Demon in my View
CHAPTER 3
ANNE confronted Jessica as soon as she walked in the front door. "You're late."
"Sorry," Jessica answered sardonically. "They love me so much, they asked me to stay a bit longer."
"Jessica ... on the first day of school?" Anne's voice was heavy with disappointment.
"Learn the art of sarcasm," Jessica suggested. "I needed to walk off some energy, so I swung by the woods on my way home."
"Thank god." Anne smiled and started to fill out the forms that the school had mailed home. An awkward moment went by in silence.
"Anything interesting happen at school?" Anne asked eventually, though Jessica could tell that her mind was not on the question.
"Nope," Jessica answered absently as she searched through her bag for a letter one of her teachers had given out for parents. She handed it to Anne.
After scanning the letter, Anne asked, "How are your teachers?"
"Fine."
"That's nice."
As usual, their conversation was more of a mandatory social gesture than a method of communication. Anne and Jessica had learned long before that they had nothing in common and had little chance of ever engaging in a truly twosided talk about anything. Occasionally one actually paid attention to what the other was saying, but such circumstances usually led to arguments.
Another moment of silence ensued.
"I'm going to my room," Jessica announced finally. Leaving her backpack on the couch, she went upstairs and into the dimly lit cavern she had created for herself.
The windows were covered by heavy black curtains, and the shades were down. A small beam of light squeezed underneath the curtains, but that was all.
The bed, which was little more than a mattress on wheels, had been pushed into a corner. The sheets and comforter were black, as were all but one of the pillows. The exception was deep violet and made of fake suede. Anne had bought the pillow for Jessica several years ago, when she had still been attempting to influence the girl's tastes. Besides the pillow and Jessica's magenta Lava lamp, there was little else in the room that wasn't black.
A laptop computer and printer stood out brightly against their dark surroundings. They sat atop a black wooden desk, which they shared with a strewn assortment of floppy disks. The computer was one of the few things Jessica cherished. Here, in the shadowed niche she had created for herself, she churned out the novels that had been her escape from the world since she moved to Ramsa.
The twenty-nine manuscripts that she had written in the past five years, the brown envelopes that held her contracts for two of them, and a few copies of the published book Tiger, Tiger were the only other non-black objects in the room.
It had been only two years earlier that she had first begun the search for a publisher; she could hardly believe how quickly things had gone since. Her first book, Tiger, Tiger, had been released about a week before, under the pen name Ash Night. The second one, Dark Flame, was presently sitting on her editor's desk awaiting the woman's comments.
Jessica flopped down onto her bed and looked up at the ceiling. Sometimes ideas for her books would strike as she lay like this, staring into oblivion, but usually they came from her dreams.
Even while she was writing, it was as if she was in a dream - one which her waking mind did not understand. She never quite knew what was happening in any of the numerous novels that she was working on at any given time. But she had learned not to read the manuscripts until they were finished. The only time she had broken that pattern, the flow of words had abruptly stopped. That had been the only story she disliked. The scenes written after she had read it seemed forced and unnatural. Trying to think them up had been a chore.
She didn't realize that she had drifted into sleep until she was awakened by Anne's knock on her door.
"Jessica?"
"What?" she asked tiredly.
"It's dinnertime," Anne announced. "Are you going to come down? "
Jessica closed her eyes for a moment more and then got up and turned on her computer.
"I'm not hungry," she called to Anne. "Go ahead and eat without me."
"Jessica-"
"I'll eat later, Anne," she snapped. Normally she would have at least joined Anne for dinner, just to maintain the illusion of a familial relationship. But when she was in the mood to write, that pull was stronger than her desire to get along with her adopted mother.
