Pinky Promise

The afternoon sun was licking the back of Michelle's neck as she walked along the uneven sidewalk of her neighborhood. It was a hot, damp summer. She glanced back down the street towards her own house, maybe she should have drove the couple blocks to Clarissa's house. The thought of the cool AC blowing on her face and up the legs of her shorts made her almost double back.

Michelle couldn't remember the last time it was so hot in the summer. She must have been a kid. The cicadas were loud in the shimmering shadows of the trees that lined the sweltering asphalt. They pulsed and droned deep into the sore folds of her childhood memories. Michelle wiped the sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand and furrowed her delicate dark brow.

She fought with a tingling feeling of hope and dread as she approached her best-friend's house. She fiddled with the blue butterfly necklace that fluttered at her sticky neck. She caressed the hope that her friend would answer the door while also battling the dread of knowing it wouldn't happen today.

The slippery butterfly quivered under her probing thumb and index finger as she stood in the bright driveway of her childhood friend's butter-colored house. The red door seemed like a mountain. Maybe she didn't need to do this everyday. She stared at the faded, rusty iron letters that spelled "The Am Comprezza's" in faux cursive. It always puzzled Michelle why they kept the previous owner's name on their front door and every time she asked about it, they looked at her like they didn't know what she was talking about.

A black cat pranced out from under the glowing navy blue SUV in the driveway and spooked Michelle. She leapt back on one dirty white sneaker and her breath hung in her throat before falling out in a shaky sigh.

"Fucking cat," Michelle whispered down at the velvet black feline with giant green eyes. It meowed at Michelle and ran off with a tinkling bell into the glossy holly bushes that marked the boundary of the neighbor's yard.

Michelle ate her heart and walked up to knock on the front door of her friend's house.

The first knock slipped off the red lacquer and barely made a sound. Michelle wiped her soaked hands on the frayed denim of her shorts and tried again.

The door opened slowly after the third knock and the tired, puffy eyes of Clarissa's mom looked out from the other side. Michelle gulped and the anguished woman shook her head. The dread gripped Michelle's stomach like an old desperate boyfriend and she put her hands into the small pockets of her shorts.

"Come on in dear," Clarissa's mom said, "we could use the company."

She opened the door wider and Michelle stepped into the frigid embrace of AC. Clarissa's mom walked into the TV infused din of her living room. Michelle took off her sneakers and ran up the tired, brown carpeted stairs. Her sweaty feet soaked into the matted grooves she had traveled up a million times over the years.

Michelle knocked gently on Clarissa's door and it opened up like a worn book. The curling edges of the faded blues and yellows of The Beauty and The Beast poster trembled as the door glided ajar. All of Clarissa's stuff was exactly as it had been since before she left for winter semester. Boxes of items from her dorm towered haphazardly in the shadows of an empty corner. A disturbed spider disappeared into a cardboard crevice of Clarissa's memories.

Michelle plopped down on Clarissa's girly bed and the rusty springs sang out in a wailing chorus under her paltry weight. She stared up into the dingy pink canopy and let out a quivering sigh.

"Where did you go?"

She sat up and examined the room, hoping for some kind of clue, anything that would let her know what happened to her best-friend. All the memories of their friendship groped out after her from almost every object in the room.

A sharp line of light from the yellowing sun shone through the dusty blinds and glinted off the fake gold of Clarissa's diary that slept on a small desk with a mirror in the corner. Michelle walked over to it.

She had paged through the thing countless times looking for something, anything. But there was nothing. The Diary went back two and a half years. Even back to that time with Jack.

A rush filled Michelle. She licked her lips and swallowed as she read one of her favorite entries:

"Why the fuck am I still friends with that bitch? Jack... my wonderful Jack. I could have sworn he was nowhere close to being her type. I chose him just because of that.

Fuck I hate her so much. I hate what she does to me. Why can't I have one to myself? There's no way I am ever talking to her again. That was the last one. I'm done.

How does she even manage it? The two of them in a dressing room at the mall? Fuck, the image is still burned in my mind. The way she looked at me. It made me feel... I don't want to think about it. How did she know I would even be at the mall today, I didn't tell anyone?

Her eyes as she... as she finished and looked at me... it made me feel... I don't want to think about it. I'm never talking to her again."

