Shiara!
by Eli Dupree

1.
My name is Jade Ashford, and I try to be a good friend.
Lori's living with me now, at my family's house, and Shiara's still in college. I graduated last year, and they were both the year below me﻿ – Lori started her senior year this year, but, well... There was "news from home", she said. ﻿She wouldn't tell me what it was, but she sounded upset. She said she couldn't continue her studies and couldn't go home anymore, so could she stay with me? I asked my family, and they said yes, and now she's been here for three months, and she cries herself to sleep every night even when I hug her and tell her it'll be okay. She hasn't told me anything except that there was "news from home" and she had a fight with Shiara.
When I asked her about the fight, she said "Fuck you! You'd just take her side, anyway."
I had only wanted to know what happened. They were inseparable – how could they fight? But I guess I can't say I've never taken sides between my friends...
One night near the end of last year (my senior year, their junior), the three of us were gathered with some of the other students from our hall, telling jokes and funny stories to each other.
"And he says, 'My mother's DEAD'!" Lori had said, the punchline of a joke. Everyone except me laughed.
I grabbed Lori and hissed, so Shiara couldn't hear, "Lori! Shiara's mom died when she was nine!"
Lori went red and didn't talk to me for a week.
The first time something like this happened, I pulled Shiara aside afterwards and asked if she was okay.
"Whuh?" mumbled Shiara. She was bent over to collect her backpack, the whites of her eyes standing out as she focused on one of the straps.
"You didn't seem so happy after Lori's 'joke'," I said.
Shiara said, "Why would what she says affect me?" and then slid on her pack and hurried away to class, without even turning to look at me. I didn't push her. I'm sure it was a lie.
But they were so close! I don't understand it. They hardly have anything in common. Physically, Lori's a lot like me – average height, thin build, lightish-brown hair – and Shiara's very much the opposite; she's short, broad-shouldered and has a mass of short black hair. Lori watches people closely, as if everyone's a threat, while Shiara barely notices other people in the same room unless you point them out to her. And, well, there's the obvious – Lori's white and Shiara's black. Mentally... Lori talks a lot and Shiara doesn't, Lori studies psychology and Shiara studies electrical engineering. Lori complains about her classes and does work at the last minute, but you never hear from Shiara and then it turns out that she has straight A plusses. How is it that they were close? Especially when Lori is, for lack of a nicer way to say it, so insensitive?
If only she'd talk to me, I could help her – I could help them both. She won't. She took over the chores the first week she was here, but she won't talk. She does all the cooking in the house now, but if I ask her about Shiara, she just looks at me stonily and hands me a plate of something delicious. The worst part is that I'm letting her do all that work. She used to tell me things, before she met Shiara, so I know she's repeating her rituals from home, and I know it's not healthy for her. I keep letting her because it gives her something to do. I don't know how to deal with her when she just stands in a room and cries.
The thing I said about Shiara's mother – it's true. People say she was in the same vehicle as her mother when it crashed, but that Shiara wasn't even injured. People say her mother went off her psych meds and drove at an angle into a rock face. I thought it must be an exaggeration. It was impossible. It was too horrible to be true. So I asked Shiara directly, to make sure it was just a rumor.
"What?" she said. "No, all of those things are true." We were both in her room; it was the first time I'd been there. I had expected it to be spartan, but there was stuff strewn absolutely everywhere, and now I was stuck in the middle where she'd been helping me with my work. I needed to get out of there.
Shiara wasn't looking at me. She was fidgeting with something on her desk.
"It affects your self-preservation instinct," she went on. What was she talking about? How could she be so calm about this? She must have wanted me not to know she cared. I took a step back, and felt something crunch under my foot. I backed quickly out the door, stammering apologies.
"Don't wor–" Shiara began.
I closed the door behind me and ran, with her parting "Jade, it's not a problem!" ringing in my ears.
How could anyone live under the shadow of that? The illness that made her mother drive into the rocks – is it genetic? Could it happen to her? She's so intelligent, so cool under pressure, so brave. Does everything good in this world have to come out of unimaginable horror? If I didn't know better I'd say that Shiara was living in a whole different world than the rest of us, the way her eyes flick around without ever really looking at other people, the way she walks around as if there are no rules and she can do whatever she wants and doesn't care what other people think. Now I know better. The reality is that she's locked her feelings away so that it looks like she doesn't care, but deep down she's hurting herself over and over again. I've known people like that before. They usually break down before long, but Shiara hasn't broken down in eleven years, and if the A plusses mean anything, she's looking at a successful career down the road... and a lifetime of dissonance and distress.
