chapter one
Weird stuff was going down in Oakville, and this time I was definitely—well, fairly—sure that I had nothing to do with it. The Sunday morning news headline on the muted television above the kitchen counter read:
Another Mysterious Withdrawal
Finn sat beside me at the counter, still in the sweats he’d slept in after our kung-fu marathon last night. He tossed a Cheerio through the air. It ricocheted off the cupboard and then the TV screen before bouncing into the right side of the sink.
“Score.” Finn grinned.
I let one fly, but mine hit the angle wrong and landed behind the toaster. Hand-eye coordination had never been my strong suit … foot-eye coordination, if such a thing existed, was a completely different story. Being pelted by breakfast cereal made the extremely stern expression on the male news anchor’s face even more ridiculous.
Mom cleared her throat from the doorway. “I hope you’re keeping track of where all those are landing, Parker.”
Finn coughed and sat up a little straighter, smiling over his shoulder and trying to look innocent. A feat that probably would have been easier if his shirt didn’t read If We Get Chased by Zombies, I’m Tripping You.
I nodded without glancing in her direction. “Easy. A few of mine are behind the toaster. All of Finn’s are in the sink. And yes, I’ll clean them up.”
She kissed the top of my head as she walked past and grabbed the remote. “That’s all I wanted to hear.” Her red-painted nail pressed the volume button and Bradley Kent’s voice rose until it echoed softly through the previously silent room. Then she grabbed an apple and began slicing.
“-sibly more puzzling, is that in spite of the fact that he’s plainly shown on the security tapes, Mr. Jameson claims to have no recollection of draining his savings account or where the money is now. The police are investigating to determine if there is any evidence of impersonation or identity theft involved in either case.”
The channel went to commercial and Mom pressed the mute button again. This wasn’t the first time we’d heard bizarre stories on the news lately. A couple of people had woken up in different parts of the city with pockets full of money, and others had attacked people while asleep. Last week, an entire family just disappeared overnight. Although the authorities were considering the possibility that they’d left due to a family emergency or something, it struck me as very odd. They’d left literally everything behind, including shoes, pets, and cars, and someone had seen them walking down the street in the middle of the night in their pajamas.
These things went beyond regular sleepwalking, and they were starting to freak me out.
Mom shook her head, then smiled up at us. “Isn’t your flight today, Finn?”
Finn swallowed a massive spoonful of cereal before answering. “Yeah.”
“Have you been to Disney World before?”
“Nope.”
“Why didn’t your family wait until school lets out for summer? That’s coming up fast.” She picked up a stack of mail in front of her and started riffling through it.
“They got a deal because it’s before the summer season really hits. It would’ve cost twice as much if we’d waited. At least that’s what Dad said.” Finn dropped his spoon back into his cereal. He glanced at me before his eyes fell to the dark green countertop before him. One hand snuck up and tugged on his right ear the way it always did when his brain threatened to start a fire from working too hard. I knew what he was thinking. It was the same thing he, his sister Addie, and our friend Mia Green had been worrying about for almost a month straight. How was I going to handle seven days without them?
More specifically, would I be able to handle seven straight days without being able to sleep in Mia’s dreams?
I’d barely survived years of watching other people’s dreams, and subsequently going without real sleep, before I met Mia. Being a Watcher, as I called it, was a living nightmare at times. The self-hypnosis that Mia used to get to sleep made her dreams especially calm and peaceful, at least when it worked and kept her horrific nightmares at bay. One week without her amazing dreams would definitely not be fun, but it shouldn’t be that bad.
And if I kept repeating that—it might be true.
“Your dad needs to find deals for me next time we go on vacation.” Mom stared at the top of my head until I looked up, then tilted her head toward where Finn sat still staring at the counter. She raised her eyebrows. When I shrugged, she tossed one apple slice into her mouth and put the rest in a sandwich bag, then grabbed her purse off the counter.
