3. Protection
When Sarah had returned from her first journey to the Underground, fresh from her victory over the Goblin King, her family, friends and teachers had all noticed the change in her. She entered 9th grade at the beginning of September very much the same as she had been when she graduated middle school two months before-a fanciful, quick-tempered girl who kept a stuffed animal in her locker, wandered off during gym class to weave flower crowns, and swept through the hallways with the affected dignity of a fairy tale princess. Though she'd always been popular, the group of girls and more romantically-inclined boys who used to hang on her every word had already started drifting away from her towards the end of eight grade. Now they were all high school freshmen, terrified to find themselves at the bottom of the pecking order and desperate to appear "grown up," hardly any of them would speak to her. Her teachers shrugged their shoulders and rolled their eyes indulgently—a talented, intelligent girl, certainly, but definitely a late bloomer. No doubt she would be a delight by the time she was a junior, but until then they would have to be patient with her high-blown fancies and haughty disdain for her more "mundane" classmates.
But when she returned from fall break she seemed, suddenly, to have done all her "blooming" practically overnight. Her whole manner had changed. Where before she had been a someone over eager participant in her classes, especially English, now she rarely raised her hand, although if called on she was usually able to give the answer as readily as she used to. She dressed differently. She traded in her flowy, peasant blouses with ruffles and lace for a wardrobe that consisted mostly of plain black shirts and jeans, a big hit with the theater and journalism clubs, where she started to make new friends.
She hadn't entirely lost her flair for the fantastical and dramatic. She still swooned over Shakespeare and seventeenth century ballads in English class, and when the drama club announced their winter production of "The Miracle Worker," she was one of the first to sign up (although that spring, when the upperclassman insisted on staging "A Midsummer Night's Dream, she'd protested hotly and refused to participate, even in the stage crew). It was just that she was much more careful about when and where she allowed herself to let it out, saving it all for when she was on stage.
Karen had been deeply relieved by Sarah's sudden sprint towards adulthood, and even more pleased by the garbage bag full of books and toys that Sarah had abruptly dropped off in Toby's room one morning, offering only the words, "I don't need this junk anymore" as an explanation. Coming on the heels of her constant complaining about her baby brother stealing her toys, Karen interpreted the gesture as Sarah's olive branch after nearly three years of tantrums and cold indifference. Although Sarah hadn't meant it as one, she did cautiously begin accepting Karen's tentative overtures of affection—packed lunches, mended her clothes, little gifts that Karen would bring home after running errands ("I saw it and thought of you—could you use it?"). When she'd approached Karen sheepishly one afternoon after she'd gotten home from school, asking for help painting over the wallpaper in her room, Karen was almost tearful. She drove Sarah to the hardware store, helped her chose one of the twenty-seven shades of white available, and together they'd donned old t-shirts and holey jeans, pushed all the furniture and knick-knacks to the center of her room, and completely covered every inch of the dark green, forest-themed wallpaper with several layers of light cream latex paint. Sarah's father had stayed late at the office that night, and so instead of one of Karen's sensible, home-cooked meals they'd ordered pizza and watched a movie, both of them sitting together on the same couch. They didn't develop a mother-daughter relationship overnight—they weren't even very affectionate towards each other—but it was something to build on. A truce. Even her father, who, due to his job, saw her mostly only on the weekends, noticed the changes and was pleased, relieved that Sarah seemed to have put the divorce and her mother's abandonment before her.
Everyone seemed happier with these changes—including, at least outwardly, Sarah herself. Her English teacher, though, who had heard a lot about Sarah from the 8th grade teacher and had looked forward to having the girl in her class this year, was worried for her, although she was not sure what exactly she was worried about. Sudden changes in behavior were not, in her experience, generally a good sign when it came to young people, but then again it was hard to say exactly what the problem could be. Although Sarah's grades had dipped a bit at first, before Thanksgiving break she had recovered and remained a high honor role student. She seemed happy, and was making new friends easily now that she seemed to have put the insufferable arrogance of her early adolescence behind her.
But there were times when her English teacher could swear that there was an anxiety to the girl that that hadn't been there before—a watchfulness, as though she was constantly on alert for something. Her class journal entries, which had previously been sincere and confiding, if a little effusive, were now shorter, carefully worded—guarded, even. When she approached Sarah after class one day and asked her if there was anything wrong, she could have sworn that, for a split second, Sarah looked panicked, like she was caught off guard and thinking frantically of something to say. But then she had only smiled, and said of course not, and hurried out the door after one her new friends. The woman kept a close eye on her for the rest of the year, never able to shake the feeling that something had to be wrong, somewhere, but was eventually forced to admit that the girl was just growing up, albeit a lot faster and more suddenly than most.
The truth behind her sudden metamorphosis was, of course, known to no one but Sarah herself. The fact was that Sarah Williams had not just returned from the Underground with a more mature outlook on life and an abhorrence for anything fairy or folktale related. She also possessed a much better understanding of just how dangerous the world could be, and the conviction that, deep down, despite all her efforts and protests to the contrary, she was a bad person.
