A month had passed since Trudy had seen the mysterious intruder near the IOTH hospital. Because she had no dormitory room for several days in, she was spending lots of time with fellow hospital frequent flier Caspio LeBlanc. Caspio's personal therapist had overheard Caspio and Trudy talking about demons, and assumed that Caspio had frightened Trudy so badly with his nightmare stories, that Trudy had become paranoid about demons to the point where she was now 'seeing' them, too.
Even though Trudy did not have strong feelings for Caspio, Chelsea, his best friend, was becoming very jealous. Most of the time, Chelsea had to ask Caspio's doctors to make appointments in which she could spend time alone with him. She had believed his story about the demons before Trudy came along, anyway.
Trudy had recently been enrolled in the educational program at IOTH. She loved her classes, especially math. She was not the most bright student, but she did her best on all her assignments. She wanted to prove to her favorite teacher, who also happened to be her father, that she was just as smart as he was.
When the bell rang that Friday afternoon, she skipped joyfully out of her English class and out to the edge of the playground, whistling a tune she had heard in one of the hospital elevators. Aside from the school's locked-from-the-outside back door, the only way off of the school property was a bridge to another smaller mountaintop where the children's dormitories and staff building sat. The two mountaintops were on separate islands, connected only by a sturdy wooden bridge, with a hundred foot drop to the ocean below.
Every day, a different professor would stand at the end of the bridge, making sure all the angel children got safely across. Today was math teacher Allek Branch's turn. Trudy threw her arms into the air and sprinted across the bridge to her father, her cream colored silk jacket fluttering softly as she ran. She latched onto Allek’s leg, giggling. She was waiting for the perfect day to tell him a secret she'd been keeping since she had first arrived on the island.
“Hey, midget,” Allek greeted her. He had been seeing quite a bit of the little girl in the last two weeks. After all, he had legally adopted her, and she was now in his Tuesday class. The two did not spend much time with each other during the week, but Allek was spending his weekends on the upper IOTH premises just to try and be a good, nurturing parent to his child. “You’re excited. How well did you do on your spelling test?”
Trudy reached into her backpack, which was as pink as her hair, and pulled out a piece of paper to give to Allek.
“Wow, an A-plus! See, I knew you were secretly a genius. You get it from me, you know,” Allek said, feeling very proud of his daughter.
A large group of students began to gather around the opposite end of the bridge. Some were beginning to cross, so Trudy and Allek stepped aside so they could pass through. Allek monitored them as they walked past, counting them in his head to make sure the numbers taken during attendance matched the number returning to their dormitories.
Trudy’s friend Merrily walked past them and curtsied to Allek, then danced off to the vine-overgrown stairs of the girls’ dormitories. Although Allek couldn't tell, Trudy noticed Merrily’s markings were getting paler and lighter. Keeping a secret about how Trudy got the card key or even knew where to steal it from was making Merrily slowly but steadily suffer the consequences.
It didn’t take more than five minutes for the group of students to cross the bridge over to the dormitories. Trudy had been lost in her own mind, thinking of the beautiful place where the balloons went, and where her mother was. There were no consequences there...
“Tiny?”
Trudy returned to earth and stared up at Allek. “Hello,” she said. “I have a secret.”
“A secret?” Allek repeated. “You guys are allowed to keep secrets now?”
“No, just me,” Trudy said, putting her hands behind her back and smiling nervously. “Don’t tell.” She didn’t want the other students to even attempt to be secretive, for their health of course. She knew she was special though. None of the other kids got to go where she had gone.
“What’s your secret?” Allek asked, accepting that Trudy was far too much of a fluke of nature to make even the slightest amount of sense to him, ever.
“A message from mommy.”
Allek stared down at her, half stuck in a pained twitching grin. Little Trudy hadn't mentioned her mother since the first night she had arrived on the island, fortunately for Allek, who was still mourning her passing a decade ago. “You and your mom talked a lot when you were...away, didn’t you?” He then began his walk across the crunchy grass to the faculty building, which was between the boys' and girls' dormitories, to enter attendance and grades to his computer.
