Lucid
By Gabrielle Castania
Copyright
The characters featured and the events that occur in this book are entirely fictitious and are a product of the author’s imagination. Any similarity to real persons or events is coincidental, and was not intended by the author.
Copyright © 2018 by Gabrielle Castania
Cover design by GermanCreative
Cover photo by Marina Shin
Royalty-free cover photo license purchased from Shutterstock
The author of this story fully supports the expression of creativity in any medium, and also the value of copyright. Gabrielle Castania claims ownership of all original characters, settings, and events in this novel, and she thanks you for your support of authors’ rights. If you would like permission to use the material from this novel for anything other than review purposes, please contact the author.
First ebook edition: July 2018
Chapter One
Through the paper-thin walls of my old, suburban home, their screaming voices pervaded the quiet sanctity of my bedroom.
“God damn it, Michelle,” my father screeched coldly at my mother in the room adjacent to my own. His voice was raw and ragged as he bantered on, heavy slamming accentuating his words. “So I guess you just can’t do anything when I’m not home? I just come in from work and get to do it all?”
Mum yelped back at him, her thick English accent clinging to each of her syllables, a souvenir from home that she would never be without, “Well, forgive me, Roger, but I fancy seein’ you go to chemotherapy just to come home and try doin’ the household chores. Try it for just one bloody day!”
“You can shove your chemo, because I am so sick of it being your excuse for everything.” He forced his voice up an octave, whining in a mocking, Cockney tone, “I’m Michelle Dawson, and I want special treatment on account of the shite draw I got in my genetics. Everyone, quick – cry for me! Your tears and sympathy will take the cancer right out of me breasts!”
“Well I know for damn sure you don’t care about me, Roger!” Mum yelped back at him, trying her best to stand her ground, though the fatigue was obvious in her voice. She typically slept the evening away after a round of treatment, but Roger had beaten her home this time, and had flown into a tizzy about a stack of dishes in the sink. “I think you’re just waitin’ for me to die so I’m out of your hair for good!”
Sarcastically, he spat back, “Well, jeez. I thought I kept that a secret.”
It was becoming increasingly difficult to focus on my Economics homework, what with them bickering ceaselessly in the next room over. In an attempt to drown them out so I could focus on my assignment, I hit the power button on the clock/radio beside my bed. Instantly, my favorite album streamed into my room, and I breathed a short-lived sigh of relief.
“Maybe if you put down the bottle every now and again, you’d care about me and your daughter the way you used to,” Mum accused, and I cringed when I realized I could still hear them. “Pardon? I can’t hear you, asshole.”
My father’s primal growl echoed under the guitar riffs. “Ashley! Turn it down!”
I spun the volume knob reluctantly, trying my best to let the lyrics drown out their fight, to no avail. “I suppose you’d rather her hear us shoutin’, then, huh?” Mum asked with a vivid snap to her voice. “Everyone’s always got to be as miserable as you?”
Instead of words, her resistance was met with the nauseating sound of flesh against flesh, followed immediately by an agonized scream and a heavy thud rocking the floor beneath my feet.
Despite them going on like this almost every night since I was in middle school, it was still a nasty, nagging little bug that dug its way into me, plucked at my heartstrings, and nestled itself deep in my core. I’d found myself rather apathetic to most things in the past few years, but their battles always struck me. Most things, I’d learned to drown out, stuff away inside of myself to sort out when I had time, but my foundation cracking was a bit hard to ignore.
The scene almost always played the same. They started screaming, tempers flared over something trivial, and one of them hit the other. I never made it much farther into the story, because, like them, my course of action was the same every time – I ran away, to a spot nobody knew about but me. I could stay there until dark and wait for one of them to pass out, be it Mum from the pain or Roger from the liquor, when it was safe to go back home. To be honest, the feelings clung to me even after I’d left the house, but at least my parents couldn’t find me, on the seldom occasions they thought to try.
