ACoN Chapter Six

Chapter Six: An Intermission

If you’ve ever had an out of body experience it might have felt something like this.

            Your body lies there on the floor and you reach out to touch it but your hand goes through.  Vaguely you think that you might be dying and that no one is coming for you.  Remembering what you were doing before you got up and fell down you continue down to the stairs to where the door is.  Someone rang the doorbell.  You can’t open the door because you’re little more than a wraith, but you can walk through.  It’s some solicitor but you can’t get worked up about it.  Who cares; you’re dying, maybe.

            You continue walking, maybe looking for a light to follow, maybe just walking to the end of the earth, maybe hoping you’ll find help.  But you’re so alone.

            Except now you’re not because you see a blue light that’s glowing in the distance and on your right.  The end of the road?  No, you don’t think so.  You think it’s more than that. 

            You go to the light and when you get to it you just stand in front of it.  In front of the house it’s in, actually, because you haven’t yet reached the light.  You stand there for so long not doing anything but hoping that the light will come out.  The day dies, too, and turns to night.  Maybe you should go back?

            But in the back of your head you know you can’t do that.  This changes everything.

            Something starts to tug at your waist.  Tugging up like it wants you to fly.  And there’s a sound in your head now.  Crying, maybe?  Numbers flash in front of your eyes and you wake up-

            -and I’m in the back of an ambulance with things hooked up to my arms and a dream fleeting past.  I try to catch it and then lose consciousness again, this time more naturally.

ACoN Chapter Five

Chapter Five: Slide

In journalism we actually learned something.  The teacher walked us through the template we’d be using on a regular basis.  It was pretty simple, or at least I thought so.  A few other members of the class were rather confused; most likely they weren’t around computers too much.  My uncle worked with them so they were second nature.

            In fact there were so many questions the class ran to the end of the period and the teacher didn’t have time to assign anything before people escaped for the hallway.  Michael caught me right before I left,

            “So, since we’re starting over, do you want to do something later, maybe?”

            I was shocked.  “Are you asking me on a date?”

            We both blushed at the same time.  “Not like that,” he hurriedly answered.  “I mean, unless you want it to be like that…”

            “You barely know me.”

            “Well, that’s the point isn’t it?  I want to get to know you.  Just like dinner at McDonalds or something.”

            “I can’t tonight,” I tucked a strand of hair behind my ear.  I wasn’t sure if I wanted to take him up on his offer.  There was just so much between us that he didn’t know about me.  Things I wasn’t ready to tell him.  And I didn’t want him to push me in any direction I didn’t want to go.  The last thing I wanted was to start dream-walking again.

            He sensed my hesitation.  “How about lunch tomorrow?  It’s the weekend and it would be completely casual…”

            The butterflies in my stomach were doing dances.  “Can I meet you there?”

            “Sure, yes.  You know the one I’m talking about?” his face was split by a smile and I mirrored it without meaning to.

            “Of course.  It’s the only one in town.”

            “Great.  Lunch tomorrow.  Oh, can I have your number?”

            I gave it to him and then waved goodbye as I nearly skipped out of the class room.

At home no one was around.  Aunt Sissy was out picking up Uncle Ben up from the airport which was an hour or so away.  Kevin was gone, too.  He was staying with a friend in the city where they were seeing a series of concerts.  Being home alone was a rare and beautiful thing.

             I popped my regular pills and laid down on my bed for a nap.  I took a lot of medicine, honestly.  Anti-psychotic stuff that helped me from losing my mind during the day, sleeping pills to keep me from dreaming, and anti-depression meds, too.  Reflecting on it now I wondered if they were necessary in the first place.  Michael was real, which meant the nightmares were.  But I didn’t want to give up what I was taking.  They seemed more important now, protecting me from actual monsters in my head.

            The doorbell rang downstairs and I got up to answer it.  Before I made it all the way out of my room though I got that head rush that sometimes happens.  I leaned against the wall as I waited for it to pass, but instead of passing it leaked into my vision, staining the edges black.  I tried to shake it away but suddenly I was falling forward, unable to control my body.  My head hit the corner of the desk and I blanked out.