Trudy followed. “Sometimes,” she said. “Wanna know what she said?”
“I want nothing more than to know what she said...”
“She said...it’s okay to be in love with someone else,” Trudy hesitated when Allek bit his lip in anxiousness, but continued. “You should be happy. She said I’ll be your sign that you can be in love again.”
“She knows?” Allek muttered, tugging at his collar to loosen it.
They reached the inset double doors of the staff building and stepped underneath the awning together. “Oh yeah,” Trudy said, nodding. “Mommies know everything.”
Allek was blushing an angry shade of red. Sure, it was obvious to almost the entire island that he had a ridiculous crush on dean Sing, but dean Sing was not little Trudy's mother, and that made it pretty embarrassing to him as her father. “They don’t get upset or anything where you were, right? Does she hate me? I didn’t know.”
Trudy grabbed Allek’s hand and put her opposite hand on top. “I know too. It’s okay. We want you to be very happy, ‘cause you made us happy. When we’re back toge-”
“I’ve been meaning to tell her,” Allek looked back over to the bridge, which was gleaming in the midday sun. “I just didn’t want to because I thought Trudy- your mom, I didn’t think she wanted me to move on. I always thought it was wrong to try to fill in the empty space when somebody who meant everything to you dies. I could never replace her, she knows that. She was the only one for me...but I’ve been feeling so compelled to find some sort of comfort.”
“I think she likes you.”
“What if she thinks I’m a jerk for waiting only a couple years to get my heart set on somebody else?”
“She doesn’t.”
Allek crossed his arms and watched a flock of seagulls fly beneath the bridge to nest in the rafters. “I didn’t know you were equipped with the ability to read minds, too.”
Trudy tilted her head in confusion. “I can’t do that. I can show you what I’m trying to say, though.”
***
“I don’t think I’m allowed in here.”
“Shh,” Trudy turned back to her awkwardly tall and blonde father in the dark hospital hallway. “We’re sneaking,” she said, as though teaching Allek the concept for the first time.
“Right, right.”
The women’s locker room was uncomfortably close, and Allek knew from high school that it was against the rules to be sneaking around them. Girls got very screamy and slappy when they were caught in their undergarments by teenage boys, and he felt plenty childish taking orders from a kid. He grit his teeth and tiptoed as quietly as he could behind the tiny pink-haired brains of the operation.
“They let you come in here?” Allek asked Trudy. “What could you possibly have to put in the lockers?”
Trudy once again shushed her father and looked in through the crosshatched glass window to the women’s locker room. She had wonderful timing, and doctor Liu Sing was sitting on a bench beside a row of lockers, legs crossed and crochet needles in hand.
“I can’t believe I’m letting my kid do this for me,” Allek grumbled, looking the opposite direction down the hall to make sure nobody would see him creeping.
“She doesn’t know we’re out here.”
“I hope not, she’d probably beat the tar outta me if she had any idea...”
Trudy tugged on Allek’s lab coat so that he'd lean over just enough to see into the women's locker room. The only woman inside was dean Sing, and she was beautiful. Her jet black hair had grown a little over the last few weeks and was hanging just over her shoulders. She had no makeup on, but that was fine. Her face was perfect without the paint. Her eyelashes were long and feathery without the mascara, and her pink lips were plump. She had a white tank top on and very tight khaki colored leggings. She was also barefoot; her typical combat boots were nowhere to be seen.
Allek had never seen her look so non-threatening. There she was, calmly crocheting a blanket in the locker room, not a care in the world.
“When I grow up, I wanna be like her,” Trudy whispered. She knew that she had deliberately stolen from dean Sing, but she still felt the utmost respect for her.
“She’s smart, too,” Allek mused. His face was practically touching the window, and it was beginning to fog up. Then it hit him. “Grow up? Who told you you were gonna grow up?”
