A/N: I am back with my response to the second prompt for this week on FYAC, focusing on how Nan discovered her powers. Bloodletting is an old medical practice where doctors would take out some blood from a sick patient. Disease was thought to be caused by an imbalance in a person's humors – four distinct bodily fluids (phlegm, black bile, yellow bile, and blood) that corresponded to the four elements. Removing the humor in excess – blood – was thought to bring these humors back into harmony and alleviate illness. I will probably continue this prompt with Queenie and Madison further when I have time.
Bloodletting
She was thirteen years old when she first heard someone else in her head.
She was attending Saint Dymphna's Middle School, a Catholic school in the little town of Frederick's Hollow in the heart of Bible belt Kentucky. Her father's job got him transferred here, so they had to pack up their home in Boston and give up the skyscrapers and bustling crowds for cows and small town gossip. Her parents weren't devoutly religious, thankfully, but they did feel she would get a better education at a Catholic school rather than the public one. So despite her begging and pleading, her long stares at the back-to-school sales of hot pink tank tops and cute denim miniskirts and flip flops with flowers on them, her mother took her to the uniform store and got her the amorphous white collared shirt and long, navy pleated skirt required at Saint Dymphna's.
She already knew she was going to hate it there as she stepped out of her mother's car the first day. The building was square and drab, the windows shuttered even in the September heat holding over from summer, and wherever there was paint was painted dark. The front metal doors loomed ominously in front of her and all she wanted to do was run back into the car, but as she turned around, she saw her mother wave and drive off down the street to start her errands for the day.
As she walked into her new classroom and found her desk, she already heard the questions and hurtful commentary she unfortunately was already used to breaking out among her new classmates.
"Who's that weirdo sitting over there?"
"She's probably retarded. I bet she can't even read yet."
"Why does she look so ugly?"
She tried to tune them out as best she could, but as her teacher started to write her name – Sister Mary Jude – in elegant cursive on the blackboard, she couldn't stop one tear from sliding down her cheek, but she hastily wiped it away before the nun introduced her to the class.
"Settle down, everyone. I'm Sister Mary Jude and I will be your teacher this year. I would like you all to welcome Nan, who just moved to this neighborhood from the big city of Boston. I expect all of you to make her feel at home."
As the nun turned back to the board to write the week's schedule, she felt a spitball collide with the back of head.
Make her feel welcome.
Yeah, right.
It was Friday of her first week and she couldn't wait for the weekend. Despite the nun's instructions, no one volunteered to show her around, no one let her sit at their lunch table, and definitely no one tried to befriend her. She had been eating lunch in the library, rifling through the books of saints and martyrs, in awe of their stories that sounded more soap opera than history.
She would never forget the last saint she read about before her awakening, or whatever Headmistress Cordelia had called it.
Saint Dymphna, the saint for which this wretched school was named after.
She was the daughter of a pagan chieftain and his Christian wife. After the death of her mother, her father went batshit insane with grief and wanted to take Dymphna as his wife since she was a lot like her mother. Dymphna escaped and started up a hospital, but her father found her. When she refused to go back with him, he killed her. Now she is the patron saint of those with mental and emotional illness.
How ironic.
It was recess time, a time that all the kids looked forward to except for her. When most kids were playing tag or foursquare or shooting hoops at the lone basketball net, she was off by the one lone picnic table, the book of saints open in her lap, when she heard them approach her.
"Hey, freak."
She ignored them, calmly turning the page.
"I said hey, freak."
She concentrated on the page, staring resolutely down at the painting of Saint Dymphna, who looked so serene and beautiful despite the horror that her life must have been. How did she really feel? Was she really so peaceful? Or did she just do a good job of hiding her sadness?
Then the rock hit her.
"Pay attention to who's talking to you. Or are you too stupid to even do that?"
Her tormentors – three boys that she recognized from her class, who already had the seeds of hate and arrogance required for becoming bullies, whose parents gave them everything and thought they were God's gift to this Earth and would never even believe that their angel boys would ever hurt someone else – laughed at her cruelly.
She tried to temper her anger, as her parents had told her to do since she was young and which she had always done faithfully since when people made fun of her, but the combination of moving to a new place and being beaten down all week was too much. So she jumped up, the book falling to the ground with a soft thud, and gave them the meanest look she could muster.
"Shut up."
The laughter stopped. The boys looked confused, then angry, and the biggest one – his name was Zach, if she remembered correctly, with blonde hair and freckles that made the rest of the girls giggle as he walked by – stepped towards her menacingly, his dull brown eyes flashing with rage that she had dared to fight back.
