Double Dog Dare Short Story

Ajera Burleigh
Fact to Fiction
The End of an Age

Double Dog Dare
I turned the lights off, faced the mirror and closed my eyes. I hesitantly began to chant. Candyman. Candyman. Candyman. Candyman. The sound of my friends giggling on the other side of the door mingled with the sound of my own harsh breathing. My hands trembled and my heart throbbed in my chest. Once more and I would die. He would come with blood trickling from his hook and a condescending smile adorning his face. I wanted to vomit and pass out all at once. Taunts soon intermingled with the sound of giggling seeping through the door from the hallway. The longer I remained in the bathroom the more they egged me on. Come on! Hurry Up! Are you scared? The sounds of their taunting
voices echoed in my head. I was scared. I was still afraid of the dark. The only reason I slept without a nightlight was because of the constant grievances my older sister presented before my mother. I hated the darkness, but it offered my sister the perfect opportunity to scare me. She scratched against the wooden post of our bunkbeds and hummed the songs to well-known horror movies in order to scare me. For years I could not sleep without something covering my feet because she told me that if I did some horrifying and mangled creature would crawl from underneath my bed while I was sleeping and cut them off. I was terrified of my sister’s tales and the imagined eyes peering at me through the crack in the closet door. I imagined terrifying monsters. Monsters that lurked in the shadows, waiting to take me away into the darkness of the night. Waiting to muffle my screams, and force me to realize my deepest fears. All of these thoughts flooded into my mind. Yet, with the morsel of bravery I had within me, I allowed those words to tiptoe past my quivering lips. Candyman. I whispered quickly into the mirror. I thought maybe he would not hear me. Maybe I was safe. I opened my eyes to the reflection of a looming silhouette behind me. I swallowed a scream and flicked the lights back on. Nothing was there. It was my overactive imagination preparing me for the worst. I released a breath I had not realized I was holding. I opened the bathroom door and smiled at my friends. I was brave.
We lived for things that would scratch, break, bruise or otherwise injure us in some way. One of our friends would scuttle across the street just as cars were passing. We always knew when he was near because his arrival was always proceeded by the shrill sound of a car horn. We rode our bikes down hills without touching the handlebars, willingly relinquishing any hope for control. We launched ourselves into the air, after strenuously pumping our legs back and forth to get the swing as high as we could, only to land on top of the unyielding ground that was only sparsely covered in grass. Everything was always a dare, a chance to prove our courageousness and tenacity. I dare you to jump. I dare you to let go.
We were gods and demons, warriors and scholars. We constructed and destroyed cities within the few hours of a single summer day. We laughed in the face of danger. We made prisoners of caterpillars and butterflies, caught in a jar with holes poked in the top. Their captivity somehow empowered us. We were powerful. We were powerful. We defied our fates. We made the rules that ordered our world, they were probable to change at any moment. We raged and declared war against parental expectations. We declared war against the older kids who were too cool to play with us. We mocked and made vulgar gestures, which we were too young to understand, at passing cars, scattering if they seemed to be turning around. We returned home when the streetlights buzzed to life. Wounds were covered with bandages that had cartoon characters printed on them. Victory feast were prepared by our mothers, eaten while we told tales of our great ventures and the battles that led to our injuries. Our parents would cautions us, emphasizing that we needed to be more careful, we never listened. We knew the shape of the world and we dared them to tell us that we didn’t.

“Boyfriend”
We were brothers in arms.
He would sit on my back patio and talk to me for hours, regaling me with tales of adventures that happened before I met him and I would respond in kind. We sat in grass covered patio chairs talking, or in companionable silence, listening to my mother tinkering around in the kitchen. I watched him lick his younger sister on the face, and be licked in return, because that was how they showed their affection for each other. The first time I saw it I was admittedly disgusted, but he licked my face one day and suddenly I was inducted into the family.
He was my first boyfriend. I was eleven then, boyfriend meant something completely different. I like you. Do you like me? Check yes or no, meticulously written on a neatly folded piece of paper passed underneath a chain of desks until finally reaching its target, whispered prayers forming an impenetrable shield around it so the teacher would not notice the exchange. I think we dated for one day, two at the most. He kissed another girl and I yelled at him as he ran down the street, but we stayed friends after the tumultuous
breakup.
He discovered a hole in the metal chain-link fence, enclosing our fortress, separating our branch of apartments from another. We sneakily crawled through the hole, infiltrating our neighbors’ borders and exploring the other side. He convinced me to try standing up on my bike seat after I peddled enough to keep going. It, simultaneously, felt like flying and balancing on a tightrope. We were always hovering on the edge of a great adventure, balancing on a bike, crawling through an opening into new uncharted territory. We were conquerors devouring the world one day at a time.

