by David James
The air was stale, filled with the scent of decaying things, but the rain from the mountains added a crisp edge that lingered in the wind.
With each step I felt my anger fade.
Here, I knew who I was, and the thrilling confidence of knowing pushed a rare energy through my veins. A rhythm of words found the beat of my heart, pushed out, and crashed in the air around me:
So the sun breaks the day
So am I who breaks-
The day is a shadow
And I am the sun.
Here, I had my best friend, Tyler. I had friends - faces that smiled, and those that didn’t. Still, they looked. They saw me.
Here, I was someone.
Suddenly, I tripped on a piece of concrete that hadn’t been set right in the sidewalk. Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw a shadow of something familiar.
My heart beat in time to Dad, Dad, Dad.
I thought I heard a whisper on the wind. A voice deep with a mysterious delirium of pain and need that sent an anxious chill crawling up my spine.
Calum.
You are your father’s son.
But when I looked back I saw only a tree, blazing red with dying leaves.
~
Mr. Brandt didn’t leave much room for people to like him. He was brash and harsh, and always smelled of disdain. He never smiled, never laughed. Mr. Brandt was crooked and morose, his edges pained with age and misery.
He reminded me of home.
“Pass?” he muttered, not looking at me.
I handed him the office slip, then made my way to a seat near the back. Mr. Brandt faced the board and went back to scratching a complicated problem in the blackness. The room was quiet and sleepy, though every other second carried chills: Dry chalk against the board like grinding bones. I felt eyes upon eyes bore into me as I moved deeper into the room, until none could see me except one.
“You know if you ever make it to school on time no one will know what to do,” Tyler whispered, his voice low.
I stepped over his leg to sit down; he was keeping it in an air cast after he twisted his ankle during the last football game.
He leaned close. “Everything okay? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“Just more of the usual,” I said, sitting down.
He stared at me. His smile began to fade, his dark green eyes narrowed. “I don’t buy that. What’s up, really”
My voice caught in my throat; a whisper exploding up and breaking open my lips. In one word, the mist came back as though it never left: “Nightmares.”
Tyler leaned closer, the muscles in his arms rippling as he moved. This close, I could see thirty shades of green in his eyes.
Thirty shades of concern.
He breathed, “Still? I thought those stopped a year ago after... Well, after.”
After he left.
So many good things happened after, but for some reason my nightmares made me remember the before.
Before, when his anger choked me.
I felt Tyler’s hand poke mine. “It doesn’t mean anything if you don’t want it to. Remember that.”
My chest hurt. I hadn’t realized I was holding my breath. “Sometimes you don’t have a choice in what things mean to you.”
A beat. A breath. “Sometimes you do.”
Brandt faced us again, gathering papers on his desk. He shifted them, stacked and re-stacked, so that when he was done they looked exactly the same. As much as I hated Brandt, I understood. He was stalling. Buying extra time before he had to face reality.
But one thing Brandt didn’t understand was this: Sometimes reality was far better than the world of nightmares, its familiarity easier than inconstant dreams.
Brandt adjusted his tie. Chin up, his brown, bored eyes glanced around the room focusing on nothing. “After you copy down the problem on the board, try solving for the solution.” He sighed. “This is only Junior Algebra, people. If you can’t do this I suggest you adjust your schedule for your senior year so we can see each other again. Remember, there is only one correct solution but multiple ways to solve for it. Stay quiet.”
Tyler tapped his pencil on his desk. His lips puffed out as he exhaled and breathed, “Turn around.”
“What?” I asked.
“What happened in your nightmares?”
“Quiet!” Brandt’s eyes narrowed, his yellow teeth bared behind thin lips. “No talking.”
For the next ten minutes I pretended: To be interested, to copy notes, to solve problems. In the quiet room surrounded by normality, I pretended to be normal, too.
I pretended to forget.
When Brandt revealed the solution and the possible ways to get it, Tyler swore and I knew we had the same problem; our answers were wrong, no matter which way we took to find them.
As Brandt started to explain what was right and wrong, I searched my notebook for a blank page to take notes on. The entire thing was filled with doodles and words and silly songs. I stopped when I found one nearly blank, except for one word, one question: Love?
“Even though adding the numerators together after finding the lowest common denominator seems right, the sum would not give you the correct overall answer in the end. In fact,” Brandt said as he crossed off a wrong number on the board, “you should have realized the only way to get the correct answer here is to subtract.”
I understood.
I drew a single line on the page, subtracting what needed to go: Love?
I smiled and looked up to see Tyler, eyebrow raised, looking at me. He shook his head and looked down. His hand moved across his paper in fury as he muttered, “Stupid, stupid, stupid.”
“I don’t get it either,” I whispered to him.
He didn’t look up. “You shouldn’t just give up, though.”
“I haven’t,” I said, confused. “Brandt’s not even going to put this on the test.”
When he looked at me I saw concern behind the green. His voice was a sharp hiss. “C’mon, Calum. I see you giving up, and you can’t anymore. I won’t let you. What exactly were your nightmares about that you’re acting like this?”
