Chapter Text
Maria Santiago is a precocious child, everyone who had ever met her would agree. But, and this cannot be denied, she is also rather strange.
There’s no single concrete thing about her that can be pointed at and said of, “Aha! This is it. This is where the youngest daughter of the sprawling Santiago family differs from normal children.”
It’s more of a sense. A creepy crawly sense that most people ignore after they grow to such an age that they can agree with their parents before them that monsters in the closet are only a product of shadows, messily hanging clothes, and an overactive imagination.
Latisha Runcorn—Maria’s sometimes babysitter, always neighbor, and supplier of contraband marshmallows on fire pit nights—adores the child and won’t hear a word against her from anyone, including but not limited to her boyfriend, Dwayne, a basketball star at their high school, her parents, or her friends, all of whom are introduced to her cute little neighbor at some point.
Latisha honestly likes Maria and is never able to fully explain why. She shrugs when asked and replies, “I don’t know. She’s a cute kid. How come you don’t like her?”
And whoever she’s speaking to is never able to explain either. Just:
“She gives me the heebie-jeebies.”
“She says the queerest things sometimes.”
“It’s…Tish, she’s off,okay, not like retarded or anything, but I swear there’s something wrong with her.”
And once, memorably:
“I babysat her before you. I don’t know what she did or how she did it but my pen exploded and ruined my essay and she stared at me the whole time like she knew it was going to happen.”
And also:
“Josephina wouldn’t come near me for a week after that kid gave me a hug.”
(Josephina, it should be noted, is Latisha’s ex-friend Becky’s cat, Needless to say, they are not friends for much longer after that particular conversation. There are jokes and then there’s taking things too far.)
It isn’t that Latisha doesn’t see what people say about Maria because she does. It had just never seemed like such a bad thing. Kids should be allowed to be kids, after all. They weren’t going to (and, indeed, shouldn’t) fit in some uniform mold of Girl, Age 6.
That’d be silly.
Maria has personality. Soul. And Latisha, for one, enjoys her company. Who cared what anyone else says?
She remembers one time she had been sitting on the Santiago’s living room couch, psychology textbook laying open in her lap, trying to study for an upcoming test while Maria slumps over the coffee table, laboriously drawing on printer paper with her markers.
They had been working in companionable silence for a while, when Maria breaks it with an abrupt question.
“What’s stark mean?”
Latisha glances up from her book to find Maria paused, marker in hand totally still, while she stares at her sitter with big, green eyes.
“Well, it’s a contrast between things that are very different. If you had a white sheet of paper,” Latisha nods toward the scattered sheets on the table and Maria’s gaze flicks down, “and a black piece of paper right beside it, the color change would be stark.”
She nods, pleased with her description and an example that Maria will be able to understand. Take that SAT vocabulary section.
“Mama told me it meant plain,” Maria says, still staring. It isn’t a challenge of Latisha’s definition, so much as a flat statement of fact.
Latisha smiles at her. “Your Mama’s right too. Sometimes words have more than one meaning. There are lots of them. Like…”
“Pretty,” Maria supplies when Latisha trails off thinking. “You’re pretty. And, it’s pretty good. It means beautiful and, and very, right?”
“Depending on how you use it,” Latisha confirms, impressed. Maria had always been quick to pick new concepts up, but that had been fast, even for her. “There’s also more than one word that can mean the same thing. You’ll learn about those in school.”
Maria’s head tilts, a little. “Are there more?”
“More what?”
“Things that stark can mean.”
“Obvious, maybe?” Latisha watches Maria’s face for an indication that she’s on the right track at least. “I don’t…think there are any more.”
And there it is. A tiny crease between her dark eyebrows, Maria’s pouty lips pulling down in a slightly displeased frown.
“What do you think it means?” Latisha asks because that’s the correct thing to say, she knows that much.
“I don’t think it’s real yet.” Maria sketches a few reluctant-looking curves on her paper. Her eyes are a shade darker than normal.
Latisha nudges aside her book because this is her temporary charge in a mood and that deserves her full attention.
Carefully weighing her words, Latisha says, “Just because it isn’t real doesn’t mean it can’t have meaning.”
“Yet,” Maria mutters. “It’s not real yet.”
“Okay,” Latisha agrees, and keeps pushing because she’s on the right track. “But when it is, what’ll it mean?”
“Lots of stuff. Not plain. Putting things together. Showing people the way. It’s going to mean…loud and quiet and shiny hard and shiny soft and wind and love and.”
Maria blinks at Latisha and repeats, “Lots of stuff.”
She smiles, her lips pulling wide to bare her straight white teeth. “What are they called?”
Latisha is largely used to Maria bouncing from topic to topic as she takes interest in them but this is a bit outside of Maria-grade normal non sequiturs. “What are what called?”
“The words that mean the same thing even though they’re different.”
“Oh, synonyms.”
“Synonyms,” Maria pronounces the word slowly. “I might like them. You know, there’s a word for the other way around too, when words mean more than one thing.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” The word is said with relish. “Riddles. When is a stark… stark, but not stark?”
“I don’t know,” Latisha admits.
“When it’s a stark.” Maria giggles for a second at the joke only she understands, then says, “Thank you.”
And she goes back to her coloring.
“Well, you’re welcome.” And Latisha goes back to her studying. It’s the way things were sometimes between them.
“You’re studying the wrong chapter,” Maria says after a moment. “I saw in your agenda.”
Latisha checks the agenda (currently closed on the seat cushion beside her), checks the chapter, and then fights down a vicious swear. Can’t be saying words like that around impressionable young minds. Especially this impressionable young mind.
“Thank you, Maria,” she sighs.
“Don’t mention it,” the girl replies.
Perhaps thirty minutes after Latisha has been studying the correct chapter in her psychology textbook, Maria gets up and starts putting her coloring instruments away.
“All done?” Latisha asks and Maria nods. “Can I see?”
Maria thinks about it, shrugs, and nods again. Latisha reaches forward to pick the paper up so she can examine it at close range. She prods her glasses up her nose and reminds herself again to clean them.
In the middle of the page, in a bold letter font that looks deliberate, is the word ‘STARK’, colored a dark blue. It’s surrounded, like Maria said, by lots of stuff. There’s a UFO in one corner and what might be a rocket in another.
There’s a lopsided cube, sky blue, not the dark blue of the STARK, beside the flying saucer and a black box next to the rocket. A pink heart hovers in between the two. Underneath everything is a sea of…lava?
Maria had taken a red marker and colored the most of bottom of the page in an unbroken scarlet scribble.
“Maria, what’s this?” Latisha points and Maria glances over.
“Oh, that’s blood,” she says casually. Pause. “I forgot, stark’s going to mean that too.”
“There’s…an awful lot of it.”
“Yes,” Maria agrees evenly, smiling her odd smile. “There will be.”
“Huh.” Latisha studies the elaborate drawing for a minute longer and then asks, “You want me to put this on the fridge?”
“Yes, please.”
“You got it, kiddo.”
(In an unrelated note, Latisha gets an A on her psych test. The bonus question had contained material from the chapter she had previously assumed she wasted her time reading.)
The next time Latisha is called over to babysit, the drawing is not on the fridge.
She finds it taped to the wall above Maria’s bed, to the left of the window that overlooks the yard. It never falls and never moves again.
She doesn’t really think about it.
(a childish voice asking, can stark mean anything else? so sure that it would)
Except, maybe, sometimes.