Three

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,

and never brought to mind?

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,

and days of auld lang syne?

The party is in full swing as the four kids play cards. Though far from a wild party, everyone is enjoying themselves. Katie’s cousins are still young enough to appreciate the privilege of staying up until midnight. For Katie and her sister, midnight has been an early bedtime for several years. Well, for her sister at least, Katie fluctuates between ten-thirty and two, depending on what is going on in her daily life. Lately, it’s been the two a.m. option. There’s not much reason to get up early, she’s on break.

Katie isn’t sure how He comes up during the end of year jamboree, but He does.

“I unfriended him on Facebook,” says Katie’s sister. “He blocked me from seeing his wall.”

“What?” her mom exclaims.

“Yeah, he did me too,” says Katie, admitting it for the first time out loud. Her stomach flutters at the release of her secret, but it quickly settles.

“I thought it was just my phone.” Katie’s mom frowns, her face displeased and concerned at the same time.

Katie voices her theory as to why he hadn’t unfriended them all and is met with reluctant nods. It makes sense.

“That’s it. I’m unfriending him,” says Katie.

“Good for you!” says her sister. She hands Katie her laptop to do the deed. “Don’t forget to block him.”

With a few clicks, the “friendship” is dissolved. Katie returns the childrens’ attention back to the card game while the adults mutter back and forth.

Katie surveys her assembled family, aunt, uncle, boy cousin, girl cousin, sister, and mother as they count down.

“Three!”

“Two!”

“One!”

“Happy New Years!”

With a smile Katie whispers, “Happy New Years, mixed family.”

Two

 “I thought we could have lunch at the park today. This is some crazy December weather,” says Katie’s mom. “Your cousins will love it.”

Katie nods in agreement. The wind is howling, but it’s a warm breeze and the thermometer reads sixty degrees Fahrenheit. Besides, Katie’s worn out from pushing her cousins up and down the street on their new bikes.

The kids wolf their lunch, eager to climb on the play set. Looking at the other mothers around, Katie is surprised by how young they are. The youngest mom there has three kids, Katie guesses ages seven to three, and doesn’t look any older than twenty-something herself. One of the children is wearing pajamas with a jacket; the youngest is in a pink dress. The eldest holds Katie’s attention the longest because his outfit is not only put together, but it is out of the ordinary for a child his age. He’s wearing dark wash jeans, a striped, pink-purple shirt with a darker purple skull design on the front, and a grey zipper hoodie with a darker grey plaid pattern.

On someone her age, Katie would have not thought twice about the outfit, but on a boy of maybe seven Katie wasn’t sure what to make of it. The mother couldn’t have come up with the outfit, not entirely at least, she’s barely dressed for the day in too-tight, light grey sweat pants, an oversized t-shirt, and a grey hoodie; Katie wrinkles her nose as the woman’s cellulite wiggles beneath the tight material; she’s fit, but it’s the kind of fit you’d call a woman who has bore three children into the world. Katie watches the child a while longer, before deciding he’s going to have a hard time in school because the other kids will be intimidated by the self-confidence the boy possesses. Katie knows kids who have things figured out early have to deal with jealous peers. She says a silent prayer the boy won’t be tormented too badly.

The trip to the park ends on the swings. Katie takes her turn on the swing after pushing her boy cousin. The girl cousin is trying to swing high, so Katie pumps her legs to match. Soon, she’s pumping harder and flying higher. The initial rush of wind excites Katie, but soon it’s replaces with a sinking in her stomach. Fear clutches her and she stops pumping. She slows down as fast as she can, dragging her feet in when the approach the ground. Katie knows better than to suddenly stop, she doesn’t want to lose her lunch, but she needs to not be so high in the air, unsecured.

Katie is annoyed by her body’s reaction to the height of the swing, she didn’t use to fear the height of swings, but she can’t help it. There had always been a healthy fear of heights, but so long as something was keeping her from falling, it did not worry Katie much. Until now. It wasn’t the only new phobia.

Sometimes when Katie walked across the floors in her new home, she felt certain she was going to fall through them. The floors were stable, but walking across certain areas, Katie had to reach out to touch a wall or piece of furniture, to assure her all was well.

Musophobia, a fear of mice. But honestly, Katie felt that one was quite rational. There is surely a gene in every human which makes them scream when they find a mouse in their homes.

And finally, the claustrophobia. It was the worst. It started three months ago, the evening of her great-grandfather’s visitation. It was in the basement of his church, and the funeral director had parked the hearse in front of the entrance. Katie dissolved when she saw the hearse, erupting into a fit of shivers. The body wasn’t supposed to be there. Her mom had said the body wouldn’t be there. Her relatives went inside while Katie excused herself, saying she needed a moment. Katie couldn’t get out of the car, but soon she couldn’t breathe in the constricted space. She ran to the baseball field beside the church, ripping off her sweater, kicking off her shoes, pulling off her tights, untucking her shirt, and gasping for air. Katie would have ripped off more clothes, but there were no more layers to shed without getting indecent. She sobbed for what felt like hours before someone was sent to check on her. She tried going into the building through the back door, venturing out to stand with her family. But people took this as a sign to greet her, and smile at her, and say what a great man her grandfather was to her, and pat her, and hug her. With the crush of the hug, Katie felt the walls rushing in. She ran to the kitchen, but the walls were closing in there too, so she fled the building, returning to the baseball field.