ACoN Chapter Four

Chapter Four: Child Prodigy

Art was the whole reason I was at this school in the first place.  Remarkable, they called my work.  Inspiring.  Gothic.  Prodigious.  I’d won awards, and when time to enroll in college came around several would be offering me scholarships.  In fact, several had already offered.  For my aunt it was like manna from heaven.  She put up with my “quirks” as we called them in part because she said I was an artist and my art would make me famous someday.  She wanted me to shine.  I didn’t see what everyone was talking about, to be honest.  It was just… the things cluttered around my head.  The small pieces of dreams I had crawled through that were growing spider webs.

            Yesterday we had dived in, the teacher giving me a particularly knowing glance.  Her name was Ms. Rose and she herself had been a child prodigy.  Part of me had been afraid she would call me in front of the class and make a big deal of my new existence here and the other part had wished she would.  Sure it would be humiliating, but it would have made me feel special, something no one else really did for me.  I had never been teacher’s pet.  I hadn’t had much of a chance to even be daddy’s little girl.

            Today she gave us our first assignment: still life.  That was it.  This was advanced art, after all.  We didn’t need the direction the freshman needed.  And of course, the definition of still life was a bit more flexible for those of us with “special” talent.  There was no official grade for each piece of work we finished, but at the end of the semester we had to submit a portfolio to her husband-the-art-collector and he would appraise the work like he would with any normal client.  Of course, seeing as the school wasn’t too fond of the one grade system she employed, if you finished the task on time you got a one hundred and tests were little more than write your name in the upper right hand corner.  I had this all straight from the mouth of the senior who had failed out of Ms. Rose’s class last year because he’d been suspended second semester.

            I sat down at the easel, across from Angie.  We could work on anything we wanted since doing the assignment in class was restrictive.  Yesterday I had started a sketch, but today I was uninterested in them.  I picked up a pen and scratched a few lines onto the paper before angrily scribbling them away.

            For what felt like an hour I just stared at the blank sheet.  Angie was absorbed with what she was doing and didn’t notice I was brain dead.  Not that it was her responsibility.

            “Try this,” Ms. Rose startled me, setting, with a soft bang, a set of water colors down in front of me.  She gave me a wink and then walked away to critique Jase’s (the before-mentioned senior who failed last year) all black blob.

            I picked up the brush warily and dipped it in the blue.  These were pretty much the Crayola watercolors you’d buy at target for your kindergartener.  It was unnerving to play with them.  I drew a few strokes across the paper and felt myself falling into a rhythm.  My mind wandered to you know who as I worked.

            What was he like now?  I mean, he’d been going to this school since he was a freshman.  He had friends I was sure.  A girlfriend, most likely.  Or boyfriend.  I didn’t judge.  Just turn green with envy.  They were lucky.  But I hadn’t really seen him palling around with anyone in the classes we had together.  I mean, he sat by people and talked to them, but no one he went out of his way to be with.  Was that my fault?  Was he too busy being confused with my appearance that no one else existed for him?  Worse, was I doing that to Angie?

            I glanced at her at the same moment she glanced at me.  A big smile lit up her face and then she dug back into her project.  No, it didn’t appear that I was.  There was that, at least.

            “It’s gorgeous,” Ms. Rose managed to startle me again and I this time I had to grit my teeth to stop from yelping.

            At first I didn’t know what she was talking about me and then I looked at what I had in front of me.  Two green-blue eyes, the smooth curve of a jaw, the outline of a smile, the dark brown hair over his forehead.  I wanted to impale myself on the brush when I realized that unconsciously I had painted Michael.

ACoN Chapter Three

Chapter Three: They Don’t Understand

Dinner that night was pretty normal, I suppose.  It hadn’t been my favorite dish of Aunt Sissy’s but I was polite enough to at least pick through it on a normal night, so the fact that I was picking through it tonight wasn’t something to notice.  Uncle Ben was still out of town on a business trip (California, the lucky) but the table felt filled with Kevin’s constant stream of telling us about his interaction with an old friend earlier.

            “I’ve actually been considering going back to school,” he said around a bite of chicken, “maybe a whole different subject, though.”

            “It sounds like a good idea,” Sissy said.  I tuned them out, not on purpose, but because my head was all cluttered with thoughts of Michael.

