I hear his chair move, and he leaves the room loudly. Just then, Clarissa bursts into tears. She covers her eyes, and for a while, all I can hear is her erratic sobbing. Moon Goddess, I feel so bad for her... Is no one going to console her? She seems so young, and no one cares! I wish I could do something... Although I'm seeing everything through her body, I don't even know what exactly she is crying about. Is it because of her father's harsh words? Is she scared about being sent to another school? And... why am I seeing all this as if I were a third party?
I'm borrowing her senses, but... it's like there's a glass between her world and me. I'm just a passenger in this body, I don't control anything. I don't feel what she feels, I don't understand any of her actions or reactions. Aren't these supposedly my memories? Or is it because I'm using magic to see this instead of actually recovering my memories? It really feels like I'm seeing the past of a stranger, but I'm in their body...
"You're such a stiff!"
The scene changed again.
I just had enough time to hear some loud banging, and the hit on my back. What the heck is going on? I can hear her breathing badly, as if she was out of breath. Clarissa looks up, and I realize her blurry vision is due to the tears in it. She's crying again. I take those few seconds to try and catch sight of the room she's in. We're in a bedroom, but this one is even more stern, like a dorm... The bed has metal bars too, and that desk has nothing but books for studying. Nothing here seems personal except for that picture on the bedside table. Wait, is that the picture Spark found? We're too far away for me to see the details, but it does look like it.
So she had that picture with her; it does belong to her. I hear her sniffle, and she locks the door behind us. The banging on the door continues.
"You freak! Go home to your dead witch mother!"
She closes her eyes, and the room goes dark again. Her dead witch mother? What the heck is going on? People keep banging against her door, and while she cries more, I feel the anger rise inside. Are those teenagers? Are we in that boarding school?
"I'm okay... I'm not a freak... I'm not a freak..."
It takes me a few seconds to realize she's talking to herself. How long has this been going on? She is shaking so much, even her voice... She slowly lets go of the door handle, and the banging ceases too. I hear people laughing on the other side of the door and going away. This is so messed up.
As Clarissa steps forward, I catch a glimpse of a red uniform. She walks up to that picture, still crying silently. I recognize my own hand, a few years younger, grabbing the little frame. It's actually broken; she put some tape on the lower corner. Clarissa sits on the end of her bed, that picture in her hands.
"I miss you, Mom... I know those weren't dreams... I want to see your magic again..."
Her mom's magic?
So her... our mother really was a witch? And we witnessed it. How old were we when she passed again? Amy mentioned we changed households around seven or eight years old. Was Clarissa still holding on to those memories? If she was bullied at school and in such a cold environment at home, it may have been the only thing that worked... She cries for a very long time while looking at her mother's picture. So long, I wonder if this is it, or if that scene is about to change again. I want to see more, more of our life beforeMaraappeared. Hopefully, I'll see what happened in Silver City too…
Yet, we stay in the bedroom until she gets up, still holding that picture. She walks up to her desk and takes one of those notebooks. The pages are darkened with lines and lines of notes from what must be her classes. There's even some languages I recognize as French, German, and Spanish. Wow, I didn't even know I could read that much. There's algebra too, and the more pages she turns, the more I realize how high-level this must be. Clarissa must be fifteen or sixteen in these memories, but this calculus is something else. Is she in some specialized school? She finally finds what she wanted, and this time, it's not her tiny handwriting anymore, but drawings. All those were done with a ballpoint pen, but it's... beautiful. She even managed to make some gradients.
This scene she drew is the first heart-warming thing I get to see in these memories. It looks like a little apartment, with furniture, and lots of plants... flowers, plants in pots, leaves... It reminds me of Sylviana's house. I even thought that was what I was looking at for a moment, but the layout is different. This apartment looks much smaller than her house, and the windows are smaller too. Moreover, a woman is drawn in the middle of that scene. She's definitely the woman in the picture... Our mother. She is even more beautiful than in that picture. Clarissa's drawing details her facial expression more precisely, and I can definitely recognize some similarities...
She grabs her ballpoint pen and I realize that's all she has to draw with. Four exact same blue stupid ballpoint pens are on the desk, and that's it... Is this a prison or a school? I think she's about to add more to the picture, but her fingers freeze. She stares at the picture for a very long time. Her breathing gets so quiet, I feel she's managed to calm down.
That's when a teardrop falls on the picture, messing it up. Oh, no...
She starts crying again, and her hand frantically tries to wipe down the soaked picture while more sobbing comes to my ears. It's getting harder and harder to witness this. I can feel her loneliness. I wish there was at least one person by her side to tell her she is fine... Didn't she have any friends at all? She suddenly gets up, and goes through her bag, taking out a phone. Finally! Is she going to call a friend? Or Amy?
She opens the list of contacts, and I'm in for another shock. Father? That's it? Her only contact is that frigid father from earlier? Oh, crap... She hesitates a long time before pressing the call button. I get nervous, probably like her, as we wait for the ringtone. It rings for a hell of a long time...
No one picks up. I swear internally, but Clarissa is in for more crying.
The scene finally changes again.
I'm pretty sure we are back home, or wherever our father lived with us; it's that horrible cold and empty background again. We are sitting on the floor of our bedroom, with some news articles lined up before us. Wait, isn't that a picture of... Silver City? I recognize that skyline. It's from a different angle, but it's definitely Silver City. What are we looking at? It looks like she's compiling dozens of news articles and taking notes. I see several headlines with the words "magic" or "witch"... Is that what she is looking for?
"Miss Clarissa, you should... put an end to this... If your father finds out..."
"As if my father cares."
I'm surprised by her cold voice. It actually sounds like mine, but... she speaks with a hoarse voice, as if she was sick. I actually hear her cough a couple of times, and it sounds pretty bad. The nice lady sounds like the one from earlier too.
"...Do you want me to call the doctor? Is your headache worsening again? You barely slept last night..."
"I'm fine... Did you find anything else about this?"
"N-no, miss. Those are all the articles we could print about Silver City. Miss Clarissa, I really think you should stop looking for witches... If you keep doing that, you'll just make yourself sicker..."
"Sicker? Didn't you hear the family doctor? I'm as good as dead, anyway. I might as well die proving I was telling the truth. I don't want to be remembered as crazy... Just once, I want to be able to tell my father, ‘I told you so.’"
