So, she turned and ran…ran as the tears mixed with the rain pouring from the clouds above.
Part 2:
Carlie & Tanner
Chapter 7
The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. ~ Marcel Proust
CARLIE sat straight up in her bed in a cold sweat, gasping for air as she got her bearings. The room was dark as always, and she could feel the sheets underneath her, sticky with perspiration. “Okay, you’re in your bed,” she told herself, feeling around for more familiar objects; her pillow and pillowcase, her blanket, the nightstand that sat right beside her bed. She reached over and felt for the old school desk lamp that sat there and pulled the string to turn it on, illuminating her little space. That’s really what it was; little. She actually slept in the office of this home, only a bed, a nightstand, and a couple of drawers of clothing to her name. Oh, and her backpack with a few books and paper inside. There was really nothing else. She was used to it. So, it went with foster home living. It could be much worse.
She had lived in a closet before, shared a bathroom with four other kids, been forced to do without food for days at a time. This, this was living in the laps of luxury in comparison. And the best part was that she actually had a friend this time, a neighbor she had bonded with when she came here over a year ago.
Her breathing began to calm as she looked around the cluttered room and saw the time; four a.m. She was safe in her bed and had obviously been dreaming…. or something…. again. She didn’t know if she could call it a dream anymore. She had been having them for a few months now, and they were coming more often. But they felt like so much more than dreams. They felt real like her brain was trying to tell her something, and she always woke up with a full memory of them and in a stunned panic, dripping with sweat.
Carlie swung her legs over the side of the bed and sat there as she shivered, having a chill where the air caught the drying sweat all over her. Her black tank was stuck tightly, to her body, and her shorts were not sufficient any longer. She quickly switched them for a pair of sweats before pulling out her little pink flashlight from the drawer, a gift from her best friend right after this started happening.
She faced the window behind her bed, which was halfway covered by her pillows. She flashed the light three times into the window that sat straight across; the one that belonged to her best friend, Tanner. He had a flashlight too, a green one, that he used to answer back with.
It only took a few seconds, and she saw it; their signal. He answered back with four flashes of his light on and off, and her body finally relaxed. It was a deal they had. He would let her know she was real and safe, so she could go back to sleep and then meet up with her the next day to talk about the dream. It’s what they always did.
With a slight smile, Carlie laid back on top of her sheets, staring up at the dark ceiling. Her mind wandered back slowly through the events in her dream, trying to go through every detail so she could make sense of it.
There had been a girl, one she had seen twice now, and she had this reddish hair, maybe more like strawberry blonde. She had been standing over the edge of a bridge and looking down, and it made Carlie feel a little nauseous. It was pretty high up, not something she was used to. She liked things nice and flat. She wasn’t that keen on water either. She didn’t like anything that left her feeling powerless.
The girl, she had jumped. She had jumped down and almost hit the rocks. She was headed straight for them, and yet, she came out fine, just a few inches away. She didn’t know this girl, had no reason to dream of her. And it wasn’t like she was this girl in the dream. She was watching her, like she was up high or over her shoulder, or something.
She closed her eyes and pictured everything in her head, zooming into crucial moments until it was mentally cataloged and filed to tell to Tanner in the morning. With a deep sigh, she fell back asleep for the remaining few hours until she would have to get up and out of the house like she did every day to give her foster mother the space to run her business, alone and in quiet.
The next morning, she was waiting outside of the neighbor’s house before eight in the morning, sitting on their dilapidated porch swing, until Tanner was good and awake. It was a routine they had fallen into, and his parents didn’t make a big deal of it. They were the kind that was too gone and too tired to worry about the small stuff. It wasn’t that they didn’t want to be around, work was tough around here. Her foster mother managed to pay the bills by working in the sales department of three different companies and having meetings out of her home, meetings that a teenage girl would certainly get in the way of if she stayed. So, for almost 12 hours a day, Carlie was on her own. But it wasn’t so bad, not with Tanner around. She could trust him in a way she had never trusted another person. They were two halves of a whole, and he understood. His parents worked themselves to the bone, to stay afloat, for him and his siblings.
She was dreading the end of summer. Tanner had been told it was his last summer of freedom. He would need to get a job and help, so he couldn’t have all day to spend with her anymore. She knew he was 18 now and he should do that, but shouldn’t he also be going to college and finding himself? This was not the life she imagined for a guy like him, one with a real family and real hopes and dreams.
“Good morning.” His voice hit her before she saw him. She had her back to him. She turned around to see his smiling face, his sandy hair a little unkempt like always. He was in his typical nerd wear; a pair of suspenders, gray highwaters, and some cartoonish polo with rainbows all over it. And no Tanner look was complete without his thick-framed rectangular glasses that sat on his adorably large nose just so.
“Morning!” she answered in a sing-song voice, ever the cheerful one even if she didn’t feel that way. In her life, she had learned that most of happiness was making yourself that way the best that you could, and it worked for her.
