by TJ Price
In high school, algebra class was fraught with peril. I’ve never been good at math—in fact, I suffer from mild dyscalculia (not “number dyslexia,” as so many people quip), wherein integers squirm and shimmy on the page, mischievously transposing themselves with the others in a sequence. This was danger enough, yet also there was Cheryl, who sat in front of me in class—or, more specifically, Cheryl’s notebook. It was not, as one might have expected, filled with theorems and diagrams but rather words. It was striking, too—in front of her, resting on her desktop, was a row of pens, each one a different color. Some paragraphs in the notebook were entirely in green; some in blue; others in red, or pink. Sometimes there’d even be a single line in a different color.
To the casual observer—and indeed, the teacher—it had the appearance of investment, even application, to the subject at hand. (I was always told that I was “a bright kid,” that if I just “applied myself”… ) Cheryl never did well on tests or quizzes, either. I know this because I saw her grades, inked in red pen at the top of the papers handed back to us. I know this because she had a sad, hopeless look every time she had to pass back whatever pile of dittoes had been handed to her, for me to take one and continue the chain. There was always a flash of recognition, even camaraderie, in that instant. Maybe I knew she was unhappy, even frustrated, with the concepts we had to learn. Maybe it was something else.
Cheryl was not a popular girl, nor did she seem particularly attractive—for reasons that would not become clear to me for a long time—she wasn’t even from one of the three towns whose children made up the population of the school. She’d come in on some kind of extension from a different town, one far more rural, through the “Vocational Agriculture” program. We called it VoAg for short, like some kind of planet in a novel by Vonnegut. Cheryl loved horses, I think. Wanted to be a veterinarian.
When I knew Cheryl, I’d been writing, too; secretly, furiously, in small yellow notebooks I’d stolen from the cabinets of the math classroom—notebooks I still use today, the National brand, with its “Eye-Ease Paper.” I’d write for hours, by flashlight in my bed, after tense family dinners and the eventual slackening of the day’s hectic pulse toward night. I’d even taken to writing in different colored pens, though I had no idea when to choose which hue—eventually I just started cycling through them all, so that none ever repeated, like countries on a map.
At the time, I had cultivated a mild fixation with the so-called “metaphysical” section at Borders—three lonely shelves with books from Llewellyn Press like Charms, Spells & Formulas and other esoteric texts detailing things like Out-of-Body Adventures: 30 Days to the Most Exciting Experience of Your Life. I even had a copy of the fabled Simon Necronomicon, whose slim pages featured a variety of hand-drawn sigils promising to invoke ancient Sumerian deities, sigils which resembled—of all things—the plotted graphs and parabolas on the board in math class. The mystical and the supernatural held undeniable appeal for me. Despite being an avid reader of fantasy and science fiction and recognizing that it was fiction, I secretly hoped that there was a whole world of unknown power that I could tap into, and perhaps slip the fetters of my turbulent adolescence entirely.
I pored over Charms, Spells & Formulas. I remember I even concocted my own rituals—I covertly snuck out to the garage, where my abusively masculine stepfather kicked off his workboots after a long day, and inked in a sigil of my own on the inside of the tongues. I put a drop of my own blood in the two-liter bottle of Coke he kept in the fridge. I stood in the middle of my bedroom in the dark at 11:59 and closed my eyes, having determined that if I opened them and the clock still read 11:59, I’d have failed, but if it had changed to the midnight hour, I’d have succeeded. At what, I can’t rightly say. I was hungry for any victory, no matter how senseless or illogical. Sometimes, I begged the invisible power of the universe to bend to my will and transform me, mind body and soul, into some other thing. A stuffed animal. A knight in a fantasy novel. An old man. My stepfather. Anything but myself.
Every time Cheryl turned around to pass me another worksheet, I said “thank you.” It was automatic, partly parental inculcation and partly out of the desire to make Cheryl smile, even just for a second. She had a way of biting her plump lower lip, as if she were chastising herself for even the desire to speak to me, and would mumble something in response before turning back to her notebook.