“Mommy,” Trudy said. “She said I’m gonna grow up and be just like her. She said I can be a mommy too. And I can be smart, and strong, and really pretty like her and like dean Sing.”
Dean Sing made a sudden movement and turned her head almost ninety degrees, but stopped three-quarters of the way, seemingly uninterested in what had initially distracted her.
“She knows we’re here!” Allek whispered loudly. He then bolted toward the open lobby down the hallway, leaving Trudy behind at the locker room door. He tried his hardest to control his breathing, but he was panicking. He sat down in one of the cushioned chairs, grabbed a travel magazine and pretended to read.
“Trudy! Look at you, did you come to see me? That’s really sweet of you!” dean Sing said to the small angel girl at the locker room door. Then she turned to look down the hall. “Allek.” The change in the tone of her voice was scary.
“Hello, dean Sing. I’m just here to keep an eye on my little girl. I didn’t notice her run off, haha, get back here Trudy...” He was terrifically bad at lying.
“Your father’s excuses are pathetic,” Dr. Sing said to Trudy, while still eyeing Allek as if he was the most pitiful creature on the face of the earth. “Did you need anything, Trudy? I have an hour or two left before I have to return to my office.”
“No, dean Sing. I just wanted to see what you’re making,” Trudy said, winking at Allek while Dr. Sing was still facing away from her.
“Come on, then, I’ll show you.” Dr. Sing set her hand on Trudy’s shoulder and led her back into the locker room.
It took Allek a moment to understand what Trudy’s signal meant, but when it hit him, he couldn’t stop smiling.
***
Trudy couldn’t sleep that night, she was much too excited about the window of possibilities she had opened for her father. Maybe someday soon she would have a mommy in this new plane of existence.
She sat on the bottom stair of the dormitory porch, head propped up on her knuckles, staring up at the silvery moon. There was a warm breeze flowing through the grass. It was a perfect night.
Then something caught her eye. There was a golden light pulsating beneath the bridge. From her month’s stay at IOTH, she knew there were no fireflies on the island, so she got up to investigate.
“Hello?” she asked, bending down at the base of the bridge. The mountain slanted almost directly downward on both sides of the bridge, so there was no way anyone could get down there. Not if they had any desire to get back up, at least. Aside from a few feet of cliff, the dormitory island was also surrounded on all sides by a large white brick wall.
“Hello.”
Trudy looked back over her shoulder at the sound of the voice. A young girl, close to her in age, but different in species, stood there between her and the vine covered stairs. The girl had beige eyes which made her catlike pupils seem much larger than they were, and beige hair. Her skin was a pale brown, and beneath her eyes were white facial markings. Two small iron colored horns protruded from her head just at the hairline. She was not wearing the nightgown all little girls on the island were given to wear to sleep, instead, she was wearing a t-shirt and denim overalls. It was very unprofessional. Trudy had never seen an IOTH child who looked like that.
“Merrily told us about you. You’re the special one that came to bring the ‘rapture’.” A long tufted tail swished from behind the strange girl.
Trudy averted her eyes. This girl’s mocking tone was very rude.
“Well aren’t you gonna tell me your name at least? I’m wasting my time up here, it feels like I’m suffocating.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m Kathulla. Doesn’t Merrily tell you anything?” Her eyes moved from Trudy to a spot behind her. “And that’s David.”
Trudy spun around. She now knew where the pulsating light had come from. ‘David’ was the one with the golden, glowing eyes she had seen the day she'd gotten out of the gate. He was floating in midair, legs crossed as if he was seated in an invisible chair. He had rich chocolate skin, thick, clumpy black hair and the same markings, horns and tail Kathulla had.
The two of them drew nearer to Trudy. “Are you really the one? You’re gonna save all these guys from the evils of the world?” Kathulla asked, rolling her eyes at the mere thought of something so preposterous. “I bet you can’t even save them from this.” The strange girl flicked her wrist and a blade of grass caught fire. It didn’t take long for all the nearby greenery to become engulfed in flames.
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