by Tara Maya, Elle Casey, J L Bryan, Anthea Sharp, Jenna Elizabeth Johnson, Alexia Purdy (epub)
After struggling with the strange, uneasy feeling for several more seconds, I gave up. It was pointless to try and remember a dream that wished to stay hidden. It would come to me eventually, as all my dreams did.
I got myself ready for the day, flipping my radio on to the local classic rock station and slipping into my bathroom to brush my hair and wash my face.
I was halfway through my routine before I noticed the scrapes and cuts. I stopped and glanced at the scratches down my arms. In the mirror, my eyes peered back at me, looking more green than hazel just then. As usual, I wondered why. They weren’t like a mood ring where each color corresponds with what mood you’re in. Blue means relaxed, red means excited . . . Nope, mine just change color as my moods do, or even when I’m not aware my mood has changed. More likely than not, the change in color triggered my response.
I decided that my current mood was a mixture of curiosity and dread. How did I get those scrapes? I thought back to the week before, and then it dawned upon me. I had gotten into a confrontation with Michaela on the field behind school. On Halloween. On my birthday. She had wanted to show me a list. I had tried to get away from her. Only problem was, I hadn’t noticed the chain that acted as a fence separating the track from the football field. I had walked right into it and fallen over, my books sprawling everywhere. I had obviously used my hands and arms to break my fall.
I rubbed the scrapes now, my face reddening from the memory. But there was something odd about it, as if it were a memory from several years ago and not a few days. An old memory.
Taking a deep breath, I tried to forget about the incident. I really hated Michaela and I made a special point not to hate anyone. But that mantra was kind of hard to stick to when you had people like Adam Peders, Josh Turner, Michaela West and all their shallow friends to deal with. They had been making my life a living hell since my first day at school when we were freshmen. And in Adam’s case, even before then.
A noise grabbed my attention and I turned to find Aiden standing in the doorway of my bathroom, gazing up at me with those bright blue eyes of his. He startled me but I relaxed when I realized it was him. My brothers were always trying to break into my room, but they were always too noisy to be successful. Aiden was the only one I never heard climb down the stairs.
“Aiden? What are you doing down here?”
“Cartoo,” was all he said.
I smiled. The medication for his autism seemed to be helping, but he still had a hard time communicating. For some reason, he had fixated on me as the most important person in his life and there was no way I was going to let him down.
“Alright buddy, is no one awake upstairs?”
He didn’t answer. Sometimes he’d go a whole day without saying anything to us. I was used to it though. I carried him back upstairs and plopped him down onto the great stuffed couch in our living room and fished the remote out from between the cushions. I tried to convince myself that the sticky residue gluing my fingers together wasn’t something the twins might have dropped in there the week before.
I surfed around until I found the station playing Aiden’s favorite cartoon. His eyes lit up and he was hooked. When I thought it was safe to return to my room, I dropped a kiss on the top of his head and crossed back to the spiral staircase leading downstairs, passing Logan and Bradley on the way.
“Don’t change the channel. Aiden wants to watch cartoons,” I called over my shoulder to them.
They zipped past me, still dressed in their pajamas, their blond hair tousled and their eyes still droopy.
“What else is new?” Logan piped.
Luckily, his tone was cheerful and not spiteful. It was hard having Aiden in our family, especially since everyone else was so normal. Well, everyone but me of course. I think my brothers were pretty well adjusted, though. I glanced once more over the kitchen counter to find Logan and Bradley on either side of Aiden, all three of them singing the theme song to the cartoon at the top of their lungs.
I smiled widely, knowing that it wouldn’t be long until my parents and the twins were up.
I descended my staircase to the sound of an electric guitar solo blaring from my stereo. I glanced at the clock. Just after eight. Why had I woken up so early on a Sunday morning? Oh yeah, the unremarkable dream that wouldn’t leave me alone.
