Julieta and The Terrible Wish

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Someone is staring at her. Julieta is accustomed to being stared at, but this is a little different. This isn’t the ‘I think you’re a troublemaker and you need to be watched’ kind of look, or even the ‘I’ve never seen a prosthetic before’ kind of look. At least as far as she can tell. This is… hm.

She looks back at the pale lady, trying to figure out what kind of look it is. Then she realizes with a start that the lady isn’t looking at her, not exactly. She’s looking a little past her, and the girl turns to see one of her angels pinned under the woman’s stare. The angel flashes and beats its wings once. They don’t need the wings to fly, not really, but it flaps a few more times on its way over to the dark haired woman.

The young girl holds her breath as her angel does a loop around the woman’s head, spinning in its usual orbit before attempting to nudge at her shoulder. But it passes right through her, just like all of them do when they try to interact with people that aren’t Julieta.

Her held breath comes out in a big sigh, part relief and part disappointment. She doesn’t know what she’d do if her angels decided to bond with someone else, especially someone older and taller and prettier than her.

The ones still clustered around her press in close, and she smooths her thumbs over one of their wings in a small gesture that could be passed off as just a fidget to anyone who didn’t know better.

Julieta takes the woman’s hand gingerly, shaking just her fingers before pulling her hand away again. “I’m Julieta. Julieta Elizondo.”

She pronounces her name the proper way - a light ‘H’ sound to begin, rushing through the middle letters but lingering on the last syllable. Some of her teachers will just call her Juliet, but she thinks it sounds prettier when she says it the way her family does.

The reminder of why she came here in the first place hits her all at once, and her shoulders slump inwards. She looks down at her shoes instead of at the monster hunter. “My parents. I don’t know where they went, but I think… uh, I think something sent them away.”

One of the angels crosses right into her field of vision, and she frowns at it. She doesn’t want to say that it was her, or her angels, just in case that gets her in trouble, but she isn’t sure what else to say. “I thought maybe if I came here you could help me find them. Or, maybe, I wanted to see if you knew about something that could find people? Like a magic… crystal… ball?”

Here, she looks up, hopeful.

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Julieta knew it would be too easy if Ms. Smith did just pull out a crystal ball, but she still finds herself disappointed. She settles back on her heels, unsure when she had started leaning forward on her tip-toes. Her angels press even closer against her, flashing slow and bright, but for once her attention is focused solely on the person in front of her. As a hand presses down on her shoulder, her eyes dart around Ms. Smith’s face, relieved by what she doesn’t find there.

No anger, no disappointment. Pity, sure, that’s fine, and maybe a little curiosity. She can handle that. She blows out a slow breath and nods, eyes going to the side where one of her angels is settled on the floor by Ms. Smith’s foot. If her angels trust her, then maybe she can too. They’re always good judges of character.

“Okay,” she agrees, quiet. And then louder, in case that was too quiet, she repeats herself. “Okay! I’ll help however I can.”

Her angels hum in the back of her mind, pleased, and Julieta stands a little straighter. Questions, she can do questions. Usually she’s the one asking them, but she’ll just have to try her hand at answering. It can’t be that hard.

As for the items, her first thought is the phone in her pocket, but she doesn’t want to give that away, not really. For a moment her brow furrows as she considers whether she should hand it over, but she relaxes when Ms. Smith says it isn’t a right-away thing. She doesn’t guard her expressions, so her alarm is immediately obvious as Ms. Smith starts with a question that she really should have been expecting.

“Uhhhmm,” she manages, very helpfully. She tries not to look too guilty and fails miserably, shifting her weight from foot to foot and unsure of where she should be looking. One of her angels seems very taken with the wooden paneling, phasing in and out of the wall at different points. She gets a little dizzy watching it, but it isn’t anything unusual. Not to her, anyways. “No, not really. They were there one second, like there there, right in front of me, and then they were gone. I might’ve had my eyes shut. I didn’t hear anything, either. Just… quiet, I guess. It was too quiet.”

With this realization she seems absolutely miserable, as now that she thinks about it her eyes were definitely closed for that crucial moment. She’s always been an angry crier, which is too embarrassing to admit, and in the moment she was just so… fed up, with her parents and everything. Too upset to think straight, or keep her head on her shoulders like her parents are always scolding her about.

And that means she missed if there was some visual clue to where they went. It’s just now sinking in for her that she isn’t sure if she’ll see them again soon. That this might not just be a bad afternoon. She doesn’t want to think about that anymore, so she tries to jettison the thought.