Some friends of the family took her out to eat, buying her a large chocolate sundae, which she ate eagerly. They took her back to the church when she received a phone call that her best friend had arrived. Katie’s heart lifted when she saw her friend, a kind girl with deep brown eyes and curly brown hair which bounces when she walks. Katie doesn’t remember touching her friend the whole time, in fact, she remembers putting her hands behind her back at one point to keep from crushing her friend in another hug, but Katie can’t shake the feeling that she was holding her hand or giving her a one-armed hug the entire time. Even if the connection was imagined, it bolstered Katie, and it kept the walls back. Katie reentered the building, her friend in tow, showing her all the pictures from the wonderful life of her grandfather, laid out to view on a plastic table.

There hadn’t been outright claustrophobia like that since. Nothing so classic. However, there were several occasions when Katie needed to leave wherever she was, just get out to find some oxygen. One such occasion had taken her to the park by her grandfather’s house for an hour on a morning when the temperature was a mere twenty degrees. That was His fault. The most recent was also a trip to escape Him. The close quarters at her grandmother’s house were closing in. Katie needed to get away before she had a meltdown in front of everyone. Katie made it an eighth of a mile before sitting on the side of the road beside a cow pasture. Katie wished the cows were nearby, she found their lumbering presence reassuring. Alas, they were in a different pasture, and the only soul on the hill was Katie, at least until her grandpa walked past on his daily walk. She sucked up her snot and dried her eyes as his head crested the hill. She was up and walking past him, back towards the house, before he realized what was going on.

Katie is shaken from her dark remembering by her nine year old cousin begging to be pushed higher into the air on the swing. With an imperceptible shudder, Katie moves behind the swing, pushing him higher and higher.

One

A sigh escapes Katie’s throat as she rubs her tired eyes, her bifocals temporarily pushed up onto her head like a pair of sunglasses. She tries to look at the alarm clock across the room, but no matter how hard she blinks, the numbers won’t focus. When Katie inherited the alarm clock its display kept her up at night, until she found the knob on the back which controls the display brightness. She considers getting out of bed to turn it back up a smidge—it isn’t like she’s going to sleep tonight anyways—but decides against it. She puts her bifocals on and tries again, squinting. Two-eleven… no, it’s changed to two-twelve.

Katie’s attention returns to the bright screen of her laptop sitting on her chest. With another sigh she chastises herself for being stupid. As the task bar pops up under the prompting of her pointer, she confirms the time. Except her laptop says two-thirteen. She once again considers getting up to fiddle with the alarm clock; she hates for her various devices to have different times, but again she decides it’s not worth the effort.

Note to Self:

Change alarm clock time tomorrow….

And/or buy a satellite clock so I don’t have to mess with that stupid alarm clock anymore.

Look up whether or not there even is such a thing as a satellite clock.

Katie concedes to herself there probably is no such thing. She’s sure she’s substituted “satellite” for “atomic.” Atomic clocks are real. Katie half-smiles to herself because she is becoming incoherent, even to herself. She should really sleep.

Instead, she opens a new browser and logs on to Facebook, annoyed that the website is asking for her password. Katie’s little sister is notorious for messing with Katie’s account, but the knowledge is not enough to deter Katie from saving her password into the browser’s cache. Once she’s logged on, Katie glances at the recent posts. Nothing new. She sighs, half because she’s disappointed, half because she knew better than to expect something new. It’s two in the morning. No one is online, not even her friends who work night shifts.

Katie checks the time on her taskbar, and then the time on the alarm clock. Still a minute off. Katie hates herself for caring about something so stupid. She doesn’t have OCD, but she’s strong type A personality about some things. About stupid things. Like him.

She tries to fight back the urge, but he’s there again in her head. Katie types in the first letter of his name in the search box and waits. His face is first in the drop down tray. She hates that he’s first, because she knows it’s her fault. She’s looked him up so much, stalked him so much, that he’s number one on her search. She clicks on his name and blinks as the page goes from the newsfeed to his profile.

With a frown, Katie inspects his profile. All the statuses, comments, and liked pages she’d seen that morning are gone, replaced by a basic information page. Hot indignation boils in her stomach and she tastes copper in her mouth. She scrolls down to the bottom of his page, but he hasn’t unfriended her, just locked her out of his profile. She glares at the text saying “Unfriend” and considers pushing the button, but she can’t do it and she hates herself for it. She’s too weak to let go of seeing what he’s saying, what he’s doing.

As her fingers hang over the keyboard, paralyzed, her brain freaks out. She can’t see what he’s saying, what he’s doing. He took that away too, leaving Katie to wonder what’s left to take. She thinks all that’s left is for him to unfriend her. In her bitter state, Katie wonders why he hasn’t; he doesn’t think she’s worth having a relationship with anyways. With a jolt she realizes why. He can’t let go of seeing what she’s saying, what she’s doing.

