Ain’t a Cheerleader in Texas...
Prolouge
Dear Mom and Dad,I know this is going to sound strange, but even though I’m entering my senior year at Houston Methodist, it’s like I’m writing to you for the first time since high school. I know you have to have called me, talked to me, even met me and had dinner with me, but for the last four years I haven’t been me- at least not for the most part- and that’s why I’m taking the time to write you something as old-fashioned as a letter.
Jessica looked up from the paper for a second. It really was an act of God that brought me here, wasn’t it? Everyone else said it was a failure, but sometimes the best things come out of failure, and I’d never have been saved otherwise. She considered things. Or maybe I was just lucky. There’s a lot out there you don’t understand yet, Jessica O’Neill. She brushed back her hair, which was turning back to its original light brown slowly but surely. She’d stopped getting it touched up almost a year ago, but it took a while to go from the early white platinum blonde she- no, the being that had taken her over- had worn for so long to the hair she was born with. She took pride in just growing it out and watching the form of her past fall away little by little every month. There was something empowering about it, although her friends who had cut it off and made do with boycuts for their final year of college.
Over two hundred collges and universities in the state of Texas, and somehow they had the good luck to end up at Houston Methodist, a school that was an expansion team for all intents and purposes. Some said that the chancellor made them Division I not for the athletics but for the cheerleaders, and in Texas that passed without question. But none of them knew the Reverend Daunte McAllister’s true mission.
“In the Bible, they speak of selling your soul and being damned for all eternity, and there are those who’ll say it’s a metaphor for sin and temptation. But I know better. It’s all real, and if that makes me exorcist, then so be it. None of my people will bear witness to slavery!” he had been quoted as saying, and the last part was written over the door to his office.
Jessica smiled at the reminder, her mind conjuring up the image of the coal black preacher in his black suit tailored more for a Harlem hustler than a man of God, though he was both in a way. She knew the story well enough: he’d heard enough about the people who lurked in the shadows sto steal away the souls of the innocent, and he’d had enough. She knew she was fortunate to be one of the few he had tried and succeeded in saving.
It might have taken three years and more for her head to clear, and she didn’t want to remember what she did as Jessie, but she had to in order to protect others from the same fate, so she put her pen back to the paper and kept writing.
The day I left home was the day I stopped existing for three years. I’m not blaming you. You had no way of knowing the evil that lay at the end of the road you put me on, or what the true cost of success really was, because there are so very few who know what the ultimate price is, even though they go in with their eyes open. Take comfort from this- I don’t blame you because I can’t blame you.
All I ask is that you listen with an open mind and try not to judge who I am now by what I was then.
She took a deep breath and paused again. It took a look at the glaringly bright blonde tips of her hair to remind herself of where she came from. She didn’t want to return to the dead blank void of her madness, but she had to in order to prevent others from being consumed the same way. She paused one last time before opening up the Pandor’as Box locked deep in her subconscious and recollecting the ten days that had turned her into someone else.