“I didn’t- I didn’t see anything. But I know something-” a darting glance to the side again, a stutter in her voice that she tries to brush off “- must have, uh, moved them.”

She isn’t going to cry in front of the nice detective lady. She isn’t. Wingtips brush against her cheeks and she forgets herself and pushes the angel away with an open palm, thinking nothing of it. “I just- people don’t just disappear. And they weren’t anywhere else in the house or the neighborhood but they have to be somewhere, right? I just need to find them.”

She keeps getting caught up on that. A snag in her thought process, like a buffering screen on a video. Like if she tries hard enough, or thinks of the right questions or the right wishes, she can make this all stop happening. “I can get their stuff from my house, and then that would help find them, right? I can go do that. It’s not too far.”

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“Oh!” Julieta’s eyes go a little wide with surprise. She hadn’t considered that Ms. Smith might want to go with her, but that makes sense. Like in those detective shows where they go behind the scenes and find clues in trash cans and secret files in hidden desk drawers. She isn’t sure her parents have any secret files, but… hm. Wait.

She’s pretty sure she knows exactly who is responsible for her parents disappearing. She’s pretty sure there’s no one else to blame but herself. She didn’t mean to, though, and that has to count for something. Her angels didn’t mean to either, she doesn’t think. Or maybe they did, but they didn’t mean to upset her with it. And that counts for something, too.

Well… she would still like to see what Ms. Smith finds. Maybe her angels left a clue that she missed, or something. It’ll just be a… second pair of eyes. Yeah. She’s still a little unsure even as she finds herself saying, “Sure. I can, um, show you the way.”

Her definition of ‘not too far’ might need just a little work. She sheepishly retrieves her mom’s phone from her pocket and boots up google maps to show them the way. Fifteen minute walk, it says.

When she leaves the office, her angels leave with her. One of them settles on her head, nesting in her hair. The glow is almost disguised by the sun shining overhead. A few flutter off to do whatever it is they do when they aren’t hanging around her.

Along the way, every crosswalk they reach is perfectly timed for them to cross, and she glances nervously at Ms. Smith, hoping it isn’t too obvious. She strikes up a conversation in an effort to distract from the too-fortuitous occurrences that follow her like a cloud. And to satisfy her own curiosity. “So, how long have you been working on… stuff like this? Do you have a badge? Do you ever work with the police?”

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Julieta really tries to pay attention to Ms. Smith, as much as she can. What she’s saying is interesting, but she can’t seem to keep her eyes fixed anywhere for too long. She looks at the phone, and the sidewalk, and the street, and her angels, but she’s still paying attention! She’s paying so much attention.

It’s good that she isn’t that close with the police. Julieta isn’t sure how much she trusts la policia, even though her friends at school all hold them in high regard. Her parents are always a little nervous around the people with their uniforms and badges and guns, which makes her a little nervous too.

Ms. Smith has a badge, too. Julieta reaches out a hand to touch it when she flips open the case, but remembers her manners and pulls her hand away again. Look with your eyes, not your hands. The United Nations seems like a pretty big deal. Julieta raises her estimations on how big of a deal Ms. Smith is accordingly.

Maybe she jumped a little high for all of this. Maybe her parents will be waiting for her when she gets home, worried sick because she wandered off on her own again, even though she’s never really alone when her angels are with her. Ms. Smith’s explanations feel a little distant for a moment, like she’s speaking from another room.

One of her angels nudges up under her arm, looking for attention, and when she passes a hand over the smooth sphere she feels a little better. They’re always shifting textures. This one feels like glass, and the one in her hair fuzzes with static over its fur-like surface. Her hair is getting a little mussed too, so she smooths it back down.

“So you’re twenty-one,” she notes, after a moment to do the math. That’s baby math, not like geometry with shapes and lengths. She smiles at Ms. Smith, then gets distracted by the flicker-flit of an angel swooping from streetlight to streetlight across the street.

“I like theater, I guess. Miss Greele says I could be in the play if I practiced, but I dunno. History is cool too. There’s a lot of it to learn.” That’s an easy question to answer. It’s the kind of question adults ask when they can’t think of anything else to ask about. That or ‘what do you want to be when you grow up’- oh. Wait, she asked that too.

“I want to be a… um… I… I’ve been in Millenium since I was a kid. We moved up here from Texas when I was really young.” Sequential order. Maybe it’ll give her a minute to think of an answer to the last one. The praise makes her a little flustered; it’s clear she isn’t used to being called a ‘smart’ kid.