Michelle fingered the page tenderly as she turned it. Her best-friend's curly pink handwriting screamed up at her. The piles of small wrinkles on the thin paper from Clarissa's tears as she wrote the entry made the page crinkle as she turned it.

"Is she going to keep doing this to me forever? And I... as much as I hate it, it gives me a weird feeling having shared everything with her..."

She closed the diary quickly. A thrill was running up from below, her breathing was getting heavy. Michelle put the diary out of sight and sat down in Clarissa's small white chair covered in chipped roses.

A strap from the dirty back pack that hung on the back of the chair slipped and the pale pink bag fell to the floor with a thud. Michelle glanced down behind her.

A book had fallen out from the soft lips of the bag and lay on the stained rug at her socked feet.

Michelle's eyes took in the book and she cocked her head. It was out of place. Way out of place. The dark cloth of the old tome and pale blushing edges of the musty pages were not something that fit in with the stained flowery vibe of Clarissa's childhood room.

Michelle picked up the strange book and turned it around in her hands. She had known Clarissa a long time, this is not something she would own.

"I hear screams sometimes," a voice called out from the doorway behind her.

Michelle jumped and dropped the book. Her heart tumbled down a hill in her chest.

"First the cat and now you?" Michelle yelled out at the boy leaning in the doorway.

"Sometimes weird moans too, like happy ones, if that makes sense," the boy said.

"What?" Michelle asked.

"From this room," the boy said, "I can hear my sister's screams and moans at night." He shivered.

"You're just under a lot of stress, you miss your sister," Michelle projected, "it makes us imagine things."

"No I'm not," the boy said, "she's done it before you know, she just wants the attention."

Michelle glared at him, "how can you say that? It's been months."

The boy shrugged and walked away.

Michelle felt a hole in the pit of her stomach. Something was off, ever since her friend disappeared, Michelle just hasn't felt the same. She gripped the book hard in her hands, she felt frustrated, lost.

There was a cream colored piece of paper peaking out the top like a makeshift bookmark. Michelle pulled it out and it was a poem written in crimson ink. The handwriting was tall and confident. She flipped the paper over, there was a strange symbol like a long capital "G" and an embossed line of text:

"Professor Sea, English Dept. MU."

An English professor? Clarissa was a Geology major, what was she doing with a poem from an English professor? Michelle knew Clarissa's schedule of classes since the first year, she hadn't taken an English class yet.

Michelle took out her phone and looked up the staffing page of the English department at MU. There was a Mr. Sea listed on the page, no photo, but office hours.

They went late into the night. She wondered if he would still be there even during the summer. Michelle felt like this book and poem had to be some kind of clue. She looked down at the musty black cover, it felt heavy, heavier than it should be for a book its size.

The sun was going down and Clarissa's room was growing darker by the second. Michelle decided to give Mr. Sea a visit tonight during his office hours. She had to find out what happened to her friend. Michelle was becoming too backed up, too frustrated. She needed closure. She needed a release.

She thought back to the last time she saw her. When Clarissa walked in on her and Michael. The last good time she felt that kind of release she needed. She thought about Clarissa's tastes and how they had changed over time. Michael was the worst of them. He nearly destroyed Michelle in that classroom, he was a brute. Michelle was a little worried about who would come after Michael, she wasn't sure if she would be able to survive Clarissa's ever increasing appetite for self-destruction.

She sighed, put the book in her knit bag and left.

Michelle parked her beat-up car a block away from campus. She didn't have any summer classes and she didn't want to pay for any kind of parking pass. She hadn't planned on coming to campus at all this summer.

The night air was just as humid, but there was a refreshing breeze blowing across Michelle's face that delighted her. After all that fantasizing on her way to Clarissa's, her car's AC had broken on the way to campus. She straightened her long black braid and checked her face in the mirror. She applied some strawberry lip gloss and smacked her lips. She titled the mirror, a bag of fresh white socks in he backseat of her car caught her eye. Fucking Gwen, she always leaves her socks in her car whenever they go shopping together. Why did she keep buying so many bags of fresh white socks? Michelle sighed, flipped up the mirror, grabbed her bag with the book, and stepped out the junky car, she didn't even bother to roll the window up. What? Was someone going to steal Gwen's socks? She laughed in her head as she walked across the still-scorching parking lot.

Michelle made her way to the mysterious professor's office. She wasn't entirely hopeful he would even be there, let alone know anything about her friend. But she had to try.

