The glittering white walls were painted over with a sparkling blue paint, done in all sorts of different shapes, littering the walls in an eerie…language, Clarence guessed. The rug on the floor had a pentacle within a circle, with a variety of shapes between the spokes, all done in the same baby blue as the wall symbols and quilt.  His lips dragged back over his teeth in a grimace.  The Barbara Ann Keeler he knew was a sweet little Christian girl who went to church on Sundays, wore neat skirts every day of the week, polished out the scuffs on her shiny saddle shoes and got straight-As in each of her classes.  There were no pentagrams on her journals or swastikas stitched into her sweaters, but maybe it was all a façade to keep the thriving community of Dawson, Mississippi from the truth.  The soles of his Chucks made a quiet tapping over the polished hardwood as the boy approached the dresser.  The journals were filled with more gibberish, mixed with her Arithmetic journal and her English writings.  Rather than books, the bound things were more like tombs; heavy, leather-bound and ancient.  Clarence put down one written in what he could only guess was Greek, shaking his head.  All of the dangling jewelry looked like solid, polished silver, each one with a different carving in it that made less sense than the last.  
Turning around, Clarence covered his eyes and rubbed his temples as he approached the bed with its glittering, cast-iron frame.  His shin smacked into the bed and sent a merciless spike of pain up his leg.  Hitting the frame knocked him off-balance, and he tumbled onto the bed.  Clarence had to bite down on his lip to keep back the swear bubbling on his tongue.  How many times had Barbara done the same clumsy maneuver?  When Clarence blinked his brown eyes open, he saw more of the same gibberish stitched into the quilt that littered the walls.  A gasp wrenched from his lips and he twisted around, scrambling on the bed’s surface.  The ceiling had an infinitely more complex circle-framed painting on it, its lines criss-crossing in the shape of a star, symbols written all around it. “Oh, now hell no!” Clarence rolled out of bed, kicking up and running across the hardwood, out of Satan’s sparkling pit of light blue demonspeak symbols.  
As he barreled down the hallway, the lanky teen nearly took down petite Barbara, whose hands caught his shoulders and steadied him.  “Hey there, Clarence!”  Barbara moved her head around, trying to catch Clarence’s panicked brown eyes with her mismatched ones.  “Where’s the fire?”  And anger, hot anger, frothed and bubbled, making him draw up to his full height, with stiff limbs and curled-up fists.  The silver bracelet jingling on her right wrist caught his eye, displaying an assortment of religious symbols, a pentagram, a cross and a Star of David the only three Clarence could rightly recognize.  The blonde gripped the brunette’s wrist and felt her twitch and shift as he pulled her away.  The light in her eyes shifted, the bright innocence replaced by something much more basic.  Her smile flattened into a thin, tight line before she regained control and had the graciousness to appear shocked. 
“What the hell is this?” Spittle flew at Barbara’s face as he shook her arm, making the charms jingle. 
“It’s my bracelet, Clarence, what-“
“You Satan-loving witch, don’t act like you don’t know what I’m talking about!”  the girl’s eyes darkened, the shocked expression fading out to a blank slate. 
“Clarence,” Barbara’s even voice sent a jittering chill up his spine, resting in a pricking tingle at the base of his neck, raising all of the little hairs there.  “Just what do you mean by callin’ me a ‘Satanic Witch’?” Although it was Clarence’s broad hand wrapped around her wrist, the lines on her face and ice in her voice chilled his bones.  He dropped his hand and released her wrist, where an angry red mark remained.  Her hand flexed and relaxed, fingers curling in and out, one by one.  She stepped forward, the saddle shoe clicking on the hardwood, sound sharp through the air.  
Scampering back, Clarence glanced back toward her room, the door still ajar, his heart hammering so hard he was sure she could hear it.  “You’re a demon. A demon from hell with all those symbols on your walls, to summon Satan from the pit and kill us all!” the words came out in a rushed breath, trembling and convictionless between them.  But at the same time, Barbara stopped.  She straightened, regarded the boy and huffed a laugh.  
“Clarence, honey…” She started, hands on her hips, shaking her head and looking at the ground.  “You been in my room, huh?”  Clarence’s back was against the wall and his brown eyes watching her in trepidation.  She reached out her hand and he jerked back as though her flesh were made of flames. His lips moved in a fast and quiet prayer as he inched away from her down the hall.  “Are…Are you prayin’ at me?”  
The volume of his frantic prayer rose, “Dear Lord, please protect me from this Satan’s Witch before me as she entraps me in her home-“
Barbara held her arms out to her sides, “You ain’t gotta stay, dumbass!”  When he continued to pray, the girl grabbed the collar of his shirt and yanked him into her room, throwing his body on the bed with practiced ease.  Clarence yelped, and she smacked him.  When he fought to get up, Barbara wrestled him back down, pinning his body to the quilt.  “Clarence Reeves, be still and let me explain!”  
“NO! No, I will not be a ritual sacrifice! Help! Help!”  Although the boy writhed and jerked, Barbara held him fast and made sure Clarence was going no further than a few inches.  Her fingers tangled in his blonde hair and jerked his head to the side so he could see the rug.
“Clarence, that is a demon trap.  These symbols painted on my walls are called sigils.  They keep me safe. Y’hear me?”
“How do I know you ain’t a liar?” Clarence panted. Sometime during the scuffle, his nose had been popped.  Blood trickled slowly down his face and smeared on the bed, staining the sigil-embroidered quilt.
“Because I go to church every Sunday.  Ain’t no demon can walk on God’s hallowed ground, dumbass!”  Clarence stopped struggling and just looked at her, brows furrowed.  Barbara’s cheeks were hardly even flushed.  There was not a fleck of sweat, her waves were still full and abundant and her body was firm, like iron.  The angle of his eyes was straining.  They closed and Clarence relaxed and regained his breath. “You gonna behave if I let you go?” Barbara asked, her voice soft like goose down and kittens.  He nodded and was released.  Clarence sat up and swung his legs over the edge of the bed, wiping his nose on his wrist.  When the bed didn’t shift, he turned about to see Barbara standing and flipping through a heavy, leather-bound journal; the one where pages can be added and removed and changed around.  Apparently, the girl had moved as he had, making it to where he never noticed she was gone.  Prior to this…day of reckoning betwixt the two, Barbara had a way of disappearing.  When they went to their lockers, Clarence could sometimes turn to find her gone.  She would time the shutting of her locker to the exact moment someone else would shut theirs, erasing her locker’s sound from his notice.  Or, Barbara would slip through the crowd, more vapor than solid human flesh.  In one of the journals he had found on her nightstand, it had said “Make yourself untraceable” and so she did.
“What’s that?”
Barbara’s blue eye was the only visible one as she glanced down and made notes in her neat, curly-q handwriting.  The only sound in the room for forty-seven seconds was the pen scratching against the paper before her lips parted and she answered. “It’s my journal,” Barbara’s response was barely a breath.  Her hands neatly slipped the silver pen in place and shut the journal, snapping the leather strap shut with a pop.