“Well, I’m off to work.” Mom patted Finn on the back as she passed him and gave my shoulder a quick squeeze on the way to the garage. “You’ll have fun, Finn, don’t worry. And Parker will survive without you. I’ll make sure of it.”
The door to the garage closed behind her. Finn pushed his empty cereal bowl to one side and rubbed his palms over his face. His grumbled words barely escaped from behind his hands. “You sure you haven’t told her that you almost died of sleep deprivation a few months ago? Because that was a seriously bad choice of words.”
“I haven’t told her and you need to chill.” I really didn’t want to go over this again. They had to leave. It really wasn’t optional. I tried to keep my voice light. “You’re going on vacation to Florida—land of sunshine and bikinis. Shouldn’t you be more excited?”
“Oh, right.” Finn dropped his hands and his grin almost reached his eyes. “Screw you, then. We may never come back.”
I laughed. “That’s more like it.”
Finn tried to laugh, but it sounded more like a groan.
Chasing a few stray Cheerios around my bowl with my spoon, I spoke fast and tried not to let my own concern show through. “Seriously … don’t you think Addie and Mia do enough worrying for the both of us?”
“Whatever. If Mia wasn’t still—if I hadn’t choked—” Finn’s voice locked up and neither of us spoke. I sat in stunned silence. In the two weeks since we’d lost the soccer championship game, he’d never mentioned it once. And unlike his parents and Addie, I never tried to make him talk about it. Can’t really blame a guy for not wanting to relive the last half of a crucial game in which he failed to block a single goal—not one. We were slaughtered.
Not that anyone really blamed him. Even at school, no one gave him any crap. Our soccer season had been messed up from the get-go, since it started only a couple of months after the football season ended as a joke. Not the funny kind of joke, but the sick kind that was whispered about in hallways across the state. Some of our offensive line hadn’t even shown up for the last game. Almost no one was in the stands, and the cheerleaders spent more time crying than cheering. I guess that’s what you get when you play a game only one week after your quarterback/senior class president/star soccer player/psychopath extraordinaire Jeff Sparks tries to set a couple of students and the school on fire.
Finn, Mia, and I had all survived—more than we could say for Jeff. I’d finally proven to Mia, and myself, that Jeff was the stalker sending her creepy messages, not me. We’d even healed, at least on the outside.
So we’d thought soccer season couldn’t possibly end worse, right? Right, but it could still be pretty bad. We tried to pull it together at the end, got the wins we needed for the playoffs, but we weren’t the same team we’d been before.
I would never be the same again. Turned out, neither would Finn.
Standing, Finn walked over to the sink, rinsed his bowl, and put it in the dishwasher before turning to face me. “We wouldn’t even be going to Florida if my mom didn’t think everything could be fixed by throwing Mickey Mouse at it.”
“Maybe it can
be.” I swirled my Cheerios around in my bowl without looking up.
“Only when you’re five.”
“Don’t knock it ’til you try it.”
The doorbell rang. Finn sat up straighter and ran his fingers through his hair, trying to smooth it a bit. That meant Mia was the one picking him up. Finn had never said a word about liking her, but it was pretty hard to miss.
The whole thing seemed a little awkward to me. Mia’s parents had been killed in a fire, and she’d been in foster care ever since. When Jeff, who was Mia’s foster brother, attacked us at the school over fall break, the foster system needed a new home for her. Addie and Finn’s parents had jumped at the chance. It had seemed ideal. The Patricks were great and Mia was very happy there. About a month later, Finn started acting different around her.
I figured having the girl you liked living in the same house with you could either be really great or really uncomfortable. Given how much time Finn had spent at my house the last couple of months, I guessed he leaned more toward the uncomfortable side of the scale.
When I opened the front door, Addie and Mia’s hushed voices stopped immediately.
“I can leave the door shut, if you like.” I leaned against the doorjamb and smiled. “For future reference, though, don’t ring the bell if you aren’t ready for someone to answer it.”