            A piece of my heart clenched when I thought of him.  I had let him down.  But that’s not real.

            But that’s not a real argument now, is it?

            He’s real.  He goes to my school.  No, I go to his school.

            And I let him down.

            Not that he knew the whole story.  Not at all.  If he thought that I had just stopped he was wrong.  There had been a very good reason for that, and I should have told him the truth.  After storming out like that I wasn’t sure I trusted him to handle it, though, and sharing felt wrong.  Like he was a complete stranger.

            Which he is.

            But I used to know him so well.

            I pushed away my plate and got up.  Sissy looked at it and sighed.  I never complained, but I was a rather picky eater, and I knew that got to her.

            “I’m not feeling well,” I excused myself.  “I’m sorry.  Maybe I can make dinner Saturday?” I knew Kevin wouldn’t be here that night and Ben got home Sunday morning.

            “Yes, alright.  I didn’t get to ask, did you have a good day?”

            “It was fine.”

            She smiled a tired smile.  The wrinkles under her eyes- mostly from laughter- seemed to appear deeper than before.  “Do you want to see your mom this weekend?”

            The question startled me and reflexively I said “no” but a part of me said “yes”.  Out loud I compromised, “Maybe next weekend.”

            Sissy nodded and I pretty much ran upstairs to my room to finish my homework, take a shower, swallow my pills, and crash into oblivion.

A nightmare can appear as anything, obviously, if someone is afraid of it, or if the dream twists it around.  Nightmares are caused by stress, and unless you’re a dream walker you can’t really combat them.  Sometimes symptoms appear around a dream right before they’re about to happen, like all the colors being washed out to grayscale, or a smell rising out of everything, or, my personal favorite, the people start to melt.  It’s actually very cool.

            This time there was no warning.

In history I took my seat and waited for Michael to show up.  He was one of the last to arrive and when he did he didn’t look at me right away.  Mr. Rabble started talking, going over the homework he had assigned last night, because, you know, teachers.

            I listened intently to the lesson just to distract myself.  Christopher Columbus today.

            “He seems like a nightmare,” Angie whispered into my ear and I jumped.

            “What?” I asked sharply.

            She looked at me sideways.  “Columbus sounds like a nightmare.  An asshole.  You know, for what he did to all the native people.”

            “Right,” I blinked away a bead of sweat.  “An ass.”

            At the end of class we got another homework assignment and some time to work on it.  Which, guess what, no one did.  That was when Michael finally looked at me.  Then, he got up and came over.

            Angie gave me a look that seemed to capture both excitement and anger.

            “Hello, I don’t think we’ve met.” He stuck out his hand.  I didn’t know what he was doing.  Was he making fun of me?

            “Yesterday I was a bit of a jerk but I’d really like to get to know you,” he nodded at his hand.  I reached out and shook it.  “I’m Michael.”

            “Kaylor.”

            “I didn’t know that,” he said, a smile at the corner of his lips.

            “Well,” I blushed, “I prefer to go by my nickname.”

            “Kaya.”

            I nodded at the same time Angie said, “Wow, no one ever guesses that’s her nick name.  I’m Angela, by the way.” They shook hands.

            The bell rang and Michael got up.  “I’ll see you later, Kaya.”

            I nodded.  I was hit by déjà vu as he walked out the door.

ACoN Chapter One

Chapter One: These Fragile Things

“Goodnight, sweet heart,” mother tucked me in.  I smiled at her drowsily.  It had been a long day of visiting my cousins.  They lived in Hawaii, but for the summer had decided to stay on the continental United States and see their family.

            “Goodnight, mommy.”  Mother turned off the lights and blew me one last kiss as she closed the door with a quiet click.

            Immediately I closed my eyes.  At this point I was adept at calling up sleep and it was no trouble to plunge right into it.  My own dream swam around me, a weak patch of memories from the day that would slowly morph into the more extreme.  Normally I blew past my own dreams and fled into the neighboring ones, but this time I slowed down to look around me.  Everything was larger than life and I felt like a mosquito walking around in a room of faces.  The dream flickered at the edges and the colors in it were faded, like a receipt left in the sun.  It worried me to think that possibly, I should spend more time in my own dreams, in case they spoiled in my head and my imagination got stuck.

