1. Human

Cole rested her fingers on the door handle. Paint flecks and bruises dappled her bare arms, still golden despite the early winter. Storms shook the apartment windows daily and rain stalked her to and from work, but today, it had failed to purge the evidence.

            Cole didn’t mind. She pulled an oversized hoodie from her backpack. Several spray cans spilled out and rattled down the apartment hallway.

Nails dug into palms and teeth into her lower lip. Cole winced as she chased the cans, tossed them into the backpack, then zipped it. She listened for witnesses before pulling on the hoodie and slipping inside. She drew the sleeves down as far as they would go while her gaze adjusted to the dim lighting.

The step-dad napped in his usual place. A beer bottle melted amber light across his socks as he slouched against a wilting armchair. The mother’s presence meant noise, drawers flung open, doors slammed, the whisper of pills, like grains of rice in a maraca. Only the faint chatter of TV hosts dusted the air, gentle and erratic as moth wings. The step-brother was almost always out, if not fully preoccupied with his headphones blasting and his bedroom door locked. She pressed her ear against the door. Not so much as a hum or snore. Cole took easy, relief-filled steps to the kitchen and began making a sandwich. Her life-long good girl reputation remained intact.

Her stomach rumbled in anticipation. Food was something she mostly gave away. Shifts at a local cafe meant staying in school, paying for books, though she’d had to avoid certain teachers to get away with no uniform--for now. If only she didn’t need nourishment, she could work more shifts and buy an official school shirt, at least. Her stomach growled in protest. Still human, though, Cole thought, smiling ruefully. With very human needs.

She had barely gotten mustard across one brown slice when the step-brother lurched inside. Like the weather, he oozed gloom and left her feeling cold. Cole bit her lip again as the sandwich was snatched from her grasp. Ten half-decent retorts circled her mind. She bit her lip harder, taming her sharp tongue.

The step-brother took one bite, then spat it into the sink. “Buy white bread,” he snapped. “What’s this gross…ugh.” He threw the rest in the bin, then stalked into his bedroom. The lock clicked shut, followed by a blast of music that shattered the quiet.

The step-dad stirred for a moment, then returned to slumber. Cole knew better than to tempt fate and rebel against the step-brother. She’d made attempts in the past. Each time, she’d only gotten burnt. Her girl friends couldn’t look past the pretty face and moody rock star demeanor. Teachers only seemed to notice his ‘potential’ and preferred to pardon his many acts of truancy in return for the brief glimpses of athletic or academic talent he showed when he bothered to turn up. The mother adored him--to the point where Cole couldn’t tell the difference between friendliness and flirting. Not that Cole knew much about the latter. Boys were not an option.

As she smothered new slices in mustard and ham, Cole recalled the past few months. She couldn’t get a boy--anyone--involved in her life. Not now. Not unless they wanted to get arrested.

A sudden flash of light streaked across the windows, sparking memories. Magenta and chartreuse splashed across her vision. Rusty, metal bars had held her in place as she hung, suspended, while paint gushed like magic onto a brick wall canvas. She put the memories away like the cans in her bag. She couldn’t let them out. Couldn’t let them be seen, be stopped. She needed this. Beyond needed it. Still human, her mind taunted. In her mind, she squashed the thought under her foot and tossed the remains out the window, watched them sail along the gutter and down into the sewers.

Cole polished the sandwich off, then made another and cut it in half, forcing herself to eat slowly. Unlike her friends, she hadn’t had much practice at table manners. The mother never cooked, never took her out to eat, except to takeaway joints as a kid, and for the last five years, she had eaten all her meals alone. This was all after, of course. After Evaline…

Almost. She’d almost gotten caught this time. Not that she’d physically sighted anyone. Cole had been careful. Beyond careful. She left really early in the morning and took several random bus trips before heading to her destination. Even then, she always took different routes, always traveled on foot to the desired spot, always took the long way there.

It should have been a cake walk. She barely had friends, not any that lived in her shady neighborhood. Her years-old, oversized clothes and lack of physical maintenance sang verses of her pitiful financial state, deterring thieves. Her tangle of dark waves had grown so wild, she didn’t even bother prettying it up in plaits or side ponytails, the way Evaline had once upon a lifetime ago, opting instead to let it fall over her face, making her unappealing to rapists and general creeps. Unappealing? Who was she fooling? In everyone’s eyes, Cole was invisible. And someone who is invisible can’t be followed, let alone caught.

But then, a feeling…

It was indescribable, like trying to explain lightning to the born-blind. It was a gut feeling, intuition, and a little bit like being psychic all at once. Cole just knew. Someone was watching. Someone knew.

At first, she tried writing it off. Don’t be one of those girls, she told herself. Don’t make things up in your head. You don’t need attention. Not over this. This is yours. Just yours, no one else’s. The thought was comforting--for all of two seconds. Once she’d promised not to make up a watcher, then she knew the watcher was real. And better than her at hiding.