“Good morning to you too.” Mia gave me a quick hug, her brunette ponytail swinging in my face and making me sputter, before walking past me toward the kitchen and leaving Addie and me alone in the entryway. I watched Mia’s retreating back for an instant. It was still hard to get used to her not freaking out every time she saw me. And even though she didn’t act like it, I knew from watching her dreams that it hadn’t been easy for her to adjust to the idea that I wasn’t the enemy.
Addie’s auburn hair blew loose around her shoulders in the passing breeze. It looked carefree … like she used to be. Her hazel eyes studied the ground between us. I wanted to see the swirling browns and golds in them even though I knew they only showed me what she was feeling when she wanted me to see. She’d always been the hardest for me to read.
The only time she’d looked truly happy over the last few months had been when Finn learned to play the ukulele
so he could sing her Happy Birthday. He was hilarious, and she couldn’t stop laughing. Even though she’d turned sixteen a week before Valentine’s Day, we hadn’t been able to celebrate either event the way we wanted to—together.
I reached out and brushed the back of her hand, hoping for a smile, but when she looked up I saw only worry.
“Don’t.” I kept my voice soft. “It’s going to be fine.”
“No repeats, Parker. You need to keep control.” She curled her fingers around mine and pretended not to notice when I glanced back toward the kitchen to make sure Finn wasn’t looking our direction. I still hadn’t managed to tell him how Addie and I felt about each other, and with his recent struggles in the soccer championship game, I didn’t know when I was going to.
Addie continued making a list of all the things I wasn’t ever to do again, staring hard at my hand while she did so. “No hallucinations. No car accidents. No coming back from vacation to find you in the hospital.”
“I know, I kno—”
“Most importantly,” she interrupted, squeezing my hand and lifting her eyes to mine. This time she let me see it: the pain she still felt every time we talked about the day Jeff had attacked us. “No disappearing. No running away and leaving me nothing but a stupid note.”
Her words fell like anchors on my shoulders, tying me to her in ways a rope never could. But we both knew—now and every time she’d asked me before—that I couldn’t, I wouldn’t promise her that. If it came to keeping my friends safe, I’d run again. What could I say? Any response from me would either have been a lie or the exact opposite of what she wanted to hear.
So I said nothing. I just led her out onto the porch, out of view of the kitchen, and wrapped my arms tight around her. We stood in the warm air of late spring and I breathed in the light citrus scent of her hair. Waited one—two—three full breaths before she finally relaxed against me and I felt the warmth of her hands on my back.
“Why does this have to be so hard?” Her voice was muffled against me, her breath warm on my neck.
“I’ll figure it out. Give me time.” The words sounded empty even to me. I’d been telling Addie this same thing for months now, but I hadn’t made any progress. I didn’t want to sneak around like this any more than she did, but Finn had made it clear, many times, how bad of an idea he thought it was for anyone to date his sister—especially his friends. And with everything else that had gone on in the last year, a solution wasn’t coming quickly enough for either of us.
“Come on.” She sighed and pulled back, stuffing her hands into her jeans pockets. The space between us made me feel colder than I should have when standing in the sunlight. “We need to talk to the others.”
Without a word, I followed her into the kitchen. There really wasn’t anything else I could say. Our relationship, if you could call it that, was more than complicated. If you took complicated, mixed in fifteen pounds of confusion and messed-up crap, then you were getting close. Keeping it a secret had definitely caused problems, and having my life depend on me spending most of my nights in another girl’s head didn’t help much either. But I felt even stronger about Addie than ever. I had no idea how to sort it all out.
As soon as we were back in the kitchen, she spun on her toes to face me. “So what’s your plan?”
I scratched my elbow as Finn turned off the TV and slid around on his barstool. They all watched me, waiting, but if they wanted an answer, they needed to be more specific.
“What do you mean, ‘plan’?”