“I see you had another one of your dreams again last night. Want to talk about it?” he asked, sticking his hands awkwardly in his pockets as they went down the creaking front steps and started to mosey through the old neighborhood they lived in.
“Sure, I guess we can, but we don’t have to,” she said with a shrug. Sometimes, she felt like all they ever did was talk about her and that he was getting nothing out of this friendship.
“C’mon, you know I want to hear it. I want us to figure this thing out together before the summer is over and we have to do things differently. Before we don’t have the time to talk about it,” he told her, motioning over to her with his foot.
Carlie watched the ground her feet stepped on as she began to tell him about what she saw; the girl who jumped and how she should have hit the rocks but didn’t. “I don’t know if she was trying to hit the rocks or what, and I don’t know what it is about this girl, but I am seeing her for a reason. I think she’s going to be in my head for a while.”
“Hmm,” Tanner said, looking over at her for a minute. “And you’re still thinking this is the future you’re seeing like you’re supposed to know these things and stop them, or what?” he asked her.
She shook her head. “I don’t know anymore. It doesn’t feel like the future or anything significant to change. It just seems like I am watching and looking over someone’s shoulder. There must be something important about the girl, but I don’t have a name or anything.”
“Didn’t you see the town the first time, where she lives? Maybe we can do a little Google search at the library and find out what towns look like that,” Tanner offered. It wasn’t a bad idea. She didn’t have any other leads.
“Sure. Let’s do it. I’ll race you,” she said with a mischievous grin, knowing that he hated to run but also that he hated to lose.
She took off, so she wouldn’t hear his complaint as he had to catch up with her, and they ran through the neighborhood that led to the old library; not much of one, but good enough for their purposes. It only had three computers, and they were slow. The
books were all from the 90s. But, it was a place to go. It was the best place they had. And it was safe. Carlie didn’t mind being poor as long as she could be safe, and this neighborhood mostly was; a community of the elderly and large families headed by bluer collar workers.
She got to the doors and stopped, allowing Tanner to catch up with her, leaning down on her knees for a moment to catch her breath before they walked inside. “Did you bring your card?” she breathed, and Tanner pulled out his wallet to show he had his library card, a little white piece of plastic with his name on the back and the name of the library on the front. Nothing more. The last town that Carlie lived in had fancier cards and huge libraries where homeless people hung out all day with a drink and job applications. It was where she had spent most of her time. She liked this better. It seemed homier, regardless of its age and lack of new reading material.
She gave her friend the thumbs up, and they walked in together, happy to see that it was still early enough in the day that there was a free computer. They walked up to the desk and used his card number to sign in before both pulling up a chair to the computer at the end, leaving room for both of them to be there without blocking the aisle.
“So, what do you remember about what you saw in the town, anything that would be unique to it that I can search for?” he asked, all business now as the computer loaded up, a little too slow for both their tastes. It looked like they would likely be there for hours. Hopefully, they didn’t get kicked out.
“Well, I remember it looking like it was mostly made out of adobe or something. Like all the buildings were restored historical ones. It was on the water because that’s where I saw her jump. There was this bridge, like going into the city I guess, and it overlooked the water where they jumped. I think it was a river or something, not an ocean, so not on the coast,” she explained as she chewed on one nail, a bad habit of hers. They never looked nice or held the black polish she put on them because of it. But she had gotten over that a long time ago, there were so many other reasons she would never be a normal girl, and that was okay. She would just find people who liked her the way she was. Just like Tanner.
“Okay, so it has a major body of water, some historical sites, and a lot of it is historical cookie cutter. What about the weather, did you notice anything about that? I am just trying to narrow it down to an area, or the language they spoke, did you hear anyone?”
“They were speaking English, though I didn’t hear much. It looked like someone was coming back from a ski trip, but everyone was wearing shorts, so it’s warm there wherever this is, and people are coming back from vacation, so same as here, end of summer maybe?”
“I actually think I have an idea,” Tanner said suddenly, his fingers taking to the keys with an epiphany. Carlie leaned in to look, her bright blue eyes reflecting back at her through the screen with a glare. She used to think they made her look like a freak. Kids, when she was younger, called her an alien. Now, it was one of those special things, right along with whatever this power was she had discovered. And Tanner was special too, though he didn’t make use of it as much.
“There, did it look like that?” he asked, leaning back and pointing to the screen.
Carlie thought about it as she looked it all over. She slowly began to nod as she looked down at the name of the town that had been brought up. “Kingsbridge,” she said. “How did you find this?” she wondered out loud.
He shrugged. “I had a boyfriend, my first one actually, who let me go on a family vacation with him once, and that’s where we all went and stayed with his grandparents. It sounded familiar. It’s only a few hours from here, and it’s like this big, rich, capital city built from an ancient parish or something. It was actually kind of boring, but I couldn’t think of any other town that looked like that.”
