Aurora 2022-Final

Sara Allard

Sara Allard

someone, instead of being on the receiving end of it. Thankfully, this boy was too busy living his best life to look up from his blur of a straw and notice me. Had he noticed my scandalized gaze, I bet he would’ve seen right through me and known the real reason I was staring: because what he was doing was familiar. As long as I could remember, I was always looking for little things to hold between my own pointers and indexes, just like the boy in the lobby. Bookmarks, twist ties from loaves of bread, dolls (the kind that couldn’t move on their own, of course), my own hair—anything would do. But instead of moving these trinkets back and forth, I would hit my thumb nail against them as hard as I could, over and over again. This was yet another thing in my life that I had to come up with a name for, because no one else did it or talked about it. I called it “tapping,” and it was a habit I didn’t remember inventing or learning from my sister or a cartoon. It was something I always knew how to do. I tried teaching the kids at my church how to tap, but they never seemed to understand the appeal. Of course, it was all fun until I lost the trinket I was holding, or I had to put it down to hold my dad’s hand while we walked. Then my urge to tap would get so strong that it started to irritate me—the same irritation one gets when their sock slips off their foot while hiking, and they have nowhere to sit down and fix it. After the final painful tug on my ponytail told me I could finally stop standing still—standing still for too long made me just as jumpy as not having a toy to tap—I quickly looked away from the boy, so that Mom wouldn’t see my inappropriate staring. Just as I started preparing to burn out all the fiery energy I had from standing still for sixty whole seconds, I heard my mom whisper to my dad, “Do you think it’s time?” Almost no question in the world can make you more excited or scared than that one, especially when people are whispering it behind your back. After settling on my default emotion of scared, I made sure to skip even faster ahead of my parents so I could pretend not to hear them. Before I could get too far, Mom slid up to me and asked, “Did you see that boy in the lob by?” I nodded, hoping that if I was polite enough this wouldn’t become a lecture about why we shouldn’t stare at strangers. As we lazily walked towards the lush trees, she continued, “...and if you’ve noticed, you do stuff like that, too.” I couldn’t believe it. Turns out, I wasn’t the only one who noticed our similarities! In awe I whispered, “Yeah, I guess so,” looking down at the mosaic of white circles that dotted my nail beds. My thumbnails always had these gnarled marks, but this was the first time I felt embarrassed by them. My dad

sophisticated name back then, so I would just call them the “electronic dancing things,” which I knew sounded ridiculous while trying to explain why I was hyperventilating next to the candy corn. It didn’t matter if they took the form of an unfairly taller-than-me skeleton singing a corny novelty song, or a candy bowl with a plastic motion sensing witch hand awkwardly screwed onto it. I was completely terrified of them. My parents’ theory was that I thought these so-called “dancing things” were actual flesh and blood, and that’s why they scared me so much. So, they ended up spending many holiday seasons flashing innocent witches and werewolves so I could see their bodies were nothing but flimsy plastic and cords. Unfortunately for them, that did little to stop the panic attack in aisle five, or the dimly lit Halloween activities kids loved for some forsaken reason. In my mind, an inanimate doll being able to move like a living person was way more unsettling than Halloween creatures being real. After all, there was also that time I refused to sleep in my room until a McDonald’s toy with moving eyes was safely ejected to the trash can. That’s what a lot of my early years felt like: a stark clash between all the trick-or-treating, playing outside, and watching cartoons that everyone gushes about in Facebook memes, and the undefeatable horrors that would snap up out of nowhere, leaving me wondering why no one else could see how scary and loud the world was. That childhood joy was very much there, but often just as fleeting as the cherry blossoms and autumn leaves in the state park, swept away because of one clap of thunder. I found the summer trips to McCormick’s Creek to be safer. It was during one of those trips to meet up with my grandparents and their deafeningly loud RV that Mom stopped me in the bricked entryway so she could pull back my always unruly hair. Sitting on the bench next to me was a brown-haired boy, maybe fifteen or sixteen years old. He was holding a straw between his pointer and index fingers and flipping it back and forth so fast that it looked like a metronome some mischievous music student turned to the fastest setting, just to see whether it would explode. For once, I could barely feel the hairbrush tugging through my hair, as I was mesmerized by what the boy was doing. Regrettably, I remember intentionally pretending that I was staring at the boy because his behavior was “weird.” It took effort for me to scrunch my eyebrows down and tug a corner of my mouth inward at the same time, but I thought it was a pretty good replica of the looks that I had gotten from most kids over the eight long years of my life. In a twisted way, it felt validating to be able to give that look to

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