Protagonist Bound

by Geanna Culbertson

  There was no natural light, except for a few streaks that came in from behind a boarded-up window in the back. But even those rays offered nothing but dreariness, as they simply allowed you to more vividly recognize the lint dancing in the humid airspace.

  The girl, whose backpack had the name “Natalie Poole” sewn into it, stopped when she arrived at a ragged bedroom at the rear of the apartment.

  The thick maroon curtains of this room were drawn shut and there was dust collecting on the few knickknacks decorating the shelves—among which was a picture frame made entirely from popsicle sticks. The frame held a worn photo of the girl, a man in his early forties, and the woman lying on the bed in front of her. This woman looked old and tattered like the apartment around her, but she had the same vibrant shade of hair as Natalie did, give or take a few gray streaks.

  Natalie sat on the edge of the bed, but the woman did not open her eyes. She was asleep, but breathing slowly and with great difficulty. Her eyes were scrunched up tight like a child kidnapped by nightmares.

  Delicately, Natalie took the woman’s hand in hers. The two sat in silence for a few minutes while Natalie traced the pale red flowers on the crème-colored bedspread with the fingers of her free hand.

  Eventually, Natalie stood up. She walked closer to the aged, wooden headboard then bent over to give the sleeping woman a kiss on the forehead.

  “I’m sorry, Mom,” she whispered into the fading woman’s ear. “I got fired today. But I’ll get another job. I promise.”

  Natalie began to head for the door of the room, but stopped short just before leaving.

  “I love you,” she said, her voice shaking.

  The tears built up in Natalie’s eyes, and she dashed out of the apartment just as they became too much for her to hold back. Sadness streaming down her face like rainfall, she ran down the hallway and collapsed to the ground under the weight of the world.

  “Time to get up,” someone called to her from a distance.

  She didn’t respond.

  “Time to get up!” the voice shouted louder this time.

  The whole room abruptly began to tremble and for a second it felt like it might crumble right there with the tormented girl trapped inside it. But then, just as suddenly, my eyes burst open and I re-entered the world of the living.

  Blue was standing next to me in her turquoise bathrobe, shaking my arm.

  I bolted upright and gasped for air like I had been underwater. “Where? What?”

  “It’s time to get up. It’s almost eight o’clock. Classes start in, like, twenty minutes,” she said.

  Comprehension clicked in my brain and I jumped out of bed to head for the bathroom. I guess the rush was far too sudden a movement though, because I stumbled almost immediately and had to stop and lean against my desk to regain balance. The whole room seemed to be spinning. My head felt like I’d left part of it on the pillow somewhere behind me. Only then did I notice how cold I was despite the fact that my pajamas were soaked with sweat.

  “Crisa, you okay?”

  I turned slowly and stared at my friend hard—willing my vision to return to normal. Thankfully, after a few seconds she came into focus again and my dizziness faded away as quickly as it had come on.

  I stood up straight and surveyed the room as if I was only now properly awake.

  “Which dream was it this time?” Blue asked plainly.

  “Natalie again,” I sighed.

  Blue nodded. “Sorry, that’s rough. But hey, at least that’s better than one of your, you know, darker dreams, right?”

  “Yeah, but those are at least vague. The Natalie dreams feel so much more resonant, and lately . . . I don’t know it feels like she, like they’ve been getting worse,” I grunted, shaking my head.

  They’re getting clearer too, I thought, but kept myself from saying it out loud.

  “You want to talk about it?” Blue asked.

  “No,” I responded like I always did. “I’m fine.”

  My friend nodded once more and then patted me on the shoulder as she returned to the bathroom to finish getting ready.

  When she had gone I closed my eyes and took a few deep breaths.

  SJ and Blue knew all about the vivid nightmares I had suffered from for years now. Even so, I still didn’t let them see just how great an effect they had on me, or share too many of their details.