“When I grow up, I want to be…” she starts off, trailing off like a fill-in-the-blank on one of those handouts teachers sometimes give. She tries to think of a career that would be fun but not too ambitious, because she’s not supposed to be too ambitious when she can’t get there. “An astro- no, I mean, um… an actress? Or an archaeologist.”

Those seem reasonable enough, right? She hurries to add, “But your job is really cool, too. Very… helpful. Who do you usually help? Like, what kinds of people?”

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Julieta takes the advice with a nod. She hadn’t really thought far enough ahead to be worried about income or a reliable career, and to be honest she isn’t sure she knows what exactly that means. Ms. Smith seems like she knows what she’s talking about, though, so maybe she should listen.

Her angel brushes against her arm again, and an impression fills her mind. Faith, that she can be whatever she wants to be. Julieta smiles to herself. With them, she’s sure any future job would be a cinch.

She hadn’t thought about paying for this, either, so Ms. Smith’s explanation is met with the same distracted bob of her head. She’s sure once her parents are back they’ll work out some way to repay her kindness, even if she doesn’t ask for money. A gift basket or something, like they give to teachers at the end of the school year. She wonders if Ms. Smith likes apples.

At the last question, Julieta gives Ms. Smith an incredulous glance, tinged just the slightest bit with a crooked smile. The kind of look that’s gotten her in trouble for being ‘smug.’ “I was really little when we got here. But I guess it’s just where there’s the most business. My dad does insurance for superhero- and villain-related damages.”

It always made sense to her, that they should live in the city of heroes. Maybe there were other reasons, but that’s what her parents always told her, and that was that. She had no reason to question further. It isn’t like she remembers Texas at all.

She caught Ms. Smith looking at her leg, and something over her shoulder. When she looks over her shoulder herself, there’s nothing there, so she shrugs and directs them around one last corner of the street. “You can ask, you know. I know you didn’t cause a lot of people think it’s rude, but it’s really not all that big of a deal once you get down to it.”

Julieta leans down to rap her knuckles against the brushed metal of her prosthetic without breaking her stride. “I was born this way, so there’s no story like you’re thinking.”

She seems in her element, up until the phone beeps in her hands and announces that they’ve ‘llegado a tu destino’ - reached their destination. Julieta slows to a stop with her feet dragging, the smile fading from her face as she looks at the silent house in front of her. “This is it.”

It’s the same as she left it, and it feels just like arriving home after school as she digs a lanyard out of her pocket and unlocks the door with the key hanging on the end of it. Only the air inside is still and quiet, and no one is cooking in the kitchen or sitting in the living room watching tv.

She slips out of her shoes as she holds the door open for Ms. Smith, and her mind sits as quiet and empty as the space around her. Even her angels are more of a muted presence, taking roost on the furniture and giving the impression of watching more than anything.

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Julieta leads the way through the house, glancing through every doorway they pass. The front door opens to a small foyer, with a little table for keys and mail and hooks on the wall for coats. Her parent’s coats both hang there, along with her own. Their car keys are still in the bowl. Their shoes are still by the door.

Past the foyer, the living room is off to the right of the entrance, with a couch, an armchair, and a TV circling a low coffee table. Two doors sit in adjacent corners, one opening out to a covered patio and the other a sliding door to the backyard. To the left is the kitchen, with a breakfast bar sectioning it off and circular dining table sitting in a fairly open space beside it.

Out of habit, Julieta snatches an apple from a bowl on the end of the counter, gently nudging aside one of her angels which is resting amid the fruit. She fidgets with the apple rather than eating it, glancing back over her shoulder at Kore and catching sight of her parents’ room, which sits adjacent to the patio. The door is slightly ajar. Through the crack in the door, a large bed and the edge of a desk are visible. The wall outside their room plays host to family portraits and, embarrassingly, framed pictures of Julieta from when she was younger.

Finally, through the dining room and off a short hallway to the right, there is Julieta’s room, with the door still wide open. The room beyond is decorated primarily in yellows and purples ranging from light dandelion and lavender to rich gold and mauve. Other splashes of color are scattered along the walls in the form of posters and across the floor as toys and school supplies.

Julieta stops in the mouth of the hallway, eyes fixed on the carpet just outside the door to her room. “They were here.”

Her voice sounds strange, distant. She looks across the hallway at the closed door to her parents’ office, and steps out of the way without moving any closer to her room. She doesn’t know what Kore might find, or what she might not. A couple of her angels hover around her, and one floats up near Kore’s shoulder as though to supervise.

She takes a deep breath. “They were here, and then they weren’t. I was in my room, right there. We were… arguing. Then they disappeared.”