Before the Dawn

by Kristal Lim

Her feet felt incredibly sore in the morning when the alarm woke her up. Aline found herself stretched out on her bed still dressed in the clothes she had worn the night before. The alarm was ringing insistently, and it took her four tries before she could get it to stop. Her head was fuzzy about what had happened at the party and how she had gotten home, but she had the vague recollection of getting worried about staying out too late and insisting on going home in the very early hours of the morning. But she remembered it was still Sunday and she didn't have class, so she drifted off to sleep again easily enough. She thought she must have dreamed then because, as soon as she closed her eyes, her mind filled with images of gowns, candles, musicians, and dancers all spinning round and round until she became dizzy. From time to time, she was awakened by sounds–the shrill tones of her cellphone, voices talking–but she ignored them all and went back to sleep. She was so tired. She just wanted to rest.

  When she fully woke up, refreshed and invigorated, it was dark outside her window. Glancing quickly at the luminous digits displayed on the bedside clock, she discovered it was 7:43 in the evening. She had slept the day away. Aline then got out of bed and winced in pain once her feet hit the floor. She hobbled over to the light switch and flicked it on so she could see what had happened to her feet.

  While she sat on the bed, she inspected them. Her feet did not look pretty. The bandages she had placed on the cut she got the previous day had been soaked through with blood. The stuff had dried fast to her skin and a little moan of anguish escaped her lips when she peeled it free as carefully as she could. The wound looked really ugly. It had gotten worse due to all the dancing she did last night. The soles were red and terribly sore, and she knew that blisters would appear on them in no time. It was a good thing she had left the antiseptic and bandages on her nightstand, so she cleaned up the soles of her feet as well as she could with some wet tissues then applied the antiseptic and bandaged them up.

  After getting into her usual clothes, washing her face, and brushing her teeth, she went downstairs to find something to eat, and each step she took sent stabs of pain through her legs. Her dad was in the kitchen tapping away on his laptop with a half-eaten plate of pasta beside a pile of papers. He looked up as she came in, his face settling into lines of worry as he studied her. "You look like you have the worst hangover in history," he observed, sounding concerned. "I checked in on you from time to time, but you looked so exhausted I left you sleeping. How are you feeling now?"

  "Like I wish I only had the worst hangover in history," Aline replied. "No, actually, I'm all rested. But my feet are murdering me. They hurt really bad."

  "Then stay in your seat while I get you your dinner," he ordered and fussed around for several minutes, heating up the pasta he had left in the refrigerator, serving it up to her, and then handing her a glass of soda. "Happy birthday!" he said brightly, and she had to laugh a little at the goofy face he made.

  "I wish you had been at the party last night," she told him.

  "Yeah, right," he snorted. "I’m sure I would have had the time of my life. Besides, I know that I would have just ruined the fun everyone was having if I had been there with my old man vibes." He watched her chew and swallow a few bites first before he asked, "So, how was the party? My credit limit is still okay, which I am eternally grateful for by the way, so I’m assuming you didn’t go overboard and order trucks of champagne for your friends."

  Aline frowned, trying to remember the events of last night. "It was fun enough, I guess. The Ballroom really went all out for us." She tried to rack her brain for more details she could share with him, but her mind refused to provide her with more than blurry impressions of a beautiful ballroom, beautiful people, sad music, and–someone familiar, someone precious. "I danced the whole night," she said, "with this guy I met." But she couldn't tell him more than that because she couldn't remember much of anything clearly. It was worrisome. What had happened to her in that place last night? Had she gotten incredibly drunk? It was the only explanation why she was missing large chunks of memory.

  "Trevor something?" he questioned, and she suddenly didn’t want to correct her father and tell him it had been another guy. "You told me about him. And, guess what, lover boy actually dropped by earlier this afternoon to see you. Also, while you were sleeping, you missed out on all the joy of giving candy to hyperactive, demanding children and their prissy parents. Does that chocolate bar have nuts? My baby’s allergic to nuts!"

  But Aline was too stunned by the piece of news he shared a few minutes earlier to be amused by his impressions of overprotective parents. "Trevor came to see me?!" she squeaked. "Well, why didn't you wake me up?"

  "Because you were sleeping like the dead," he explained patiently. "He seemed like an okay kid, was worried about you getting home safely because he said you hadn't been answering your phone."

  "Oh, God! My phone!" She realized she hadn't even checked it for any missed calls. "I gotta call him back."

  "After you're done eating," her dad decreed, so she gobbled up as much of the pasta as quickly as she could then made her excuses to go back to her room. Her feet were still hurting, but she decided to ignore them the best she could for now. She grabbed her phone and found Trevor's number in the list of missed calls. And it was a long list. The poor guy must have kept trying to call her for most of the morning and the early afternoon. The phone was almost out of power, so she plugged it into its charger before she redialed Trevor’s number and, after half a ring, he immediately picked up.

