The end of the day couldn’t have come fast enough. The school was still as exhausting as it had been since the first day I’d started as a freshman. Too many people, too many teachers, too many papers, too much of everything I didn’t want any of. I sighed taking a step outside and looked up at the bright sun above. The sun had finally wriggled out from behind the endless stream of clouds, and it was warm out. That lifted my mood slightly.
I started off toward home. Bond had strict parents and couldn’t really hang out unless it was planned at least a week in advance. Jo was off doing whatever. They were the only ones with actual substance at my school. Everyone else was a meaningless chit chat, some nice formality that carried into that uncomfortable zone of overstaying a welcome. Everyone was an awkward conversation waiting to happen, and I just couldn’t wait to be done with it all. Work was one thing, but for some reason, school followed me back home more of the time. This wasn’t any exception. All around me were the kids chattering excitedly about their first days, wide-eyed freshman not yet acquainted with the horror of the world. I almost loathed their optimism.
“Hey, sweetie, what’s up?” someone asked as they pulled a headphone from my ear. A wild flare of anger rose within me, but I instantly recognized the voice and felt my face heat.
“Hey, Vance! How are you?” I asked excitedly, my mood instantly skyrocketing. My heart melted gently beneath the sound of his voice shaping the word meant for me. ‘Sweetie’. At a time, I’d been vastly excited when he had given me the name, and then crestfallen when I found he gave pet names to everyone, but in the last couple months or so, I’d slowly started to noticed he seemed to reserve the names for me, or so I’d thought. I liked to keep that idea close to mind.
“Aw, I’m not doing much. Mind if I walk with you?” he asked casually, falling in step beside me.
“Yeah, I’m not doing anything,” I giggled. Vance Gutiérrez-Ortega. The stuff of literal dreams. I tried my best not to stare at him as we walked along, chatting lightly about nothing and laughing darkly about everything, but it made me feel awkward knowing I was deliberately trying not to look at him. Was it noticeable? Was I trying to be too nonchalant? Did I look like the dumb love-struck girl I felt in the moments with him?
Vance graduated two years ago. This wasn’t a rare occurrence for him to catch me walking home, but it was greatly appreciated each time he did. Most of the time he was there to visit some friends in the area, as he’d moved a city away, but I liked to tell myself he was there for me. I’d had a massive crush on him since I first met him when I was a sophomore and he was a senior. From the first day I laid eyes on him, I was irreparably stuck on him. Vance Gutiérrez-Ortega was 6 feet 3 inches of a deliciously spicy Dulce de leche treat, as Jo liked to describe him.
Vance was Mexican.
He had diamond cutter cheek bones fit to a slim almond colored face with big, dreamy, warm hazel colored eyes. He had black hair he used to wear long and heavily styled (I used to think of him as my personal senpai as he managed to get his hair to resemble anime characters) but that he now wore in a stylish crew cut.
He traded his teenage heart throb look for a magazine cover look.
“Yeah, so how’d your first day go?” he asked as we approached the little strip plaza a few blocks from my house.
“Ah, it was a day. You know. Hated every moment of it, nothing really changed,” I sighed, my eyes rolling up to the blue sky. The clouds were wispy and dancing on the horizon, and the sun was shining through the trees as a warm breeze rustled my hair. “I’m already ready for the year to be over.”
He laughed and said, “Don’t look at it that way. It’s just gonna suck more for you.”
“I was ready to leave school the moment I got in,” I muttered, scrunching my face. My stomach groaned as we passed a pizzeria, and he asked, “You wanna go in and get some food?”, gesturing to the open door. Heat raced up my neck, but the smell of fresh baked pizza was wafting out through the door and carrying along the breeze straight to my nose. I’d smelled it about a quarter of a mile back, but I was trying to ignore it as I didn’t really like to be detoured when I was walking home, even if it was to attempt to satisfy my now insatiable diet. But, Vance had suggested we go in for some food, which might be the closest to a date with him I’d ever get.
“Sure,” I said with a smile. It wasn’t often when I broke the diet with my father, but it wasn’t often Vance asked me to get food together. I opened the screen to the little pizzeria and was hit with the full intensity of fresh pizza and fried chicken and mozzarella sticks, and my stomach groaned even more. I walked up to the counter and said, without having glanced at the menu, “Can I get some fries with barbeque sauce?”
The girl behind quickly wrote it down and tapped a few keys on the register, looked up and said, “Will that be all?”
As I was in the process of saying “Yes”, Vance suddenly cut me off and said, “Can you make that two please?”
I looked up at him, surprised, and the girl said, “Okay, that’ll be $5.02.” Before I could make a move, Vance pulled out his wallet and gave her a ten. I glanced and said, “Are you sure? You don’t have to pay for me, you know?”