The moon in the sky was a strange one, it had a red tinge that made it look like a bloody scythe. Michelle shivered. Her heart was starting to change its pace the closer she approached the English faculty building. She rubbed the goosebumps on her skinny arms and continued up the glossy white steps of the building.

Crickets screamed all around her and her hand trembled as she pushed the heavy door open. She had to pause when she entered to get a grip. What was wrong with her? Michelle never felt like this, it was a thrill, part fear, part excitement. She swallowed and looked up at the black grid that had white letters marking the office numbers of each professor. She found "Sea G.454" and made her way down into the basement of the building. Her sneakers squeaking on the polished marble in the quiet building.

The crimson carpeted steps seemed to go on forever down, down, down like a long hungry tongue swallowing her up. Deeper and deeper she kept going. Only the muffled echo of her sneakers on the stairs filled the space. Michelle grabbed her dark braid and looked up behind her, all she saw were flights of ancient grey stairs draped in a river of red.

Her heart was a butterfly trying to free itself from the cocoon of her nymphesque body. She bit her strawberry-flavored cherry lip and decided to continue even deeper down the hungry stairs. What was she afraid of? Michelle couldn't remember the last time she felt anxious like this. Even when she had heard about Clarissa, she didn't experience this type of visceral fear.

Eventually, the stairs ended and Michelle spilled out into a long corridor with a single door at the end of it. She had past the point of no return. Michelle wiped her forehead on her shoulder, the basement was a tad cooler, but there was no air condition in the grand, old building.

The lights above flickered with a dirty rusty glow. The carpet was a cascading pattern of spidery fractals that made Michelle feel like she was walking along a single tight rope cast out onto the void. The smell of fresh dirt filled her head and the sounds of trickling water tickled her inner ear.

There was a dim light coming from the small tinted glass window of His Office and Michelle slowly drifted towards it like a Emerging moth into a reflection of the moon.

Standing in front of the door, she heard muffled voices. A strange kind of long yearning moan from a woman, a growl, smacking, another shrill moan, more smacking. A woman's laughter or was it a cry?.

Michelle's heart was throbbing in her left ear and she knocked as hard as she could with a limp wrist three times through clenched eyes.

All went quiet. The blood rushed around the studs in her burning ears.

The door handle slowly turned and it opened gently. There was a young, mousy Asian woman standing there looking up at Michelle with large dark eyes. She wore a blank look on her face and tilted her head, puzzled. She held a clipboard at her side and wore a black dress with white lace. She had no shoes on and a strange muffled buzz was coming from somewhere on her body. A well-polished, silver hoop dangled from a black choker around her neck.

"Who is it?" A man's voice called out from behind the creepy Asian girl with a kind booming hiss.

"Another M?" The girl called back in a kind of confused way, drawing out the "M" into a question.

"Interesting," the man said.

The collared woman opened the door and gestured for Michelle to enter.

Michelle gripped her braid hard and entered nervously. A single cold bead of sweat ran down her side ribs from her armpit under her airy pale blue t-shirt.

The door shut behind her and Michelle was in the dim glow of a small waiting room.

The collared girl sat Michelle down on a bench across from another girl with dark eyes and a long black braid. She was wearing a thin blue shirt with a pink butterfly necklace and denim shorts. The pretty student bounced her legs on the socked toes of her feet.

The collared woman who showed Michelle in left the room. A mixed scent of cherry and fur followed her out the room.

Michelle adjusted her bag and studied the student on the bench across from her. She was reading a journal or diary of some kind with a wide smile. Michelle felt the small hairs on her neck stand up. Where the fuck was she? Was this a waiting room?

The room was so quiet and so yellow. Only the shuffling of the pages from the pretty girl across from her and the ticking of the large Grandfather clock in the room made any sound.

Tick, tock, tick... Tock... sick... socks... click... click... click...

Michelle felt herself drifting away, where was she? Her clock was cleaned out.

A strange tide of memories unlocked and flooded into her vividly like a slurry neon soup.