Lori said something to me yesterday. I was still in bed, and she'd gotten up, and I had just asked her to hit 'Snooze' on my alarm clock. She said it while standing there, staring out the window, with one hand still resting on top of the clock:
"Jade, if you were talking to someone and you found out they'd betrayed you, what would you do? Would you be angry, would you hurt them?"
"I'd probably rip their face off," I said, because that's what Lori needed to hear. Then I realized. "You're talking about you and Shiara, aren't you?"
She threw the alarm clock at my head. That's why I have this black eye today.
I know I shouldn't have run away when Shiara was telling me about her past, but I have to be honest with myself: I don't think I could have handled it. I had thought Lori was a little neurotic, and when she started to tell me what her life at home had been like... well, I'm not proud of how well I took it. As for Shiara... the way her gaze slides past people is really unnerving, and I'd be surprised if it didn't come from past trauma, if it wasn't a coping mechanism of some sort – like it's so distressing for her to even be in the presence of another person that she has to constantly pretend that there isn't anyone there, except when she absolutely has to acknowledge them. I guess it could theoretically be something benign, but that's my instinct, and I can't believe my instinct would be so wrong about anyone.
This may sound silly, but I almost noticed the odd way her eyes move before I noticed that she was black – I don't know if it stands out to anyone else, but to me, it's really really noticeable. You can literally stare at her eyes – I'm afraid to say I've done it – and even if she is facing in your general direction, she won't focus on you. I know what I think about that, but it seems so inexplicable that sometimes I wonder if it's a neurological thing, like she's just incapable of registering eye contact:
There was one night near the end of my junior year, a month or two after they first met each other. I was walking back from a concert, with Shiara. Lori caught up to us, breathless and flustered.
"I'm glad I found you," she said, to Shiara. "I can't stand crossing campus alone at night. I feel like I'm being watched all the time."
Lori was alongside us now, walking with Shiara, already making me feel like I was the outsider. Shiara responded to her, "How do you 'feel' like you're being watched?"
"What? You know..." Lori waved her arms, bright and pale under the lamplight.
"I guess you can know that someone is watching you," Shiara went on, "if you've checked. But that's not a feeling."
Now that I've thought about what she said, it makes me wonder. Lori should know more about whether it could really be a neurological thing, because of her studies, but when I asked the other day, she replied with a lot of bitterness. She said "Yeah, you're probably right", but she said it so pointedly that I'm left with no idea what she really meant.
Lori worries me, and she's getting worse every day, but at least she's here with me where I can help her fight it. Shiara? I finally sent her an e-mail a week ago, and this was her reply:
hi jade!
i'm almost completely recovered now. no big issue right? you people are always like that about the "bad" things but it's really just nonsense.
sorry about Lori but i don't know enough about how she works to help

"Almost"? Poor, oblivious Shiara – she thinks she can just dismiss everything, she thinks I'll be reassured by a message telling me that she's been hurt so badly she needed months to recover. I'm making myself sick worrying about her, because I don't know what she needs or what's making her hurt. I don't know what's happened to her in the past, and I don't know what Lori did to her in the present. The only thing I know for sure is that she's not as invulnerable as she wants us to think.

2.
I am Lori Diana Baker, and I am proud to bear my grandmother's name.
You think your grandmother is great? Think she's some sort of role model? Bitch, your grandmother didn't beat your father with an umbrella as he tried to stop you from getting on the bus to go to college. Your grandmother is shit.
I'm with Jade now, but I can't bring myself to tell her the truth. And you know why? Because she doesn't want to hear it. She'd listen, sure, because she wants to try to be a friend, but deep down she doesn't give a shit about my problems. Nobody does. I tell college friends that shit? Suddenly I'm not part of their group anymore. Mom and Dad? Yeah, when they're rotting in hell. Other adults? They stand around like idiots and say things that are Nice and Supportive. I've only ever met two people in the world who actually wanted to hear about my life. One of them was Grandma. The other is a sick, sociopathic freak... a little black girl named Shiara.
I arrived on campus alone, weighing 90 pounds and carrying what I could fit in two duffel bags, and by the end of my sophomore year, I weighed 150 and I was healthy for the first time in my life, but I was still alone. Sure, I had "friends", but when your "friends" are college kids, you're better off without. I went to their parties and listened to them complain about how their parents didn't let them go out at night on weekends, so I told them, well my parents locked me in the basement without food on weekends, how's that for a good time? Ha ha ha ha ha!
