by Tara Taylor
Copyright © 2012 by Tara Taylor and Lorna Schultz Nicholson
Published and distributed in the United States by: Hay House, Inc.: www.hayhouse.com® • Published and distributed in Australia by: Hay House Australia Pty. Ltd.: www.hayhouse.com.au • Published and distributed in the United Kingdom by: Hay House UK, Ltd.: www.hayhouse.co.uk • Published and distributed in the Republic of South Africa by: Hay House SA (Pty), Ltd.: www.hayhouse.co.za • Distributed in Canada by: Raincoast: www.raincoast.com • Published in India by: Hay House Publishers India: www.hayhouse.co.in
Cover design: Charles McStravick • Interior design: Pamela Homan
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any mechanical, photographic, or electronic process, or in the form of a phonographic recording; nor may it be stored in a retrieval system, transmitted, or otherwise be copied for public or private use—other than for “fair use” as brief quotations embodied in articles and reviews—without prior written permission of the publisher.
The authors of this book do not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the authors is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the authors and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales, or persons living or deceased, is strictly coincidental.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2012939086
Tradepaper ISBN: 978-1-4019-3528-3
Digital ISBN: 978-1-4019-3529-0
15 14 13 12 4 3 2 1
1st edition, July 2012
Printed in the United States of America
Content
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Part Two
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Part Three
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
About the Authors
Part One
Chapter One
September 1997
My mind went blank.
I could see nothing but white.
No, please, no. Not again.
The guitar pick I held in my hand dropped to the floor, and I couldn’t move to pick it up. My body was frozen. My father’s old guitar, sitting in my lap, felt heavy and cold, like someone had suddenly placed a block of ice in my lap.
That is, until the spinning began. It usually happened right after my mind went blank and the cold set in. It was almost as if I were on a Ferris wheel at the fair and I couldn’t get off, even though I wanted to.
I don’t want to see. I don’t want this. What if it’s bad?
Spinning. Spinning. I kept spinning.
I squeezed my eyes shut until I was sure my face was creased like my favorite shirt when it had been in the drier for too long. I tried to breathe deeply, down into my stomach, to make it not happen. But there was no halting it or even slowing it down, and the swirling sucked me into a deep vortex, a tunnel. I had no control.
Sliding.
Down a long tube.
Until, suddenly, I stopped. This was it—the place I didn’t want to be, the place I had tried to avoid. Through no wish of my own, I was forced to look through a telescopic lens into a fishbowl—only I wasn’t seeing fish.
No. I’m not seeing pretty fish at all.
I was having a vision.
Two people were in my lens: a boy and a girl. Burke Brown, the star hockey player in my high school, who was dating my best friend, Lacey. I couldn’t tell who the girl was. Not Lacey. Burke grinned as he wrapped his arms around her. The girl’s back was to me, though she looked familiar, and I knew she was someone from our class. She wore a tight, black, short skirt and an equally tight, turquoise T-shirt, both of which accentuated her curves.
Burke tilted his face down, and the girl stood on her tiptoes, reaching up and putting her arms around his neck, her T-shirt pulling away from her skirt to show bare skin and a small butterfly tattoo etched into the curve of her back. Their lips met; they kissed, long and hard, the heat between them igniting the air, creating sizzling sparks that I could actually see above their heads. The noise of the sparks crackled. I was watching and listening in 3-D.
I felt like a voyeur. This wasn’t for me to see.
Only I am seeing it.
I wanted to turn away, but I had nowhere to turn. From past experience, I knew my visions had 360-degree powers.
The kiss ended, and the girl slowly pivoted and gazed in my direction with droopy, sexy eyelids, lipstick smeared across her face. Oh, gawd. It couldn’t be. But it was.
Amber McKinnon.
Lacey’s worst enemy.
The vision dissolved. I was back to blank for a second. Then, like the snap of a finger, I was once again in my purple-painted bedroom with the black furniture, my guitar nestled comfortably on my lap. The cold was gone. The white was gone. But the vision was carved in my brain. I buried my head in my hands as my body trembled and shook. A massive headache launched itself in my frontal lobe, and I pressed my fingers to my forehead, rubbing frantically, trying to make it go away.
At least you didn’t see anyone die.
“Shut up!” I had this mean female inner voice that talked to me all the time. And then I had this soothing man’s voice that also came to me. They were totally opposite and made me think I was going crazy.
“I never see people die, stupid. I only see hints.“
I threw a pillow across the room, hitting my vintage Jim Morrison poster, the magenta and white psychedelic one where he looked as if he had wings growing out of his back. I loved the Doors, even though I knew no one else my age listened to them. Morrison’s poetry just spoke to me, and sometimes it calmed me.
“Meow.” Cedar, my black cat, sat up, licked her paws, and stretched as only a cat can, with her back arched and her tail spiked. Then she looked at me with wary eyes.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, scratching her behind the ears. “I didn’t mean to scare you. Don’t leave me alone, okay?”