Katie feels stalked in the basest of senses. Like a tiny animal all alone, being circled by a predator in the deep, deep rainforest of the Amazon. She knows the beast, she recognizes its smell and she’s paralyzed. With a sting Katie remembers she’s been stalking too. She hates hypocrites.

I don’t want to be the small animal. I don’t want to be eaten.

Her stomach churns and churns, giving her no peace. She knows her defense can be flipped, that he could say that too, and it only makes Katie want to cry. She is so helpless. And alone. And pathetic. But she can’t help her argument.

I’m trying to catch a glimpse of the predator before he launches himself, sinking his teeth into my furry, little throat. Maybe I could side-step him. Maybe when fight-or-flight kicked in I’d actually be able to fight.

She stares at the profile again. Finally, she clicks on the Facebook logo and it returns to her newsfeed, which is free of him. She hid him months ago. She wanted to be able to hide her eyes if she needed to.

Dread fills her. He’d threatened to make waves today. She hates him for it, because it’s her family too. She knows he wants them on his side, but her side isn’t even the side he’s supposed to be against. Hell, I’m not even supposed to have a side, she thinks. Well, of course she chose a side, that couldn’t be helped after everything they had gone through, but Katie had her own side now, and for the entire world it felt like it was only her.

People on My Side:

Mom (doesn’t count)

Sister (barely counts/has her own side too)

Best Friend (stuck in a cabin in the boondocks somewhere)

Professor (half on her side, half on Jesus’ side)

WHY DOES JESUS NEED A SIDE IN THIS TOO?

Katie sighs. Alone. She rolls over her taskbar again and sees the other browser she has open. With a click, the page appears. It’s Stargate: SG-1 fan fiction, and not just any fan fic, it is slash fic. A quick scan down the list of pairings makes her smile. Jack/Daniel, Jack/Teal’c, Jack/Cameron, Jack/Other Male, Daniel/Teal’c, Daniel/Cameron, on and on down the characters. Katie’s just about read one story for each pairing, and more for the popular parings, curious to see how other people make the characters she knows and love interact in new and strange situations.

Katie’s favorite story by far was a Jack/Daniel pairing. Daniel and Teal’c get stuck in a time loop, reliving the same ten hours for weeks at a time. Daniel has to translate several hundred pages of alien text and memorize his findings before he and Teal’c can break the loop. During this period of arduous labor, Teal’c and Daniel spend time off base, being free of consequences and enjoying every moment. The care with which they treat each other and the understanding they cultivate is palpable to Katie. Eventually the story turns to Daniel wooing Jack every few loops, until they end up together in the last loop, and Katie loved it, but what she loved about the story wasn’t the romance, it was the love. The brotherly, unconditional, undying love of Teal’c and Daniel was unlike anything she’d ever read. They weren’t romantic, but their relationship was filled with a soul-feeding love. To Katie’s great disappointment, all Daniel and Teal’c slash pairings fell short of that level of connection.

Katie’s never been in love. She’ll tell anyone that. Katie’s been in crushes, Katie’s been in lust, but Katie’s never been in love. Well, there was one time, but Katie was too young to judge all these years later whether it was love or infatuation. It could have not been love. She was very hormonal at the time.

Him. He’s back in her mind. Katie swears under her breath, she’d distracted herself as long as possible, but he always slips back into her thoughts. The memories of his words flash before her and she wants to stop them, to break the loop of unhealthy memories, but she cannot. There’s no way to stop the onslaught, so she closes her eyes and tries to breathe through it.

How to Kill Me:

When Katie first tried to talk things out with him and he hugged her at the end. He said he might have never had a real relationship with anyone in his life.

Insert dagger into heart.

Including her.

Twist.

When Katie tried to stand up and protect her loved ones and it went horribly awry. That one earned her a “you've become the enemy.”

Slice.

When Katie decided she could not protect them by herself she turned to someone she should have been able to trust, but it went wrong too. He read what he was never meant to see and did not feel a word she said. She cried herself to sleep for days.

Tear asunder.

Now, his profile is locked up. Katie is blind and terror grips her. She wants to text her cousin, ask if anything happened today, but she doubts he would have said what he tells other people about her in front of her own cousin. But maybe he did. Katie imagines her cousin standing up to him for her, but then gives up the fantasy. She’s alone.

Katie smirks and wonders what side of slash fic Jesus is on, and then abandons the out-of-left-field thought. Katie gets irreverent when she is upset. She feels a little guilty, because she doesn’t mean to mock. People love Jesus and it’s what works for them, it’s the love they need. Who is Katie to make fun of that?

With a final look at his profile, Katie shuts her laptop. Her stomach is still in knots, and her mind is running circles, but it’s not going to get any better tonight. She resigns herself to a nightmare-filled night, prays for a few hours of dream free sleep, and closes her eyes. Sleep will come.