But then she saw the book. I’d had it out on my desk that day, if I remember correctly, in a brazen move to display my interests to anyone happening to look. I wanted to be known as a Magician, or at least cultivate the appearance of someone who apprehended a Higher Art, and I had leaned into being a Weirdo. I also carried around copies of Ram Dass’ trippy New Age book Be Here Now—designed as a roadmap for an acid trip—or old textbooks with embossed titles like PSYCHOLOGY. I’d even started loading my backpack up with books thick enough that they could double as a weapon of blunt force, as I’d discovered that utility in a recent incident involving myself, a loud-mouth, and a red hardcover copy of the American Heritage Dictionary. (When collared, I protested: “You told me to use my words, so I did!”)
Something flashed in Cheryl’s eyes when she saw Charms, Spells & Formulas. She wanted to know more.
So I told her.
We didn’t get much chance to talk, right then, but eventually I passed her my phone number (house phone, land-line, this was the ‘90s) on a scrap of notebook paper, and from then on, things changed drastically. It took a little while, but eventually, after I spilled the beans about my own turbulent family life and existence and interests, Cheryl began to hesitantly invite me into her world.
She wouldn’t tell me about her life outside of algebra class—maybe a passing anecdote about a horse she really liked—instead, she invited me inside her head. It turned out that she had developed an entire cast of characters, each of them fully realized with their own personal history, and they existed in a quasi-spiritual realm that overlapped with her mind.
These “alters” (calling them “characters” doesn’t seem quite right) were of a range of ages, dispositions, temperaments, and even abilities, and they would frequently slip out and “take over” control of Cheryl—expecially in times of distress or anxiety, most of which seemed to be triggered by mystical events beyond Cheryl’s control—events which had been set in motion by prophecies or curses or broken promises.
After Cheryl told me about this entire universe within her and I expressed only fascination—and, perhaps, crucially, affirmation that it was all real—she slowly began to introduce me to them. At first, she was shy. There was always a moment of hesitation that crackled through the phone before she “channeled” a particular alter, and sometimes this shyness would translate. Sometimes the alter wouldn’t make it more than a handful of seconds before Cheryl would return to herself, expressing apologies and tender regret that the alter just was too shy.
Not always, though. Other alters were harsh, brusque, domineering. They were protectors, Cheryl eventually confided. Warriors, with scars on their bodies and on their psyches, but they were lean and hard and they wouldn’t take shit from no one. Then there were the playful, coquettish alters—those that were flirty, but never overly so—and the ‘normal’ ones, who just existed to carry on the day-to-day operations of this clan, all personae that had been thrust together for an unknown reason, to co-exist in Cheryl’s head.
In the meantime, life around me had started to gel into an unremarkable, unhappy gray. None of the “magick” I’d researched was working. I was still myself. I was still unheard by my mother, or by my sneer of a stepfather, who decried me as lazy and useless, a man who once threatened to burn all my books in the backyard. I was doing poorly in my classes. I had no real friends—those that associated with me continued to suffer through my sporadic company, or so it seemed—and so Cheryl’s ability to “channel” was a light in the gloom for me.
My envy got the better of me. One night, during a thunderstorm (or so I recall) I let Cheryl wind down after telling me the fraught interaction that had happened between two of her alters that very day, and then I took the plunge:
Can you teach me how to channel?
I heard her breath catch, could see her lower lip, caught between her teeth—and then she said yes; yes, she could…but it would be dangerous. Was I ready for that?
I was heedless. I needed something. I wanted to live in Cheryl’s world, I wanted to have protectors and guides and constant companions. Yes, I said. Yes, I’m ready.
I’m sorry to say that the end of this story will be anticlimactic, so if you’re hoping for some kind of narrative wherein the light triumphs over the dark, as in so many tales of fantasy, you might be disappointed.
I’ll do my best.
When you hear a warning, you always assume the danger is close, that it’s just moving through. That you might miss being targeted, if you just lay still enough and let its massive shadow pass over you. The danger part wasn’t immediately apparent to me, nor to Cheryl, at the time of the ritual, and it wouldn’t become clear or present until much later, after the final battle. I learned how to channel—it was, for Cheryl, a complicated series of incantations derived from obvious Latinate roots and a flourish of pantheistic mythology. I obliged her throughout the process, repeating dutifully when told to, lighting appropriately-colored candles at the proper times, facing a particular cardinal direction and impressing my will upon the universe.