As if she understood, Cedar gracefully walked in a circle before she lowered her body and curled into a ball, purring loudly. I petted her soft back. I wished I could forget things as easily as Cedar could and let my emotions fade in one purr. I slipped the guitar over my head and stuck it under my bed. Alone in my bedroom, I liked to strum out songs that I tried to write. The ones I made up to make me feel … make me feel what? Part of the world.
Or outside the world?
Face it, Indie, you will always be on the outside.
“Don’t,” I whispered. “Don’t talk to me. I just want to be a normal seventeen-year-old. I want this all to go away so I can have a boyfriend.”
Indie, this is not a bad thing.
This time the voice was the soft whisper of the kind man. I had no idea who he was or why he spoke to me, but he always tried to soothe me. He was nice. But today I didn’t feel like
being nice back.
“Yes. It. Is. It’s awful.”
Sometimes one must accept—
“Go away! You leave me alone, too.”
I put my hands to my ears and rocked back and forth, my bed creaking underneath me. “Lalalala.”
I kept rocking. I was always going to be on the outside because I had visions, visions that came true. And I’d been having them since I was little. When they first started, I was naïve enough to think that everyone around me also saw and heard things. I didn’t know that other people weren’t like me. Like that time with my friend Anna.
I had been nine, and I was with Anna at church. We were dressed in pretty dresses, and we sat on the hard wooden church pews, our legs dangling below us, not quite touching the kneeling bench. I glanced around at all the people and the rainbow of colors above their heads as the minister talked on and on. I was supposed to be listening, but all I could see were the bright colors and … the pink and red hamster cage in my room. Suddenly my stomach felt sick. Was something wrong with my hamster, Teresa? Sadness swept over me and covered me like a heavy, scratchy blanket. My mom and I had gone to the pet store and bought the pretty cage to match my Strawberry Shortcake covers. And I’d picked Teresa because I liked that she was gray and brown, instead of just brown. I fidgeted until the minister stopped talking and we were excused. On the way out of church, I whispered to Anna, “Something is wrong with Teresa.”
When we got home, I ran to my room and stopped as soon as I saw her lying frozen stiff in her cage.
Anna screamed. Then she turned to me and asked, “What did you do to her?”
“Nothing.” My voice was quiet. Looking back, I now realize how calm my voice sounded. Unlike Anna, I didn’t seem surprised at all.
“You’re scary! I want to go home.”
My eyes pricked with tears. Did she really think I was scary? Why did she think that?
I stopped rocking and looked at the ceiling. “Why am I like this?” I was no longer a kid, but the same things still happened to me.
“Why did I have to see Burke with Amber? Why?” I yelled. Then I looked down and spoke softly. “I’d rather see a dead hamster.”
I flopped back on my bed and stared at the ceiling again. Was Burke messing around on Lacey? Please, be wrong.
But I knew the vision would be true.
If only this vision wouldn’t come true. Just this once, could I get lucky and not have it come true?
I got up, went to my dresser, and pulled out a sketch pad. I flipped it open to the page where I had doodled Lacey Hughes and Burke Brown together in black scrolling letters inside a big flaming red heart. Little peach-colored cherubs and sparkling silver and gold stars made with a special glitter pen surrounded the drawing. This handiwork had been done at the start of grade nine.
When Lacey and I started high school, each of us picked a guy to like, and she had picked Burke. We had sat cross-legged on the floor of her bedroom, with paper, scissors, colored markers, pencil crayons, and glitter sticks scattered happily and haphazardly around us, like we were back in elementary school. That was the last time we had done crafts, as we called it, and we promised not to tell anyone because we had just started our high school journey and needed to act mature. We’d giggled as we sketched the hearts, dreaming of the day when we would have boyfriends. Lacey and I had been friends since kindergarten. We were five; she had brunette hair, and mine was blonde. She was tall; I was short. She was outgoing, and I was what teachers called “shy.”
“Burke!” I exclaimed that day. “Lacey, he’s the hottest guy in school.”
“Might as well dream big,” she’d replied, as she haughtily lifted her chin, having drawn a heart around his name.
Then she grinned, and suddenly my brain had felt like a computer downloading information. My eyes glazed over, my mind went blank, and I blurted out, “Red. You’ll wear a red shirt the day he asks you out.”
“Oh my god,” she’d squealed. “It’s going to come true! You’ve seen it.” Then she’d smiled and wiggled her eyebrows up and down. “Red checked shirt? Red turtleneck? Or maybe … red sexy tank?” She did a little dance with her shoulders.
I heard the word tank in my head. I grinned. “Red tank, ‘cause it’ll be spring.”
Then I had jumped up, and pretending to hold a microphone in my hand, I started belting out, “There goes her baby! And his name is Burke!”
Lacey rolled onto her side, laughing hysterically. “You crack me up.”
I kept singing and dancing around the room. Lacey kept laughing.
Then she jumped up, made her fist into a microphone, and started to sing along with me. After a few minutes of off-key screeching, we both fell onto her bed in a fit of giggles. Lacey was my only friend who knew about my visions, and she accepted them as a part of me. I loved her for that.
As we lay on her bed, side by side, our shoulders touching, staring at her stucco ceiling, she asked, “Is he really going to ask me out?”