Carlie nodded. “You’re a genius. So, what do we do now?” she asked.
He shrugged. “I am not sure yet. Maybe we should go there?” he asked. “I don’t know how we would get there, though.”
“I think we need to know more about our powers first and then we go and find this chick, whoever she is. And where’s your sense of adventure? We could hitchhike, take odd jobs, steal food from convenience stores,” she whispered with a soft laugh. “We’re almost adults anyway.”
He gave a hard nod with a tight jaw, and Carlie realized what she had said. She had almost forgotten that was a sensitive subject. So, she tried to change it. “Tell me more about your powers anyway. You never do say much, and I wanna know.”
He shook his head and took her hand before quickly logging out of the computer. They left the library, going to sit on the bench outside.
“I have been practicing, but if anyone hears me, they are going to have me committed,” he said seriously, glancing around. “I want you to think of a color, any color, make it something weird like fuchsia or whatever, not a normal color, okay?” he ordered.
Carlie sat up and thought of one, nodding to let him know she had it. This might be fun, to finally see what he had been working on. He took it much more seriously than her. Not to say she didn’t believe it to be serious, but it should also be a thing of fun.
“You are thinking of lavender.” Her blue eyes went wide. He hadn’t even moved his mouth when he said it. Was he reading her mind and then talking into her head?
“Holy friggin shit, Tanner, you’re telepathic!” she squealed in delight, and he motioned for her to keep it down.
“Technically that term is a misnomer. It should be clairvoyant since I can do more than one thing, but it doesn’t sound as good,” he said with a shrug.
“Do you think you could talk to the dead too?”
Tanner rolled his eyes. “I haven’t exactly gone to the cemetery and tried to give anyone a call from beyond the grave or anything, so I don’t know.”
Tanner had actually been the first of the two to get powers. Carlie found this out the moment she told him about hers. He came forward about it, telling her that he had been able to read people’s minds sometimes he thought. He had felt it since he was a kid. They didn’t think anything of it then until these strange dreams continued. She had been, against her will, exercising the use of this power, whatever it was, so much now, but he had yet to tap into his. He had been embarrassed and left it alone for so many years. Just a little recent practice and he was able to not just read her mind on a dime, but he could also communicate with her telepathically? That was a little frightening to think about, what limits this power had; maybe none. She was convinced there had to be a reason for it. People didn’t just go around doing these things or they wouldn’t need to keep it a secret. She had also felt strange lately, and she got the feeling something was coming, and not just the end of summer.
“Okay, okay, I get it. But I wonder if you should try. If you want to. There is a reason we have these, and I bet this chick with the red hair is going to know when we show up at her doorstep. I can just feel it.”
“We can’t just up and leave. We need a plan.”
“I know that. I say we watch things, and we keep a diary. We write down everything, even if we pee a weird color!”
Tanner screwed up his face. “Ew, really, Carlie?” he asked, making her cackle, doubling over with the laughter shaking her body. She was not a girl with a filter. It just isn’t her, and it made it even more fun to be that way when it freaked out her bestie every once in a while.
“Seriously, though, Tanner. Let’s do this. Besides, maybe this could be the answer to your little problem. You could get out of here. We both could. Maybe we’re supposed to save the world.”
“This is not a comic book, Carlie. Just remember that.” She nodded, patting him on the back out of love for his pessimistic ways. It was the perfect dynamic.
They made their way back to Tanner’s house, kicking cans around in the alleyway for fun and wasting time. It had been just the two of them doing just this all summer, something they had begun the summer before. And during the one school year they spe
nt together, it had been them after school and on the weekend all the time. Carlie knew she was grasping at straws here with their powers being a way out, but she couldn’t stand the thought of losing her best friend to the real world, the man, the machine, whatever you wanted to call it. It just wasn’t fair, and so much of her life had already been unfair. At some point, the universe owed her something, right?
It was later that night when they finally got to get into Carlie’s room, even more of a mess from her foster mother’s day of work than it was when she had left that morning, and pulled out some of the paper from her backpack that she kept. They stapled little books out of it and began to write down the date and time and what happened that day, making a promise to keep doing that every day, and they would read it at the end of a week and see if either of them had noticed a pattern or something unusual to go off of. They were going to get to the bottom of this.
Chapter 8
We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. ~ T. S. Eliot
“HOLY shit!” Carlie sat up in bed once again, her mouth completely dry. This time there were no other words to describe what she had seen and felt.
For days, she had no dreams, and in fact, she hadn’t seen much of her best friend. They had both been ill and confined to their beds with something akin to the flu from Hell. It had been horrible, and Carlie was sure she would never get over it. Neither of them had used their powers during the time, and part of her wondered if there was no coincidence in that. What if this was all related? She didn’t like the idea at all. And now that she had seen more, way more than she ever wanted to, she knew it was almost time to go. They just had a few more things to talk about.
In the Dark Page 6