This was nothing new to me. If anything, I fidgeted at how obvious it all felt, let down by the artificiality of it. Cheryl wasn’t tapping into any kind of mystical forces—she was roleplaying. Half of the larger events that occurred to her alters were cribbed directly from novels I myself had read, or television shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Still, I played along, forcing myself that I did, in fact, believe I could channel these spirit guides—my desperation for affection, validation, and escape was too great to do otherwise.
I developed my own cast of alters—it was easy enough. I was a creative kid. Most of my alters were in one way or another dramatic foils for Cheryl’s, engineered (maybe unconsciously) for congruence with hers. For the brusque, angry protector alter, I created a winsome, devilishly charming guy who was also fiercely loyal to any who proved themselves worthy. I probably didn’t know it at the time, but I was healing the broken places in that alter’s psyche by providing (in character, of course, as my own alter) what they needed to heal and become a more integrated version of themselves.
These relationships, alter-to-alter, became the entirety of my interactions with Cheryl. Though we talked on the phone for hours and hours, over multiple days of the week (much to my family’s consternation, as we had only the one line), the time we spent as ourselves got smaller and smaller. Cheryl’s alters would beg to speak with specific alters of my own, even if I wasn’t particularly feeling that persona at the time. Regardless, I’d “channel” them anyway, listening to Cheryl’s voice either slide up in pitch to wheedle and tease, or descend to a gruff, semi-amused candor.
It couldn’t last. Like all stories, imagined or otherwise, there’s a rise and a fall. We went on like this for a while, even over a summer, and only ever on the phone. It never occurred to me that I knew nothing about Cheryl, outside of the town in which she lived. Any time I tried to get any information out of her, or even think about suggesting that we maybe meet up sometime and go to the bookstore, she would instantly segue into one of her alters, and the curtains of her interior world would shut gently on my query, subsumed by the importance of the fantastical events within.
When fall came back around, we no longer shared a class. Algebra class lay behind us, a tangle of abandoned variables. There was always Algebra II to reckon with, but the gods of block scheduling had cruelly divided Cheryl and I—she had a different teacher, during C period, and I was in F period, far toward the end of the day, and in a different classroom too. She’d returned to Planet VoAg already by that time, so it was rare we got a chance to ever interact face-to-face.
Cheryl became bodiless, an incorporeal voice whose arrival was heralded by the ringing of the telephone. I was growing away from her world. The Internet had just sprang into being, and I’d even got a computer for my bedroom. Its screen became my new portal, and when I discovered free-form text-based roleplaying on the networks of IRC, Cheryl’s increasingly claustrophobic world began to shimmer and fade for me. She must’ve sensed it—I know she must’ve, because our phone conversations grew strained, awkward. Her alters felt cartoonish, outsized, dramatic. They gesticulated vocally, like ham actors, and my uncomfortable silences in response said it all.
Then, as the cold autumn began to shimmy through the denuding trees, Cheryl told me that the worst had come to pass. There was an evil spirit, she explained one night, in low tones, as if not to be overheard. I thought I heard some yelling in the background, but assumed it was the television. (Cheryl liked to put on her DVDs of Buffy as we talked, sometimes we’d even watch together—or our alters would.) She told me that she would need all of my guys for a special exorcism ritual, that she needed all of my spirit energy for the most intense channeling she’d ever done, and that it was going to be really, really dangerous. She needed me to focus all of my alters on all of her alters, and concentrate on warding her from the threat of this horrible demon.
I agreed, of course. Maybe I was swayed by the ardent desire of my alters to protect and shield hers; maybe I’d bought so thoroughly into it, convinced by her passion and terror, that I allowed myself to participate.
But the exorcism—or warding—never happened.