“Yup,” I said with conviction. “He sure is.”
Blond, muscular, and a stud hockey player, Burke was every girl’s dream. He played center on his hockey team, and his photo was always somewhere on the Ottawa Citizen‘s sports page after one of his games. He walked with a swagger, wore a hockey jacket, and was the star of his OHL Major Junior Team. In my city, and especially in my high school, hockey boys got perks. Dressed in his gear, leaning on his stick, looking serious and tough, his photo was also displayed in every Royal Bank in the city.
In the spring of grade 11, he finally asked Lacey out. Sure enough, that day she’d worn a red sexy tank top. It had taken Lacey almost two school years of dressing like everyone else, wearing the same makeup, doing her hair just right, and attending the “in” parties to get Burke to notice her. She’d also honed her skills as the star setter on the volleyball team. The combination of style and athletics made her one of the most popular girls in the school, and now they were a total power couple.
Today, many months later and after a full summer of romance, what was I to do with this vision? Tell her and ruin everything? She was in love with Burke and would be devastated. Maybe I was wrong about him and Amber. It was just a thought….
You must learn to trust. It was the kind man’s voice again.
“Stop talking to me!”
My throat dried up. I tried to swallow but tasted only dry dust. I covered my ears to the voice that haunted me, even though it was always nice to me no matter how I yelled at it.
“Okay, I’m sorry. I know you’re trying to be nice. But please, I’m begging, leave me alone.”
There was a knock on my door. “Hey, little sister, who you talking to in there?”
It was Brian! And he was mocking me again.
“See?” I hissed to the air. “Leave me alone.” Then I said loudly, “Cedar.”
“Yeah. Right you are. Cuckoo crazy girl.”
Sometimes Brian barged in and made a joke about me talking to myself, but today I heard his footsteps heading down the hall to his room. He loved standing outside my door, listening to me talk to no one. He thought it was funny. Ha ha. So funny. Brian was older than me by two years and had finished high school. He was working now, at a popular hamburger joint called Licks. He was thinking about his future in the restaurant business, but to save money he still lived at home. Although we both had blond hair and blue eyes, our personalities couldn’t have been more different. Loud—and what I would call obnoxious—Brian had friends from all different groups. He had jock friends, musician friends, and geek friends, and just … tons of friends. Everyone loved him because he was the life of the party. Girls loved him, too. There was always a new girlfriend at the house.
I exhaled, forcing the air out so that my lips vibrated. Then I ran my hands through my hair and listened to make sure that Brian was indeed gone. I heard his bedroom door slam and sighed. I’m sure he hated my issues as much as I did. Behind closed doors, every family has their “stuff,” and
ours was and still is me.
I slowly turned the page of this book that Lacey and I had madeto see another heart.
I would never reach my dream if I couldn’t stop the visions. This heart had been colored with purple marker, not the traditional red associated with love, and the names were written in green block letters. Angels dressed in gray and black circled the heart, and there were no glitter stars. The two drawings were polar opposites: one dark, one light.
I traced my finger along the word John.
Then I let my finger slowly cruise along my own name. That day in grade nine, I hadn’t chosen John. I’d chosen Dale Anderson just to pick someone, to feel part of the high school experience. Then last year, John was transferred to our school.
I closed my eyes. I’d been reliving the first time I saw him over and over and over since it happened. I couldn’t help myself.
I’d been sitting in English class, at the back of the room, of course. It was “hockey jersey day” at school, and most of the kids were wearing some sort of loud hockey jersey with a huge logo on the front and the number and name of their favorite hero on the back. It all felt so conformist, and I hated it. I refused to play the part and wear a stupid jersey. As I sat there brooding, slouching, and doodling, a waft of fresh soap and some type of musky, masculine woody aftershave combined with the familiar smell of cigarette smoke hit my nostrils. My body tensed and my stomach flipped and my breathing picked up speed and then … he passed by my desk. I tried hard not to stare.
Who was he?
I’d never seen him before. He had to be new to our school. I swear my heart stopped beating for a second. He wore jeans and a nondescript gray hoodie and … no jersey. His flip-flops slapped the floor, and his frayed jeans dragged along the tiles. Nobody wore flip-flops to school. Talk about not conforming. He sat in the desk kitty-corner to me.
Who was this guy?
My throat dried up, and sweat started beading on my upper lip. I slid deeper into my seat and lowered my head, letting my hair hang in front of my eyes, just so I could catch a glimpse of him without him knowing I was staring. Right away I was drawn to his strong, chiseled looks, his square jaw, straight posture, and wide shoulders. No way did he look like a jock, though. He was lean, almost skinny, but he had this strong, long look. And he had unruly thick, dark, curly hair that was so incredibly cool because it was wild and unkempt and yet still all in the right place. I continued doodling, my pen ripping right through my paper because I pressed so hard. Why was I still staring at him? This was crazy and totally stupid. But he was intriguing, because I just knew he wasn’t a conformist. He was different, like me, perhaps. The teacher started talking, droning on and on, and I didn’t hear one word until a question was posed to the class about the book we were supposed to be reading and he put up his hand.