  "Aline, are you okay?" were the first words he said.

  "Uhm, yeah," she answered, a bit startled by his abruptness. "How are you?"

  "Fine enough, I guess," he replied. He sounded troubled. "Listen, I hope you don't think I'm being pushy or anything, but can I see you? Now? I'll come over if that's okay."

  "Yeah, sure," she said, puzzled by the strange intensity in his tone. "I'll be wai–" She suddenly realized he had already hung up. She frowned at her phone. "Weird," she mumbled to herself.

  Some minutes later, she opened the front door to find him standing outside looking quite agitated. His bangs stuck out on one side like they'd been frozen by a careless breeze and his clothes were rumpled. But his unkempt appearance wasn't what alarmed her. He had an expression in his green eyes she had never seen before. It sort of looked like–and she hoped she was just imagining things–cold fear.

  "Aline!" He stared at her hard, like he was trying to cut through some sort of illusion that made him unsure if it was really her. His hand reached out as if to touch her, then stopped, and she saw him bite his lower lip in sudden nervousness.

  "Trevor," she said with some wariness evident in her tone. The way he was acting was making her nervous, too.

  "Can we talk?" he asked. "Somewhere private, where your dad can't hear? There are some things," he swallowed, "about what happened last night–God, I think I must have been really drunk or something. Please, just–let's go somewhere and talk." He was pleading now.

  He was scaring her, but she wanted to hear what he had to say. Maybe he could explain why she couldn't seem to clearly remember what had happened to her in that ballroom. "There are chairs out back," she said, "below my old tree house. We could talk there, I guess."

  "Okay." He nodded. "Okay. Let's do that."

  "It's this way." She joined him outside and gestured for him to follow her around the house to the backyard. It would have been quicker if they had just gone through the kitchen, but her dad was still there and she didn't want him to see Trevor and how weird he was acting. When they got to the chairs, she sat on one, relieved that she didn't have to walk on her aching feet anymore, and pointed to the other chair across from her so he would sit there. She wanted some distance between them because she suddenly had no idea what he might do at any second. "So, you wanted to talk," she prompted once they were both settled into their chairs.

  He let out a loud breath and buried his face in his hands for a moment. Then he straightened up an
d looked at Aline. "I can't remember things from last night clearly," he finally confessed.

  Those words sent a little chill through her. "What do you mean?"

  "I–I'm confused about whatever happened or didn't happen last night." His brow furrowed as he tried to make sense out of his thoughts. "What I remember is going to work and helping set up the big private room for your party. Then sometime around eleven, I think, things sort of–get hazy. I remember running around from table to table bringing in food, and guests started arriving, though they didn't look like anyone I'd seen in school. Then that balcony, standing there with you thinking I've never been out on a balcony in the Ballroom before. I didn't even know we had one. And then that tall guy with the black hair showed up and dragged you away. I was going to go after you, but this other guy, someone blond, stopped me. He said something." Trevor was silent for several seconds as he tried to remember, but he huffed a bit in frustration when the right memory didn't come to him. "Then I thought I saw you, but you were walking towards the woods, and I thought that was really strange, so I ran after you. And I must have lost you or knocked myself out or something, because the next thing I knew, I was waking up just as the sun was rising and I was in the middle of the woods behind the Ballroom."

  He then stared right into her eyes. "I know the whole thing doesn't make much sense. I can't even be sure if it really happened or not. But that’s what happened to me. That's what I remember." It looked like he was pleading with her to come up with an explanation that would clear up the confusion he was feeling.

  She said nothing for a long time. Then she stood up, which sent a sharp bolt of pain from her feet to the rest of her body. But she couldn't afford to pay attention to it now. "Wait here, okay? I wanna show you something." He nodded, and Aline walked as quickly as she could to the back door that led to the kitchen. "Trevor's in the backyard and I'll talk to you about it later!" she told her startled dad in a rush as she limped past him and headed upstairs for her room. She took out the silver leaf from where she had hidden it and went back out to where Trevor was seated, ignoring her dad's questions and telling him that everything was okay.

  "Here." She held out the leaf to Trevor like an offering and, curiosity lighting up his eyes, he took it and studied it carefully.

  "What is it?" he asked, so she told him about the dream she'd had and how she'd woken up and found that a leaf from a grove of silver trees that shouldn't exist had somehow hitched a ride with her back to the real world.

  He just looked at her in silence for a few minutes. "You’re not joking." He wasn’t asking her a question.