When she began to notice, about a month ago, she’d come up with endless logical reasons for it. Maybe someone was interested in scouting her for a newspaper article. Maybe they were art lovers, or rebels, or both, and appreciated her elaborate rebellion. Maybe they lived in one of the thousands of apartments in the area where she’d been working.

But then it stopped being only that area. The watcher’s gaze followed her into other areas, like at home and school. Then it followed her almost everywhere else, into all her safe places. She felt it on her while she worked, while she studied, ate, hid, cried, slept. She woke to the same weird feeling burning in her gut and could only quell it after checking every inch of the apartment, including under beds and the dreaded step-brother’s room. Even in the company of her friends, the step-dad, mother, step-brother, the cafe at its peak, on a bustling city street, in a crowded classroom--she could sense the watcher’s presence.

It rendered her helpless, reminded her of being little. Whenever the mother was at home, rummaging frantically through her belongings for loose change, Cole used to lie beside Evaline at the bottom of a linen cupboard. Evaline blu-tacked glow-in-the-dark stars and planets to the walls, since they were both scared of the dark. Evaline was older and grew out of it sooner, so Cole soon found herself lying alone. After they moved house, they both stopped being scared. But the watcher had rekindled her unrest.

Cole carried the second half of her sandwich and backpack into the mother’s and step-dad’s unused bedroom and climbed inside the wardrobe. She didn’t have a room. The mother insisted the step-brother, who was older, needed one more. And even though the little time the step-dad spent in the place, when he wasn’t driving trucks in and out of the state, was in the lounge room, the mother insisted he needed a lot of personal space.

Cole bit into the sandwich. She didn’t want to think about the rage welling up inside. She wanted to think only of her beautiful, reckless act of defiance, the thing that left marks on her skin and along bricks and an undeniable scent of newness over everything. She felt like a brightly coloured bird among the coats. Her defiance burned inside her like the colors she had poured into an image outside a rundown, intercity primary school. Cole finished the sandwich, trying to ignore the stab of pain eating always brought her.

Her secret felt so loud and glorious inside her head, too glorious for no one to hear or notice. Especially not the watcher. She could feel him pressing in like the coats, trying to get inside her head, trying to bring her out. The gut feeling seared into her thoughts, a giant hot poker, burning all else away.

Cole jumped at an unexpected burst of sound: ringing. We have a working phone? Cole puzzled. The mother hated phones. Disconnected them as soon as they moved in, or didn’t connect them in the first place. Cole hoped the step-brother would hear. The music blasted on. Sighing, Cole stumbled back into the too-real world of the apartment and headed toward the merciless ringing. Just as she spotted the phone, hanging on a wall in the kitchen, Cole stopped dead in her tracks.

The watcher…

Cole remembered moving in nearly a year ago. Remembered setting things down, helping the mother put things in cupboards, helping the step-dad carry the armchair into the box-ridden lounge room.

The watcher did it…

The mother had contemplated putting up a framed picture of some old-timey celebrity, something in black and white. She and the step-brother had argued about it, with mentions of over-dead-bodies and the hiss of a bottle cap in the background. Not so much as a phone connection had marred the cream wall.

The watcher installed a phone line…

Her breath caught in her throat as the ringing stopped, then restarted. Her hand moved automatically and she spoke in a tone so natural it chilled her. “Hello?”

“Anything.” The voice was ragged, not old, not so young, clearly male. Cole noted all these things as goosebumps rippled on her flesh. “I’ll do…anything you say.”

Anything…

In that moment, nothing was strange anymore. The worst had happened. The watcher was real. There was no hiding, no secret, no hidden bird. An idea struck her hard, a want she’d never put into solid form, but rose like a great wave to meet the watcher’s question, that bright, unexpected horizon.

She wanted out, gone. She wanted to get away from the game she’d been playing for years called ‘family’. To burst out of the dark and into the open air, which reeked of paint, sunlight and blood and to leave marks behind in places that mattered. The answer escaped almost instantly:

“Distract them.”

Unspoken consent passed between them. In the following silence, Cole understood that the watcher knew her. Knew her down-deep. And she was the same. Her fear wasn’t of being watched, being seen. It was of the watcher himself, the see-er. Not a faceless possibility of somebodies, but a definite, terrifying someone she had recognised all along.

“Done,” the watcher breathed.

They hung up in unison. She sensed his hand lower the receiver as her own did the same. She swallowed. There would be consequences. But right now, it didn’t matter. She had her answer. For now, she could be free. Cole shouldered the backpack. A tiny rattle stirred a new feeling: excitement.

Freedom always came with a price. But freedom wasn’t a want.

Cole slipped out, her last defiant act before the final goodbye.