed frozen.
After all the other kids got on the bus, the driver looked down at me and squinted.
“Hey, quit jerking around and get on,” he called out.
I stood frozen. I was in pause.
Even though I could feel everyone staring at me and hear them giggle and laugh, being frozen felt good. It felt like there was a barrier between me and them. It was like I had a protective shell between my feelings and the things that hurt them.
I guess the right thing to do would have been to listen to the driver and get on the bus, but being frozen felt so peaceful. I knew I’d never hear the end of it, but I just kept standing there.
“If you don’t get on this bus this minute, I’m going to leave you here, I swear,” the bus driver yelled. The kids on the bus grew silent.
I just stood there.
“Fine, I’m sure they’ll send Mr. Barnes down here for you when they hear about this.”
With that, he drove away.
I continued to stand frozen for some time after the bus left. I knew the school would never send Mr. Barnes out for me. They had a schoolful of other things to worry about. After a few cars drove by and asked me if I needed any help—then quickly drove away when I didn’t move—I got tired of being there and started walking home. I eventually called my mom at work and told her I threw up on the way to the bus stop and needed to stay home sick. I spent the day sitting in my room, periodically picking up an invisible remote control, pointing it at myself, and going into pause for a while.
It was around this time that my grandmother died; I was just past my thirteenth birthday. We always called my mother’s mother Bobalu. She was the anchor of our family. Despite a sometimes difficult life, she was a happy person. She could have a conversation with just about anyone. She also smoked like a chimney, suffering through a few heart attacks and lung cancer before she died at sixty-two.
I’d never experienced anyone dying before. When we first got word that she’d passed away, I wasn’t immediately sad or in shock or even that upset. I was curious. The rituals of death and funerals and mourning were foreign to me, and fascinating. Everyone in my family, which was normally so happy together, was suddenly sad and crying. I asked tons of questions and wanted to know everything. What would her coffin be made of? Where were they keeping her body? Would she look different dead than she did when she was alive?
When the day of her calling hours arrived, I walked into the funeral parlor, took one look at Bobalu’s casket, and completely lost it. The casket was closed, so it wasn’t like I saw her remains. I saw a box. On the inside of that box was my grandmother’s body. Her death suddenly stopped being a curiosity and smacked me right in the gut.
In the following days and weeks, I became obsessed with thinking about what happened to Bobalu when she died. I came to believe that she went to heaven because she was such a good person. When she got there, God answered all her questions about her life. As a result, Bobalu no longer knew me as the bright, near-flawless grandson with unlimited potential. She saw me as I really was. She now knew the frustrations and disappointments. She also knew about my growing disconnection from the world. In death, Bobalu knew everything. She knew the truth.
One night a few months after the funeral, I was sitting in my bedroom when I heard one of the thuds. Not a distant thud, like something outside the house. It sounded close, like something heavy and thick hitting the attic floor directly above me.
I ran out of my room and up the attic stairs at the end of the hallway. When I got to the top, I could see moonlight coming through the windows of our playroom, one of the two attic rooms. While it was normal for toys to be strewn over the room, nothing seemed particularly out of place. There was nothing big on the shelves, so nothing could have fallen to make the noise I heard.
Without turning on any lights, I turned toward the door to the room in the back of the attic. As soon as I looked at the door, I was overwhelmed with panic. I felt like I was stuck underwater and couldn’t breathe. We’d lived in that house for a few years by that point, and I’d never given that door or that room a second thought. Now the sight of it left me unable to move or even consider turning on a light, let alone try to find out what was on the other side. It just felt like something was present in that room that had never been there before. Something I wanted nothing to do with.
Then I started to wonder if whatever was in that room had come over into the playroom and pounded on the floor, summoning me, knowing that I was right underneath, knowing I would come upstairs to investigate. Now it was in the room across the hall, waiting for me to come to it, or to come after me.
I stood there in the dark, not sure what to do. Going back downstairs meant walking right by that door, easily within arm’s length of whatever was on the other side. Eventually I mustered up the courage to run back downstairs to my room and sit with my heart pounding in my throat. For the rest of that night, any noise I heard was evidence that whoever or whatever was up there might be coming downstairs.
For a long time afterward, I would do anything to avoid going up there. I’d swap chores with Michael, find an alternative to whatever was stored up there, not play with certain toys. Anything to not be in the attic, especially at night.
Eventually, I had to go up for some reason or another. I was nervous but felt nothing even remotely similar to what I experienced that first night. In fact, it felt so confusingly unscary that I ended up exploring the entire attic—each room, closet, and crawlspace. I was fine.
But every so often I’d be up there and I’d get that feeling. It was like being surrounded by something you felt sure was there but wasn’t. I could feel all the warmth drain out of the room, then an abrupt and extreme sense of danger. My heart and mind would both race, I’d start to hyperventilate, and everything would suddenly go out of control. It always happened when I was looking at the closed door to the spare room, and always when I was alone. I would be overcome with fear, drop whatever I was doing, and run.
I can’t tell you when the dreams started exactly. Or why they started. Around the time I entered my teens, they just suddenly became part of my life.