The End of an Age
I was at home, relaxing in the living room, the locked screen door the only thing separating my sister and I from the outside world. The sky was clear, sunlight beamed unimpeded by clouds or trees to the ground and heat shimmered above the sidewalk. No noise could be heard, even the wildlife had resigned themselves to lying in a shaded area all day. Every small breeze filtered through the flimsy netting on the door was a brief reprieve from the sweltering, unforgiving Virginia heat. We were still in our pajamas, haphazardly slumped on the carpeted floor. My family had been living in this apartment for two years and, besides running around outside until collapsing, my favorite thing was devoting all of my efforts to the lofty goal of trying to imprint myself in the plush carpet of our living room floor while watching movies all day.
Summer was officially here, I had just finished the fifth grade two short months and I could not have been happier to finally be in the same school as my old sister again. There was always that one awkward year where the alarm clock obnoxiously screeched twice, where we rode different buses and her teachers’ names were unrecognizable to me. None of that mattered because it was summertime and we would be reunited as I entered sixth grade and she began seventh.
I heard someone shout my name as they approached the door. I immediately recognized my best friend’s voice. She rode her bike over to our apartment, a common occurrence during the summer. Her house was inconveniently situated at the top of a steep hill that formed the only entrance and exit to the neighborhood.
I greeted her as she came into view. She jumped off her bike before it came to a complete stop, she let it fall uncaringly to the ground, completely disregarding the kickstand. "Turn the news on!" she blurted out.
I walked over to the door, unlocked it and let her in while laughing at something funny on the television. Her face was a strange mixture of sadness and disbelief. My curiosity peaked. I interrogated her first because it was my mom’s job to watch the news, to me this was an extremely odd request. She told me to just hurry up and do it. I picked up the remote from the floor and started lazily flicking through the channels. I thought she was trying to make me panic for no reason. The news was already broadcasting the story.
Eleven year old boy killed in a hit and run crossing the street on his bike. He was crossing the street while heading to his middle school to visit his favorite teacher who was teaching summer school at the time. The car was speeding and hit him, he died before they could get him to the hospital. I’m sure the words they used were much more formal and a lot less crass, but it sounded like they were talking directly to me:
Your best friend was crossing Nine Mile Road while heading to Fairfield Middle School. Your ex-boyfriend was struck by a speeding black sedan that continued driving after the collision. The police have been unable to find the vehicle that killed your best friend. The paramedics arrived on the scene and your best friend died on the way to the hospital. Your best friend is not coming back home. You will never see him again.
It really didn’t matter because it all meant the same thing. He was gone. Not gone as in taking a trip with his family, not even gone as in critical condition and in the hospital for a long-term stay. Gone as in vanished, disappeared, forever. As a kid "forever" seemed like such an arbitrary thing. Forever was a word that had no real meaning. It was a concept of whimsy and beautiful thoughts that evoked young children’s’ dreams. Forever suddenly became never. Never would I see my friend again. What happened to our forever? We were best friends forever. School lasted forever.

The Mourning Period
We mourned a prince taken unmercifully.
As a child it seemed unbelievable that someone my age could be there one day and then suddenly disappear. I knew what death was, Lion King was my sister favorite movie after all. Disney movies made us believe that the first close death we would experience would be one of our parents. Dying was for people much older than we were.
Before that I had only known a few people who died, however, I had only met those people twice. Once, before I was old enough to remember, and again when they were no longer alive to help me make memories. Those people were only connected to me by the prefix "great" attached to their names, my great-grandmother, great-grandfather, great-uncles and aunts. They were all separated from me by two complete generations, this was someone I saw regularly. When he died I knew there would be no more adventures, the great quest was over before it truly
began.
My sister cried a lot in the month following. I honestly do not remember crying, but I'm sure that I must have. We sat outside a lot, leaning against the cool metal of the apartment mailboxes, talking about what happened and telling tales of our past battles with him. We waged great wars against our parents for later curfews. We stood united and defended against their attacks with the hopes that if we fought long enough they would surrender. I think I dealt with it better than my sister; I was the stronger one between us. People always thought I was older because she acted like the younger sister, always needing my protection and advice. Many people still think that. I smothered a lot of my grief so she could lean on me.
I told her to think of it as though he moved to a different state. I think I said Texas. At night I could hear her in the bed above me crying. It seemed like nothing could comfort her. Then one day she woke up with a restrained smile on her face. She told me she had a dream. She saw him smiling at her, he told her that he was happy.
Even after the dream, for a long time my sister could not cross the street by herself. She would always hold my hand, gripping it tightly as though I were the only thing keeping her tethered to the land of the living. She gave up her dream of running track, they were supposed to tryout together the next year. She never rode a bike again after that day. Yet, somehow that dream was all she needed to stop crying. She needed him to tell her that it was okay. I have never seen her cry about his death since then.

The Memorial
I could not go to the funeral. How do you ask a stranger where your mutual loved one will be buried? Do you knock on the door? Do you call? What is the proper etiquette for dealing with grieving parents? Maybe proper is not the right word. I didn’t really want to go to the funeral anyway, to see him unmoving, the unnerving stillness of a wax doll, stealing his once expressive face from him. That would have been the worst thing possible. It was unnatural to me that only in death are we truly still. It was probably for the best that I did not go to the funeral. I felt like every future attempt to recall any memories of him would be bleakly tainted by a haunting stillness. All these years have passed and I have never seen the grave. I’m not sure I could have handled going even if I knew where it was.
For three years, on the bus ride to school, I would see it. Each passing made it a little easier to forget, and a little easier to remember. It was all that I had left, a faded white cross with a few roses littered around it, a fast food restaurant to the left and my middle school disjointedly sprawled on the right. Now, dry dirt marks the spot where his cross once nestled in the grass as though his death had permeated the very land leaving it barren. Those who remember its exact placement, the red and white roses surrounding it, the sliver of wood protruding from one side of the cross, remember its importance.
Two years seemed like a lifetime as a kid, best friends were made quickly and enemies were lifelong nemesis. Most of those kids are distance memories now. I have not seen of spoken to them since we moved, but I still remember their names, their faces, and how long it took me to walk to their front door from my front porch.
It was our worst fear. Though we never realized we feared it until it came to pass. It was one of those fears that lingers just on the edge of your subconscious thoughts, taking form in creeping nightmares at three o’clock in the morning jerking you from a restless sleep, half formed scream perched on the tip of your tongue. Always quickly dismissed. It was just a dream. That will never happen to me.