She had beaten the Labyrinth, yes, but only barely, and the more she thought about the more painfully aware she became of how lucky she'd been. She'd barely known what she was doing from one moment to the next. How much of her victory was due to her own strength, her own bravery, determination and skill, or even that of her friends? How much had been due to pure chance, or due forces beyond her knowledge or control? She had saved Toby—but did that even count if she had been the one to put him in danger in the first place?
The defeat of the Goblin King was something that she endeavored to think of less often, but which troubled her even more. She was a child, and fairy tales and love poems were poor substitutes for experience She had no frame of reference to help her understand the strange tension that accompanied the fear she felt when she thought of him, to explain the guilt that would overtake her when she thought of the look on his face during their final confrontation, how it fell when she refused him and the Underground had seem to collapse around her. Her fear, and the other unresolved feelings that she stuffed down and tried to forget drove her to develop a passion that proved to be the only exception to her newfound, almost pathological aversion to the magical and fantastic: "apotropaic magic," the use of magic charms, talismans, and gestures to ward off evil.
For the next two years, without any regard for religion or culture, she amassed an impressive collection of jewelry, good luck charms, and peculiar personal habits that she worked very hard to keep secret from those around her. She walked around with pockets full of bread and salt, insisting, when Karen complained about the laundry, that it was to help her "get into character." She embraced any and all superstitions she came across, flinging salt vigorously over her left shoulder, refusing to walk under ladders or open umbrellas inside, and nearly had a panic attack one night after dinner when she'd dropped the broom, though Karen could not get her to explain why she would be so upset about "expecting company." When Karen discovered a pair of large metal scissors stashed under the mattress of Toby's crib and had a conniption fit, Sarah insisted that she had only been trying to keep him safe, and, when pressed, lamely explained that she thought it was the place Toby was least likely to find them.
She took a beautiful wooden jewelry chest her father had gotten her for her birthday and filled it with protective charms and talismans: several old iron horseshoes she'd picked up at garage sales, a cheap, stamped-metal Hand of Fatima charm that bend badly in one corner after she'd left it on during gym class, a string of glass nazar beads to guard against the evil eye, an ahnk, four different crosses (a crucifix, a Celtic cross, the Franciscan cross, and a cross made out of wire and real iron nails), sprigs of dried herbs like lavender and St. John's Wort bound in twine, lots of pentagrams, a bundle of twigs she'd taken from an ash tree in the courtyard of her school, a wand made out of rowan that she'd bought on ebay, and a ratty-looking St. Brigid's cross that she'd woven herself out of some flat grasses she found growing by the creek behind her house. Her walls were hung with posters and drawings of protective symbols, and she had to assure the occult-wary Karen that it was all abstract art.
She would carry these charms with her, around her neck (though always under her shirt) or in her pocket, relying on one for weeks before putting it down forever and choosing another, the same way other girls her age went through television shows or brands of lip gloss, until the end of her 10th grade year. That summer, she'd carefully packed it all up into the wooden jewelry chest and stuck it under her bed. For a few weeks afterward, she felt a little anxious without it—exposed. But the weeks turned to months. She went about her life, went back to school, dove headfirst into a grueling junior year as the lead in both the fall and spring drama club productions, AP classes, SAT tests, and early college applications. Nothing happened—and if something was going to happen, she understood now that the drawings and trinkets wouldn't really do anything to prevent it.
Still, she found it hard to let go completely. When she went off to college—on the west coast, horrifying her father and sending Karen into alternating paroxysms of pride and anxiety—the chest was one of the few personal items beyond basic necessities that she took with her. Through dorm rooms, rental houses, and her first apartment, she kept it under her bed—out of sight, but close by in case she should need it.
And so, when Sarah woke up on that in middle of that horrible night, after she'd stumbled, sobbing, to the bathroom to get a cold washcloth for her face, after she'd stared into the mirror in a mix of horror and confusion as the red, puffy welts on her face, just beginning to bruise, slowly began to disappear, as the cut his ring had left on her cheek stopped bleeding and closed before her eyes, after her face had returned to normal and the only remaining sign of her injuries a dull, throbbing ache that she could feel all the way down to her bones, after she'd grabbed hold of each side of the sink and lowered her head and sobbed for what felt like hours, she carefully wiped her face, walked back to bed, knelt down, and drew the worn, scuffed wooden chest out from under her bed.
She opened it, and laid out its contents, one by one, on her rumpled bedspread. Then, one by one, she took the yellowed papers, and hung them on the wall all around her bed. The cross made of iron nails she put on and tucked under her nightshirt. The other jewelry she hung from thumbtacks from every window frame in the apartment. She nailed the horseshoe over her front door. The crumbling bundles of St. John's wort and lavender she hung by her bed. The ash and rowan wood she put in her nightstand, along with some paper salt packets from the restaurant where she worked. She raided her pantry and carefully poured thick lines of rice and salt across her threshold and the sills of every window in the apartment. When she was finished, hours later, sunlight was just barely starting to filter through the cracks in the window-blinds. As she anxiously surveyed her work, a loud, sudden buzzing from her nightstand almost made her jump out of her skin. Shana was calling her-Sarah remembered then that it was Wednesday morning. It was past six, and she and Shana were supposed to open together nearly an hour ago.
Sarah didn't move. She stared at the phone until it finally stopped ringing, then she climbed back into bed, clutched the iron nail cross until the dull points dug into the palms of her hands, and cried.