Falling

1966

Lily had been magic since the moment she was born. Her birth had been the most tranquil St. Vincent's Hospital had ever seen, the infant Lily smiled the moment she was held, her vibrant red hair - nearly blood red - had shocked the delivery room nurses.

She was a fairly normal child with only small events of magic that set her parents wondering. Her mother noticed that flowers left in her youngest daughter's room never wilted, and once she was capable of moving about on her own, her father realized that whenever things went missing about the house, Lily would always be the one to find them.

Her life at school was another matter. When she was five, she joined her sister at Our Lady of Grace, the local catholic girl's school. There, Lily stood out immediately to the nuns. The dress code was a dismal scale of grays and Lily's wavy red hair, which now reached her waist, stood out like a sore thumb. Her teacher, Sister Bernadine, particularly found Lily's presence unfavorable, almost immediately targeting her for her most strict punishments and harshest criticism.

She made her stand in the corner at the slightest noise during class, she kept her in during breaks to clean the blackboards and she warned the other children against befriending her. But it was Lily's hair that truly upset Sister Bernadine. "Red is the devil's color," she would tell a terrified Lily when they were alone. And after being held after on the first day of class, she warned Lily while snipping up a newspaper with alarmingly sharp and shinny shears that if her hair wasn't kept in strict braids at school, she would cut it all off at the nape of Lily's neck.

Lily, who naturally had a mellow disposition, tried her hardest to fit in at Our Lady, even if she absolutely hated it. She silently withstood Sister Bernadine's treatment, and timidly tried to make friends with her classmates, but often to no avail. The other children began calling her names inspired by Bernadine's attacks, their favorite being 'witch,' and as the year passed, Lily felt more and more isolated. Petunia was her only friend, but being two years older and having her own group of friends, she could only spend so much time with her ostracized younger sister.

So Lily became accustomed to spending her time alone and experimenting with the little tricks her sister reprimanded her for practicing, even if they were the only two who knew she did them.

But then one day, while being teased out in the yard during break, Rebecca Wiles, her most enthusiastic bully, grabbed hold of both her braid and yanked her around by her hair. The yellow ribbons tying off her braids came out in Rebecca's hands and Lily's curls unraveled from their pleats. Upon the class' return, Lily's hair was still undone; she didn't know how to braid, her mother usually did it for her, and Petunia was nowhere in sight to fix it for her.

Lily tried to slip into class unnoticed, but Sister Bernadine's eyes locked onto Lily like a magnet the moment she stepped through the door. She stormed through the throng of girls and dragged Lily to the front of the classroom by the scruff of her neck. She opened her desk drawer pulling out her silver shears and grabbed Lily's hair roughly in a fist on top of her head. Lily, whose body had begun to tingle the moment she saw the shears felt something building up inside of her she couldn't control.

Though she wasn't fond of the torment from her classmates her for her dark red locks, secretly she loved the color of her hair. Her mother always told her it was beautiful while she brushed it out and braided it, and her father liked to joke about how easy it was to find her in a crowd. Petunia frequently called it strange, but always in the voice she used when she was hiding her envy poorly. But most of all, Lily liked it because it made her feel that her different insides were reflected on the outside too. It made her feel special, like maybe her strangeness was part of something bigger.

So while her body was flooding with panic so intense her vision blurred, two things happened that Lily couldn't quite explain later. A shriek escaped Sister Bernadine's throat as her hand suddenly released Lily's hair, dropping Lily to the floor. A blistering burn scalded her hand where it had touched Lily's hair. And the shears that had so terrified Lily went flying out of her hands, embedding themselves to the hilt in the ceiling.

The silence in the room was deafening as all eyes turned to Lily, wide eyed and sprawled out on the floor.

Things after that were blurred for Lily. She remembered her parents being called in and a very serious conversation being held over her head in the headmaster's office. She remembered the words 'Dangerous' and 'Disturbed' and by the end of the conversation, her mother was in tears. Most of all, she remembered the horrible grin that spread across Sister Bernadine's face as she bid her 'goodbye forever.'

There was a long car ride after that, longer than the drive that normally brought her from school to home, and in the front seat her parents argued back and forth while Petunia, who had been taken from class, repeated over and over that there was nothing wrong, that Lily was normal, all the while holding tightly to Lily in the back seat.

The car stopped at a big imposing building after a drive through the country. It was all white, as were the dresses of the nurses who stood by while men in uniforms pried her her screaming sister off of her and carried her through the door. She passively allowed them to do so, to scared and hurt to resist, and instead hung completely limp like a rag doll in the orderly's arms. Above the door a sign read Avery Hills Sanitarium.

Things there were always fuzzy. Doctors who never looked her in the eye asked her what had happened and how it made her feel in a voice that betrayed it made no difference, and at all times of the days she was given pills and shots that made her head fuzzy. Sometimes she would wake up in a room she didn't remember entering, her muscles sore and her brain frazzled. When she complained to the nurses, they would rub her arm sympathetically and tell her that those were the side effects of ECT. Lily had no idea what that meant and it scared her horribly that there was something being done to her she had no knowledge of.

She had no idea how long she was there either, and she sometimes couldn't remember how she'd gotten to Avery Hills. Scarier still, she was forgetting where she was before she came to Avery Hills; before the whitewashed walls and stoic nurses. But one day her parents came and their pale faces told her whatever change they had expected to overtake her wasn't the one they got. There was more fighting, this time with the doctors, and then she was in the family car again, speeding home.

The first few months home were patchy and distant. Her sister's hair which had been cropped at her chin when she had last seen her, now hung down to her shoulders. She had trouble remembering things she used to know, like their home address and the names and faces of their neighbors. Sometimes she would wake up with no memory of the day before, but her mother was infinitely patient and spent everyday with Lily; baking, playing, and brushing her hair. When her father came home, he would put her on his knee and let her pick what television show to watch. Suddenly Lily was a very precious child to both of her parents.

Petunia too tried to help in her own way. She had switched schools and taught Lily what she learned in class everyday after she came home. The first few months back from Avery Hill, Lily was slow in learning and often quiet. But after six months at home, Lily was back to her usual perky self and caught on fast to Petunia's lessons.

Not long after Lily returned to herself, Petunia caught her standing her pencil up on it's sharpened point and panicked. "You can't do that Lily! You have to be normal, or they'll send you back! Is that what you want?"

Though Lily had no clear memory of the sanitarium, she could still remember a feeling of complete abandonment, of infinite confusion and terribly lonliness. She shook her head. "No, Tuney, I don't want to go back!" She may not know what 'back' meant, but Petunia had said it with enough venom to embed the point.

"Then promise me you won't ever do this again." Petunia, whose eyes were brimming with tears, struck an imposing figure, holding the pencil in one tightly clenched fist and shaking it in Lily's face.

"I promise," Lily assured her sister. But she had lied.

From then on, Lily was home schooled by her mother in the mornings and allowed free reign of the house and the neighborhood in the afternoon. Outside, hiding in the bushes or under the covers at night, she would make clovers float, and needles spin around in the palm of her hands.

Occasionally her sister caught her, and would react with fear and anger, but Lily knew that there was something bigger inside of her than floating clovers or spinning needles, and the only way to discover it was to practice.