It’s darker now. She’s unable to reply for a moment, but then she chokes, “I told you. You need to break it, you need to face … ” It’s like there’s a lump in her throat that prevents her from saying anything more—she swallows and halts mid-sentence. But she goes against my expectations by managing to spit, “I came back because it’s not safe.”
It’s random. There’s nothing to bring on the sudden realization. But I stare at this powerful being and wonder how I didn’t see it before. “You’re the girl, aren’t you?” I ask softly. The girl in all my dreams. Who smiles and weeps and loves.
Yet again she doesn’t answer. Is it because she can’t … or she won’t?
It’s so obvious. They’re the same size. The voices may be a little different, but that’s easy to alter. The question comes from all sides, a relentless drum. Where is she? Where is she? Where is she? Here, I tell the boy silently. Not dead after all. But secrecy surrounds her like a shroud, this girl who haunts me in both dreams and sleep now.
“What are you hiding from?” I press, thinking of the shadow in the dreams. “How do I fit into all this?” She only shakes her head and backs away, head bent toward the ground.
In the distance, I hear a stick snap. Yet another unknown presence teases my senses—are there two beings stalking me? This bizarre girl and … someone else? Something else? I whip around quickly, narrowing my eyes to better see into the brush. The girl is right about one thing; it isn’t safe out here. My instincts are singing. “We’ll continue this later,” I tell her, abandoning the clearing. My fingers brush the ribs of a tree trunk as I pass it, and I start to sprint.
Somehow the girl gets ahead of me. “One more thing before you go,” she rasps, her baggy pants billowing in the breeze. With all her shadows and facelessness, she almost looks like a ghost.
I dart around her. “Yes?” The wind rushes past, a roar in my ears.
She deliberately falls behind, but I don’t stop. Her tone is a mixture of determination and worry and real warning as it floats to my ears: “Do not, under any circumstances, go to Sophia Richardson’s birthday party.”
I don’t bother asking any questions.
Fifteen
The blank page stares up at me, mocking, beckoning. I stare back down at it. Thinking. My pencil taps against the kitchen table. Tap. Tap. Tap. A poem about hiding. I’m not a writer—if it weren’t for the dreams, I wouldn’t be a painter, either. Joshua thinks I’m creative; I should’ve corrected him. Maybe then I wouldn’t be distracted by this.
Not only do the words not come, but my mind buzzes with more theories. The woman said it’s almost time. That someone—he—has found me. And I need to remember. What does all this have to do with the car accident? How do the dreams fit in?
“You never work in here.”
I glance up at Mom, who’s standing by the kitchen table and staring at me with an indiscernible expression on her face. She’s tired; her shoulders sag, and there are lines under her eyes. For some reason, as I look at her, all I can think is that I should have tried harder to be the daughter she once tucked into bed every night.
She stops waiting for me to say something. I watch her walk to the sink. It seems there are always dishes to do, no matter how often I try to do them when she’s not around. Once in a while I’ll also do a load of laundry for her, clean out the fridge. If she notices the small gestures, she doesn’t allude to it.
“Sally Morrison called, by the way,” Mom suddenly informs me. “The school counselor? She wanted to know how you’re doing.” As Mom speaks her voice is low, careful. She doesn’t look at me. “When I asked her for a number, she said you would know where to find her.”
I know she’s wondering what I’ve told Sally. But I also know she doesn’t want me to acknowledge what goes on in this house. Sometimes Mom and Charles are alike that way. So all I say is, “Thank you for taking the message.” I tap my pencil some more, my eyes on the white paper spreading miles before me.
“Would you say I hide from you?” I ask abruptly. Mom starts, faces me. Wisps of hair falls into her eyes, and she brushes them away. The house is so silent that I can hear a clock ticking. I mark each second as it passes.
“What do you mean?” Mom finally asks.
“I’m writing a poem about … hiding,” I say, weighing my answer. “As a person. I suppose pretending is the same thing as hiding, isn’t it?”
“You’re asking my opinion?” Disbelief colors her voice. She wipes a plate clean, clearing her throat. She takes her time to answer, mulling over it as I had. Then, “Yes, I guess pretending can be similar to hiding. Hiding doesn’t seem like the right word to use, though. I would say that when someone is pretending to be something, or hiding who they are or what they believe, they’re really more … protecting themselves.” My mother—no, I shouldn’t say that anymore, for really, she won’t ever accept it—sighs. Regret fills the empty space beside her. Regret is a rather plain Emotion and she pays me no mind, intent on her summons. Her eyes are wide and muddy, her hair dull and limp.
“I’d like to think that it’s never too late to change the way things are,” I say casually. Sarah—that’s her name—looks at me again.
“What do you mean?” she repeats.
I give up on the poem, sitting back in my chair. It’s time to go to school soon anyway. “Just that nothing is set in stone.” I bend down to grab my bag. “The past may be the past, but everything else is changeable. You can adjust the path you’re on, right?”
Sarah doesn’t answer now, but I see that her brow is furrowed and Regret is gone. I walk to the door, smile back at her once. Caught off guard, Sarah smiles back. It’s tiny, and it’s hesitant, but it’s a smile.
“I’m going to Sophia Richardson’s birthday party.”
Joshua jumps a little at the sound of my voice. He glances at me as he slams his locker shut. His eyes behind that red hair are wary. “Assuming,” he begins tiredly, “that you also got an invitation to that horrible event—no offense, but I doubt it—why would you want to go? I sure as hell don’t plan to.”
I shrug, hold my books to my chest. “There’s … something there I want to see.” The girl—that Emotion, Element, whatever she is—either wants to stop an event from happening at that party or wants to stop me from discovering something. And if it’s so important that she would advise me against going, then it’s definitely something worth seeing.
Joshua eyes me skeptically. “What on earth would you possibly want to see at Sophia Richardson’s birthday party? The Dorseth brothers getting so drunk they can’t even walk? Sophia bullying her friends or forcing me to dance? Spin the bottle, truth-or-dare? What could you find interesting there?”
Nothing I say will be a good enough reason for him, so I just shrug again. “I thought you might want to come with me.”
He starts walking to class. I don’t have this one with him, and mine’s in the opposite direction, but I catch up anyway. He doesn’t speak for a moment, and somehow I know he’s thinking about the last time we were together, in the library. The way I ran away, how limp my fingers were when entwined with his.
“Tell me something,” Joshua says. He flips that hair out of the way for the millionth time and I resist a peculiar urge to tell him to cut it. “Why do you want me to come?”
If I answer right away, he’ll know I’m lying. If I don’t answer, he’ll walk away and never look back, no matter how much he likes me. I’ve pushed Fear away, Maggie is dying, and my brother is a coward, so technically, Joshua is the only person in the world who gives a damn about my fate. I think about it for a moment, and then realize I don’t want to think about it. This in itself is strange, unsettling, dangerous.