Her mother and her mother's friend were arguing about something in hushed whispers in the kitchen, it was becoming heated between them and sometimes the whispers were quick shouts or yelps of words. Michelle was a young girl playing with a barbie doll. It looked just like her friend Clarissa. She had it walk to the pink plastic mansion and mimed the actions of walking up the stairs. The doll rounded the corner to her bedroom when she stopped. Michelle gasped as she used her other hand to manipulate another pair of dolls on the bed. It was a Ken doll and another barbie that had a long black braid. Michelle moved the Clarissa doll in a shocked way and worded quietly the drama to herself as she continued to manipulate the two dolls on the bed. The Clarissa doll ran out the house crying. Michelle grinned.

There was a pair of expert hands paging deep and rough through the sensitive, pulsing, rosy book of her memories. "Easy Baby, please," Michelle heard herself mumble incoherently in a stupor.

Michelle was older now and she was with Clarissa's first boyfriend. She was waiting outside the school for Clarissa to finish up with her volleyball practice. She had timed it perfectly, her friend was always the last to leave, Clarissa took the longest showers.

"What are we waiting for?" Clarissa's boyfriend asked for the fourth time.

"Do you want to kiss me or not?" Michelle asked, not looking at him but at the door.

"Well, yeah, but what are we waiting out here for?" The impatient boy asked.

Michelle heard something from behind the school exit and knew Clarissa was coming. She pushed herself up against the pale boy and the shock of it shut him up suddenly. Michelle listened for the door to open when she planted her hot mouth on the boy's chapped lips, forcing her inexperienced tongue deep and awkwardly into his mouth. The boy just stood there shocked and let her do as she wished.

Michelle heard a pile of books fall to the ground behind her and the door slam shut. She closed her eyes as a strange ecstasy overtook her body from the loins up. Her soul shivered as she heard Clarissa run away sobbing.

She opened her eyes and the dumb boy was staring down at her with a hungry look, his first one. He didn't care about Clarissa anymore, he wanted Michelle.

"Thanks for the kiss, but I don't think this is going to work out," Michelle giggled while she grabbed Clarissa's books from the ground and ran off after her laughing with a terrible joy. Her heart and body was overflowing with life as she chased down her sobbing friend. Life was incredible! The young Michelle thought as she ran.

The Grandfather clock chimed and Michelle found her mind returning like a slammed door, she swallowed a small amount of drool that had accumulated in the bottom of her mouth and focused her eyes.

The pretty girl sitting across from Michelle on the bench held the journal out in front of her and slipped her other hand in the wide gap of her shorts and under the mauve cotton of her panties as she read.

Michelle's eyes widened.

The collared girl came out and whispered something in the pretty student's ear. The student looked up at Michelle and nodded. She pulled her hand out from her shorts and closed the journal. Michelle caught a glimpse of a tattoo just deep enough on the student's right inner thigh. It was a single symbol, Michelle tried to remember, where had she just seen that before?

The collared girl stood up and faced Michelle, "Mr. Sea will see you now."

Michelle grabbed hold of her bag strap and stood up. The pretty student was looking at her. Michelle followed the Asian girl out of the room.

"Gee... he's already in your head," the student called out in a happy voice.

"Excuse me?!" Michelle turned back sharply to look at her.

"This way please," the petite collared woman said, placing a hand gently on Michelle's soggy back and pointing with her clipboard.

Michelle turned away slowly from the student's knowing smile and followed the other girl down another even stranger hall and into an office. What kind of office hours were these? What kind of professor was this?

The Maid shut the door behind her and Michelle was now alone in a dim musty office with a man in his early thirties sitting behind a desk writing in a notebook with a tall raven feather.

Michelle blinked, no it was just a normal pen, her senses were all out of whack since she entered this place.

She stood there while the man wrote in the book. She examined him, he was kind of how she imagined him from his handwriting, but with an extra tinge of magnitude.

He was all in black. His suit jacket fit him perfectly and counter balanced the casualness of his black t-shirt. He was pale, with a capitol "P" almost dead looking. No he was dead, or no, not dead, but cold. His dank wild hair was tied up into a black cloud of a bun. He oozed a violence that was hard to understand for Michelle. His green eyes looked sharp and tired at the same time behind his stylish tortoise-shell glasses. His dark wild brow made her chest tight with nerves. His all-seeing glasses reflected the white page of the paper he was forcing himself into. He was beautiful in all the wrong ways for her. He was pretty and strong at the same time. He was a conflict, a paradox of terrible power and precious subtlety. She was just a single drop of blood in his shark-infested ocean. She Gulped.