Past Ghosts

"Sarah! Where have you been!?" Karen demanded as her stepdaughter walked into the kitchen, trailing mud behind her in great globs.

The young girl looked up with a pained, sullen expression. "Out, I was practicing." She said.

"Why didn't you come in when it started to rain?" Karen asked, looking again at the big brown puddles congealing on her linoleum. 

"I didn't notice," Sarah barked. Karen rolled her eyes at the girl's tone, pulling a handful of paper towels off the roll and bending to blot at the mess on the floor.

Sarah shifted, sending a wad of wet fabric into the older woman's face. "Sarah, please, watch out," she said tiredly. The girl was a huge bundle of hormones, a teenage girl in all her glory.

"Huh!" Sarah made a noise - something between a sigh and an exclamation - and stomped her size seven foot perilously close to her stepmother's hand. Karen yanked the appendage back quickly, rocking onto her heels and looking up at the dark haired girl.

"Sarah, please," she said. "I don't know what's up with you lately, but..." 

"What's up with me?" The girl asked, rearing back, eyes spitting fire.

Karen rolled her eyes. Sarah was always melodramatic. She listened to the girl's complaints - everything from having to go to school to walking in wet shoes, and just rolled her eyes at it all. She had learned long ago that there was no use arguing with the girl. Then her eyes popped open as she listened. 

"... no idea what I've been through! A Goblin King, a labyrinth... all to save Toby! And do I even get a thank you? No! I came that close to falling into the bog of eternal stench and you don't care! Sometimes I hate you!" She screeched, arms on hips, and stomped away, the sopping dress slapping against Karen's legs, wetting her pants. 

Karen hung back, open-mouthed, as Sarah clomped up the stairs and into her room, muttering all the way. 

"Oh no," she said, mechanically cleaning the mess on the floor, and tossing the paper towels in the garbage when she was done. 

She walked up the stairs slowly, into her room and locked the door. She collapsed, face first, onto the bed. Tears began to leak from her eyes, quiet sobs that were muffled by the thick bedspread that she made faithfully each morning. 

Images whirled through her head. "How could you?" She asked almost silently, into the emptiness of the room. She pictured the Goblin King as she had seen him, cold and proud, poised in front of the red-orange sky and the twisting maze of the labyrinth. 

She thought of her baby sister, the girl that she had wished away when she was sixteen, the girl that she had condemned to a week of life as a goblin. A girl who still was strangely reticent about taking showers. 

The tears flowed, grief for herself, for her sister, for a long-ago mistake that had, thankfully, had no real consequences. Blaise had re-appeared after a week of frantic searching, popping right back into the front yard, as if she had never been gone, but the guilt had remained.

And suddenly, Karen understood what was wrong with Sarah. Jareth, with his haughty airs and graceful, cruel mannerisms, had no doubt charmed her. Where his petty meanness had repulsed her, it would no doubt appeal to Sarah's sense of theatric melodrama. 

Oh, Sarah, she thought, the tears finally drying, leaving a sore ache in her chest and her heart. What have you done? 

Karen wiped her tears, smoothed her shirt, took a deep breath, and went to call her sister. The phone rang in Blaise's Idaho home, twice, three times.

"Hello?" Her sister answered, a brusque, professional response. 

"Blaise, I'm sorry."

                                                                    THE END