  "Right now, I really, really wish I was." Her tone was earnest. "But I’ve got strange dreams, a silver leaf that shouldn’t be here, no clear memory of last night, and injured feet. I don’t see anything that would make a good joke out of these things." Then she asked him the question that she was actually scared to hear him answer. "Do you believe me?"

  He opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again. He was silent for a minute before he finally said, "I don’t know. This is all just–" He ran a hand through his hair again, messing it up some more. "What about your friends?" he wondered. "What do they remember about last night?"

  "Damn!" she exhaled. "I haven’t even called any of them yet. I’ll talk to them later," Aline promised. She hoped he hadn’t noticed the hurt expression on her face when he didn’t say he believed her.

  He clutched the silver leaf lightly. He obviously didn’t want to risk getting cut by its thin edges, too. "Can I keep this for now?" he asked.

  "Sure," she shrugged. It didn’t really matter to her one way or the other.

  "Okay." He nodded once and stood up. "I’m gonna go. I think I’ll pass by the place where I woke up earlier. See what I can find there, if there’s anything weird. I’ll talk to you again in school tomorrow." His manner had now changed. His nervousness was gone and he looked determined, like he was on a mission.

  "Yeah. Okay. We’ll talk," she agreed. She watched him as he walked away, and it struck her just then that there was something incredibly familiar about him, that he had always seemed familiar to her somehow. She suddenly wanted to call him back, but what exactly was she going to say? She had a horrible premonition that no matter how strange things were right now, they were going to get even stranger, and that she and Trevor were going to be in the middle of some serious weirdness.

  She continued to obsess about the odd stuff going on as she went back to her room, carefully avoiding her dad for now, and started calling up her friends. The first person she was able to reach was Sam, and her friend sounded kind of loopy when she answered Aline’s call.

  "Hey, sorry," Sam said. "Just woke up a few minutes ago and I’m still really sleepy."

  "You slept the whole day?"

  "Yeah. And my feet are killing me. I’m never wearing heels again!" she swore. "That was some party last night, huh?"

  "Yeah, it was," Aline agreed, feeling like a liar as she said it. "What were the highlights for you? I kinda lost track of everybody once the dancing started."

  "Well," Sam paused, and Aline thought that she could almost hear her friend’s brain whirring, "uhm, I guess the dancing was pretty good." She sounded uncertain though, then she chuckled ruefully. "Oh, God. I think I must have drunk too much last night ‘cause I don’t really remember much of what happened in the Ballroom except the dancing. But I think I saw you with some blond guy and the two of you were pretty much glued to each other all night. Which was kinda weird. I thought you were going to talk to Trevor. What happened to that plan?"

  "I–well, we didn’t really get the chance to talk." For a moment, the face of Aline’s dance partner from last night became clear in her mind but, before she could focus on it, the image disappeared again. But the feeling of rightness, of belonging, stayed with her and she suddenly wanted nothing more than to see him again, whoever he was. "Hey, I’m gonna hang up now," she told Sam. "I wanna talk to the others for a bit before I go back to bed." Considering she had slept the day away, she was fairly sure that it was actually going to be a long, sleepless night for her. Sam then said her goodbyes and Aline contacted Meran and Cassie next. They basically said the same things–they slept most of the day, their feet were hurting, and they couldn’t really remember what happened in the Ballroom–so the previous night was still a big mystery. She then tried calling Gracelyn a few times, but the other girl wasn’t answering her phone, so Aline just left her a message instead.

  Then she lay back in bed and tried to make some sense out of everything she knew for sure and everything that didn’t quite match up.

  One, a silver leaf from a dream had mysteriously shown up in her room and she had a bad wound that proved just how real, and sharp, it was. Two, some costumed freaks had been running around town and pulling pranks that no one else seemed to notice, and the whole thing may have been just another dream. Three, Trevor’s incredible story about waking up in the woods and her friends’ reports of not remembering details about last night were just too crazy, except that something similar had happened to her. Four, she was probably going crazy. Yes, that last thought certainly felt truer compared to everything else.

  She sighed and turned on one side to stare out the window, trying to make her mind as blank as possible so she wouldn’t have to feel the anxiety that was beginning to overwhelm her. She actually succeeded in zoning out for a few minutes. But then, a sound crept up on her hearing, and she gradually realized that she was listening to soft music coming from outside. It was lovely, as dark and sweet as the wine she now recalled tasting on her tongue last night. He had given it to her, and he had made her eat some kind of fruit as well because he promised she would like it. As the sound steadily grew louder, like it was coming closer to her house, she started to remember more details. The feel of his hand on her waist, a flash of his smile, the eyes that had stared into hers as he asked her to promise–promise him...

  "Yes," she thought she heard herself whisper. "I pro
mise. I’ll come back to you."

  And then the music took her away.

  ~~~

  Chapter 7