“Do you believe us now?” we ask.
“Yes, for the love of God, yes I believe you! Just don’t move anything else. That was so creepy!” We turn around, catching her terrified eyes. Instead of comforting her, it seems to do the opposite. “Can I please have Renee back? I can’t keep looking into your eyes when they’re glowing like that.”
We close our eyes and take a deep breath. Finding the place where Sheya and Renee differ is harder than we originally thought. This is the way that we’re supposed to be; no conflict, no anger. But we cannot be like this all the time, either. After what felt like hours, but was probably just a few minutes, we were able to find separation. I immediately throw up my mental shields, not because I don’t trust Sheya, but because I don’t trust myself to not merge us back together. I’ve never felt so strong and so sure of myself.
“Thank you,” I say to them.
“Yeah, whatever.”
I open my eyes and smile down at Cymone. “I’m sorry that I freaked you out so bad, but you demanded the truth and that was the only way to get you to believe that what I was saying is the truth.”
She reaches out and grabs my hand. “I need to lie down, I’m feeling a little light headed. But as soon as I stop freaking the fuck out, there’s a lot of questions I need answered. And they mostly revolve around the boys.” She sprints around the counter and up the stairs, presumably to head to my room. “And bring me up a cup of chocolate milk! A bitch is thirsty!”
Sighing to myself, I wonder why it feels like I’m the one that’s about to be shown something freaky.
12
Renee
“So,” Cymone says around a bite of donut. I’m so glad that I found them in the pantry while I was making her chocolate milk, because she’s been silent for almost fifteen minutes. Sadly, I guess she’s remembered the real reason she’s here. “It’s pretty weird that I’m kind of talking to two people even though I’m really talking to one? This must be like those weird Sci-Fi phenomenons that all the nerdy kids at school geek out over.”
I lie sprawled out on my back next to her. My eyes are trained on the ceiling and I just can’t seem to make a black hole form and swallow me whole. With a huge sigh, I roll over to my side so that I can look my best friend in the eye as we finish up this long conversation. In some ways I feel so free and in other ways I feel so exhausted. Having Cymone know everything is definitely going to be a blessing and a curse.
“Yeah, I guess I can see where you’re coming from,” I finally say. “But a lot of the time it’s me talking and Sheya will just listen and comment where they please.”
“Aw, you pay attention to me.”
“‘They’? Is Sheya not a girl?”
“Nope. Apparently they’re everything and nothing,” I say with an eye roll.
“What the fuck does that mean?”
“I have absolutely no idea, but I’ve just been going with the flow. So anyway, yeah there’s two of us, but the response will always be one.”
“Unless you do that weird bonding thing with the burgundy eyes?”
“Yeah, unless we do that. Which we shouldn’t be able to do. My dream mom’s eyes were red when she bonded with her Inner Self, so I’m assuming that Sheya and I haven’t fully bonded.”
“Dream mom? So you’re pretty positive that what you’ve been dreaming is something that happened in the past.”
“Honestly? I have no idea. It feels so real and the dream me is also named Ren, though I think that that is her full name and not a nickname. And dream me’s Inner Self was named Shaye. That’s too close to Sheya to be a coincidence.”
“Even though I named myself from the internet?”
“Look, I don’t know. It’s all just too close to be something that happened for no reason.”
“Or maybe you want it to mean more than what it does. Why can’t you be happy that we’re getting closer?”
“I am happy. But we’re missing something, Sheya. Something that’s important. I can feel it.”
“We’ll get the answers when we need them. When you go looking for things you’re not yet ready to face, it’ll put you on a path you’re not meant to take.”
“Oh, now everything makes sense!” Cymone announces. “This is why you’re always lost in your head! You’re having conversations with Sheya! How do you even focus on things when you have someone talking to you the entire time?”
“Um, we don’t talk all the time. Most things don’t interest Sheya, so they don’t comment. But ever since, uh, the guys moved to town, Sheya has been really vocal.”
“Me?! I resent that. You’re the one that’s been stepping out of your shell a little more. Or should I say clothes?”
“It was a one time thing and I was fully clothed!”
“This time.”
“Speaking of the guys.” Uh oh. “What was with the whole ‘danger’ thing you were mumbling about the other night?”
“How would I know?” I reply with a huff. I roll back onto my back, deciding that I don’t really want to hold eye contact with her for this conversation.
“You’re right. You were pretty out of it. Do you think they’re the same as you?”
“Huh?”
“What?”
“Yeah, last night they did something weird to me or something. Because one minute I’m arguing with them about leaving you alone and then the next I find myself driving home. I didn’t feel any panic or anything about the whole thing until this morning when I woke up! It had to be some mind control or something, ‘cause girl, you know damn well I’d never leave you alone with them after you so adamantly said that they were dangerous.”
“I told you!” Sheya exclaims. “I told you something wasn’t adding up. They know more than they’re letting on.”
