Ertifferrah Written By: Elay Understood CHAPTER 43 THE MORNING AFTER...Elay TV Content Creator
“I’m glad you said yes,” the soothing voice of Octavious said as he stroked her face, pulling her hair from around her eyes. “I wouldn’t have settled for anything less…”
Amazed at how gentle he was with her last night brought her to tears as she thought about the moment again, wishing she could relive it.
“See, there you go,” he cooed. “That’s what I like to see from you—that smile, the look of satisfaction.” Poking around at her face and then rubbing his nose on hers, he reached behind her pillow and pulled out a remote control.
“Watch this! I got the whole play-by-play of what we did last night recorded on TV! Wonder how much money I’d make off this tape if I sold it…? Betcha didn’t know I had a camera in here did you?!” He teasingly waved the remote in her face as a large flat-screened plasma TV dispensed from the white wall.
Erica could do nothing but burst out into hysterical laughter because they both knew that what really went on last night was a whole lot of nothing. In fact, after sharing a nice kiss, they watched movies, ate junk food, and played Uno, lots and lots of Uno.
“Ahhh, ha, haa! Octavious, you are so silly! “ Face red as a glass filled with strawberry jelly, she continued to laugh uncontrollably.
Not wanting to miss the moment, he pressed a small button on the side of the bed to record, and Erica’s live-action, side-splitting laughter popped up on the screen.
Seeing her on the TV made him laugh out loud too. “Aw, Erica, see, I have so much fun with you!”
It took some time until they were able to calm down, but eventually, they did. Holding hands, they talked on the bed while something played on the flat screen. Octavious thanked Erica for one of the best nights of his life.
“No, really, in all honesty, Octavious, I should be thanking you for respecting me… You know, I thought you were like going to be like most guys when it came to that.”
“I can be…but when it comes to you, Erica, it’s different and that’s why I didn’t want last night to go wrong. Even though I’m not a virgin, I wanted to wait and share that moment with you because I know how important it is to you. Being with you in that way did cross my mind more than a few times, but the desire to wait until the moment was right outweighed that.”
“I love you!” Erica blurted out with arms outstretched, and she fell backward into the bed of pillows, an abundance of feathers flying out. Everywhere, there were the results of the brutal pillow fight that they had last night.
After Octavious and Erica made breakfast; pop tarts, waffles, and orange juice, he told Erica everything-about why he missed school and how he got back to Earth.
It seemed as though the story brought his back down like to like how they were yesterday when she first came to his house. Erica took his tray off the bed, pulled the covers back, and patted the bed, gesturing him to get in. He obliged.
“I think you should lie down and get a little more rest before we do anything else today.”
“You’re right.”
Erica kicked off her socks and climbed in next to him. Behind her were the remote and a set of headphones. She turned the TV on to an afternoon talk show. Placing the set over her ears, she was able to listen to the show on TV through them; she didn’t want to disturb Octavious with any unnecessary noise, because he needed his rest.
*
Stirring slowly from her nap, Erica got up and prepared herself for what was left of the day.
Octavious was already awake in another part of the room, working out his arms on a bench that pulled out from yet another wall.
Erica walked in “You aren’t the only child, are you?”
Almost dropping the bar, he wobbled back and forth, trying to get the bar back in the latches. “Aw, do we really have to talk about that right now?”
“If not now, when?” she asked him with big, brown, puppy eyes and patiently awaited an answer.
Rolling off the bench, he huffed, stretched long and good, and then proceeded.
“My older sister, who I mentioned to you before, claimed to have uncovered some untruths as to how the government in Akasha was run. She said she had discovered a magical book. One very similar to the one you have. Now, if I’m not mistaken, didn’t you write in your notebook that it hadn’t written back to you for some time?”
“Yes.”
“There may be a reason for that. I haven’t seen my sister for some years now, and I miss her like hell too.”
Reaching to comfort him, Erica asked, “Why, where is she? What happened?”
“Yeah, uh, this is the unbelievable part. My mother is Lady Governess.”
“Woah! She is? Really? Well, that explains the big houses.”
“Yes, so then you know what she’s all about right?”
“Taking pride in Integrity, ruling justly, and always keeping an open line of communication with her people.”
“Right! But according to my sister, there was something shady whirring behind our mother’s eyes that she didn’t like. My sister said that I was too young to tell what she saw in mom and didn’t want to plant a seed of doubt in my head until I was old enough to make a decision for myself.”
“What is your sister’s name?”
“Originally, my parents named her after our land, Akasha.”
“So, your parents named her Akasha?”
“Yeah, but the name didn’t stick for very long. On her sixteenth birthday, she wished for her name to be changed to Nyah.”
“Why?”
