“Look out!” I warned.
Blue eyes, framed with circles of exhaustion, flashed behind longish black bangs. At the last second, he’d jerked sideways and I slid past. Just as I regained my footing and turned around, he’d snagged the ball with lightning speed and sent it back to me, then continued down the hall without a word.
In the brief glance he’d passed my way that day, I’d noticed his hollowed cheeks and the blank “no one cares, why should I give a shit” look. Since then, I’d heard rumors that he’d been kicked out of his last school, so I’d tried to be nice and say “hey” to him in the hall a couple of times, but he’d ignored my attempts, brushing past me as if I hadn’t spoken.
From his first day at school, he’d parked in the back of the classroom and scribbled on a notepad, ignoring everyone. And here he’d done it again. I was just about to yell, “Hey, rude guy,” when I saw ear bud wires dangling in front of him. Had I missed seeing them in the past too?
As he started to pass me, the wind blew his unbuttoned flannel shirt open, revealing a vintage black Rush t-shirt. Cool. A band with deep lyrics. The dark circles under his eyes had faded somewhat, but his gaze never engaged with anyone’s, like he totally existed in his own world. I moved to tap him on the shoulder, but he jerked out of my reach before I connected. What was his deal? Frowning, I lowered my hand.
“Sorry,” he mumbled. Pulling the ear buds out, he shook his black hair away from his eyes. “What’d you say?”
His deep voice stunned me. Though I wasn’t sure what I expected him to sound like, husky wasn’t it. Maybe grittier to go with his indie look. “What’s happening?”
“Bomb threat.”
“Are you serious?”
“Someone called it in.” His blue eyes held mine longer than he’d ever done before.
My shades were dark, but I felt as if he could see right past the lenses. God, I hope my eyes didn’t give me away. Curling my nails into my palms, I tried to keep my expression and voice even. “As in…someone called in a bomb threat?”
He shoved his hands back in his jeans and continued to stare. Was he expecting me to say something else? To confess I already knew the truth? Not in this lifetime.
“Don’t know,” he finally said with a shrug. “I just heard the principal say school’s cancelled and others talking about a bomb.”
Exhaling a pent-up breath, I forced a calm tone. “Thanks.”
When he walked away, I called after him, “I’m Nara. What’s your—” but he’d already put his ear buds back in as he headed toward an old black Mustang in need of a paint job.
“Off!” he barked at a black bird sitting on the car’s roof, then shook his fist as it took flight.
Guess it left a present. As I snickered, a blonde girl from my Spanish class passed me. “Hey, school’s canceled,” I told her. “Some kind of a bomb threat.”
“A bomb?” Her eyes widened. “Thanks for letting me know.”
While she hurried back toward her car, I tried to recall her name. Sarah? No Shannon? Something like that. I could name every girl on my soccer team, but outside of that realm, I wasn’t the best at remembering names.
“Nara,” someone called out when I opened my car door.
Sitting in the long line of cars exiting the school, my friend Lainey leaned out her window, her auburn hair swirling in the wind. She held up her cell phone and a couple seconds later my cell beeped with a text. I’ll call you later.
I waved, then climbed into my car, welcoming the lingering heat to chase away the chill in the air.
As I set my sunglasses on the rubber mat on my dash, I glanced in the rearview mirror. The guy was still standing beside his Mustang. He’s not looking at you. But when I pulled out of the parking lot and his attention followed my direction, I glanced away from the mirror, worry echoing in my mind. He knows I’m the one who called.
***
Setting my backpack on our coffee table, I grabbed the remote and clicked on the TV. Our school was the “breaking” news and a blonde reporter held a mic in front of our principal.
“Principal Wallum, can you give us an update?”
Mr. Wallum pushed his thick, black-rimmed glasses up on his bulbous nose and squinted at the bright camera light. “A bomb tip was called in at five this morning—”
“So it wasn’t a bomb threat then. Someone tipped the police off?”
My cell phone started ringing Dokken’s Alone Again, and I turned the TV down, then quickly dug through my backpack.
