The Awakening

by K. E. Ganshert

  She blanches.

  “I have to get out of here. I have to get to Detroit.”

  “Detroit! Tess, Detroit is awful. It’s—it’s …” She twists up her face, as if searching for the proper description. “Well, if this evil stuff is real like you say it is, then Detroit is like hell. You can’t go there. You’ll be killed.”

  “We have to. Dr. Roth said there are others out there like us—people who can see the things we see. Luka and I think some of them live in Detroit. At least they did six years ago. We have to find them. In order to get there, we need fake IDs. Is there a way you can get a hold of my dad without the police catching on to you?” He’s a man who stands toward the top of the ladder at Safe Guard Security Systems. Surely, with those types of connections, he can get Luka and me a fake ID. “Maybe you can contact him at his work. I can give you the number.”

  Leela slides her hands from mine and looks down into her lap.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “Your dad … he’s on some sort of probation with Safe Guard. They didn’t fire him, but I don’t think he’s working right now.” She bites her lip. “I guess they aren’t letting him return to his job until you turn yourself in and get treatment.”

  My hope plummets. For my family. For me. What’s going to happen to them if he gets fired at Safe Guard? What’s going to happen to Luka and me if we can’t figure out a way to get out of here?

  Leela’s eyes light up. “Bobbi!”

  “Your cousin?”

  “Her dad’s the chief of police.”

  “You can’t tell him, Leela, he’ll come after us!”

  “I know that, but there’s a whole bunch of confiscated fake IDs at the station. Kids make them all the time. Bobbi and I used to look through them when we were younger. They’re put into Evidence, which is this small locker in the basement. Her dad keeps the key in the top drawer of his desk. I can find a way to get them.”

  “How?”

  “I’ll go visit him first thing in the morning.”

  “Has he questioned you about me?” I have to imagine she was interrogated more than anyone else. It was no secret that we were close.

  “Yes, but Bobbi told him we had a falling out. He told his officers to leave me alone. But Tess, they’re tracking your parents, twenty-four seven.”

  Which means I can’t see them. I can’t contact them. I can’t speak with them. Not until this is over. If it ever is. “You’re positive nobody’s following you?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  So maybe our falling out was a good thing. A silver lining. There’s a dragging sensation in my stomach, as if I’m about to wake up or go somewhere else. I grab onto Leela, wondering if I can bring her with me like I did with Luka. “I’m going to call you in the morning when we wake up.”

  She shakes her head slightly, as if grasping for clarity. “If you say so …”

  “If I say so?”

  “This is a dream. It’s not real. You’re not real.”

  “No, I’m real. This is me, in your dream.” Desperation stains each one of my words. She’s going to wake up and discredit all of this. I grapple for a solution. Something that won’t negate the progress I’ve been making while we sleep. “A password.”

  “What?”

  “We need a password. Something random. Something I wouldn’t know. You tell it to me now and when I call you, I’ll say it as proof that all of this was real.”

  I’m slipping … slipping … “Leela, a password!”

  “Jelly donuts.”

  The crowd erupts into cheering. Everybody jumps to their feet, Leela too. Whooping and clapping, because Matt Chesterson scored the winning touchdown.

  My eyes fly open. I’m awake in bed at Motel California. Shafts of light squeeze through the cracks in the blinds, turning a whole host of dust motes into floating sparkles. I sit upright. Did that really happen—me, visiting Leela in her dream, or was it some weird, hopeful dream of my own? The details begin to fade, like all dreams do. I squeeze my eyes shut and hold the details tight, running them through my head until they are committed to memory.

  When I look around, I find that I’m in bed alone. I kick the sheets off my legs and quickly stand, then brace myself against the wall to ward off a sudden bout of dizziness. For one panicked moment, I think Luka left in the night. But both of our backpacks are on the chair, and there’s a white note on the pillow. I pick it up.