Sighing, I found a pair of semi-clean jeans among the pile of clothes on my floor. I grabbed an old t-shirt from my drawer and pulled that over my head. I promised Tully last week that I would help her with her English paper, but only if she would help me with science. We had a system, Tully and I. She helped me with my trouble subjects and I helped her. You see, I was a dreamer, head in the clouds, big imagination. I had an ‘analyze poetry’ type of personality. Tully was very scientifically minded; thought mostly in black and white. Of course, we both appreciated each other’s talents, but I probably couldn’t tell the difference between a DNA sequence and the number of chromosomes I had if my life depended on it.
By the time I made it back upstairs with my backpack and my books, the rest of my family had joined the fray on the couch.
“Where are you going so early?” Mom asked, a towel thrown over her shoulder as she mixed pancake batter in a bowl.
“Tully’s,” I said, grabbing an apple and a muffin. “Science test on Tuesday and English paper due Thursday.”
My mom merely raised her eyebrows and nodded. She knew our system as well.
“Hey Dad,” I said as I walked past his favorite recliner. How he could read his magazine while the boys watched unrealistic cartoon characters bash each other to bits was beyond me.
“Mornin’ Meggy,” he answered, his eyes never leaving the story he was reading.
I glanced at the article on my way to the front door. It was an exclusive on Stonehenge. My dad had a penchant for scientific and archaeological magazines.
“Well, see you around lunch time I guess,” I said as I pulled the door open.
As the front door snapped closed, shutting off the sound of arguing boys and the clang of Mom moving dishes around in the kitchen, I threw my head back and took in a deep breath. The sickle-shaped, silvery leaves of the eucalyptus trees rustled in the breeze. For a minute, I thought I heard voices again: dreams, full moon, memory . . . they seemed to whisper.
I shivered, despite the warm autumn morning. That was the thing about the Central Coast; our best weather was in the fall. Sure, we had our fair share of foggy mornings, but on many occasions I had even walked on the beach in shorts and a tank top as late in the season as Christmas Day.
A heftier gust of wind pushed through the branches above my head, parting them like a curtain, and just as quickly as I thought I’d heard them, the voices were gone. Shaking off the weird chill and pushing the voices to the back of my mind, I hiked my backpack further up my shoulder and made my way down the road. I passed our neighbors’ houses, their sprawling front lawns either enjoying a shower of morning sprinklers or lazing in the shadow of the tall shade trees. I loved our street.
I rounded the final curve in the road and headed towards the blue, tidy two-storey house on the corner. Bypassing the front door, I stepped right out onto the front lawn, shading my eyes against the sun as I glanced up at Tully’s window. I smiled to myself, and then took out the tennis ball I kept in my backpack for just this purpose. I wound back my arm, took aim, and launched the neon green ball right through her open window. Less than a minute later, the tennis ball came whizzing back at me. I caught it and stowed it back in my backpack just as Tully poked her blond head through the window.
“I’ll let you in through the back,” she said as loudly as she dared, “Mom and Dad are still in bed and they want to sleep in.”
Both her parents were professors at the local college. On Saturday nights they often ventured into San Luis Obispo to have a night on the town. Tully had once said that they were in denial about growing old. Of course, the fact that they had to sleep in until noon the next day did more to point out t
heir advanced age than going to bars did to enhance their formative years.
Once Tully unlocked the door and led me upstairs, we started pulling out our books and notes. We chatted a little bit about the latest school gossip, but neither of us decided anything was all that new or important. Besides, we weren’t privy to the good gossip anyway. Yet it still baffled me that for a high school consisting of just under six hundred students, we sure had a lot of drama that took place.
Sighing, I grabbed my notes on the latest English tragedy novella we were reading in our literature class and made myself comfortable as Tully grabbed her desk chair and moved it closer to me.
Only after I sat down on Tully’s bed did it occur to me just how tired I was. I tended to be an early riser, so it wasn’t like my schedule was any different than usual. But today I felt as if I’d joined Mr. and Mrs. Gordon on their club fest last night.
