The dream was wearing on her. She wanted to wake up to the chaos that was her world. She missed arguing with Brian over the breakfast table and cuddling with Varden. How do people wake themselves… “Ouch!” she said after Misty’s brush got caught up in a nest of knots. Pain. She would pinch herself. “Ouch!” she said again, this time for her assault on her arm. Misty Mom gave up and handed Mia the brush.
“Thank you,” Mia said, getting up. She pulled her hair back, twisting a scrunchie around it. Mia took a moment while she was at the desk to look inside the drawers. There she found a wad of cash, a library card, and six pieces of gum. Mia tucked the cash and gum into her pockets and got up.
Misty was fading away.
“Misty,” Mia said quickly. “Thank you for everything you did for me.”
The ghost looked puzzled but appreciative before her lack of energy made her disappear.
Mia left her room and tiptoed past her parents’ suite of rooms, where her mother’s steady breathing confirmed her father’s report that Amanda Cooper was indeed sleeping in. The acrid stale odor of cigarettes dominated that section of hall. There was no doubt Mia’s mother had been smoking in her bedroom. She always smoked, ignoring the warnings that cigarettes caused lung cancer. Amanda didn’t seem to care that it caused her husband’s and daughter’s eyes to water when the rooms weren’t ventilated by the cracking of a window. Amanda lived in Amanda world, a world where everything was for her benefit.
Mia moved down the stairs, her heart pounding. The more she moved through her childhood house, the more she feared that, instead of a dream, she was really in 1998. “I’m Mia Martin. I’m thirty-two years old. I’m married to Ted Martin and have two little boys, Brian and Varden. I live…” Mia’s eyes opened wide. “That’s it. I just need to get back to the farmhouse. Where’s my keys?” Mia answered herself, “Somewhere in 2018, probably the hall table – no, we had to move them because of Brian. The office. I wonder if Charles took his car?” she asked, walking out the back door and over to the garage. She opened the door up and looked inside. No car. Not that she’d get away with driving it if this dream world kept to the rules.
There, leaning against the lawn mower was her dented, reclaimed, light-blue Huffy bike. It had a vintage banana seat and long handlebars to compensate for the small wheels. Mia wasn’t tall enough for a touring bike. She had found this gem at the resale shop. It served her well until the other kids her age started calling it a baby’s bike. “Hey, Cooper, did you forget your training wheels?”
She opened the garage door and pushed the bike out. She closed the door and got on. She cruised past the Gifford house, and when she saw the ghost of Edwin Gifford tending his flowers, she almost crashed the bike. Mia swerved back onto the verge of the road and stopped.
“What’s the matter, Mia? You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Edwin teased her.
“Sorry, Mr. Gifford, I’m feeling a bit crazy today,” she said, trying to stop her hands from shaking.
“Have you eaten yet?”
“No. I really have to get to the… the Murphy place.”
“Lord, girl, you don’t want to go there. It’s haunted.”
Mia saw the twinkle in the man’s eyes and couldn’t help smiling.
“There, that’s better. Wait here,” he said conspiratorially. He disappeared for a moment, and when he manifested, he had a paper napkin in his hand which was wrapped around a large cinnamon roll. “The lady of the house won’t miss it. Now get, before I get accused of giving sweets to children.”
“Yes, sir, thank you, Mr. Gifford,” Mia said, tucking the roll into her worn-but-sound bike basket.
She rode away, and as she turned the corner, she looked back to see Edwin returning to his weeding. “I took for granted that he could move tangible things,” Mia said. “I wonder how he and Bea White are getting along now?”
“Crazy Cooper’s talking to herself!” jeered a pimply-faced boy from the driveway where he and a few boys were playing basketball. Mia couldn’t remember the boy’s name. He was one of a dozen bullies that had made Mia’s life hell growing up. She didn’t say a word but continued to pump the pedals of the bike to get her out of the neighborhood as fast as she could.
She cruised quickly through the town of Big Bear Lake. She instinctually avoided the cemetery by taking a parallel street which took her past the Bravermans’ house. She saw Tom in the yard with his mother Susan. She was tossing him a football. Tom was just a bit taller than Mia at this point. He raised a friendly hand, and Mia returned it as she rode by.
Mia kept thinking about how she may have gotten into the situation she was in. If it wasn’t a dream and she hadn’t been kidnapped by Roumain, it meant that somehow she accidentlly ended up back in time. “The portals…” she said aloud. “Did Brian find the book with Ed’s opening words in it? No, it’s locked up. Plus, I’d still be an adult. I’m a kid. Who does this to a person? What did I do to the universe to deserve this!”
The grade of the road became tougher. She found herself standing as she continued to pedal upwards away from the town and towards the hollow. The abandoned subdivision the 2018 Murphy farmhouse