  Tess,

  At Walgreens. Got an early start. Getting supplies. I didn’t want to wake you up and I don’t want you to worry. Hopefully I’ll be back before you read this. But in case I’m not…

  Yours,

  Luka

  I look at the clock. It’s seven in the morning. What if Luka doesn’t come back to me? I should want that. I should want him to come to his senses and leave; but I’m not ready to be on my own. Not yet. Before panic can have its way, the lock clicks and the door opens and Luka steps inside with two plastic bags in hand. I run to him and fling my arms around his neck, like Leela did with me in the dream. He drops the bags and wraps his arms around my waist, his hands splayed wide on the small of my back. “Good morning to you, too.”

  The sound of his voice in my ear has me remembering myself. I let go and take a step back, cursing the blast of heat in my cheeks. Seriously, enough with the blushing already. “Did you run into any trouble?”

  “It’s seven in the morning on a Saturday. The only person I saw was the checkout person at Walgreens and she was half asleep.” He picks up one of the bags and dumps the contents onto the bed. Two bottles of orange juice. Some bananas. A box of donuts. A buzz cutter. A box of hair dye. And a phone—a cheap plastic mobile one that allows a person to pay for minutes as they go.

  I pick it up. “I have to call Leela.”

  “Leela?”

  “I visited her in my dream.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I visited her like how I sometimes visit you. I told her everything and she believed me.”

  He looks skeptical. “I don’t know if that’s the smartest idea. To her, it was just a dream. What if she doesn’t even remember it?”

  “Leela won’t report us.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  I nibble the inside of my bottom lip. Am I? “If she does, we’ll ditch the phone and run. I mean, what’s this for anyway? Who else can we call?”

  “The Greyhound bus station, for one.”

  “And how will we get tickets without IDs? How will we even get there?” The closest Greyhound station is a forty-five minute drive to Eureka. I listened to Luka’s skepticism once about Leela, when he didn’t want me to tell her what was really going on. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe I should have told her everything from the beginning. Or maybe he was right. Maybe telling her everything would have ruined our friendship before it started. “Leela’s our best option.”

  He stares down at the carpet, working a muscle in his jaw. I wait to see if he will extend the same trust I extended to him last night. Finally, he looks me in the eye and gives me a small, singular nod.

  I dial Leela’s number. Five rings, then voicemail. I hang up and try again. “C’mon, Leela, answer the phone.”

  This time, the second ring is followed by a groggy hello.

  “Leela, it’s Tess!”

  My enthusiastic greeting is met with silence. I picture her sitting up in bed, rubbing her eyes, trying to bat away the web of confusion. “Tess?”

  “Yes, Tess. Do you remember the dream?”

  She says nothing.

  My heart thuds much too fast. This has to work. “Do you remember jelly donuts?”

  Luka quirks his eyebrow.

  “Leela, please say you remember.”

  “I do.”

  “Do you believe this is real?”

  There’s an agonizing pause. I wish I could see her face. I wish I knew what she was thinking. I wish, I wish, I wish … until she says two glorious words. “I’m in.”r />
  She is resolute.

  She is determined.

  We have an ally.

  Chapter Six

  Plans & Disguises

  After talking with Leela for who knows how long, we have a plan in place—most of which involves us sitting around the motel while Leela does all the dangerous work. We will call her at nine tonight to see if she was successful. If so, she will drive to Motel California. Luka and I will hide in the back of her car while she drives us to the nearest Greyhound station in Eureka. We will buy tickets and we will leave on the first bus out of town.

  To Detroit.

  In the meantime, Luka and I will disguise ourselves.

  After eating two donuts and drinking all my orange juice, I examine the box of hair dye. Luka sits on the edge of the bed, pouring over the three files we picked from the large pile as though committing every symptom, every jotted letter to memory. I begin removing the items from the box of dye—two pairs of plastic gloves, two plastic hair caps, a packet of bleach primer, another packet of light brown dye, a small bottle of golden boost to give the brown a honeyed tint, two application bottles, and directions, which I unfold. I’ve never in my life colored my hair, not even professionally at a salon. It’s always been the same shade as my mother’s—a brown so dark it’s occasionally mistaken for black.