Emailing and texting were my mom’s main form of communication, so hearing the ring tone instead of a text message ping was surprising. Mom cared about my grades and which colleges I was thinking of applying to. Otherwise she depended on me to keep myself together, because…I always had. She had no idea I had my own way of coping. No one did. (Well, except Gran Corda, my seventy-eight-year-old semi-lucid grand aunt, who sequesters herself in a retirement home and has this to say about her name: “Corda’s short for Cordial. I—I mean Cordelia. Or maybe it’s Corduroy. Wait, it’s….well, hell’s bells…I can’t remember.” I’d confided in Gran the year my dreams first started, thinking, “There, I’ve told someone. She’ll forget the moment I walk out the door.” Oddly, that was one thing she never forgot.)
Pushing my cell phone to my ear, I glanced at the TV. “Hey, Mom.”
“Inara, I just heard the news. Where are you?”
The shakiness in her voice startled me. Mom was always in control.
“Inara?”
“I’m fine. They sent us home before school even started.”
“I’m glad you’re safe.” She exhaled, then cleared her throat before her tone went back to the steady one I was used to. “They said on the news that a student might’ve planted the bomb.”
My eyes darted back to the screen, where Mr. Wallum was nervously adjusting his bowtie. He always looked like he’d stepped right out of a dusty old library book. “Seriously? I haven’t had a chance to listen to the news.”
“They found an explosive rigged to detonate inside one of the school lockers. Thank God it was caught before school started.”
I winced. The thought that a student could’ve been blown to bits made my stomach queasy. Not to mention all the other people who might’ve gotten hurt. My instincts had been right. “Yeah. Me too.” I turned off the TV and tension released between my shoulders.
“Well, I’m due in another meeting,” Mom started to say when my phone beeped.
“That’s Lainey calling. See you later.” Clicking over, I switched ears as I flopped onto our tartan-patterned couch that desperately needed to be updated to something from this decade. “Hey.”
“Did you hear the news? About the bomb?” Lainey sounded breathless.
“Yeah, I just saw—”
“Ohmygoditwasinthelockerrightnexttomine! My dad said they’re investigating a couple of suspects. Both are people from school. Can you believe it? I want to kiss whoever called in that tip. I could be in a billion pieces right now!”
Smirking, I blew her a silent kiss. Lainey had been my best friend since she walked up to me on the first day of middle school and announced, “Hi, I’m Lainey O’Neal and we’re going to be besties, I just know it.” That’s what I loved about Lainey. If she wanted something, she marched in and made it happen. Rejection/failure didn’t compute. Not only had she given me my nickname, Nara, but she’d always been a great source of information. When it came to the latest news, she knew the scoop, since her father was a Central Virginia police officer.
“That was a close call,” I agreed.
“No freakin’ joke. Dad said that anyone within fifteen feet of that locker could’ve been killed or seriously injured.”
“Good news all the way around then. Since school’s out, I guess that means practice is cancelled too,” I said.
“Nope. Miranda just called. Coach talked to Principal Wallum about practice. Even though the fall soccer program isn’t ‘officially’ part o
f the school, Mr. Wallum loves that we’re undefeated, so he said we could use one of the back fields furthest from the main building while the police conducted their investigation.”
Miranda always conveniently forgot to pass on team news to me. As team captain, she hated that I sometimes ignored her “orders” at practice. I didn’t like the sway she seemed to have over my teammates (they were the hive-mind to her queen bee). But right now I didn’t have time to be annoyed. I hadn’t really thought through what having a “surprising day” would be like. I’d just liked the idea of it. I curled my fingers tight around the cell.
The bomb incident in my dream had woken me before I could see how my day would turn out. Once the disaster was averted, I’d planned to ride out the remaining few hours in the predictable confines of my home, where the biggest surprises were when Mom would be home and what we’d have for dinner. That would’ve been a novelty. But now I was going to have to play soccer? Be calm. It’s just practice. Not a game with more on the line. You’ll be back to your old self tomorrow.
