Stomach growling she walks with light steps up to the chalkboard. Feeling the eyes zoned in on her back, her heart begins to race. They saw. They knew. Air wheezed in and out of her lungs, her feet shifted from one side to another as she picked up the banana colored chalk and pressed its rounded tip to the chalkboard. It had many sides. Like a golf ball almost, with all sorts of dents and rounded corners from long days of explaining the Pythagorean Theorem and foiling to high school students. The chalk left its mark on her hand, specks of its dust disseminating all over her body as she wrote on the immense sea of green surrounding her. It was thin. Small. Narrow. Had no curves, it was like a pencil, a ruler, the red ruler you excitedly buy with other supplies before school starts. The ruler that becomes broken by the end of the year because you were twirling it around your chubby pointer finger on your small hand and it flies off and hits the wall. Everyone stared at the broken red ruler that clanged to the ground and then burst out in laughter.
That girl doesn’t live here anymore. She’s gone. No longer a resident in happy-loving-straight-a-student-teenager-perfect-land. No. That ship has sailed. With the help of a noxious persuasive new friend she has moved. The for-sale sign has officially gone up on her perfect house in her perfect life. The bright smiling face of a blond real estate agent plastered on the cover of a sign on her green grass near the envy colored ivy growing up the bricks of her former abode. “You don’t want to live there.” The honey sweet voice beckons. “Come. Come into my land.”
Stepping into this new realm she feels a sense of strength and control seep into her pores, it takes over. The velvet voice urges her closer, further into the land.
With each step she gains more control, she feels like she is flying, adrenaline pumping through her, keeping her alive through the journey between lands. She stops walking. With a look back she sees everything pass her by. Friends go out to dinner, laughing, she smiles. Remembering. Wishing that that was now. She takes a faulty step towards the laughter. “Hurry now. You don’t want that anymore.” The urgent voice calls. She looks longingly back at the old land, wanting to run back, back to the life she knew. No. No. She needs to do this.
Swiftly turning to the new land she takes a shuffling step. Her heart sinks to her feet. This step burns, it deteriorates, a loss of freedom permeates her body, on her ankles, where seven handmade bracelets from her friends once were now are bound by shackles. The atmosphere becomes colder. Chills race through her body, she’s flying, light, yet her body is being weighed down, frozen into the ground, each step forcing her more firmly down. Turning around she tries to run, faster, faster, the icy wind whips at her cheeks, her frosty pink hands swing at her sides. She runs, sprinting towards home. Towards where she wants to be. The same scenery passes her over and over. Surrounded in white. “You might as well stop running, you’re stuck here anyways.” The once sweet voice says caustically, no longer with the enticing façade. “Welcome, my dear, to the land of the frozen.”