I'd always been… different. Not necessarily special in any way. Just different.
It started when I was around three years old. My mother heard me yelling in the backyard, and came out to see what the fuss was about. As she got closer to the door, she realized I was talking to someone. According to her, I was standing in the middle of the backyard, hands on my overall clad hips, long pigtail braids down my back, shouting. I was in the middle of a very heated argument. With no one.
When she asked who I was talking to, apparently the look I gave her was quite comical. I looked to my left, then back to my mom, completely dumbfounded that she would ask such a stupid question. I gestured to the empty space next to me, and said that it was my friend named Gracie. My mom nodded, turned on her heels, and never asked any more questions about Gracie.
But something happened in that exchange. Something about the look on her face. I realized I had done something I shouldn't have. Even at three, I knew that something wasn't quite right.
It probably continued, but I don't remember much. Until about three years later, when we went on our annual ghost tour. Every year, my mom and her group of friends would drag their kids up to a little town in the mountains that was famous for unusual deaths and spooky stories. We went every year, but the stories were always different. The town had no shortage of ghost stories.
I don't remember much, but I do remember that the story was about a woman. She could supposedly be seen walking up and down the street, sometimes looking into windows. The tour guide asked if any of us knew why this woman refused to cross over. Being the dutiful student I was, I raised my hand.
"She's looking for her baby," I answered.
My mom looked down at me, surprise evident on her face. I was always so quiet, and was the last kid anyone expected to speak in front of a large group like this. The tour guide just nodded and continued with the story. As the group walked to the next spot, my mom asked me how I knew that.
"She told me," I answered simply.
My mother's eyes widened, and I watched as something I recognized flashed over her face. It was fear. She was afraid. But not of the ghost story- my mother was afraid of me.
I continued to see things, but stopped telling anyone.
There was a mother and two children in Victorian outfits who appeared on the edge of the woods by our house sometimes. They were the worst. They glowed an eerie white, and just stared.
The light in the hallway outside my bedroom flickered constantly. It was the only light in the entire house that ever flickered. My mother was dating an electrician at the time who assured her that nothing was wrong with the wiring. He tore half the wall apart, but could never figure out why that light flickered. I knew, but I didn't tell anyone. I had woken up one morning and found someone sitting on my bed. I clenched my eyes shut, and told whoever it was to go away and not come back. The light stopped flickering.
I used to see the little boy who had lived in my aunt's house. There was also a woman there, who I always assumed was his mother. I didn't like spending the night there.
There was the old farmer who would walk through the barn if I was untacking my horse after the sun went down. I never saw much of him, just his back as he walked out to one of the fields. He was the most visible one I ever saw, but he stayed away from me. I always appreciated that.
There were other things, too. I gained a reputation for being psychic by the time I was ten. Not because of the ghosts- no one knew about that. This stemmed from the time I looked Anna, our neighbor, dead in the eye and told her she was pregnant. She got flustered and assured me that she couldn't be, and that she had her hands full with their six month old baby. I shrugged my shoulders and told her to take a test when she got home.
"It's a girl," I told her as she walked to her car.
She called my mom the next day. She was pregnant. A few weeks later, she found out it was a girl.
When my mom got worked up because my aunt told her she was pregnant at 40, I nonchalantly told my mom not to worry about it. I wasn't going to tell anyone, but I knew the baby would neer be born. My aunt miscarried at 10 weeks.
My mother tended to ignore these little premonitions, but I always suspected it was because she had them, too. She told me she never saw or sensed any ghosts, but she had an uncanny ability to guess the gender of an unborn baby. No one had ever challenged what she said, because no one had ever known her to be wrong.
She had been raised catholic, and premonitions of any kind were not tolerated. Seeing spirits meant that an exorcism was probably in order, which was why she forbade me from ever mentioning my "friends" to my grandparents.
I always assumed my "gift" was why I felt so different. I chose my words very carefully, because it would be hard to explain something I wasn't supposed to know. I had friends as a child, but always felt like I was standing on the outside, just looking in. One of my friends, Madeline, used to see "angels" in her house. She was the one I trusted the most.
Things changed around middle school. The long, lanky limbs softened and turned to curves. My top lip filled out to match the bottom one, which I always thought was big because I had been stung by a bee as a child. Freckles splashed across my nose and cheeks, and my dark hair grew at an alarming rate.
I noticed the changes in the way I was looked at. I picked up on the way the boy's eyes followed me in the hallway. I knew the grown men did the same, shaking their heads awkwardly as they looked away. I assumed it was something I was doing. I stopped wearing shorts. I only wore shirts that were three sizes too big. I didn't wear makeup, and attempted to keep my hair at a boring shoulder length cut.
It continued as I grew up. I was never popular, and preferred to be a wallflower. The braces and terrible haircut were a deterrent for a while, but I still seemed to attract a lot of attention.
Attention that I never wanted.
It cost me a lot of girlfriends, who could sniff it out and considered it a threat. It also gave me some great friendships. There was Haven, the awkward late bloomer who immediately latched onto me. I always found a way to divert any unwanted attention onto her, which she thoroughly enjoyed. Then there were the pimpley, stringbean boys I surrounded myself with. They were never anything more than good friends, but they served as a great buffer. Plus, it was high school, and there were always rumors swirling that I was dating one of them.
In reality, I didn't date anyone until college. I felt like I was always being looked at like a meal, something to devour and toss away. It was primal. And i didn't like it.
On some level, I convinced myself that I was making it all up. I was sure that every teenage girl felt that way. But not every teenage girl could order champagne at a restaurant at 13 without the waiter batting an eye. Not every teenage girl could, with one look, fluster a grown man into dropping whatever he was holding in a breathless heap. At least… I didn't think.
I assumed I was the freak, so I started walking with my head down, never looking up from my shoes. I made it a priority to never be alone in a room with a man. Not because they had ever done anything, but because the sheen of sweat on their foreheads told me that I made them extremely uncomfortable.
My mother was the same. She could get any man- except the ones she wanted (a trait I definitely inherited). She used it unabashedly. From the extra sway in her hips to get bumped to first class to the married man who stopped by whenever money was short. I'd find somewhere to go when I saw his car turn into the drive, and always came home to a stocked pantry and knew that the lights wouldn't get turned off that month.
We were… different. But not in any spectacular way. Most of the time, we blended in. I had a hunch that this was a skill picked up over generations.
Most of the women in my family had been plagued with the same ills. Bad marriages, divorces, substance struggles. Common things that most families deal with in one way or another. But for us… there was something else. I remember noticing it when I was a kid, the way all the drama and theatrics seemed to be a diversion. It almost seemed like the women in my family were fighting something, and I always thought it was part of themselves.
My mom did it in a destructive manner.
My aunt channeled all her power into her career, making a habit of devouring men and spitting them out as she climbed her way to the top.
My grandmother tried to drown whatever it was inside us.
Because the truth was, we all had it. That subtle glimmer in our too-blue eyes. We all felt this rolling, fearsome power. And we all tried to hide it. We had to hide it.