of the empty prospects his future holds. Such is my brother’s nature.
“You should decorate this room,” he murmurs after a time. “It’s depressing in here.”
“I didn’t know white was depressing,” I say.
He rolls over to face me, serious for once. He can’t ignore the bruises on my face anymore. “Has it been hard for you, while I was gone?” Relief vanishes at the question.
Mulling over the best response, I ponder the white walls, imagining them covered in posters or paint. It’s strange—they’ve been white for so long, empty, like me, that it’s difficult to picture it. “Nothing is ever hard for me,” I tell Charles, making my tone sincere. “And Mom is tougher than you think.”
Charles sighs, his fingers gentle as they skim the yellow bruise beneath my eye. “I-I’m sorry I haven’t … I’m sorry I never … ” A new Emotion appears—Guilt. She places her hand on my brother’s cheek, in the same place his fingers rest on my own face. Unable to confront these truths and feelings, Charles abruptly switches course. Now he rolls to his back, arm under his head, and gazes up at the ceiling. “College wasn’t for me, Liz,” he murmurs. “You know I’ve never liked school.”
I nudge him with my shoulder, playing the part of the little sister well. “You’ve never liked school as much as you like parties and alcohol, that is.”
“Hey!” he protests, grinning ruefully. “I’m weak, okay? I tried to stay away. Really.”
He’s lying, but I don’t call him on it. With one last grin, Charles leaves me. The floor creaks, and then the door is clicking shut. Silence. Soon I’m closing my eyes, my muscles relaxing. Just as I’m hovering between reality and dreaming, I sense that odd familiar-unfamiliar presence from the road, lurking nearby. Watching, waiting, for what?
Sleep has too firm a hold on me to break. This mysterious visitor isn’t even close to being finished with me, though. Somehow, I’m certain of this. I will find out what it wants one way or another.
For now, I dream.
I’m standing at the edge of a clearing. The grass is knee-high; it ripples in the breeze. The skies above roll with fluffy clouds that make me think of the inside of a cupcake. Not sunrise or sunset, just a space in time that feels frozen, content.
Across the wide space, sitting with his back to a tree, sits the boy from my dreams.
His head is bent. He studies the pages of a book with intensity, his brow furrowed. In the daylight, even from this distance, I can see his features better than ever before. He’s … delicate. His hair falls over his brow in a dark, silk curtain. His face is oval-shaped, his lips a thin line of contemplation. He’s wearing a button-down shirt and jeans. No shoes.
Without my realizing it, I’ve started walking toward him. The boy doesn’t so much as twitch at the sound of my approach. The tips of the grass tickle the palms of my hands and a light material brushes against my knees. Glancing down, I notice that I’m wearing a dress I’ve never seen before. It’s a summery creation, all yellow and beaming. Something I would never own.
Once I’m just a few feet away from the boy I halt. Wait. He’s more slender than I realized, his fingers long and tapered as they grip the corner of the book. “Where is she?” he asks without looking up. His voice is calm this time, so feather-light it could be a lullaby. When I don’t answer, his gaze meets mine, wide, innocent, chocolate-brown. Such a contrast to the black hatred that burned in his eyes that night in my room. A fly buzzes past my ear. Now he’s the one waiting.
“Where is who?” I ask, just an instant before it occurs to me. Who else could he possibly be talking about? The one connection I can make to him, the other person in my dreams. She screams and weeps and rocks, forever imprinted in my mind as a broken thing.
Tears pool in the boy’s eyes suddenly. “What did you do to her?” he demands, clutching the book so tight that his knuckles go white. Now his tone and expression are as harsh as Tim’s backhand. I open my mouth but no sound comes out. What answer can I give?
The book falls to the ground and the pages flutter. Mindless, the boy presses his forehead to his knees and his shoulders shake. His shirt catches in one of the grooves of the tree bark behind him but he doesn’t bother to pull free. He’s drowning in grief just as his companion is in my other dreams. But who is really dead? What is this place? Where do I belong?
Somehow, none of it matters. A bizarre instinct consumes me to reach out, to touch him. Maybe just to prove to myself that none of this is real, or that he’s real. I don’t know. “She’s alive,” I tell him. It just pops out. I have no proof, I have no knowledge, but something inside of me clenches and releases when the boy comes alive. He stands, his red-rimmed eyes suddenly fierce, and seizes my shoulders. The movement is so quick; one moment he’s on the ground and the next he’s too close, with all his heat and passion.
“Where? Where?” he demands.
I shake my head. This infuriates him. I can see it in the way a muscle twitches in his jaw … but there are no Emotions. What does it mean?
There’s no time to analyze. “You owe me,” the boy says through his teeth. Suddenly the beauty of this place roils and changes. The sky darkens to an orange hue, and a sound fills the air, something akin to television static. “You did this. You ruined everything. We were happy. We were safe. You need to tell me the truth. Tell me the truth.”
An ironic statement, though he doesn’t know how ironic. It’s impossible to get the truth from someone who doesn’t know it. Pretending not to notice the rumbling world around us, I tell him point-blank without any facade of regret or empathy, “I don’t know where she is.”
An insect lands on my arm and I experience a brief flare of pain as it stings me. I shake it off, and my gaze shifts from the boy’s face. For the first time I notice the dark cloud surrounding us like millions of grains of pepper. A swarm. Bloodthirsty, incensed. It grows louder and louder, a hungry hum. No way to escape.
“This isn’t real,” I say, turning my focus back to the boy. Before I can ask him questions of my own, attempt to understand the strangeness of all this, the boy’s eyes turn red. Not just pink from tears, but a violent, ruby red. His pupils disappear and his lip curls in a snarl. “Lying,” he hisses. His fingers bite into me. Not him, my instincts whisper.
His body quivers and stretches. Those eyes switch back and forth between brown, red, brown, red. Monster, boy. I look up at him. “Who are you?”
The words echo: Are you … are you … Time stops.
And then, just as quickly as it began, the changes retract, swift as claws. The violent swarm dissipates, the sky brightens to the happy blue, and the powerful creature is a simple boy again. Sitting against the tree once more with the book back in his hands, he turns a page as if it’s the most fascinating text he’s ever encountered. As if none of it happened.
I take a step toward him, prepared to demand everything and anything.
I wake up.