“Meg, what happened to your arms?” Tully asked, grabbing my hands and pulling my arms out to examine them.
“Oh,” I said as I blinked away my sudden weariness, “the thing that happened with Michaela the other day, remember? When I tripped over the guard chain?”
Tully gave me a look. I knew that look. It was the same look I always got from other adults right before my parents decided it was time to take me to a new psychiatrist.
“You didn’t trip over anything.”
“Yes, I did, you were there, remember?” Why did I always have to be the crazy one? “She wanted to show me the list of girls Adam Peders would never date in a million years? She hinted that you were on the list as well, or don’t you remember that either?”
I was suddenly angry for some reason and it wasn’t even at the insult the list had caused. I was angry because I suspected Tully was right. The argument had been real, I know that for a fact, but something about tripping over the chain wasn’t quite right. Yes, it surfaced along with the memory of Michaela’s pinched face but it seemed misplaced, contrived even. Like when you were a toddler and you were trying to figure out how to piece together a jigsaw puzzle for the first time in your life. Although the pieces don’t quite fit, you tried to force them together anyway.
Tully glanced up at me with her clear green eyes. I normally towered over her, but at that moment she made me feel as small as my twin brothers.
“I remember you tripping over a chain fence,” she whispered, “but that was in third grade when Marissa Campos told us she knew how to make our freckles multiply.”
Both of us released a laugh at the memory, and the tension that had been building up melted a little bit.
“I, I’m sorry Tully,” I whispered, hiding my arms and the scratches covering them from her view. “Do you promise not to freak out if I tell you the truth?”
Tully raised her right hand and crossed her heart with her index finger.
“I don’t know how I got these scrapes.” I held my arms out in front of me again, as if looking at them would give me the answer.
“How can you not remember?” Tully insisted. “They look pretty new. Are there any others, I mean, not just on your arms?”
“Yeah, my knees actually, and I feel like I’m going to be finding bruises all over the place in a day or two.”
“Did you fall down yesterday, maybe playing basketball with your brothers?” Tully asked.
I actually considered it, and to tell the truth, I couldn’t remember much of what had happened yesterday, not much at all. When I told Tully this she furrowed her brow and sighed. “It’s like someone has erased your memory.”
As if Tully’s words were the snap of a hypnotist’s fingers, part of my dream from the night before surfaced in my mind. An image of a white dog and trees standing stark against the light of the near-full moon flashed across my vision. Unfortunately, it was gone before I could get a good hold of it.
I sighed again.
“Maybe you hit your head when you got hurt, and are suffering from amnesia.”
I shrugged, then suggested we drop the subject altogether and focus on our homework. Tully readily agreed with me. I think deep down we were both a little rattled by the whole thing, and right then and there I had no answers to offer.
When I got home later that day, I decided I needed a nap. Mom thought I might be getting sick, but I just waved her off and said that studying for science often made me brain dead for an hour or two anyway. As I crossed the living room I saw Dad’s magazine sitting askew atop the coffee table. A familiar image of Stonehenge dominated the cover and for some strange reason I recalled noticing that before, when I had left that morning.
A terrifying image shot through my mind then, of a dark forest scene crowded with the rotting corpses of dogs, a moonlit meadow and something else I couldn’t quite see . . . I gasped, the burning image of glowing, violet eyes piercing my skull.
My mom was at my side before I completely lost my composure.
“Meghan! Meghan, what’s wrong?”
“I’m okay Mom,” I mumbled as I clutched my head. It didn’t really hurt, my head, but the sudden return of details from what must have been my dream from the night before had shocked me that much.
“What’s the matter?” she pressed, using her petit frame to keep me on my feet.
I thought lying was the best choice in this situation. “Headache,” I grumbled.
I had had migraines when I was younger, in the years after they found me in Los Angeles, and a few since then, so it wasn’t a complete impossibility. In order to add to the act, I pressed my arm against my forehead. Too bad I had forgotten about the scrapes.