  I hold up a plastic glove. “I’m going to look horrible.”

  “Impossible.” Luka shuts the manila folder. “Do you want some help?”

  “Do you know how to help?”

  “It can’t be that hard.”

  His words do not instill much confidence, but we read the directions together and he pulls on one pair of the plastic gloves. He pours the pouch of bleach into an application bottle and shakes it up. I put a towel over my t-shirt while Luka removes the backpacks from the chair and has me sit in front of the vanity. The first squirt is cold. So much so that I hunch up my shoulders and squeal.

  “Sorry.” I don’t miss the laughter in his apology.

  He continues, squeezing the cold goo all over my head, then slowly massaging it into the roots and out to the ends. My scalp tingles. I’m pretty sure it has less to do with the bleach and more to do with Luka’s fingers. It takes him a while to finish. My hair, which grows like a weed, has grown out since I got it cut with my mom before my first day of school. It hangs well past my shoulders and my bangs are long enough to tuck behind my ears. Once my hair is properly soaked, he hands me the cap. “You’re supposed to leave this on for twenty minutes.”

  Just what I need. A shower cap. When I put it on, the tingling turns to burning. “Is it supposed to sting?”

  “According to L’Oreal, that’s normal.”

  “Are you sure you don’t have a sister?” As soon as the question is out, I want to yank it back in. My teasing smile falls away. Luka might have had a sister if his mother hadn’t listened to the doctors after her first failed government-mandated pregnancy screening. They told her the fetus had an abnormality. Like the many women before her, she underwent a procedure that would fix the problem. Nothing too alarming about that. After all, pregnancy screenings have been part of life for years now. Fetal modification is as common as the flu shot. Not just here in America, but all over the world. It’s the second part of the story that makes it alarming. I look down at my feet. “That was insensitive.”

  “Tess?”

  I keep my attention fixed downward.

  “I don’t shatter easily.”

  This is a good thing. Lately, I’ve been feeling all too shatterable.

  “Did you ever find out whether your mom passed her pregnancy screening when she was pregnant with you?”

  “I could never figure out how to ask without arousing suspicion.”

  “Maybe she never had one. Lots of women were slipping under the radar back then.”

  My mind wanders to Luka’s mom, failing her second screening but carrying the baby to term anyway, and for the first time, a fierce sense of admiration blossoms in my chest for the woman. All the worry she must have gone through during her second pregnancy, and then the confusion that must have occurred when she brought forth a healthy, beautiful baby boy. “Why do you think your mom failed your screening? Do you think the tests somehow picked up … the gifting?”

  “It’s crossed my mind.” He nods at the manila folders on the nightstand. “I was looking through the files hoping to find something about it. But the screenings weren’t around when that older guy, Josiah, was born and it doesn’t mention anything about them for the other two.”

  I shake my head. I’m so tired of having all these questions and no answers. Dr. Roth’s death was frightening and horrible, yes, but it’s also incredibly frustrating. He had our answers. He was going to tell us everything. But now he’s dead and all we have to go on are three client records that are six years old. And these three records are leading us to Detroit, a gigantic, over-populated city we’ve never been to, in search of three people who might not even be there anymore. For all we know, they are in Shady Wood with my grandmother. The chances of finding them is an impossibility that I’m foolishly hanging my hopes on. Because without them, we will be at a gigantic dead end.

  The stinging of my scalp intensifies. I attempt to scratch through the plastic cap. If offers little relief. I think about Leela at the station right now, either failing or succeeding in her mission, and an entire horde of butterflies unleashes in my stomach. I can’t think about Leela. Distraction is key. I glance at Luka, who has taken a seat on the edge of the bed and fiddles with his frayed hemp bracelet. “You look deep in thought.”

  “I’m trying to figure out why we haven’t seen anything lately.”