            But I couldn’t spend too much time, here.  I had to meet Michael.  Leaving a dream was easier all the time.  Just find the edge, or a weak spot in the middle, where reality doesn’t hold up in the least, and push with your mind.  Make it into something that can let you out- a door, a window, a hole.  I, personally, preferred a slide.  I slid down it, focusing on landing in whatever dream Michael would be romping around in.  The more time we spent with each other, the better we were at finding each other.

            Happily, I landed on my feet and did a little twirl.  That’s another thing.  In the dream worlds you wear whatever you want, and I was wearing my favorite dress.  It was pink and white, with puffy sleeves, and made me feel like a princess.

            Michael clapped and laughed.  I laughed, too.  The world around us was filled with clouds that soared up in the sky and down next to the earth.  They were solid things, not the cold, white, water vapor they were meant to be.  I reached out and touched one, feeling the smooth edges of it.  The texture reminded me of my kitchen sink at home.

            “Come on, you’ll never believe what I found!”  Michael grabbed my hand and pulled me along.  “It’s the greatest thing.”

            “What?” I ran alongside him, dodging the clouds every once in a while.  “What!” I grew more excited with every passing moment.

            We came to the spot where he had pushed through into this dream to look for me.  It was an old wooden door, with cracks in it, and some ivy growing through.  Something out of a fantasy story or castle or madman’s laboratory.  “It’s through here,” he assured me, and we went through the door together.

            Wherever we ended up was different than what he had been planning.  A look of disappointment spread through his face.  “It changed, already.  It was the coolest thing.  The dream was in space, and there were these aliens, who were actually rather nice, and were hiding the Hero who was only wearing their underwear, and then there was this rain that was coming to destroy everyone and only the Hero could stop it by finding this dog that could speak with its mind,” he took a breath and I gave him a light punch on the arm.

            “It’s fine.  Let’s look around this one.”

            Every dream is different just as every person is different.  Sometimes they tell stories, and sometimes they are just a moment frozen, and sometimes they are just feelings and colors and flashes of images.  There are no two dreams the same, even the recurring ones.  Very rarely do they make any sort of sense upon waking up, but during the dream, for a dream-walker, they do make a sort of sense that perhaps only we can grasp.

            There is the belief that there are hidden messages in dreams.  Symbols that can predict the future or define the past.  I wouldn’t say that was incorrect, I’m sure there’s a reason behind everything, but I don’t know how accurate they actually are.  I’ve never paid much attention to them at all.

            Michael and I wandered through the dream that was a rather boring seeming one.  Everything was pretty much in shades of grey.  Washed out and watery.  Like a painting that has turned moldy.  Everything was cookie cutter.  Large, rectangular sky scrapers with windows reflecting an invisible sun.  Blocks of houses with the gabled roof, two-car garage, manicured lawn, and brown siding.  There was no one.

            “It was so much better, before,” he mumbled under his breath.

            “Yeah,” I sighed.  “Now I sort of wish I had seen it.”

            “Should we go find another dream?”

            I nodded and we turned the way we had come, but the landscape had changed.  Creating a doorway is harder when it’s not your dream, so we preferred to use the same ones if we could.  Now we had no way to find it.

            “That’s a bit creepy, now, isn’t it?”  We moved closer together, our shoulders touching.  The heat between us felt like static electricity and we jerked apart as if a ghost had flown between us.  It was then that we realized what we had stumbled into.  A nightmare.

“Kaya!” my aunt yelled from down below.  “You’re going to be late if you sleep any longer!”  But she was wrong- I hadn’t been asleep.

            I shuffled through my backpack.  Nerves bit into my stomach.  For my junior year of high school I was transferring to a better one.  An art school, for the rich and prodigious.  I was of the latter.  I wasn’t really that big into doing art, honestly, but my Aunt had had me submit a few pieces for a scholarship competition and I ended up winning.  Painting was a way to get rid of all the pent-up energy I had.  Once upon a time I had used up my creative juices with pure imagination.