Two nights later, the phone rang, and my mother picked it up before me. I was in my room, frantically typing up a long paragraph to introduce my new character to the Broken Dagger Tavern, a totally normal human gravedigger—insultingly nick-named “Gopher”—to contrast all the half-angel/half-demon/half-vampire tropes that came galumphing in. I could visualize Gopher, in fact. Downtrodden, dirt-caked, footsore, carrying his shovel over one shoulder. He was in charge of burying all the dead, you see, from all the battles, and yet lived in abject fear of his own death—which could have come at any moment, given the characters who could annihilate with only a simple snap of their manicured, claw-tipped fingers.
My mother hollered down the hall for me, to let me know it was Cheryl. I was irritated, being drawn inexorably back to the real world, as I imagined the end of a true Out-of-Body Experience might be. The sad, listless floating back to the flesh, like all the ghosts at the end of Night on Bald Mountain from Disney’s Fantasia.
I put the phone to my ear, but before Cheryl said a single word, I knew something was dreadfully wrong. There was an odd quiet to the sound that came through—a blankness that felt threatening, like the void that opens up beneath someone skating on thin ice.
She said my name—my name, not any of my alters—and I could tell it was Cheryl that was speaking. Her voice sounded frail as an eggshell, and it hiccuped with sobs.
She told me she needed my help.
That her dad had threatened her, hurt her. That he had been doing so for a long time, and now it had gotten really bad, and she needed somewhere to go, and could she please come to my house for just a little while and she promised that she could just stay in my closet, and I could bring her food from time to time, and no one would have to know, and all our alters could be together and the evil demon would never threaten her—or us—ever again because of how close we were, with all of our alters’ power combined…
I didn’t stop her, or interrupt her. I let her talk for a long time, mostly because I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know Cheryl. I only knew her alters. I didn’t even know what kind of house she lived in, or if she had any siblings, or anything. I didn’t know what to do. I felt like I had been stripped of all my powers—in that moment, I might as well have been Gopher in the Broken Dagger, mutely shouldering my shovel, walking away from Cheryl’s grave. That’s just how it goes sometimes, I’d written for Gopher’s dialogue, just before breaking away to take Cheryl’s call. People go away. If we’re lucky, they don’t come back.
I had to tell my mom. What else could I do? I was a teenager, but even then I knew that Cheryl couldn’t live in my closet, and I think she knew it too. She made me give her the phone, and I did, cringing—I hadn’t told Cheryl what I was doing, and I felt like this was probably a huge betrayal. My mother asked her a few questions, then listened to the answers, her face set in a grim mask of dismay. Every once in a while, her gaze cut to me, sitting on the arm of the couch near to her, perched like a nervous bird. My roleplay session was all but forgotten. All I could think was that Cheryl’s alters had been right—there was an evil spirit, bent on destroying everything we had created over the past months, and it was me.
After a few more minutes had passed, my mother asked Cheryl for her address, and then we were in the car, my stepfather driving and my mother in the passenger seat. She’d switched the radio off, and the headlights starkly illuminated the road ahead. There seemed to be no one else out that night—I felt like the world had ended, and we were the last ones left, barrelling through the world’s unnatural hush towards an uncertain destination.
Eventually, though, we spotted Cheryl’s house. The mailbox was dented on one side, and the red flag was poking up like a sailor’s semaphore, as if in warning. It was a small house, and to either side, long flat fields spread out generously towards scrubby forest. A large, shadowy barn loomed adjacent, bigger than the house, seeming to dwarf it. And there, sitting on the porch steps, barefoot, was Cheryl. I hadn’t seen her in months. She’d lost weight, and her long blonde hair had been chopped off. She looked like a different person, haggard. When our headlights washed over her face, she flinched, shielding her face, but it wasn’t fast enough to hide the dark, smoky hollow that collected in the socket of her left eye; nor was it fast enough to hide her lower lip, which was puffy and split, as if she’d bitten right through it.