  He’s right. Where have all the white-eyed men gone? And what about the guy with the scar? I’ve slept two nights in a row without evil infiltrating my dreams. The more I think about it, the less sense it makes. “You’d think if evil were after us, we’d be easy targets here.”

  “It’s almost like …”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. It’s almost like something’s protecting us.” Luka shakes his head and stares down at his palms. “It’s driving me nuts, not knowing how I protected you.”

  “You mean with the force-field thing?” He’s done it twice now. First in real life, when one of the white-eyed men lunged at me in the locker bay of our school, and again in a dream, while we were saving Pete. Both times, waves of light radiated from his palms and drove the darkness back. It was like a reaction, one he doesn’t know how to reproduce.

  “I was trying to figure it out for at least two hours the other night in the alley.”

  “Did you ever do it?”

  “No, but it was exhausting work. I hadn’t planned on falling asleep.”

  “You had a nightmare.” I pick at a hangnail on my thumb. He wouldn’t tell me about it yesterday, but maybe if I push now, with some distance between the memory of it, he’ll open up a little. “What was it about?”

  “Nothing.” He’s lying. It wasn’t nothing. But he stands and holds up the now-empty hair dye box. “It’s been twenty minutes.”

  Luka helps me rinse all the bleach from my head into the sink. I ring my hair out like a wet rag, then towel it dry. The sight of me in the mirror makes my eyes go a little buggy. “I look like an albino.”

  “A very cute one.”

  There it is again—one of those comments. They do funny things to my stomach.

  “You sure you don’t want to keep it this way?” he teases.

  “You prefer blondes, huh?”

  “I’m pretty sure that’s more like white.”

  “I think we’ll draw less attention to ourselves if I’m a brunette again.” I fill the second application bottle with the brown dye, pour in the golden booster, shake it up, and hand it over to Luka, who has put on a new pair of gloves. Not many boys his age could pull off the look. Luka, however, pulls it off well—wearing the perfect amount of amusement and self-deprecation.

&
nbsp; Our eyes meet in the mirror’s reflection. One corner of his mouth curves up. “I have a thing for brunettes, by the way.”

  I bite the inside of my cheek to keep from smiling. Just how much would Summer and Jennalee mourn that statement? Once my hair is soaked in goo all over again, I don the second plastic cap and pick up the clippers from the vanity. “I’m assuming these aren’t for me.”

  “Not unless you want a buzz cut.” Luka is still standing behind me, and the vibration of his voice tickles my ear. It makes me think of the warning on most side view mirrors—objects are closer than they appear. “It’s only a matter of time before I’m on the news too. Might as well disguise myself now. You ready to be the hair stylist?”

  I’ve watched my mom give my dad haircuts with our clippers at home. This might be something I can actually do. “I think I can handle that.”

  I stand. Luka sits.

  “Just an all-around buzz?”

  “Sounds good.”

  It’s not a very flattering hairstyle. The lack of hair has a way of exacerbating every flaw. Even Pete, loved and adored by the girls, got a buzz cut in seventh grade and his nose went from endearingly crooked to distractingly crooked.

  Maybe this will be good. Maybe a buzz cut on Luka will even the playing field a little.

  I set the clippers to the lowest setting, let out a shaky breath, and get to work. The second I run my fingers through his hair, my body grows warm and fluttery. Neither of us speak. By the time I’m done and everything is even and his scalp feels like prickly stubble and my feet are surrounded by tufts of thick, dark hair, the room is so charged I have to take a quick step back just to catch my breath.

  He shakes off the towel and brushes hair from his neck. “How does it look?”

  “Um …”

  “Uh-oh. It’s that bad?” He stands from the chair, sets his hands on the vanity, and leans closer to his reflection. He puts on his pair of black-rimmed glasses. In his well-fitting dark denim jeans and his white undershirt, he looks … incredibly sexy. There are no other words for it. The only thing the buzz cut has exacerbated is his perfection. He turns around and nods toward the clock. “Your twenty minutes is up.”