            In my backpack was everything a normal student would carry around- books, pencils, papers- but alongside those things were my two pill bottles and an emergency inhaler I might need.  The doctors insisted and I was ready to take anything to keep myself sane.

            Leaving my room I saw myself in the mirror.  Long sleeves and pants.  Dark eyeliner, raccoon-ed eyes, and a heavy amount of concealer.  My naturally brown hair had been died darker over the summer for personal reasons.  My normally blue eyes looked hooded and almost gray.  Like unshed tears, I supposed.  Angry at the thought I slammed the door on my way out of the room.

            “I’m walking to school,” I tossed over my shoulder.  “Grab something to eat there.”

            Aunt Sissy sighed.  “Make good decisions,” and grabbed me for a hug as I tried to run out of the room.

            “See you later,” I almost made it out the door without running into Kevin, my cousin, but no such luck.

            “Bye, brat,” he called after me as I squeezed past him to the front yard.  Growing up we’d had a lot in common, but him being three years older than me and a college dropout changed that.  We weren’t “mean” to each other, but he knew which buttons to push to get a reaction and so did I.

“Kaylor Strain,” Angie leaned up against my locker, effectively closing the door and forcing me to actually face her.  “Ready for the first day?” her smile was bright and her eyes gleamed wickedly.

            Angela Heart was another new student here at Academy, but for a different reason.  She’d just moved in with her dad, permanently, and so was in need of a new school.  I was here on scholarship.  You’d think that would set us worlds apart, but Angie had always been the black sheep in her family as well, preferring abstract art to stocks.

            True to my word I had walked to school, listening to my regular soundtrack.  The cafeteria opened early and coffee was free.  Then I’d hunkered in the corner to people watch and sketch while waiting for the day to get started.

            “Not really,” I sighed, moving to lean next to her.  “What’s our first class?”  It was such a small school that they tried to keep people together from freshman year.  Us coming in the middle pretty much gave us the same exact schedule with the exceptions of math- where she was a prodigy- and newspaper- which, for whatever reason, counted as my gym credit, for which I was eternally grateful.

            “American history,” I could hear the eye-roll.  “Don’t you just love that subject?”

            I laughed.  We both knew I had taken it last year already, the public schools around here let you choose when you wanted it.

            “I’ll help you through your homework.”

            “Counting on it,” she winked and sprang away from the wall as the warning bell rang.  “Let’s go.  Best to get seats now before all the good ones are taken.”  She was, of course, referring to the boys.

            Angie and I had met over the summer.  I’d been working at the local theater and she’d come waltzing in, bored out of her mind.  We hung out and became fast friends, which was nice for a change.  I’d had “friends” at my last school, but none of them had ever really gotten me like Angie did.  Through our summer adventures we learned that the rich boys from Academy really were everything they were said to be and then some.

            Our history class was taught by an older guy who’d assigned a bunch summer reading neither of us had done.  I didn’t have the patience for books and Angie just didn’t care for history at all.  I’d set the guy up to be old and stodgy, but in truth, he actually had plenty of energy and sense of humor.  He asked us, as we were coming in (being some of the first to arrive) whether we had done the work.  Before we could answer with a lie he chuckled and shooed us along.  He knew no-one had done it.

            Angie slid next to a pair of twin guys.  Green eyes and blondish-brown hair and really tall.  One wore a green sweater and the other glasses.  Adorable.  I’m not as guy crazy as Angie, but I can appreciate a work of art when I see one.

            Slowly people trickled in.  I busied myself with getting out a notebook and hiding a sketchpad behind it.  That’s why I didn’t notice the pair of dark eyes that had started watching me until Angie nudged me and whispered “six o’clock”.  I would have turned around then and there but the bell rang and the teacher- Mr. Rabble- began talking immediately.

            I tried to pay attention but now it was like I could feel the weight of those eyes drilling into the back of my neck.  I squirmed in my seat and finally, when Mr. Rabble wasn’t looking, I turned to see who was staring at me.  I tried to make it look like I was just glancing at the clock on the back wall but I was frozen when I saw who it was.

            Because.

            Because he shouldn’t have been here.

            Because he shouldn’t have even been real.  He was a figment of my imagination.

            Because the boy looking at me was… Michael.