  The broad perspective, which they were aware of, was that my dreams could be broken down into two categories:

  The first half of them took place in a world that was strange and that I didn’t recognize in the slightest. It was nothing like our realm, or anything else I had ever seen before either. Most of the buildings were gray and metallic and stretched to the sky like iron giants. The people in these dreams dressed plainly—fading in with the background that surrounded them. And there were all these tiny, shiny devices that made noise constantly and never seemed to leave people’s sides. Overall, it gave me the creeps.

  The subjects of these dreams were always suffering at the hands of horrible people and circumstances. None of them had ever made a second appearance, except that one girl. Natalie Poole. Over the years she had become a far too frequent and unwelcome visitor to my subconscious—especially lately, given that dreaming about her was like watching a private performance of a tragic play with absolutely zero comic relief to get by on.

  While I didn’t know what kind of place my imagination had intended Natalie Poole’s world to be, it seemed that the second type of nightmares I suffered from consistently chose more traditional areas of Book for their subconscious settings.

  It was true that I had no way of verifying this as I never saw the visions clearly enough to guess at specific locations. But every once in a while, I would register buildings or forests or mountains that struck a chord of familiarity.

  Furthermore, it just felt like Book. I wished I could have explained it better than that, but after years of trying and failing to articulate a more acceptable reasoning, I found that beyond gut instinct, there was none. I just knew these dreams were based in Book as surely as I knew that the ones featuring Natalie weren’t.

  In retrospect, this second type of nightmare I was tormented by should have been a lot less off-putting than those of Natalie’s gray world. These dreams were in places my brain understood. And since they were way blurrier than my dreams of that metallic city, they shouldn’t have bothered me as much. After all, how could I be upset by fictitious, nocturnal glimpses of people I didn’t know saying and doing things I didn’t understand?

  Despite this logic, there was still something unsettling about them. Not as unsettling as other Book dreams I’d had a few times. Those were . . . Well, let’s just say Blue was right. They were a much worse kind of nightmare.

  Nevertheless, these frequent, fuzzy visions of Book gave me the shivers in a way I couldn’t quite explain but couldn’t well deny either. They gnawed at me continuously—threatening to take up the attention of more than just my dreamscape if I ever let them get a tight enough hold.

  Like I said before, SJ and Blue were the only two people that I had told about these, and all my other dreams. Although, to be perfectly honest, even with them I tended to be vague and elusive about the details.

  Occasionally when I was really rattled I mentioned the content of certain visions. However, even in those cases, the specifics I chose to share were limited at best. For, despite being best friends with Blue and SJ for so many years, I still didn’t feel comfortable letting them in on this completely. It just felt . . . wrong somehow.

  For the rest of the morning, I was in a funk.

  I did not enjoy the pancakes at breakfast even though there were twelve different types of homemade syrups to accompany them. And I didn’t even make a single sarcastic comment during D.I.D.

  Which is no easy task, by the way.

  Today, Madame Lisbon was going on about Fairy Godmothers, avoiding confrontations, and the importance of waterproof mascara in today’s s
ociety. I think SJ was listening, though it was hard to tell. She had her eyes glued to the teacher like she always had during our lectures. Then again, she was not very fond of this particular subject either, so she might’ve just been having a really focused daydream. Blue, on the other hand, was carving her initials into the desk with her hunting knife, in cursive. A bit of a bold move, but I respected the quality of her penmanship, or knifemanship, as it were.

  Me, I was in no mood for daydreams or shenanigans. I simply stared absentmindedly at the chalkboard while my frazzled subconscious simmered like a fried egg.

  While it was true that over the summer I had dreams much less frequently, as a whole, over the last year they had been becoming progressively more lucid. As a consequence, they were really starting to bother me.

  It used to be that I could just push them all away at sunrise. However, as they’d grown clearer, more eventful, and more consistent, it was like their images had begun to loom over me like ghost memories.

  My friends could tell I was being affected, but they knew well enough to leave the matter alone since, as mentioned, I wasn’t too keen on sharing. As a result, I was left to my own devices for sorting out these feelings of unease and trepidation.