Standing in the woods. Then the clearing. Then the picnic table. Then the people, including the guy in the cheap wolf costume pointing to the other side. Then the second path.
Then Her.
She is probably eight to ten years old. She has straight blond hair that goes a few inches past Her shoulders. She wears a simple powder-blue dress with no ornamentation or frills. She is dripping wet. Her cheeks are a little hollow, but otherwise She looks perfectly fine. Our eyes lock as soon as I see Her. She doesn’t look sick or dead or particularly stressed about anything—until I get close.
Then She starts talking in something that sounds like gibberish or an evangelist’s prayer tongue. The closer I get, the louder and more agitated She becomes. It’s like She’s scared of me; She doesn’t look angry. It’s almost like She thinks our time together is running out and She becomes more and more desperate to connect, for me to understand what She’s saying. Except for Her eyes—empty, dark, and still. Then, when I’m close enough that I could almost reach out and touch Her, She starts to shout at me.
I’d wake up in an absolute panic. My heart was racing and about to push itself out of my chest. I’d bolt up and scan the dark room for any sign of Her. Then I’d spend hours trying to calm myself down to the point where I could sleep again. I’d tell myself anything, just to feel safe closing my eyes, even for a moment.
Sometimes the dreams would occur in the standard order. Sometimes the scenes were mixed up or I’d just see a few fragments and not the whole thing. I remember a few occasions when I’d only see an image—the wolf guy, or Her standing there speaking Her gibberish. Regardless, they all ended exactly the same way—with me sitting upright in bed, breathing hard and fast, disoriented, scanning the darkness for Her, convinced She had finally come for me.
Those who’ve heard the story of these dreams have all asked the same question: What is so scary about a little girl?
You see, that’s always been the rub. There is nothing inherently scary about a little girl.
Which is exactly why She was so terrifying to me.
It wasn’t what I knew about Her or the dreams that frightened me; it was what I didn’t know.
The unknowns about the Little Girl in a Blue Dress felt like puzzles or enigmas or mysteries to be solved. Like, why was She wet? Was She sweating? Had She been in water?
Who were the people sitting around the table? I didn’t recognize any of them. They all seemed to be in their late teens or early twenties. Nothing about them rang a bell. Nor did I have any clue where the cheap wolf costume came from.
And what was with the gibberish? You’d think that someone motivated enough to come back from the dead, bang around my parents’ attic, and worm Her way into my dreams would have figured out how to deliver the message. A million times I’ve thought about what I remember Her saying, to see if there is even a pattern or anything that sticks out. To be honest, I’m not even sure She repeated the same thing—it could have been different every time.
And the biggest mystery: Why Her? There were no dead girls in my past. I had nothing in my family tree about blond girls who died young.
I have spent countless hours over the years going over those dreams in my head, trying to find any connection, any literal, metaphorical, or figurative symbolism or meaning in any detail of that dream, and I always come up with exactly nothing.
Which is when it starts to get scary to me. I mean, there has to be some connection. It happened to me—and it happened for some reason. She is my Jacob Marley. Somehow the wetness, the people, the forest, the man in the wolf costume—those were somehow Her version of the chains Marley forged in life and had to drag with him through eternity. If I didn’t recognize what they meant, that meant I hadn’t figured something out yet and the connections would present themselves only after all the bad stuff She was warning me about eventually happened.
Then there was the message itself. Just as Marley came back to warn Ebenezer Scrooge about the coming visits from the ghosts of his past, present, and future, She was warning me about something, too. Or at least I’ve always accepted it as a warning, but it equally could be a threat, a prophecy, a harbinger of something. Something that someone/something else was going to do—or that She planned to do Herself. The only thing I knew for sure was that it almost certainly couldn’t have been good news. The Little Girl did not come into my dreams to wish me a good day or compliment the shirt/pants combo I’d worn earlier. She had something to tell me that was very important.
I feared that whatever it was had to be so bad that only She could deliver it. I feared what She’d do when She tired of trying to communicate with me in my dreams. I feared I had only come so far in my experience of Her. And it could get worse at any moment, any time.
I also feared that it might be impossible to heed Her warning. When Marley came to visit Scrooge, he said it was too late to save his own soul but that Scrooge had time to be redeemed. But what if Marley and the Christmas ghosts spoke gibberish? Would Scrooge miss his one and only chance to redeem himself? Because I couldn’t understand the Little Girl in a Blue Dress, would I miss Her warning? Would I miss my chance?
So, it wasn’t an apparition I feared. I was scared of what I didn’t know, simply because I didn’t know it. My life began to feel like that flash of a moment between when you know you’re going to be in an auto accident and the impact itself. Like that moment between when the wave crests above your head and when it comes crashing down on you. Even if it is only for an instant, the waiting is the worst part. Worse than the collision. Worse than the injury and damage. Whenever Little Girl came to me in my dreams, my whole life started to feel like that moment. Just waiting, knowing and not knowing, all at the same time.
Two aspects of my life blossomed as I headed into my teens.
