The first time I noticed her, she was standing at a crosswalk and staring into the sun. There was something wrong with her face– not wrong like different, but wrong like... like I don't know what. The way she held it, maybe. The fact that she was staring into the sun on purpose. I didn't call out to her for a couple of reasons. First, because she was wearing earbuds, and she might've not heard me. Second, because leaning out of a van to ask a little girl if she was lost seemed like a one-way ticket to getting arrested or beaten within an inch of my life. I wanted to, though.
I remember wondering if she was real. She was the kind of small that made me think malnutrition, wearing an old nightgown half a size too big. Her black hair was so thin and short I could see pale scalp through the prickly strands. I was in the passenger seat of Hollis' van— white, unmarked except for the dents, reeked of weed in the back even though nobody had smoked anything in it since 2018— and we turned right, skirting the curb she was standing on. I wanted to ask if she was okay. She had this little furrough between her eyebrows, like there was a multiple choice question hidden in the UV rays and she only had one chance at answering it right. I looked at her eyes, looking at the sun.
Her eyes were black, too. Like her nightgown, like her hair, like the earbud wires, like the walkman they were connected to. Like the shadow puddling at her bare feet.
Hollis was saying something, I think. I don't remember what it was.
When Hollis was small, he drew pictures. A circle head and a rectangle body, two dots and a wide, curved line. A triangle roof. A shape he didn't know the name of, made of seven spikes in a circle, and a flattened oval floating over it. Two dots inside. A curved line. He insisted it was his friend. When asked what his friend's name was, Hollis frowned at the paper and said, like he wasn't sure, "Something bad?" His mother was a little creeped out, but she was also dealing with newborn twins and didn't have enough time or energy to be worried.
His father thought he might have something wrong with him, but shrugged and offered to buy museum tickets so the little guy could look at artists who probably had much worse things wrong with them and still got exhibitions.
Hollis never stopped drawing Something Bad. It littered the margins of his notes and homework and exams, to the bemusement of his teachers. It used up all the ink in his pen because at some point, in the nebulous years of growth spurts and voice cracks and crying in the bathroom, Something Bad became a coloring exercise. Seven spikes in a circle, filled in with black ink except for two empty circles and a thin, curved absence. A flattened black oval above it, like a perfect selection on a Scantron. Everyone asked what it was. Hollis shrugged. Said, "Something Bad? Drawing it helps me think."
His teachers asked his parents about it. They shrugged too. Something Bad had lurked around the edges of their lives for fourteen years; they were used to it by now.