  When morning classes finally ended and lunch came round, I found myself uncharacteristically lacking in hunger. So, instead of joining Blue and SJ in the banquet hall, I spent the hour wandering the school hallways, reflecting privately on the matter of my dreams.

  Most other sections of Lady Agnue’s were deserted during lunchtime. That is, aside from the traditionally armored guards who constantly patrolled its red-carpeted corridors. Every nine minutes on the dot, one would predictably pass whatever area of the school I happened to be strolling through and raise a metal-covered arm to his helmet to salute me as I went by.

  It was pretty much as close as a girl could get to being left alone around here, so I ignored their presence and allowed myself to get fully lost in my thoughts. Specifically, the unpleasant ones that I so often tried to evade but could never seem to utterly escape.

  I shook my head and groaned at the frustration.

  For the life of me, I couldn’t understand why my dreams were so messed up. I mean, what kind of person even had reoccurring characters in their dreams anyways?

  Ms. Natalie Poole had been a regular visitor to my sleeping consciousness for some time. She’d even aged over the years as my dreams about her had progressed. More disconcerting still, she had begun to appear in my dreams more frequently as I got older. While I used to average one dream about her per month, in the last year they’d begun coming on a weekly basis.

  Natalie aside, my weird, indiscernible dreams taking place in Book were eating away at my peace of mind. These shouldn’t have bothered me as much—being so fuzzy and all—but this notion was offering less and less solace in recent months because they, too, were beginning to get clearer.

  I was starting to make out faces and conversations more easily as if I was witnessing them firsthand. The sharper these visions became, the more I felt like I was suffocating from an irrational form of claustrophobia each time I woke from them. Which was just exhausting.

  To make things worse, these dreams were a walk in the clouds in comparison to the more unsavory nightmares I had of Book—the ones Blue had been referring to earlier this morning. Those were about death.

  Such ominous dreams had always been way blurrier, so it was difficult to make out many details. But let’s just say that the main event of what was unfolding within them came across very clearly and very permanently.

  Beyond that, even in recollection I didn’t want to get into it.

  Believe me, I’m doing you a favor.

  The victims I envisioned in these nightmares were different each time; despite the general haziness within my subconscious, I could ascertain that. Strangely, though, these nightmares (like my dreams of that odd, other world) also had reoccurring characters. Two if we’re being specific.

  The first was a girl. She was much harder to make out than Natalie Poole. But from what I could gather, she had tan skin, dark hair, and a laugh akin to a serpent’s giggle.

  If you’re trying to imagine what that sounds like, by the way, think tinkling bells mixed with the sadistic hissing sound a rattlesnake might make just before lunging for your throat.

  The second member of this chronic duo I kept dreaming about was a boy. Judging by the sound of his voice, I garnered that he was in his early twenties. Alas, past that I was unable to make out a more detailed description.

  My visions of him (and his counterpart) were always characterized by vague flashes or snippets of dialogue like I’d had the night before last; not full scenes. Moreover, his very essence seemed to be cloaked in shadow. No matter how hard I tried when I was conscious, my memory could only grasp at fragments of darkness when I attempted to recall him more finitely from my dreamscape.

  It didn’t quite make sense to me how he or the girl fit into my dreams. Like I said, neither one was a victim (as the victims of such dreams were new each time). I just kind of sensed phantom-like auras of them interspersed throughout the greater picture—usually surrounded by a backdrop of bronze and a lot of darkly colored stained glass.

  Ugh, could I be any weirder?

  How was I even able to imagine such things? I was a teenage girl and a princess, for goodness’ sake. I should’ve been dreaming about unicorns and rainbows, not assassinations.

  I sighed with frustration.

  Like it’s not enough that I don’t have control over my real life; I don’t even get a say in what happens in my subconscious one either?

  That’s just terrific.