“She said that until she could find a real reason to have the opportunity to carry a name with such a noble weight, she needed to uncover truths. She said she found something written in an old book that referenced back to the day of the Old Kingdom. It was an entire chapter devoted to the tale of the Deities, like the one I told you about. She liked to read, so she brought it back home. I guess it was like one of those mythology books or something.”
“Where’d she find it?”
“Here’s the good part, she too was able to travel like how you and I can. Just like you, she got to Earth when she fell asleep too.”
“Oooh,” Erica responded, shaking her head.
Octavious continued, “She too attended Tarsus High, but my sister was the wild rebel of the family, so she never was home much. And to think that you think I’m something else!” he said with a wide grin. “Getting to the point though, my sister liked to hang out with the older crowd—like the college student. She even dated a guy in college.
“She spent most of her weekends hanging out on their campus. That is where she found the book about the Deities! It was in the basement of the Fine Arts building. She and her friends started this like a rock band, and they needed to find props for a talent show. They thought the story was cool and wanted to try it out, figuring they could use all the help they could get to up the chances of winning the first-place prize money.
“Nyah thought it would be a good idea to make copies of the book so that the other two girls could have their own book to reference. Following the concepts of the book as closely as possible, the three girls, my sister included, chose an Earth Element they wanted to represent and used those as their stage names. They, soon after, changed the name of the rock band from ‘Satin Thong’ to ‘The Deities’.”
“And which element did your sister want to be?”
“Ice,” Octavious said, as cold as the word itself. “She wanted to be nice.” He continued the story as they walked out of the bedroom, through the bath, and into the main entrance where the tall white palm trees with gold cocoanuts were.
“See, being that the girls considered themselves ‘bff’s (best friends forever), it wasn’t long before they started to change at the same time.”
“Change like how?” asked Erica.
“It was little stuff like how my sister just quit going to school altogether and her two colleagues started skipping their classes even more. But people didn’t look at it as a bad thing, sweeping it under the rug, thinking that the girls were preparing for the talent show. I mean if you had the chance to split four thousand dollars between three people, wouldn’t you take the show a bit more serious too?”
“Yeah, damn straight!” Erica said excitedly. “But I thought your sister was rich.”
“She was,” catching himself, uncomfortable about speaking of his sister in the past tense. “She is, but she didn’t want anyone to know,” Octavious added while searching around the massive white room for something, “she wanted to keep a low profile.”
“Unlike you,” Erica said with a smile.
“Hey, I can’t help it if I like to dress nice,” he said, looking in the triple mirrors, studying his physique, and then changing into yet another outfit. He continued, “As the day of the talent show approached, the girls grew even tighter than they thought they ever could become. Most people thought that when they began dressing more Goth, it was all in the name of school spirit. Like most people did who had their hand in the talent show one way or another, they would begin to dress in costumes giving hints or just making it plainly obvious what their role was pertaining to the show. So, you see, no one really recognized the real deal that was going on with my sister and her crew. But their attitudes started changing too. They started acting all secretive, not talking to other people and stuff like that.”
“Oh, so what about Nyahs’ boyfriend, didn’t she still talk to him?”
“Yup, they still talked. The day before the show, the girls were excited. My sister said she was going to the mall to pick up the costumes and didn’t want them to join her because there was other stuff she had on hold that she didn’t want them to see, like it was a surprise, so she’d catch up with them later that night.
“But what her friends didn’t know was that my sister had to travel back to Akasha to get them.”
Nodding her head, Erica said, “Ohh…”
“That’s when the trouble started! Nyah made it back to Akasha and found our mother waiting for her in her bedroom. They got into an argument because my mother confronted Nyah about the Deity book she had found on her bed. Mom knew about her renaming the band and how her interest in Deities had become more of an obsession than a hobby.
“Guess mom didn’t approve of our own flesh and blood-forming a separate party outside the family line even if was supposedly all in fun. She ordered her not to continue participation in the band and forbade her from going back to Earth. Nyah wasn’t trying to hear that and insisted on changing their mother’s mind. She told her that she liked Earth a lot better because they gave her freedom there to find out who she really was and to be that person. She enjoyed the freedom to explore and raise questions without having to hear ‘it just is’ or ‘this is how things have been taught to us’.
“Mom didn’t like hearing that. All I heard was a loud smack as she slapped Nyah across the face. I saw it—they didn’t even know I was there. I wasn’t too much into all this Deity stuff then. I had to be around eleven years old at the time. Anyway, mom and dad had their focuses on Nyah more than on me because she was going to turn eighteen soon and they wanted her to marry.
“Nyah didn’t like the thought of tying the knot that early, let alone having a pre-arranged marriage,” Octavious said with a chuckle. “Like I said, she was a rebel, and hearing that she wouldn’t be allowed to travel back to Earth was probably the straw that broke the camel’s…, uh, you know, the camel’s back. My sister didn’t like that one bit and threatened mom saying she’d form her own Deity group and overpower hers.