Mia leaned back against the counter and folded her arms. “Well, can we just make eye contact now … and then you not look at anyone until I come back?”
I sighed and shook my head. “No. That would be the simplest option, but it won’t work after the first night. Ever since the hospital, my mom has been very … attentive. She stares me straight in the eye every time we talk, and if I won’t look back at her she asks what’s wrong, over and over. I’d have to avoid her completely all week and that doesn’t go over well either, especially since she’s just beginning to relax a bit lately. I’ll just have to deal with it until you get back. It’s not like I haven’t done this before.”
Mia frowned but didn’t argue, and since it looked like Finn and Addie were about to, I kept my attention on Mia as she asked, “Who is your backup if we’re all gone? Your replacement-me? Have you been thinking about it?”
“I was thinking last night that we should try using video chat right before you go to bed,” I said with a shrug. Finn and Addie visibly relaxed at just the idea. “I mean, if you’re willing?”
“Of course.” Mia’s response was immediate. She didn’t even need to consider it.
“Thank you.” The words weren’t enough, but I knew she understood how much her help meant to me. It was literally life or death. She saved my life every day. How could two words ever be enough for that?
Addie looked thoughtful. “Do you think that will work? Maybe we should’ve tried it before now … ”
“I have no idea, but it’s worth a try.” I shrugged. “I thought about testing it last night, but if it didn’t work, then it would just have been one extra night of no sleep. Besides, you guys have to go; it’s not like you can just decide not to. If it fails, it fails. I’ll be fine. My mom won’t be able to help with the sleep issue like Mia can, but at least her dreams are usually safe and boring. She’s definitely Plan B.”
Finn nodded. “I think that’s the best choice. With your top three options gone.”
Mia rolled her eyes, but the corner of her mouth jerked up. “You make us sound like contestants on some kind of game show.”
Finn grinned wide and then said, “Sweet! What kind of game show, exactly?”
Mia opened her mouth, but I decided to cut her off before Finn could derail the conversation even further.
“Anyway, yeah. It will be fine.” I tried not to think about the fact that Mom had been on three dates with my physics teacher, Mr. Nelson, in the last month. Or that from the way she’d giggled when he called her on the phone last night, I got the impression she was enjoying herself. That was great; I was happy for her. I just really hoped he didn’t show up in her dreams tomorrow night—or the next five nights after.
I’d learned a long time ago that there are some images that just stick with you, no matter how hard you try to forget.
Mia cleared her throat and her wide eyes didn’t leave mine in the awkward silence that followed. I knew they were all going to keep worrying about me no matter what kind of plan we had, but Mia was in a unique position to understand just how bad it could be for me to be stuck in the wrong dreams. Her nightmares had been a literal hell for both of us for a long while.
Even now, though her bad nights were definitely fewer and farther between, when they did show up … between me not sleeping and her reliving the death of her parents, it made for a rough night all around. On top of that, she’d added a new recurring nightmare featuring the night Jeff attacked us. I didn’t think she’d told Addie or Finn about this one, and it wasn’t my place to share it if she wasn’t ready.
In the seven months since we’d met, Mia and I had survived more than a few nightmares, both in reality and in her head. In some ways, our friendship was brand new and tenuous. In other ways, we’d already survived more together than most friendships ever could. Add in the fact that we both knew she was keeping me alive, and our friendship was unique if nothing else.
“So, uh … should we watch some TV?” Mia asked, changing the subject as she shot me a sympathetic look.
I glanced at the clock on the microwave. “What time do you guys have to head home? Need to pack before the flight to the magic planet or whatever?”
This time all three of them glared at me. Mia because we both knew I’d called it the wrong name on purpose, Finn because we both knew he didn’t want to go, and Addie … I really wasn’t sure. I could probably make a list of reasons why she should be glaring at me and none of them would be the reason she actually was.
[Night Walkers 02] - Paranoia (2014) Page 1