  I had been so consumed in my own head up ’til that point that I hadn’t noticed just how far I’d managed to walk. Lo and behold, I now found myself coming upon the majestic Treasure Archives at the other side of the school.

  Giving my mind a break, my eyes wandered from trinket to trinket.

  Housed right here in Lady Agnue’s for nearly two decades, the Treasure Archives contained the most historically significant relics in our realm. Each display held a variety of treasures, from Aladdin’s chrome genie lamp to the tiny enchanted pea that had messed up Marie Sinclaire’s princess grandmother while she slept on a hundred-plus mattresses. They, like the rest of the objects in these cases, gleamed under the rays of sunshine currently bathing the incredibly vast hallway intersection.

  Suddenly, a dark figure blocked out some of this light and cast the treasures I’d been looking at in pompous shadow.

  “Taking in our realm’s ancestral history, Miss Knight?”

  I turned around and saw the source of the darkness, Lady Agnue herself, standing behind me. Today she was wearing a navy-velvet dress. She carried a clipboard with her and—I suspected—a hidden agenda in talking to me. We weren’t exactly gal pals after all.

  “Something like that, Lady Agnue.” I shrugged innocently. “Can I help you with anything?”

  “I hope so, Miss Knight,” she replied. “I was going to call you into my office later this afternoon, but as you are here I might as well tell you now.”

  “Tell me what?”

  “The usual, Miss Knight. It is a new school year—the time for a fresh start, if you will. You are getting older. And as you enter into your second-to-last year at this institution, the clock until the Author begins writing your fairytale is rapidly ticking. Although, despite this, I assume you are still entertaining the delusion you have had since you were a child that you can rebel against the natural order and try to determine who you are fated to be on your own, correct?”

  “Well . . .”

  “Just as I thought,” she said, cutting me off sternly. “Listen carefully, young lady. I have been very tolerant of you and your inappropriate behavior thus far, but my patience is wearing thin. You graduate next year and it is high time you swallow your pride and that silly idea that you can be something more than what you are. It is not possible.”
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br />   “Lady Agnue, I know you don’t want to hear it, but I don’t agree. I think—”

  “Female protagonists are not supposed to think, Miss Knight,” Lady Agnue interrupted. “How many times must I tell you? They are supposed to be beautiful, charming, and poised. Things like thinking and fighting are for the heroes. And in case you have been neglecting your studies, I challenge you to open any fairytale and discover for yourself that the heroes are always male protagonists. Also, it is ‘do not’, not ‘don’t.’ Princesses are not supposed to use contractions either—rule twelve, I might remind you.”

  I knew Lady Agnue was our headmistress, and talking back to a person of that level of authority was ill advised, no matter what type of school you went to. But this woman was the most narrow-minded, old-fashioned crone I had ever met, and she was really getting on my nerves. People lectured me about this stuff all the time, but she seemed to consider beating down my deepest hopes and messing with my self-image some sort of sport.

  I’d never been completely sure whether this disaccord between us had been my fault or hers. More often than not, I ended up conceding that it was neither. Instead, I chalked it up to the natural order.

  Lady Agnue was the old, the conventional, the tried and true timeless archetype of a woman that our world deemed young ladies should aspire to be like. She was, in an essence, so much like the worn classic books we were forced to read in school—full of wisdom, but also dust. For while the beliefs and ideals she represented contained certain amounts of worth, they were also out of date. Moreover, they were too proud to admit it.

  I was not like those books. I had never lived to model myself after the past. As constrained as it may have been, I was compelled to live for the future. I took chances. I was not afraid to be different. I risked the respectability and security that came with sticking to the norm in the hopes of turning the pages forward in my life.

  As such, it was only inherent that Lady Agnue and I were meant to be at odds. Since that first day of school five years ago when I’d arrived at orientation in my child-sized combat boots and went for the snack table before the program commenced, she’d pegged me for what I was. And I—since that same day when she’d made me wash all the windows in the ballroom as punishment for the transgression—had known what she was too.