My mother told me to stay in the car, and I did. She got out, walking through the stabbing beams from our car, mosquitoes and gnats seething in her wake. I don’t know what she said to Cheryl, nor do I know what Cheryl said back to her, but a few moments later, some adults darkened the door behind them both. I thought about turning on the radio, tuning it to a channel that would be all hiss, all static, to drown out the jumble of voices that rose and fell like waves inside of my mind, but one glance at my stepfather’s face in the rearview quashed that brief urge. He met my eyes, then looked away. I couldn’t read his expression, but where he grasped the steering wheel, his knuckles were blanched white, even in the dark of the car.
Voices were raised, but still unintelligible, from the porch. I could just barely make out my mother’s voice, volume climbing in that way it did when she got angry, or was refusing to back down, and I was frightened. I imagined all the worst things that could happen, but I couldn’t even come close to the reality of the next few moments.
My mother returned to the car, and shut the door behind her. She said nothing. The engine rumbled, as if muttering insults sotto voce. I was just about to open fire with a fusillade of questions when she spoke.
Cheryl’s going to stay with her aunt for a little while.
Then, to my stepfather, in a tone so bone-tired I could almost hear it scraping over her vocal cords: Let’s go home.
I never heard from Cheryl—or her alters—ever again. Not in class, not at lunch. The phone at home ceased ringing as often, much to the relief of my family, until my younger sister developed a relationship with a classmate her own age, and then the line was flocked with passionate gossip once more. I sank into the comforting hum of the Internet, and further into the company of the bodiless—but this time, even the voices were stripped. All that remained were glyphs on the screen, lines of text constituting fiction, stories, all of it made up and utterly unreal—too fantastic to ever be true.
In recent weeks, I’ve begun a new therapeutic relationship. Throughout my life, for one reason or another, I’ve gone in and out of therapy—first, it was for being a child of divorce, then it was for behavioral issues in middle school, then it was for depression, then it was for anxiety, and then and then and then. Most of the time, the therapists would open the session with the same query: How are you feeling?
In response, I’ve always had the puckish urge to quip: to which “me” are you referring, exactly? Even though I’ve long since left the notion of Cheryl’s “channeling” spirits behind, I still feel fractured, spun apart—parts of myself at odds with other parts, some even acting in willful contradiction to the others. Sometimes it feels like the ghosts of those alters I’d dreamed up so many years ago are haunting me, maybe even bent on revenge for how I’d treated Cheryl and her alters.
Part of me even says, quietly, in the middle of the night: if I’d believed her more—if I’d not gotten bored of her increasingly complicated conflicts and narratives between her alters and my own—if I’d been more interested in a real relationship, rather than so adamant on escaping myself— if I hadn’t needed so badly what she was offering…
Maybe I would’ve actually been friends with her, then. Maybe we would have been able to fashion something secure and healthy—shared something of ourselves that was actually healing, instead of acting like two drowning people dragging one another down into the murky depths of delusion and insecurity and fantasy.
Maybe.
If.
I don’t know where Cheryl is today. It’s likely that she moved on from those days of adolescent angst, of broken homes and unhappiness; of abuse and neglect. I know I have, in one way or another, though from time to time I do feel that old familiar flight instinct kicking in—escape, escape, says a part of me, eagerly.
But then I think about the hours Cheryl and I spent in that shared world of overlapping minds and imagination, and I remember how my protector alter sheltered her wounded, traumatized alter, and I think of the sound of her, breathy and full, through the phone—how grateful she’d sounded, even with the voice she’d affected for that particular role. I think of how reluctant she’d be to disconnect at the end of our phone calls, and how eager she was to update me on all that had happened with her alters in the brief time since we’d spoken last.
I hope that I was real enough to keep her here, to safeguard her splintered self through the darkness of those times, when the world outside of us seemed uninterested in the voices we kept within. I hope that I channeled enough care for her, even that last night. I still remember how it felt—as if all the pieces of myself suddenly came together in a rush of clarity, and all at once, I knew that I had to sacrifice our imaginary world in order to save a real person.
In my more fanciful imaginings, I believe that moment was because all of my own alters came together for the first time since their invention—united by the common goal of destroying our imaginary world, in order to save a real person.
I hope that sacrifice made a difference in Cheryl’s life, wherever she might be today. I know that she—and all of her selves—made all the difference, at least for a time, in mine.
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