Mystical | Moon Challenge | Write Under the Moon
It Wasn’t Her Appearance
That chilled me to the bone
She walked into my room looking like Wednesday Adams. Black dress, long sleeves, braids, white knee socks, black loafers with buckles. She handed me a yellow slip from one of the student counselors and said, “I’m in this class now.”
She looked around without waiting for a response from me and took a seat in the empty chair at the end of a table.
I looked down at the slip in my hand and read her name: Lily.
Lily.
The name jarred me. It traveled like tiny electrical impulses up and down my spine and my arms.
It was now mid-September and just that past June our family had lost our Lily. To the lake.
“Our” Lily had been my ‘great’-niece, daughter of my brother’s firstborn, my first niece. Lily had been my brother’s first grandchild.
Had been.
She was fourteen years old in 2021 and summer vacation had just started — Lily would have been a high school freshman in the fall. But on that summer day, she was being a kid, being independent and feeling free. She and her girlfriend ran through the sand from the park and began goofing around on the slippery…