“Like what?”
He looked down at my paper. “Like you’ve given up on everything but being miserable.”
I looked down too, and realized I’d been filling in the page with pictures. A boy with large hands sat in the middle of the page, surrounded by lines and lines of trees. I had pressed so hard with my pencil that breaths of gray ash flew across the surface in dark shadows; the Love? was impossible to see.
“Explain,” Tyler said quietly, like he cared. Like always.
I exhaled and watched the pencil ash dance and die; pieces of gray running across the desk and jumping off.
At his desk, Brandt was lost in his newspaper. I saw the headline: Bloodletter: What Nightmares Are Made Of.
I shivered. I breathed, “It was so real this time, so real I could still taste it this morning. I was in a forest surrounded by all these dying things. It was like there were a thousand ghosts around me; mist was everywhere, alive and breathing and suffocating me. I almost died. I almost...
“Then there was this light that was everywhere at once. It pulled me up, hugged me and I was finally able to breathe. And my skin... It was black and shiny and filled with tiny lights as bright as the moon.”
There was Tyler and nothing else but the memories I wanted so badly gone. “I almost died again.”
“But you didn’t,” he said as I thought, Like always.
“How do you know your dreams are supposed to have meaning anyway?” Tyler continued. “Sometimes a dream is just a dream.”
“I don’t know, Tyler. This dream, especially, was just intense. They have to mean something. I can feel it. I just wish I knew what they were telling me.”
Tyler moved closer to me. His eyes found mine and for a moment it felt as though he was trying to look beyond the blue. His eyes, like clouds before a tornado, moved back and forth, searching.
I hoped he would find some truth inside.
“Calum,” he said. “You are not your father.”
I expected this: Mist in my throat, eating me alive again until memories of my father made me scream. Instead I felt relief, a calm warmth of familiarity, of always.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Well, you aren’t him. You forget that sometimes.”
I almost laughed. “I wish I could forget so much more.”
“Nah,” he said. “No one should forget the past. Just maybe not dwell on it as much. You have to know where you came from to know where you’re going.”
Still, as we fell into silence, I tried.
Underneath the other, I wrote a new word in my notebook: Hope.
Then, for the first time in years, my thoughts were not of what was, but what could be. They were desperate and vivid thoughts, clinging to my every breath and falling onto my paper in words: Family, friends, future.
My lips tugged up at the sides and Tyler said, “Better, Calum. Better.”
And then I felt the air being sucked from the room, and whispers like bees cut through the quiet.
I looked up. A shiver tickled my chest when I saw her. Invisible hands wrapped themselves around my heart and squeezed.
“Who is that?” Tyler asked.
I shook my head. She was a stranger, a mystery, but one thought choked me until I couldn’t breathe: I know her.
Brandt had his arm around her shoulders; even from my desk I could see the way she leaned away. His smile didn’t fit his face, the lines mapped in discourse. Every other second he would look down at the seating chart in his hand as he introduced us one by one.
She was beautiful.
Her dark brown curls fell in loose waves past her shoulders, and they seemed to move in a heavy tide with every turn of her head. Her face was shaped like a heart. Her skin was a dark, liquid gold, dotted with tiny freckles that looked like stars upon it. With every name, her lips opened, slightly smiling; they were full and shining and red as blood on snow. As she brushed a curl away from her lips, I saw the faint outline of a tattoo on her right pointer finger, though I couldn’t make out what is was.
How do I know you? I thought.
My heart boomed so hard against my ribs until:
I can’t breathe.
“And this is Calum Wade.”
Too much, too fast.
Our eyes met.
I’m dying.
One moment lingered forever.
Hope.
Blue against eyes so dark they looked violet.
Love?.
Her eyes narrowed into this: I hate you.
I can’t breathe.
“Do you know her?” Tyler asked when she turned away.
Those eyes, I thought. I know those eyes.
“No,” I whispered. My hands were palm down on my desk, fingers spread out like branches, digging hard into the fake wood. “I’ve never seen her in my life.”
The bell sounded and Tyler said, “Well, Kate looked like she really knew you. Wonder what that was about.”
Kate. Her name was ash in my mouth, more bitter than mist, and thoughts of her filled my mind.
I hurried toward the hall with my head down, avoiding Kate as much as possible. As I rushed past her though, my eyes couldn’t look away. When they locked with hers, helpless against the violet, the world dissolved into a ballad of quiet rage, whispered words like daggers in the air.
-Kate-
“Welcome to your nightmare, Calum Wade,” I whispered so only he could hear. “You have three days.”
I knew it was him the moment our eyes met; it was though the air smoldered in agony around me. Made everything too hot. Made anger shiver through my body.
His eyes: As blue as though they were filled with cold, dead bodies...
Made me forget how to breathe.
Finally, after so long we found him.
Relief burned around my heart and made way for more anger. For revenge.
I would have to tell Marcus soon, but until then Calum was mine. Until then I was stuck in this school, this Hell. Every second here made me glad we didn’t have school in the Order. Only training, which was fine with me; I got to kill things.