“You there, Nara? My dad says it’s safe to practice.”
“Yeah, I’m here.” Silently freaking out.
“The football team will be practicing in the back fields, too,” she sing-songed.
Lainey liked to tease me about Jared Polenski. I’d been crushing on the blond quarterback since last year. Well, me and every other girl in school. “Just because I watch him practice doesn’t mean he’s even aware I exist.”
“He’s seen us there checking the team out, and I heard him say you’re tall.”
Five eight isn’t that tall. “Great, he thinks I’m an Amazon.”
“Actually, he said you’re tall for a soccer player. Just pointing out that he knows you’re that star goalie, who never lets a ball get past—oh, that’s Sophia calling. Gotta go. See you at four.”
Star goalie, who never lets a ball get past.
If Lainey only knew the truth.
Chapter Two
You know that feeling of déjà vu people talk about? I live it. Every. Single. Day. I’ve dreamed my entire next day since I was seven, so it just became a part of me, like the small scar on my forehead, the dimple on my left cheek and my wide smile.
It’s not like I can predict the future or try to win the lottery. That’s not how my dreams work. I only dream about things I will personally experience in my life…well, a day before they actually happen. That’s it. I just get one day ahead. Which sometimes makes life pretty routine and predictable, but there’s also an upside. Imagine knowing you’re going to have a bad hair day, or that you’ll burn the toast for the eighty-zillionth time, or that Mount Everest will appear on the tip of your nose a half hour after lunch. That’s when a ponytail, cereal and Benzoyl Peroxide come in handy.
Knowing what’s coming can be reassuring somehow. Not to mention, it sure helps with exams, dealing with friend stuff, and definitely playing soccer goalie. Who wouldn’t want to know which direction the ball would be kicked before it left the player’s foot?
I’ve lived with this odd gift for nine years now, which hasn’t always been easy. There’ve been times when I’ve woken in tears from a friend’s betrayal or been crushed by a slam from a boy I thought was the cutest guy in the entire middle school. “Nara likes me? She’s a dog.” I’d overheard him tell his friend outside the boys’ bathroom.
Growing up, I often choose to avoid the unpleasant stuff I know is coming. Avoiding situations doesn’t stop them from happening, but the “out of sight/out of mind” concept mostly works for me. Every once in a while, though, I’ve challenged a dream.
When I was eight, I’d dreamed that a boy I really liked had given another girl in our class a heart-shaped box of chocolates. All he’d given me was a lousy punch-out Valentine card. As soon as I’d woken that morning, I’d desperately rubbed my Magic Crystal Ball (a birthday present from Aunt Sage, who was clueless about my gift).
“Will he really give her that heart box of candy?” I’d asked the shiny ball. Digital words spelled out across the surface in reply, “Not sure, try again”. I immediately rubbed it again and got “Concentrate and ask once more”. One more vigorous scrub gave me, “Try again later”. So frustrating! At school that day, instead of going to the bathroom to avoid witnessing the hurtful scene, I’d stayed and hoped. And had my heart ripped apart all over again.
My dreams had never been wrong.
Not once.
Which was why today was so out of the norm. I didn’t usually change the course of things for people around me. I’d tried once when I was seven, not long after my dreams began. In my dream, a girl named Sadie had fallen from the monkey bars and broken her arm. The next day, as Sadie sprinted off toward the monkey bars, I caught up with her and asked her to do chalk drawings on the asphalt. In my dream, I didn’t think much of the over-the-fence “homerun” baseball that had bounced across the asphalt and rolled to a stop in the grass. I’d been too busy watching the teachers hover over Sadie after she’d fallen. But that day, instead of bouncing innocuously, the baseball had clipped Sadie in the head.
Sadie didn’t come to school the next day. Instead, she was in the hospital with a blood clot on her brain. I blamed myself for not paying attention to the details. If I had, Sadie wouldn’t have had to suffer through brain surgery. The hardest part was wanting to apologize to her but not being able to.