My shoes were still laced on my feet, and my school bag was still packed, as I’d hardly gotten in the door when the bell rang to begin today’s fight. I grabbed my jacket from the bedpost, took my out-of-date MP3 player, and headed for the exit that would get me out of the house the fastest – my bedroom window. Any time they heard the front door shut during a fight, one of them would come racing after me to insist that everything was fine, and on a list of all the things that I wanted, that was very, very low.
I crept carefully along the angled subsection of roofing that stretched beneath the bedrooms on the second floor. There was an old maple tree in the front yard with a solid branch that extended toward the side of the house, and fear of hurting my ankles from the shock taught me to use that branch to lower myself a bit. I was never sure if it actually helped, or even if I’d really be hurt if I just went from the roof, but lessening the distance between the ground and me never struck me as a bad idea.
The dry, frigid January air taunted me, gray clouds overhead threatening me with snow as I made my way to my hiding spot. It wasn’t a cool place with fun things to do, bustling with people enjoying themselves. There was no classic establishment tied to a memory that held a special place in my heart. I didn’t run to find a friend to vent to. There was nothing in my hiding spot, and that was precisely why I liked it.
In my neighborhood were a couple acres of undeveloped land, originally meant to host more copy-paste homes like the rest of them on our block, but the plans were scrapped a few years back for reasons I was too young to pay attention to. With a bit of exploring through the trees one day when I just needed to leave the house for a while, I found a little inlet off the main dirt path marking what would have been the road. I’d begun to refer to it as “the meadow”, even though it was only about a quarter acre of vacant field, lined with the lush trees that decorated the rest of the massive plot.
With the icy air whipping around me, I tugged my coat a little closer as I sat down against a thick tree trunk and began a second attempt at my homework. I wasn’t much a fan of Economics, but writing a paragraph or two on stimulus packages was much better than sitting there and moping about my parents. It only took me a couple minutes to fudge the assignment, and I sighed in relief as I finally penned my name on the faded cornflower lines. Since I was in my final year of high school, I’d had ample time to learn how to make things up for an assignment that yielded me a passing grade, and I glided my way through almost all of my core classes with relative apathy.
Finished with my homework, I tucked the notebook back into my bag in favor of one of my most prized possessions – my sketchbook. Since I was a child, I’d harbored a strong interest in art of almost any medium, and I hadn’t left home without the means to draw since elementary school. My homework and the fight had all but fried my brain, and I struggled to find my inspiration just yet, so I resorted to slumping back against the tree again to watch the clouds slide by above me in an attempt to free my mind.
Within moments, I could feel myself beginning to give into sleep. Mum and Roger had woken me up before my alarm that morning with yet another aimless argument, and I slogged through my day with heavy eyes. I hadn’t planned on napping
, but the relaxation I found in the meadow had begun to lull me. My sketching pencil still in hand, trying for the basic shape of the human body, I allowed myself to drift off.
Despite being asleep, and knowing that I was asleep, I could still somehow feel everything going on around me. I heard the cracking of the tree branches, tasted the crispness of the wind in my lungs, felt the ground beneath me, the sketchbook in my lap, and the pencil in my hand. I could also sense the things that I couldn’t see, like the frozen sun teasing me in the sky, or the wind rustling against my body, or the person suddenly laying beside me.
Alarmed by the sudden intrusion, forgetting that I was supposed to be napping, I popped my eyes open, sitting up with a strong jolt. Everything looked the same as it was when I conked out, save for the guy asleep in the dead grass only about a foot away.
Whoever he was, he was there, and he shouldn’t have been. The meadow was my hiding place, where I came to escape other people, and he was absolutely not welcome to join me. I’d never before interacted with someone in the meadow, never even considered bringing someone else to my hiding spot, to my place outside of the real world; it wasn’t for sharing, and I couldn’t think of anybody I trusted enough to bring into something so intimate. Of course, anybody could realistically find the space with a bit of curious adventuring, but I didn’t like the thought of sharing, especially not while I was asleep with half of my possessions laid out beside me.
