The Seven

Maybe I can blame it on genetics. Maybe I can blame it on the way I was raised. Maybe I’m crazy. I don’t know anymore.

I was definitely raised to be an introvert – my mother and I rarely left the house for the first three years of my life, and afterwards, only on errands, for school, or, if I was very lucky, she’d search out the most well-behaved, perfect-looking children among her friend’s kids for me to have a play-date with. That maybe happened… Ten times? In the first eleven years of my life.

I don’t remember them much, although I do have an impressive memory. Claire and Grayson both had blue eyes and blonde hair, and rich moms. Those weren’t my friends, though. Pass it off, if you wish, as a hoax, or a mistake, or my imagination.

The Seven were there.

It started off on the morning of my third birthday. Like most young children on their birthdays, I got up early because I was excited. The sun wasn’t quite up yet, and it was summer, so I suppose it was probably around four. We’d just moved into the brand-new house a couple of months before, and I’d finally gotten used to sleeping on the mattress pushed up against the bare white walls. I remember hearing the sound of crying.

I looked around – it didn’t take long to find someone in an otherwise empty room. He had black hair. At that point, I’d never left the house except for car rides and playdates, so I’d never even seen anyone with black hair before.

At first, I thought he was a girl, because of his long hair. I’d never seen a boy with long hair. My mom always said guys should wear their hair short, because long hair didn’t look proper on them, and I guess I believed her. She didn’t let me associate with boys who had long hair.

When he looked up, though, I could tell. Something in his expression, the way he was trying to hide his emotions. He wiped away tears from ash-grey eyes, afraid. He looked a bit older than me – seven, maybe?

He tried speaking to me, but I didn’t understand. Now, I suspect he was speaking a different language. It took a while, but from his repeated use of the word “Cleverd” while pointing at himself I figured out he meant that was his name. I told him my name, but he insisted on calling me something else – Kitty, I think. It didn’t really matter at the time.

Anyway, it took a few days of him following me around for me to realize my parents couldn’t see him. Surprisingly, I didn’t think much of it at the time. In fact, I took to calling him my imaginary friend. For a few days, or maybe it was weeks, it was just me and him.

Then Kiara showed up. I’d never seen an African American person either, by then. Like I said, I was really secluded. I figured she was some supernatural being (hey, I don’t mean to be racist, these were real thoughts that ran through my head and real experiences). She was about the same age as Cleverd and wore lots of jewelry. She taught us to use our ‘powers’. We used them to go to different places. Each of them had a name, but the only one I remember is “Crystalia”.

It came gradually, in such a way I hardly noticed it – somewhere along the way, we started being able to communicate with one another. I could tell I wasn’t speaking English, but I didn’t hear any foreign words come out of my mouth. The other two noted the same.

We traveled to two main places, other than my house.

There was a desert, where people wore lots of clothes, and the houses were little huts with animal skin – or maybe fabric, I wasn’t really paying attention – hangings. The people there looked like they were Kiara’s brothers and mother – supposedly her father was dead. They never spoke to her though. Then again, they might have, but I never understood them. Not the way I understood Kiara or Cleverd.

Sometimes, we’d go to an old, burned out mansion with Cleverd, and he’d talk about how he recognized this painting, or how his little brother used to play with that toy. Sometimes I would step outside that black husk of a building, and see green fields and bright flowers under grey skies, and Cleverd would call me back in. One time, I stayed outside when it rained. The rain didn’t smell the way rain usually does, though. It smelled like fire. Along with the rain, ashes fell too. Somewhere in the grassy field, I saw row upon row of stones, marked with names. I didn’t recognize the first names, but the last name…

At the end of every name, it read ‘CLEVERD’. Three of the headstones had the same death date, but before I had a chance to check them, Cleverd called me back inside. I found out later that Cleverd was actually his last name – he didn’t like his first name.

I was with Kiara and Cleverd for a year before the others showed up. To be honest, I don’t even remember the order.

Violet had dark brown hair and purple eyes. She took us to a field of identical purple flowers swarming with bees. You know, I never really had a problem with bees after that.

We rarely ever saw anyone there, except in the distance. Every time we were there, Violet ran through the fields, searching for her father. She never found him, though. Apparently, he raised her after her mother died. She was an only child.

Jake, who had dirty blonde hair and blue eyes, brought us to some place that looked normal to me. Beyond that, I don’t really remember. Normal places weren’t exciting enough to remember, I suppose.

Lilly, who had dull brown hair and green eyes, took us to a farm. We ran through the dust barefoot as people harvested food by hand. Once, we stopped in a little house the size of a shed to watch her mother sew by hand. Her mother looked tired and dirty. She ignored her daughter, which I thought was pretty cruel, but maybe she was hard of hearing and blind.

Lucy had squinty, dark brown eyes, pale skin, and hair blacker than Cleverd’s. She took us to this place with stone columns and men who fought one another with various different weapons. She said her brother was there somewhere, but the almost-fortress was too big to find him in. We called ourselves “The Seven”.

They stayed with me until I was seven. I remember telling my parents stories of our adventures, and my parents remember me telling stories too, but none of us remember what I said. They say they heard me talking to myself; that I’d zone out, and there’d be this far-away look in my eyes. I remember the last day, though. Cleverd told me he was only allowed to stay until his birthday. I asked him when it was, and was surprised to discover that after all those years, his birthday was the same as mine – July seventh. We asked around – to the same result. Every one of us had turned seven on a July seventh. To this day, I wonder if there’s a significance in that day that made us meet. I will always wonder. He and Kiara left that day. I never saw them again, except in my dreams.

Lilly was the next to go. I didn’t even see her in my dreams after that – not until a cadaver lab visit in High School, when suddenly, I felt this tug inside my head, and, though I was doing fine and not even breathing strangely, the room was suddenly far away – I was looking through what seemed to be binoculars, but I was only wearing my glasses.

My vision came back, and I smelled cinnamon and ginger. I was looking at a brown-haired, green-eyed girl in a prairie dress – like something you’d see in The Little House on the Prairie. She looked familiar, and at first I couldn’t place her, but when she smiled, I knew it was Lilly.

She suddenly screamed, terrified, and suddenly my vision turned to binoculars again. When it cleared, I was falling towards the floor. My teacher caught me, and escorted me out of the room. My classmates probably thought I was a wimp, and passed out because of the bodies. I didn’t though. Maybe it was a hallucination. Maybe I really traveled there. I don’t know. That’s what got me thinking again. That made me want to write all this down.

For years, I was obsessed. I drew pictures of my imaginary friends, wrote down their backstories, talked about nothing but the Seven… I stopped speaking to anyone, unless it was “pass the salt” or about the Seven.

I even researched some of the facts I remembered.

Crystalia – I told my parents about that place. I spoke of it again and again. They can attest to that. I looked it up. There’s really a place in Africa called Crystalia.

Cleverd – my parents asked me, repeatedly, whether I meant ‘Clever’ or ‘Clifford’. I insisted that no, it was Cleverd, with a d. I researched it – it’s really a last name.

Do the research for these two things yourself, if you don’t believe me. Now, maybe I can’t prove I heard those words, before I could have possibly known them, without my parents’ help. But I can’t ask them for help. They’d think I was crazy. They already thought I was crazy enough when I ‘made up’ the Seven. So many years later, revisiting the topic, trying to prove it was real…

So I pretend. I lie. I act like everything’s okay. When really, I just want to know – am I crazy?