After that experience, any “adaptations” I’d made had been strictly stuff that affected me. And even those weren’t often. I’d learned the hard way that altering an event could affect how the rest of my day was supposed to unfold. Knowing what was coming—even if I didn’t like it—was better than not knowing what would happen if I changed something. Avoidance worked for me. But last night was the first time a dream had left me with only one choice.
My dream started out just like any other day—full of screeching tires and normal “I’m running right up until the bell” annoyances…
It’s three minutes ’til second bell, and I’m in such a hurry that I rush into the school bathroom and accidentally pick the stall with the lock that never works. Of course I’d pulled on the jeans with the stupid zipper tab that sometimes gets turned sideways. I always have to fiddle with it in order to unzip it. Not now. I grind my teeth and flick at the dang metal tab, hoping to get it to cooperate.
After thirty frustrating seconds of flicking, I vow to cut the “jeans of torture” up the moment I get home.
Someone shuts the stall door next to mine. “I’m at school. Where else would I be?”
Still attacking my zipper, I roll my eyes and wonder, Why do people talk on their cells while in the bathroom? Eww.
“Yeah, no one’s around. What’s up? You sound weird. Wha—What’d you say?”
I pause my zipper attack.
“You’re serious? Why are you doing this?” she hisses.
A deeper voice comes through the phone, louder now, but I can’t make out the guy’s words.
“I thought you were blowing off steam last night, bullshitting with Jay and Kurt.” Her voice lowers. “Just cause you’re pissed at the principal isn’t a reason to rig a frakkin’ bomb in the school.”
God, no! A bomb? My urgent need to go evaporates and my hands start to tremble. I grip my waistband tight as the guy’s voice rumbles, sounding harsher. I strain to hear what he says, but my heart is thudding too loud.
The girl is Lila Jenkins. I recognize her “frakkin” comment. She’s a Science Fiction fangirl to the point she even bleached her hair blonde and cut it short like her favorite TV show character. Lila also dates David Donaldson, who was recently expelled for beating up a sophomore because the guy had the nerve to take “his” parking space.
“I won’t rat you out. Don’t you threaten me, asshole. Everybody in this school’s a jerkoff anyway. I’m going out to my car until the fireworks are over. That is far enough away, isn’t it?”
A couple seconds later, she flips the phone closed and mumbles, “I
diot” with a heavy sigh.
I clench my jaw and wait for her to discover my presence. By the time she bypasses my stall, I’m so anxious my teeth are hurting. As soon as the bathroom door closes behind her, I count to ten and then burst out of my stall in a full run…only to jerk awake at four this morning.
I didn’t bother flipping a coin. Instead, I quickly got dressed, then went hunting for a nearly extinct species—a payphone.
Chapter Three
“Don’t forget to make that eye doctor appointment, Nara.” Miranda wagged her finger toward me as she and Sophia walked down the hall. Sophia snickered, briefly pausing in front of me to cover one eye and squint through the other one, pretending to read an eye chart. “I see…a G, an O, an A, an L and an S.”
“Trying to get your own stand-up TV spot, Soph?” I called after my teammates as they continued on their way, “Yesterday was a fluke,” I finished as I opened my locker.
Sophia snorted, wrinkling her freckled nose. Miranda cast a captain-like “it’d better be” look, then turned away. Her dark, choppy hair flipped out in all directions—thanks to gobs of pomade. It also never moved an inch. I knew this for a fact, because her hair always looked the exact same after practice as it did before. Made me wonder how she got her fingers through the concrete mass to shampoo it.
Sifting through the stack of books in my locker, I jerked out texts for upcoming classes. My teammates had teased me mercilessly yesterday for missing so many balls during practice, but Miranda and Sophia had been the worst. “But Nara, you’re so perrrrfect. You never miss,” they hissed.
Sophia had especially enjoyed mocking me over and over. Once that girl sensed weakness, she circled like a vulture, ready to peck you beyond death. Neither of them would let up anytime soon. At least not until I proved I was back to my old “never let a ball find its way to the back of the net” self, which I was pretty sure Sophia secretly hated as much as Miranda secretly resented.
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