The outsider was relaxing flat on the ground beside me with his hands behind his head, concealed by black, shoulder-length hair. His ankles were crossed, his eyes were shut, and a soft smile rested on his unconventionally attractive face. He looked almost vaguely familiar, but I had no real idea who he was or where he came from. His presence was made that much more absurd by the fact that he seemed to think nothing of cuddling up next to a complete stranger.
I took a moment to look him over, up, down, and back again in the hopes that I could figure out anything about him. His features were defined, fitting well with his somewhat angular face, and he looked to be only a few years older than I. Nothing about his outfit of black jeans and a muted blue hoodie was especially noteworthy, save for the chunky metal belt buckle that jutted from beneath his jacket, brazenly displaying the initials, “DC”.
I continued to check him out for far too long, trying to piece together who he was and why I almost recognized him – until he opened his eyes. He noticed me noticing him and he stared at my deer-in-headlights face for a moment, his zen expression unchanging.
But after that moment, he sat up, and I jerked backward from the unexpectedness of his motion. At my surprise, an amused smile sliced through his plump, pale lips, his bright green eyes electrifyingly alive with the light of it. I tried to make my mouth move, tried to make a sound, but the oddity of the entire situation seemed to trapped the words inside of me.
The two of us looked dumbfounded at one another, neither of us disturbing the eerie winter silence between us. Breaking our eye contact, he looked around for a moment before taking notice of the way I’d anticipated spending my afternoon, drawing instead of playing “Guess Who” with a stranger. With another smirk, he slid the pencil from my grasp, taking my sketchbook and scribbling on it.
When he finished, he picked the pad up off his lap and extended it back to me, nodding his head toward it with encouragement. His grin was still present and he didn’t seem entirely threatening, despite how bizarre this all was, so I figured I had nothing to lose by delving into the oddity of the whole experience.
As I extended my hand to take my book back from him, the tips of my fingers brushed against his, igniting sparks at the impact sight, and it would have been kind of nice, had it not woken me up from what was apparently still a dream. I blinked once, and he was gone, vanished into thin air as though he’d never been there at all. I examined the area around me, trying to see if I could spot him darting off, but he seemed to be gone without a trace.
It brought me to the realization that I’d simply been having a rather lifelike dream, one that felt almost exactly like I’d never fallen asleep at all. My time with the enigma had been somewhat interesting, but he was gone, and I was alone once again. With the peacefulness of my space disturbed by whatever that was, I looked up into the sky above me. The sun had dipped behind the tree line, and it was beginning to get dark. If I didn’t start making my way home soon, I’d be stuck in the meadow without any light to guide me back out. I almost knew the layout of the plot of land well enough, but I wasn’t willing to risk getting lost and sticking myself outside for the night in the middle of January in Upstate New York.
I didn’t have time to dawdle, stuffing my things into my bag carelessly and hurrying back to the main path. As much as I tried to shake off the dream as I shuffled along back to the familiar, mapped out sidewalks of Suburbia, the image of that stranger’s smirking face was all I could focus on.
Chapter Two
A few nights later, my father stood before me, toe-to-toe, yelling in my face as he held up my mid-year report card. “What do you call this?” he barked at me. Mum sat at the dining room table a few feet away, still exhausted from her nightly battle with Roger, though she always tried, for my sake, not to show it. The façade worked when I was younger, and I believed that Mum was a superhero whose problems always rolled off her back, but as I grew to understand their relationship better as I got older, the verity of the charade was all but lost.
I kept my eyes on the piece of paper that dangled before me to avoid my father’s scorn. “What do you mean?”
When Roger drank – as he had with dinner that evening, pairing a little too much whisky with his takeout Chinese – he was prone to becoming enraged at the smallest provocation. That evening’s topic was my report card, which Mum had mentioned came in the mail while trying to find a topic to break our icy silence at the table. “The letter D is what you start our last name with, Ashley,” he seethed. “It is not meant to be your grade in English.”