Pretty soon I learned that you don't say things like that, because college kids just freeze up and stare at you and sometimes they say Nice things. And sometimes they just say "oh" and apologize for five minutes straight, and either way they never talk to you again, and if you walk past them on campus, they don't even meet your eyes.
Then I met Shiara.
You have no idea what Shiara was to me, before I learned what she was really like. She was the only person there who listened to me, from the moment I met her.
It was on a Wednesday, 1:32 PM. I had been latched onto Jade for a few weeks then, and I was talking to her in the common room of her quad, telling her things I probably shouldn't have told her, while I knew with a horrible little bit of self-awareness that her shoulders were slowly closing in and turning away from me, and her glassy eyes glancing more and more often at the clock. That's when Shiara walked in. I didn't think she looked like much, with her little black face and her down-turned eyes, but what she said after overhearing the last bit of our conversation changed everything.
"Why did you stop? I wanted to hear more."
I didn't even think. I told her more, and whatever else she may be, she never interrupted me, never told me what I should have done differently. Jade excused herself a few minutes later and left us alone together, Shiara absorbing everything I said. I didn't stop to go to my afternoon class, or my evening class, and by the time we parted at 4:00 AM, I was bound to her.
I spent long evenings in her little room, away from everyone else, pouring out my heart to her. She'd sit quietly in the wooden chair while I sat or lay on her bed or paced back and forth in the limited space, talking, or talking and crying, or sometimes just crying... and she didn't mind. Shiara didn't mind when I soaked her pillow with my tears. She didn't even complain when I accidentally broke any of the weird gadgets that she left lying around the room, on the shelves, on the floor. I stupidly thought that because she didn't get mad at me, it meant she was a nice person. What it actually meant was that she was taking advantage of my guilt, trying to drag me in, to keep me coming back to her.
And I did. I went out of my way to please her: I baked cakes for her, until I learned that she was leaving them in her room until the went bad. I helped her move the furniture in her room once, despite the way she always put too much weight on me when we carried things together. I even gave her a sweater I knitted last summer at Grandma's house... the next month she had another sweater, in a similar design, but a better fit and with more intricate patterns. I asked her where she got it.
"I made it," she said.
"I didn't know you knew how to knit."
"I didn't!" she said, almost cheerfully. "I liked the one you made, though. I taught myself because yours was interesting and it made me think of how I could make a nicer one." I don't think anyone will blame me if I stopped making things for her after that.
I should have known from the beginning that I couldn't trust her. She never looks anyone in the eye. She never tells anyone about her own life, not even me, not even when I'd told her everything about my own. I don't know the slightest thing about her past, except that one story about her mother, and, well... that story is a bald-faced lie.
Jade believes it, but if you ask me, that's just Jade being her ﻿naïve self. I didn't really believe it even the first time she told me. Okay, I get it that the joke I told was a horrible joke, and I obviously wouldn't make a joke like that now, but Shiara laughed along with everyone else. That's an undeniable fact. But Jade insisted that it was true, so I finally went and asked Shiara myself, and she told me it was true, and that's when I stopped believing it completely: Shiara talked about the supposed "accident" in such static terms, confusing or leaving out so many details, that frankly, it was an obvious lie and I can't understand why anyone would ever believe it. She probably put it about just to get sympathy for herself. Look at me: my mother is a truly horrible person, and I'm no saint, but if she died, I'd be crying over her grave, you know? She's my family.
I let Shiara's faults slide because I needed her. I rationalized her lies. I told myself that there must be some reason for her to behave that way, that I just didn't understand.
It all ended the evening I told her about Grandma's death. We were in my own room together – I was finally living in a single this year, it's not that I don't love my previous roommates but there's really nothing like the ability to lock a door between yourself and the world – and I told her, as clearly as I could between sobs, and when I finished I just cried on her for a while, and then... she, she sort of cuffed me on the shoulder, in a friendly sort of way, and she was smiling at me like it was funny, like it was all some sort of joke, and she said, and I remember the exact words she said, "That just sucks for you doesn't it? It's kinda nonsense for you."
I don't remember what happened after that.
In the next few days, a lot of things were different. Not a single person on campus would look me in the face. Some official college mail appeared in my mailbox; I never opened it. When I saw Shiara in the quad, she was walking funny, and parts of her face were swollen and bruised; no one would tell me what happened to her, but I could put two and two together. None of that mattered.