I started to become heavily involved in my church. From simply attending Sunday service I felt increasingly drawn into joining the Sunday school, youth group, and confirmation classes, mostly because I wanted to hang around with the other kids. I looked to my fellow teen parishioners to fill the human void in my life. My family had kept attending the same church after we moved to the house on Thirty-fourth Street a few years earlier. Since I now lived in a different neighborhood and school district, I rarely saw most of these kids more than once a week. When I was at church, I was on my best behavior. The lack of regular exposure, plus me being on my best behavior, made it easier for me to make friends at church than at school. Though at the time I wasn’t terribly interested in all the Jesus stuff, this group became the one area of my life where I was deeply involved with other people.
I also quickly embraced the self-righteous “stick it to the Man” vibe of the church’s social activism and attitude toward the outside world. This led to the other blossoming area of my early teens: my letter writing, which grew into something more purposeful. As I became more involved in the church, the subjects of my letters switched from complaining about budgets, parks, and proper signage at crosswalks into the need for politicians to address poverty and injustice.
Writing letters soon led to social action—doing walkathons for cancer research, volunteering for food pantries, boycotting products, marching against nuclear arms, and just about anything else I could fit into my schedule. I was a full-time bringer of truth and righteousness. I felt I’d found my purpose and calling, a way to realize my potential. My goal was nothing short of changing the world, but underlying it was a strange and uncomfortable anger. I was upset that there were so many things wrong with the world and that adults had allowed things to get so fucked up. I felt that while it was profoundly broken, it was also profoundly fixable. All I had to do was try.
But of course, nothing changed.
I’d write letters. I’d attend rallies. I’d protest. And nothing ever seemed to change.
Because the world allowed all these horrible things to happen, I believed that it was tacitly saying these things were acceptable. Yet I also slowly came to realize that no matter how many marches I attended, no matter how many letters I wrote or bake sales I ran or cans of food I collected or miles I walked, there was nothing I could ever do to stop it. I thought I could make a difference in the world, but often there was no difference to be made. We march and protest and express our opinions, and all we accomplish is making ourselves feel better. I think I was angry because not only did I know that nothing would change, I felt foolish for thinking that I could ever make any substantive difference in the first place.
Despite my growing apathy, I kept writing letters, kept boycotting, and kept attending protests and rallies. I did this mostly because I was so desperate to hold on to the small amount of human connection that surrounded these activities. I thought it was useless work, but I didn’t want to stop. Even though I felt less and less connection to and tolerance or trust of other people, at the same time I could not bear to let them go. I figured there had to be some formula—some combination of actions—that would result in the world accepting me, and me feeling wanted. While part of me wanted to keep trying different tactics until I got the equation right, I was also feeling increasingly desperate.
During this time I noticed that both the Little Girl dreams and the terror spells in the attic were accelerating. You might think the connection was simply a matter of circumstance and suggestion. At the time, though, the dreams began to feel like a validation of some impending doom.
I was just a teenager, and I was already haunted. Haunted by my own disappointment. Haunted by a disconnection from the world around me. Haunted by a festering depression. Haunted by loneliness.
I never knew why or how, but I felt the Little Girl in a Blue Dress was the harbinger of my own self-destruction. I had no idea who She was. I had no idea how She was connected to me. All I knew was that the Little Girl in a Blue Dress knew the truth.
I felt trapped. Trapped between the world I didn’t understand and a ghost that I didn’t understand. That’s when I asked my mother if I could move my stuff up into the attic playroom. I wanted to make it my bedroom. It was like I was magnetically drawn to the attic. As much as I was scared to face down whatever I felt was there, I equally couldn’t stand the thought of staying away. Given the choice between my fear of the outside world and my fear of Little Girl, I had to choose which I wanted to be closer to and which I wanted to distance myself from. Even though I was terrified of Her and what She might mean, She also felt like my future, my journey, and my path.
My mom was a little shocked that I wanted to be up there. I just shrugged it off, saying I thought it would be cool.
“This room is a little drab,” my mother said. “We should paint it. Any color you’d like?”
I thought for a moment.
In confirmation class, we’d just finished learning about the colors of the liturgical seasons in the church year—white and gold for Epiphany and Easter, red for Pentecost, dark blue for Advent, and purple for Lent. I really had had no idea what Lent stood for before we talked about it in class. But afterward I thought about it all the time. Most people think of Lent as being the six weeks before Easter where you give up chocolate or swearing or something. In the church year, Lent is supposed to be a time of prayer and preparation, of introspection and self-examination. Most people also mistake the purpose of giving things up for Lent. It isn’t to deny yourself something, it’s to let go of distractions. To focus on your true calling.
“Purple,” I answered.
She probably wasn’t surprised, as I had recently decided to adopt purple as my official color. Anytime I could have anything in purple, it was the color I chose. The color of Lent.
I never admitted this to anyone. I just told them that I really liked purple.
But in truth, I saw myself as preparing for something. Something I didn’t know. Something I didn’t understand. Little Girl was trying to tell me what it was, but I wasn’t ready to hear it yet. So I waited, and reflected, and prepared.
A lot of church literature refers to the season as the “Journey of Lent”—as if it is not a mark of time but a passage with a destination. I knew I was on a journey myself, though I had no idea where or why. I just wanted to be alone, surrounded by purple walls, ready for Her and as far above the rest of my life as possible.