"Excuse me?"
"I said shut up. Or did you not hear me?"
"You little –"
He pushed her down to the ground, and that's when she heard it.
It was like a stream, mumbles and jumbles of words and thoughts, racing, racing, racing through her so fast she would have gasped if not for the dirt in her mouth. What is this? What was going on? What was she hearing?
She didn't know it then, but the Headmistress, or Miss Cordelia as she was called by her pupils, had later taught her that clairvoyants can differentiate thoughts by the unique feelings and sensations they evoke, like a barcode or a fingerprint. She could feel that his thoughts were foreign – they smelled like fresh mud, tasted acrid and smoky, showed up as forest fires and racing rapids, felt like fine ash and broken glass. Her own thoughts smelled like lavender and incense, tasted like strawberries, reminded her of open meadows and brilliant flowers. She just knew the difference, like her and his thoughts were two rivers running in parallel and she was on an island in the middle, able to see both.
She spat out the dirt and looked at Zach, unblinking, and suddenly the thoughts began to coalesce, the words became intelligible, and she suddenly understood what she was seeing, hearing, thinking, feeling.
"Beating up on me won't change anything."
"What?"
"You're taking out your anger on me because you feel guilty."
His face suddenly turned white, his eyes growing as big as saucers. His thoughts kept racing faster, but she saw them clearly now.
"Your uncle hurt your sister. You saw it happen. You didn't understand then, but now you do. And you hate yourself for not saying anything."
His two cronies shot him questioning looks, confused as to what she meant and why he was getting so flustered about it.
"I said shut up!"
Faster, faster, faster.
"You wonder if it still happens. She doesn't laugh as much as she used to. You can tell she's afraid when he comes over. But you still don't have to courage to tell anyone. So you bully other people to make the pain go away, to feel powerful and in control. But it never lasts."
"SHUT UP!"
And he struck her across the face, his breath coming in short, rapid pants, his eyes bulging with fury, his friends looking at him in utter bewilderment, and by now the nuns had noticed the kerfuffle and were running towards them, their habits flying out behind them. She could hear the beads of their rosaries smacking into their thighs.
But she didn't stop, the torrent of his thoughts kept coming, careening wildly around in her brain, and she just kept speaking, her mouth revealing his deepest fears and secrets, and she felt power running through her like hot lightening and she liked it.
"You hate yourself because you're weak."
"I'M NOT WEAK!"
"You're nothing but a coward."
"NO!"
As the nuns finally reached them, frantically restraining the now crying and screaming boy, she brushed the dirt off her uniform and walked back into the school. She grabbed her bag, hastily shoving everything she had in her desk into it, and sneaked out a side door, darting quickly for the wooded park next to the school so the nuns would not see her. She raced home, scaring the shit out of her mother when she arrived in the kitchen, breathless and disheveled at 11 AM, uniform covered in needles and gravel and hair a windswept mess, demanding to know what happened.
Her parents withdrew her the next day.
They didn't really know what to make of her "affliction," as it became known around the house. They at first didn't believe her, chalking it up to her vivid imagination, but when she started telling them their own thoughts, that was when they looked at her in a whole new light.
"Mom, stop screaming that Dad forgot to get eggs again and that he needs to write a fucking list, you're giving me a headache."
"Dad, stop thinking about your secretary at work."
"Mom, Dad is mad at you because you didn't make dinner tonight."
"Dad, Mom is angry because you forgot to put in the load of laundry last night after she reminded you twice about it."
To say the house was tension-filled was an understatement.
They shipped her off to Miss Robichaux's soon after, once they found out what the school actually catered to. Miss Cordelia came to visit her, to explain what she would be learning and assuage any fears that she may have about moving away from home.
"Nan, I know you must be confused. It's very difficult when a witch first awakens to her gift."
"Did you have a difficult awakening?"
Cordelia looked taken aback by her question, but as she answered, her face grew earnest.
"No, my mother was a witch, so I knew what to expect. My job is find girls like you and guide you as you learn the old arts. It is my responsibility to keep you safe and protect you. We witches are hunted, Nan. People don't like what they don't understand and are quick to demonize those that don't fit into their worldview. They will seek us out and hurt us if we don't know how to control our gifts."
"Can I tell you a secret, Miss Cordelia?"
"Of course, Nan."
So she leaned in close and cupped her hands around her ear, absolutely giddy to share her newfound realization from the schoolyard, to whisper aloud the words that she had thought to herself every night in bed since.
"I don't need protection. I know people's secrets. They are the ones who should be afraid."
A/N: Don't mess with Nan!