“What do you want me to do?! If they do know more than they’re letting on, that means that they’re a step ahead of us! And, regardless, we don’t know if any of this is real. This could be just a figment of her imagination.”
“Do you really believe that, Dipshit? Like, honestly and truly you’d say that out loud to your friend, right now?”
“Uh, no?”
“I thought so.”
“Um, Sheya’s been a little skeptical of them and how they showed up out of nowhere. But we haven’t decided exactly why Sheya’s feeling that way.”
“I’m telling you, something freaky is going on! We should interrogate them!” I roll my head over so that I can look this psychopath in her eyes. Her green eyes sparkle with mischief and I can see the crumbs all over her mouth. She reaches out and shakes my shoulder as if I wasn’t already paying attention to her crazy ass.
“You remember what Caylen said, on that first day?” Sheya asks.
“About what?”
“About them not being worthy enough in their little community and thrown out.”
“Ok? What does that have to do with anything?”
“For the love of… Listen, Dipshit, if they are like us, then they’re Unblessed!”
My eyes round and I stare at Cymone like my mind has been blown. Because it has.
“What? What?! What did Sheya say?” Cymone asks, as if she’s always talked to Sheya.
“Sheya said that if they are like us, then they are the Unblessed and not Blessed.”
“What the fuck does that even mean?” she huffs, flopping back against my pile of pillows.
“In our dream, we learned that there are the Blessed, those with an Inner Self, and the Unblessed, those without an Inner Self. Caylen said that they were at the bottom of their society and thrown into the streets by their parents because they weren’t worthy or something like that. At the time I thought that he was just talking about some weird commune or something and that he was a little insane, but now I think he was trying to tell me something without actually telling me something. I think he was trying to tell me that he and his brothers were Unblessed. But it wouldn’t make any sense because the kids in my dreams weren’t thrown out by th
eir parents.”
“Wow. This is getting weirder by the second. I bet Caylen is the one we need to coerce into telling us everything if he was the one trying to hint at what’s going on.”
“Ok, but what can I really do? And what is it that we’re actually looking for?”
“What if you’re not human!” she says. “What if you’re some kind of alien that was planted on this planet to take it over?!”
“Let’s be serious for a second,” I say with a nasty scowl on my face. This is not the time for her wild jokes.
“What if she’s right? Not the whole ‘take over the planet’ bit, clearly she’s moronic for that. But what if you’re not human? Pretty sure normal humans don’t have an Inner Self.”
“So, if I’m not human, what the hell am I? Can’t I be one of the super humans with special abilities? Like telekinesis or fortune telling? Humans have those abilities, you know?”
“Yeah, the completely insane ones that are trying to con people out of their money. No one ever takes fortune tellers seriously, unless they’re desperate to hear things they clearly want to hear.”
“Then what?! What else could I be? I’ve seen the videos of my birth, unfortunately. I have the pictures and videos of me growing up. My mom and dad are my mom and dad!”
“Tell that to Detective Gadget over here. Let's see what she has to say.”
“That’s not likely,” I finally say to a weirdly patient Cymone. “Mom has shown me my birth video so many times, I’m sure it could be considered child torment or something. I have the videos and pictures of me growing up, so there’s no way that I was planted here. Unless Mom and Dad are aliens, too.”
“And who’s to say they aren’t?! How much do you know about your parents?”
I sit up quickly and stare at her, trying to decipher if she’s messing with me or not. “What do you mean ‘how much do you know about your parents’? They’re my freaking parents. I know a lot about them.”
“But they’re never home. I mean, look around. It’s three p.m. on a Saturday and your mom isn’t even home! When was the last time you actually saw her?”
“I don’t know,” I mumble. “Maybe a week or so?”
“And your dad?” she presses.
“Almost a month, I guess.”
“Exactly! They’re always gone. They could be going back to your home planet or something!”
“That’s absurd. Just because I haven’t seen them, doesn’t mean I don’t talk to them. I talk to my parents everyday. I don’t know about you, but I doubt T-Mobile has service out in space.”
“Ok, point taken.” I flop back down on my back, trying to stop my mind from churning with all of the possibilities. What if I’m not human, then what? Do I ‘Blue skidoo, we can too’ my ass into outer space and find a home planet that I don’t even know exist? The one thing I’m sure of, is that I don’t want to talk to the boys about this.
“We won’t know the answers, but I don’t want to talk to the boys about it, just yet.”
“What?” she exclaims, slapping me on the stomach to drive home her shock. “Why not? They may hold all of the answers!”
“Because,” I grunt out, trying to catch my breath after being assaulted. “Sheya believes that if we go looking for answers we’re not ready for, we’ll be put on a path we’re not meant to take.”
“Ah, so you pay attention,” Sheya says.
“Sometimes.”
“Wow. Sheya is so deep. Fine, we’ll do it their way. But, I hold the right to stalk them and try to find out answers on the sly.”
“You don’t have a sly bone in your damn body.”
“There’s a first for everything.”
She flops down onto her back next to me, interlacing her fingers with mine. “Are you scared?” she whispers.
