William Royden

Every sound made me flinch.

For some bizarre reason, I couldn't look at animals, more specifically their eyes, the eyes of dogs, cats, even birds and squirrels.

When I did, they seemed to possess a look of agonizing pain, near death.

Another strange symptom of my sickness was that I became obsessed with the fact that outside of my school, every girl or woman I saw in Robinson had straight black hair.

To this day, I think it was true that for a whole week, there were no exceptions to this.

It was as if some secret coven had appeared in my town.

And though they seemed to pay no attention to me, every time I saw a female approaching me, I would see the inevitable black hair and run in another direction.

It was the sort of irrational terror only a child can feel, and it sunk deep into me for a time, and then, just as mysteriously, it left me.

Things went back to normal.

My worst moment during my time of fear was on a snow day when school opened two hours late.

A neighbor's mother drove two kids and me to school that day in a truck.

When I got in the truck and saw her straight black hair, I started to cry.

I swear she took no notice at all, never even glanced at me in the rearview mirror, even as her two sons made fun of me.

I said I had hurt my knee somehow.

The woman was totally silent throughout the trip.

I stared at the floor so as not to look out the windows and see any more black hair, just as I did when I was on the bus.

When we were dropped off, the woman didn't even respond to her son's goodbyes.

She looked through the front windshield and never turned her head.

I thought she was scared of me, that she knew I was aware of her secret.

At four o'clock, Cording and I got moving again.