What mattered was that I'd lost everyone who I thought cared about me, within a single week. Shiara was still as friendly towards me as ever, but I ignored her. I knew her game. Never pity her: she has gotten exactly what she wanted.
How long has it been since then? Three days? Three years? Jade took me in, and I guess that's a good thing... a lousy friend is better than no one at all. It doesn't help. I can't get my loss out of my head, and I can't stop running through my head what a freak Shiara must be, to pretend to be my friend for so long, just to get her own sick enjoyment out of hearing about my suffering.

3.
People sometimes use "Shiara" as a name for me. That seems useful.
I am experiencing an unexpected-and-unsurprising absence of periodically "Lori" now, the thin-faced with freckles person-comprehensive-impression, an absence which floats like the smell of air after electrical storming or like the confusion of removing a component from a circuit only to find nothing changes. In this case it ended with me-directed violence and from-their-end non-participation, predicted by the model of slow degradation of every distinctive person-comprehensive-impression towards nonsense and then absence: it had progressed towards more and more nonsense-saying things like "look me in the eye" when its face wasn't a meaningful-object-of-focus. I dislike losing people that way but at least that is not as bad as messing up a complex design and having to restart from the beginning. Mechanically-guaranteed activities benefit-from/require close attention more so I should pay them more attention (I've been distracted).
But for people, I'm running out of non-my-avoidance-requiring people. Should I start on the normal ones?  I tend to be so irritated at that: no amount of information-exchange fixes them. People are like foundations dug out and filled with gravel, where no matter how much water/information you throw in, they are unchanged. I liked this "Lori", though. It sometimes said "uh, yeah, okay" after I answered questions instead of asking more questions and then going back to the original questions over the course of weeks. Pity about "Lori", I could have had more nonnormal-people-interacting-experiences with it.
Frequently normal people nonsense-say "Shiara's mother died" people-thoughts. I suppose they nonsense-expect that I should assume identity with a former-self to me, recorded only in episodic-memories of episodic-memories, who maybe was thus. I can only reconstruct from semantic-memories, the ones with lower naturally occurring error:
It, the former-self to me, was riding in a back seat of a short-roofed automobile when the automobile hit something, the mother to it driving, no one else inside. There had been some carelessness, unreasoningness, an ill-maintained vehicle. Help was telephoned for from nearby but it didn't understand until the police officers and paramedics arrived. It asked for the mother by the epithet "Mom", foolishly; there was no such person.
An episodic-memory suggests this: that the officers tried to cover its view as the mother was lifted from the wreckage, but that it contrived to see. The episodic-memory suggests that it saw a face, brown yet strangely pale, and red blood poured across the rocks, and it was irritated not to have been able to clearly see the levels of stratification of the blood as it seeped along. That's the strongest episodic-memory; I could dig for more but why bother? Episodic-memories are like wine; they seem like "classy" to people but really they just mess with people's minds.
Afterwards people nonsense-said "Shiara you must be devastated" and it confusedly wondered what they meant, and expressed its confusion, and confused the sayers of the thing. They were left confused like ants who have been given stilts and hence remembered the wrong distance to walk back to their nest: foundering, mechanical, caught in their own nonsense-expectations. Sometimes they retry-when-shown-to-be-obviously-wrong-said "every person suffers differently" as if saying it could bring them back to a nest they could feel at home in. At first it didn't understand what they could mean by "every person suffers differently", but for this statement it eventually found a meaning once it worked through a long series of thoughts and conclusions that I with-fairly-low-inaccuracy remember...
It, myself, spent a long time thinking about "every person suffers differently" and about myself and searched and searched and dug around in its partially-nonsense-infused brain for any experience it could find that they would have called suffering, and when its focus began to drift all the time, when it finally noticed that it spent less time thinking about suffering or lost quickly-fading-from-memory former person-comprehensive-impressions than it did about electrical circuits and other mechanically-guaranteed systems, when it finally began to realize the only meaning of "every person suffers differently" that was possible with reference to the lack of anything to find– 
that's when I first knew that I'm not a person, and that "loss" is something that describes how people feel and now how I operate. And that's when I started fixing my thoughts so they didn't stay like a nonsense-purposed imitation of people-thoughts.
This is tiring me. Forget people, let's talk about electrical engineering.

~(October 2010)