“About what?” I whisper back.
“Why the fuck are you two whispering?”
“Shit, I don’t know.”
“About potentially being an alien with three men chasing after you?”
“Um, well, I never thought about it like that.”
“You should.”
“I think I’ve done enough thinking for the day.”
“Want to watch some HGTV?” she asks.
“You read my mind,” I say, smiling for the first time all day. I can’t wait to watch a marathon of House Hunters.
“Fucking kill me now.”
13
Renee
I walk onto campus, feeling as if I don’t know reality from fantasy . Cymone and I spent the rest of the weekend lounging around and binging on HGTV and donuts. Cymone and Sheya spoke a lot to each other, but it was all through me. Sheya hasn’t felt the need to be too involved in the conversations, personally, and I don’t blame her. Most of the things that Cymone wanted to talk about revolved around being a superhero in my spare time and ways to coerce info out of the guys without them really knowing what we’re doing.
What’s troubling me more is the fact that I haven’t heard from my mom or dad the entire weekend. This is the longest I haven’t seen my mom and I don’t know what to make of it. I try not to take anything Cymone said seriously about my parents being aliens, but something is definitely going on.
“Ren,” Caylen’s deep voice mumbles to my left. I look over to see him standing right by the door, as if he was waiting for me the whole time. “Let’s ditch school, I have something important to tell you.”
“Ditch? Can’t this wait until lunch?” I ask.
“It could, but this is pretty serious and I would like for us to have a lot of time to talk about it.”
“What does it matter if you ditch? It’s not like your parents really care what you’re up to nowadays.”
Sheya’s right. Mom and Dad haven’t been paying me any attention for the longest time. “Fine,” I say. “Where do you want to go?”
“Is there a park or something around here?” he asks.
“Park? Yeah, I guess so. But it’s kind of rowdy. I’m guessing that it’s probably a little empty since school is going on right now. Come on, you can follow me.”
We hurry back to the parking lot and hop in our respective cars. I’ve never really ditched school before, but there’s a first for everything. The ride to the park was long, due to all of the traffic lights and slow drivers. We pull up to Deltona Park and it’s blessedly pretty empty. Everyone is probably in school or at work, either way, this is the most peaceful I’ve seen this place. I park my car and get out, waiting for Caylen to pull in beside me.
“Wow,” he says. “This is pretty big.”
“Yeah, it’s alright. Come on. There’s some benches in the back and it’s pretty secluded with all of the trees and whatnot.”
“Lead the way,” he says.
I can’t help but peak at him from the corner of my eye as we follow the sidewalk to the back of the park. His light brown hair looks golden in the gleaming sun, his faded smattering of freckles more defined, and his blue eyes sparkle with a life of their own. But what has me looking at him so hard is the deep furrow of his brow and the tight way he’s clenching his jaws. Whatever he has to tell me, it’s not something that he wants to.
We walk passed the basketball courts and beyond the gazebo, and finally get to the picnic tables that’s placed underneath the trees. The silver moss hangs from the limbs of the old trees like Christmas streamers in December. The breeze is blowing such a humid current that I can’t even take pleasure in it brushing across my face. We sit on top of the table with our feet planted on the seats, We face a large expanse of sand and grass, the epitome of a small town landscape.
“So,” I finally say, trying to break the silence. “What is it that you wanted to talk about?”
“Why do you like it here?” he asks instead.
“Huh?” I stupidly respond.
“Here. This place. This town. This state. Why do you like it here?”
“Uh oh. He’s getting weird again.”
“Who are you tel
ling?”
“Um, I love it here because it feels like home, I guess. It’s small, and not very diverse, but it’s all I know. The humidity, the sun, the rain, the mosquitoes, the gators. It’s all a part of me and I love it. It makes me a Florida grown girl, and I don’t know how to be anything else. This is my home.”
“What if you have another home?” he cryptically asks.
“What do you mean? Like another house?”
“No, what if you have somewhere else where you belong as much, if not more, than you belong here?”
“Here it comes! He’s just going to give us all the information that we want!” Sheya exclaims.
“That’s not possible. I was born and raised here,” I say.
“But what if you weren’t?”
“I definitely was,” I say, scrutinizing his face a little closer trying to see if he was high off of that crack or something.
“Well, maybe now you were. But what if you weren’t always from here?” he presses, facing forward instead of trying to catch my eye.
“Just cut to the fucking chase.”
“Just cut to the fucking chase,” I repeat after Sheya. “What are you even trying to say?”
“You’re not from here,” he huffs. “Well, not originally from here.”
“Ok… so where am I from then?” I say, humoring him. If he says I was from San Francisco, I’m going to have to laugh in his face.
He takes a deep breath, causing his deep blue shirt to stretch across his broad shoulders. His fingers twist and turn around each other, showing how nervous he is about what he’s about to say.
“Brace yourself.”
“You’re from Relvaria,” he forces out.
The Inner Self: The Prophecy Page 9