“There was only one other time when I can vividly recall her being that angry.” Octavious thought back to what his mother had done to him just days ago but shook it off. “Anyways, Erica, the door was closed so it was hard to hear what was going on because they lowered their voices, but I heard bits of it.”
“What did they say?”
“I heard Nyah say something about mom cheating her way to having the throne and something about revealing the truth about Integrity.”
Erica’s heart dropped. “You’ve got to be kidding me right? I knew something was up, but not like this,” she said sorrowfully.
“No, I kid you not because that same night, Nyah came into my room, woke me up to talk. She looked really different from earlier. It was kind of scary too; she had this scared, wild look in her eyes when she was crying. She told me that she couldn’t stay here anymore and that she was going to Earth and never coming back.”
“So your sister said she found out some untruths. I wonder what they were.”
“Baby, I can tell you this much, ever since she found that Deity book, I never saw it out of her sight until that day, you know when my mom found it laying on her bed. Other than that, she never left it. I guess she was excited about the talent show.
“The Deity book was brown, similar to the she-bear notebook you write in. And what tripped me out about you was that when you wrote in the book, it actually said something back,” Octavious said.
“It does, but it hasn’t talked to me in a while now, so I don’t know what’s going on with it,” Erica said sorrowfully.
“Wow you’re really reminding me of my sister right now. That’s how she acted about her book. She wrote in hers too. I think she used it as a journal. But she held on to it like it was a part of her body or something. You understand what I’m saying?”
“Yes, yes I do,” Erica softly continued speaking of the she-bear notebook as if it were a revered friend. “Don’t know what the deal was with me finding that book, I just stumbled across it. Found it in Lady Gov—uh, excuse me, your mother’s gift room one day when I went to talk to her—”
Surprised, Octavious knocked something off the ledge of the counter and asked, “You’ve been talking to my mother?” “You’ve been talking to my mother?” he asked again, pale as a ghost. As if having a severe, mental meltdown, Octavious asked frantically, “Uhh, Erica, did these ‘talks’ of yours between you and my mother ever become intimate, to your knowledge?”
Kind of knowing where the question was headed, she felt the hairs on the back of her neck raised before she could answer slowly, “Intimate? Well, we’ve talked a lot, honestly, and I don’t know if this is a good or bad thing, but I believe we’ve spent more quality time together than my real mom. You know, she even called me her daughter. She told me that I was like one of her own.
“Come to think of it though, my mom was always busy working for your mother, doing this and that, so she never did have many chances to spend with me. On her days off, she’d be too tired or had things to do around the house. You know how that goes, I guess…”
“I understand Octavious,” said kindly.
Erica just loved how he showed so much compassion towards her like she was the most important person in the room, no matter how many other people were there.
Taking a deep breath, Erica proceeded into the conversation, “Um, your mother always told me to never hesitate to come to her with anything, with any concern—that nothing was too petty to be discussed.”
“So what one thing do you think you two talked about that could be considered intimate to you?”
“The day I got my period…”
“Ooh, man, yeah, that would do it,” he said with dread. “Please, you’ve got to keep talking about it so that we can decipher whether or not we have a problem.” He said seriously.
Nodding her head, Erica continued. “I didn’t want to tell my teacher or the school nurse because they would have informed my parents, so I went to your mother. I didn’t want to tell my real mom, it was too embarrassing.
“We spent the whole day together. I remember it like it happened a week ago. She told me that I would have nothing to worry about because it would be a secret kept between only us two, but, of course, you too now know, but that’s okay though,” she blushed.
“I remember your mother went on saying, ‘We shall keep this between you and me alone. I am so proud of you darling, this is an important milestone in your life and should be celebrated.’”
“Not trying to impose, but did you feel different after talking to her?” he asked, eyes never moving from hers.
“Yeah, yeeah, I did, but though that may be, it was, you know, something to do with what happened, you know? Come to think about it, soon after talking with her about all of that, that’s when I started having troubles sleeping.
“I think that stuff you told me at your house about sharing dreams and secrets with people really must work then unless it’s a mere coincidence that you all of a sudden started having trouble sleeping after talking to my mom.”
“She must have been influencing my sleep and purposely interrupting my dreams so that I wouldn’t meet you!” Erica cried out upon the discovery.
“Dreams are often portals that lead you to become a more refined person, a gateway to yet another world that holds secrets but many people never find these secrets; and for my mother to want to take you under her wing and treat you as her own daughter, there must be something special about you that would explain why she is doing this.?”
“Yes, that is all true, but what would your mother want to do with me?”
“I think I know exactly what!” Voiced Octavious. “I think she purposely kept a close watch on you so that you could take her place as queen!”
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