“Meghan! What did you do to your arms?”
“Uhh,” I answered dully, “tripped in P.E. on Thursday. We were playing softball.”
The grumbling sound next to my ear told me that she chose to believe my story, for the time being at least. She helped me down the spiral staircase that descended into my room.
“You’ll kill yourself climbing down if I don’t help you,” she insisted.
Once downstairs, I sat on the edge of my bed and told her I could take it from there. She stayed for a bit longer, closing the blinds that hung from my sliding glass door while making comments under her breath about my messy room and its likely contribution to my headache. Mom liked things immaculate.
Finally she left, but only after I feigned lying down and going to sleep. I listened to her footfalls as she climbed the carpeted steps, but even after she had closed the door behind her, I stayed in bed, my forearm over my forehead and my eyes glued to the glowing stars stuck to the ceiling.
Only after my breathing evened out and I no longer felt the waves of terror flooding over me, did I allow my thoughts to wander back to my nightmare from the night before, and most likely, the reason for my current state of scraped skin and exhaustion.
-Eight-
Familiar
Of course, no answers ever came to me and after an hour of agonizing reflection, I came to the conclusion that I had simply had a nightmare the evening before and that my scrapes and bruises had been a result of a violent case of sleepwalking. Though my room remained fully intact, I knew there was no other explanation.
Despite the fact that there were still bits and pieces of my dream missing, I felt somewhat satisfied with my conclusion. After all, it wasn’t like I had never forgotten a dream I’d had before.
I joined my family for dinner, putting on my freshest face and brushing aside any concerns they voiced aloud. Of course, my mother was the only one to display any true worry. The boys had no idea I had almost fainted (they had been at the grocery story with my dad when I had first come home from Tully’s). Dad had merely given me his customary once over. As long as we had all our limbs and weren’t hemorrhaging from the head, there was absolutely nothing wrong with us.
After dinner we huddled down to watch TV before Mom and Dad started getting the twins and Aiden ready for bed. They all complained when the time arrived, but somehow my parents managed. Logan and Bradley soon followed, grumb
ling about how late it wasn’t and how they weren’t even tired as they yawned and rubbed their eyes. I grinned, finding something amusing in their simple, childhood woes.
Yawning, I called a goodnight to my parents. I had school in the morning, hurrah, and a test early in the week. It would do me no good to start the week out cranky and tired. I clambered down my spiral staircase, half eager for the warmth of my bed, half afraid of what would happen once I fell asleep.
The visions and voices and nightmares were returning, I could deny it no longer, but I wasn’t sure I could deal with it again. I couldn’t go back into therapy and the medication I had taken when I was younger had made me feel nauseous all the time. And the truth of it was, it never really helped. I only pretended that it did so they wouldn’t give me more of the awful medicine. Like before, I would just have to find a way to ignore my visions. If I was lucky, in a week or two everything would go back to normal once again. I pulled on my pajamas and curled into bed, counting imaginary pink and yellow butterflies visiting white flowers as I tried to keep my frightening memories at bay.
* * *
Monday morning was a riot in our house, as usual. I packed a lunch and grabbed my backpack, squeezing out the front door right before Jack and Joey started throwing cereal at one another. The morning was foggy once again, that nice thick fog that rolled in from the Pacific Ocean and nestled itself in the lower areas of the coast.
I strolled along the side of the road, making my way down to Tully’s. A group of middle school kids waited for their bus on the corner of the street. Today they stood huddled around the street sign, the older kids trying to look cool while the little kids picked up acorns and launched them at one another.
As I watched, something caught the corner of my eye. I turned and glimpsed the dark sweep of a bird’s wing disappearing into the redwood that stood behind the wide stone barrier wall that denoted our neighborhood. I stared at the spot where the wing had disappeared, thinking it was just a crow. As I watched, however, the bird edged closer to a gap between the drooping branches.