I balled my fists tightly.
Three days.
There, in the tiny, sickly-illuminated classroom, I began the countdown that meant his death.
Three days, I repeated silently.
My heart began an unsteady cadence, burning and beating like fire.
Days now instead of months separated Calum from the world of the living and the land of the dead. Maybe I should have been sympathetic, but all I could think was this: He would die and I would finally live. Be free, happy. If I wouldn’t have found him the countdown would have been my own. I would have run until I couldn’t, and life was not nearly as fun if you were the one running away.
I never ran away.
I ran toward the kill, one foot after the other, racing against the wind, nothing stopping me until I delivered the final death blow.
And Calum? I could kill him in one beat of my heart.
I was going to enjoy this game.
I just couldn’t let the Orieno get him first.
Chapter Three
Black Keys
-Calum-
Lakewood was under a dome, it felt like; a dreamquake where time tilted on its side and hours became slowly moving figments of reality. For the rest of the day classes went by in blurs, muted and hollow. Lifeless. Each moment bled into the next until I felt more alive inside my mind than out of it. The world there was electric; it was life laced with question and possibility.
An unrelenting whisper like poison: Three days.
That one decaying thought made my pulse race every time someone spoke to me. No more was my sense of here and now, but rather what might be. Around every corner, I jumped, thinking it was her; living between life and reality I felt my energy wither, haunted by the memory of Kate.
“I see nothing. Again,” Tyler said looking around.
I pointed down the hall. “She was just there.”
He sighed. “That’s what you said the last five times you thought you saw her. There are other people in the hall, Calum. The lunch bell just rang.”
“I swear I’m not making this up. She’s following me!”
“Maybe.” Tyler put his hand on my shoulder. “But I’m pretty sure she wasn’t in the guy’s bathroom.”
A smile flickered. “I told you I wasn’t sure about that.”
“Though if she was,” he continued, “I might have to rethink why we’re avoiding her.”
I punched him in the arm.
“What?” he laughed. “All I’m saying is that if she likes you enough to stalk you in the bathroom, she can’t be all that bad.”
I shook my head and opened my mouth but nothing came out. Tyler was wrong. This felt different, serious.
Bodies pushed against me, rising in waves too close.
When I spoke, my voice surprised me. It shook and warbled through the air, sounding flat. “I can’t get what she said out of my head.”
“What did she say again?” Tyler asked, his voice softer. Our steps marked time together as we walked down the hall. “You have three days?”
I nodded as my shoulder jerked up, waves upon waves elbowing back. “Yeah, but I have no idea what that means. I mean three days to what? Live?”
Tyler laughed again but I couldn’t. Those times I saw her the world became cold and slow, too slow. Our eyes would lock and I could see nothing else but her: Shaking fists, shoulders pushed forward, teeth grinding, and eyes that could make the warmest heart grow cold.
Too many waves closing in. Soon, I would drown in this sea. I could feel the air begin to thin as the scent of sweat and perfume took over.
Tyler and I turned the corner closest to the cafeteria and I felt the wrothy waves crash against me in one final blow until all the air was gone and I was left alone, suffocating on the
floor.
“Watch where you’re walking,” Kate said as she shoved past us. Then, a whisper of shattered glass hidden against a crash of thunder: “Calum Wade, I will kill you.”
“Watch it yourself,” Tyler said, helping me up. “Okay, I take back what I said. No way you want anything to do with her even if she likes hanging out in bathrooms. You all right?”
Those eyes.
“Yeah, I’m fine. Thanks.”
I am always fine.
“Okay.” He grabbed at his navy and white LET’S GO ALL THE WAY AT HOMECOMING football shirt. The entire team was wearing them today. “I need to go see Nurse Anne real fast to see if I’m cleared to play at the Homecoming game next week. Coach will kill me if my leg isn’t better.”
“See you at lunch.”
“Grab me a piece of pizza if you beat me?”
I nodded. “No problem.”
Before he left, Tyler grabbed my shoulder and silence fell between us. The hall was quiet, a deathlike expanse of sea free of movement. In the distance I heard the roar of lunch like thunder.
One
Two
Three
Three seconds before someone opened the cafeteria door and the thunder boomed louder.
One
Two
Three
Tyler’s voice cracked through the dead hall. “Don’t sweat the small stuff, Calum. Kate’s clearly someone neither of us should be hanging around. I mean, if you don’t know her and she already made some threat toward you after only being at Lakewood a few minutes, she can’t be good. If you’ve never seen her before, there’s no way she has anything against you. Don’t even think about her, just let it go.”
“I know,” I said but all I could think was a panicked thought: I know those eyes from somewhere. Purple rain falling down in sheets; I am caught in this storm. There’s only this, only her. That’s all I can see, and all I can think is: I must have seen her before.
And then, for a terrifying moment, my thoughts boomed and bent into feelings strong enough to paralyze: Will Dad come back? Will he kill this time?