“Sorry,” I murmured, keeping my eyes anywhere but on his, trying my best to ignore the droplets of spittle that landed on my face as he spoke.
In a quick flash of fury, he pressed his hands into my shoulders and shoved me hard against the small section of wall that separated our living room from the kitchen and dining area. His tone fell into an eerie calm, sinking my stomach as I remained pressed against the drywall. “What do you have to say for yourself about this?” Paralyzed by the impact, I was stuck looking him in the eye with a frozen expression, trapped there and unable to look away. His admittedly short fuse ran out just as I found the words to reply, and he rushed back to me, forehead pressed to mine in a show of bravado, a degrading little fountain of spit splashing onto my skin as he growled at me. “I will not have any daughter of mine keeping such a terrible grade! Explain this, right now!”
Something inside of me snapped in that moment, and I pulled back from him, pressing myself as flat against the wall as possible to get away from him. “That’s my English grade, yeah, but you don’t get to pretend you care how I’m doing in school. You just need another excuse to flip out, and this one’s just convenient for you,” I accused with fervor.
Mum piped up with a dragged out, “Ashley,” trying to warn me away from diving in before checking how deep the water was and landing in over my head.
Roger stepped back, crossing his arms over his charcoal, argyle sweater as a smirk showed itself on his face. If I had the chance to expose the raw nerve endings of the anger that I harbored toward him and everything he’d become in the past few years, the man he used to be falling to pieces with Mum’s cancer diagnosis and being replaced with a snarling monster I couldn’t say I knew, I took every chance to do it before he swiftly extinguished my fire. “You never care about Mum or me,” I spat, and Roger let me ramble, his expression unchanged. “As long as you feel good, it doesn’t matter how Mum and I are. Nothing matters to you but you!”
“Ashley, Love, watch yourself,” Mum contin
ued, now more pointed and direct.
Again, though, I brushed aside her advice in favor of my anger, presenting itself as cliché teen angst. “You know, they make contraceptives for a reason, and you can use them even after you get married. Perhaps, if you’d thought of this eighteen years ago, you wouldn’t have me to worry about. You could have just carried on with your selfish life and everything would be fine. You’d be so much happier if I weren’t around.”
“Looks like the only way out is to kill yourself, then,” Roger spat at me, the whisky dancing and swirling around in his words as he slurred them, “so spare us both the pain of your oh-so tortured existence and give that a shot. Your mother has enough pain pills, and you can even wash it down with something from my liquor cabinet. Go to sleep, never wake up, and everyone is that much better off.”
Hearing how far our tiff was carrying on, Mum ignored her fatigue and fresh bruises from earlier that afternoon in favor of shooting out of her chair, standing between her husband and her child with a hand on each of our shoulders, trying to push us apart. “Stop it, right now.”
“Oh, you wish I’d do it!” I screamed over her, my throat quickly growing tender from the harshness I was relatively unaccustomed to.
Across from me, Roger snarled like some sort of feral creature. “I promise you, my life would be infinitely better if you were not around.”
“Stop it!” The house fell silent with one swift, exasperated screech from Mum. Roger and I didn’t stop eying each other, didn’t so much as blink, and I felt my muscles begin to twinge with the poisonous itch of fury as it coursed through me. “We’re a proper family, damn it, so act as such. There’s nothin’ wrong with us and we aren’t broken. You love each other, right?” Not wanting to be the instigator, neither of us said a word, which only served to frustrate Mum farther, prodding her into asking again, “Right?”
In one swift move, giving into his feelings before I could, Roger reached up, grabbed Mum by the shoulders, and tossed her to the floor, her frail form putting up little resistance as she fell. He turned to me with animalistic eyes, our war-machine still well oiled despite the interruption. I moved in time to have the satisfaction of seeing him stumble drunkenly over his own feet for a moment, taking off through the house as he shuffled to block my way to the front door, well aware that I’d be trying to leave, as was standard procedure when a fight broke out.
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