Diary

Over the next couple weeks the vision repeats every two or three days. I'll be minding my own business and then bang--- I'm in a service announcement for smokey the Bear. I come to expect it at odd times, on the ride to school, in the shower, eating lunch. Other times I get the sensation without the vision itself. I feel the heat. I smell smoke.

My friends notice. They stick me with an unfortunate new nickname: Cadet, as in Space Cadet. I guess it could be worse. And my teachers notice. But I get the work done, so they don't give me so much grief when I spend the class period scribbing away in my journal on what can't possibly be class notes.

If you looked at my journal a few years ago, that fuzzy pink diary I had when I was twelve with Hello Kitty on the cover, locked with a flimsy gold key I kept on a chain around my neck to keep it safe from Jeffrey's prying eyes, you'd see the ramblings of a perfecly normal girl. There are doodles of flowers and princesses, entries about school and the weather, movies I like, music I danced around to, my dreams of playing the Sugar Plum fairy in The Nutcracker, or how Jeremy Morris sent one of his friends to ask me to be his girlfriend and of course I said no because why would I want to go out with someone too cowardly to ask me out himself?

Then comes tha angel diary, which I started when I was fourteen. This one's midnight-blue spiral bound notebook with a picture of an angel on it, a serene, feminine angel who looks eerily like Mum, with red hair and golden wings, standing on the sliver of the cresent moom sorrounded by stars, beams of light radiating from her head. In it I jotted down everything Mum ever told me about angels and angel-bloods, every fact or piece of speculation I could coax out of her. I also recorded my experiments, like the time I cut my forearm with a knife just to see if I would bleed (which I did a lot) and carefully noted how long it took to heal (about 24hrs) or how could do 25 grands jetès back and forth across the floor of ballet studio without getting winded. That was when my mum started seriously lecturing me about keeping it cool, atleast in public. That's when I started to find myself, not just Clara the girl, but Clara the angel-blood, Clara the supernatural.