He smiled at me with that smile of his, that small half-smile that starts with downcast eyes but slowly rises to meet your face as if you’re the reason for that smile. He smiled at me with that smile, and I melted, and he said, “I want to.”
“Okay,” I said dumbly with an even stupider smile on my face. So I let him pay for the food. I could see how the girl looked at Vance. Every girl looked at him like that. He was just too attractive to ignore, and even though I’d seen this look on so many faces every time I was with him, I still felt a flare of hot, spiteful jealousy, so I looped an arm through his and leaned gently on his shoulder as she doled out his change. I looked up at him dreamily, not as an act but rather a rare display of my genuine affection for him, and said, “Thank you.”
I was being bold in doing this. I was very conservative in touching him generally simply because it wasn’t as if he ever asked me to. I didn’t want to overstep my bounds with him, but I really couldn’t help but try to show that regardless of him not being mine, in my company, he needed to appear to be mine so I wouldn’t get self-conscious and insecure. If I pretended he was mine, I could pretend I was a happier, more stable person who was capable of complex emotions like love. I hated feeling insecure, but my crush on him was far too much to be ignored and played lightly, so I had to do something to avoid feeling driven crazy with this stupid, irrational jealousy.
He looked down at me almost—dare I say—lovingly, and said with that same smile, “No problem, Ama.” I could literally feel my eyes growing doe-y. God, he made me such a helpless, love-struck mess.
We sat near the large windows as we waited for our food to come along. I gazed off absently, feeling a nice contentedness with the entire world for a moment. It wasn’t too hot in the little pizzeria; the sun was out and shining; I could smell the world on the breeze; I was sitting with Vance Gutiérrez-Ortega waiting on my favorite snack. I had been lucky enough to find one of the few breaks in life’s difficulty where I was rewarded with simply being alive in this moment. Life was good.
I looked back up to Vance, a warm, genuine smile on my face and rested my head gently on my knuckles, adoration on my face.
“What’s got you so smiley?” he asked, a kind half smile on his face.
“It just feels like a good day, now,” I responded, feeling the sun break through the trees and shine on my face. Vance opened his mouth to respond, but caught himself as a quirky smile pulled higher at his lips. His gaze had shifted from my eyes to a spot on my face, and my smile fell to a sly snicker, attempting to cover the heat that jumped to my neck.
“You have a triangle on your face,” he stated.
Rolling my eyes, I smirked at him and said, “That I do, that I do.”
“Why do you have a triangle on your face?”
“Ah, the only thing I could think of is that the Illuminati has chosen me and they’re probably going to send someone for me soon so, yeah, be ready for some guys in a black car to roll up and take me away,” I snickered.
“Whoa, so you’re like, some kind of savior or something?” he said with a laugh.
“More like a destructive killing machine, so you better watch out.”
“I knew it. You’re too cute to just be that innocent,” he said with a sly smile, and my eyes dropped to the table as I giggled, saying, “Nah, I’m not cute. Maybe dangerously beautiful, but not cute.”
“Dangerously beautiful, huh? That sounds about right.” The girl from behind the counter brought up our fries then with a bottle of their barbeque sauce, and I said a thank you as my mouth watered. I reached out for a fry and blew on it gently, popped it in my mouth and looked up at him and asked, “How’s everything been? What have you been up to lately?”
Vance walked me home and even stopped in to say ‘hi’ to my mother for a moment, since he’d met her before, and she had liked him enough to remember him. She asked how my day was, and I’d mentioned how it was good, but I was tired then. My day really wasn’t super amazing or even worth saying it was actually ‘good’, but I got to see Vance today, and that’s pretty good. He always brightened my days, and I was happy whenever he came around. It was a shame I didn’t know when I’d see him again, but then that was my fault for not having asked to hang out again. Despite how close of friends we had gotten over the last two years or so, I was still too shy to even attempt to cross the boundary any more than I already did. I knew my feelings for him; I knew them well, but I was just too scared to act on them. Maybe it was fear of rejection, maybe it was fear of losing him if it ever went wrong, but I kept my emotions carefully concealed around him. He made it hard at times, though. He could make it very hard for me not to burst out spontaneously with everything in my heart. It at least had brought me some sort of comfort to know he wasn’t just screwing around with as many girls as he had before. He was a notorious heartbreaker.
I trudged up to my room and dropped my new bag next to the closet, fell on to my bed. I was glad I didn’t have work today because the day had taken more out of me than I had expected. It was only the first day and I already didn’t want to go back. I was already dreading going back the next day, but I tried to snap myself out of it. There was no point in thinking about not going to school because it would just make the school year that much worse for me. I was just already ready to be done, but then I’d been ready to be done for a long while now. Letting myself sink deeper into my thoughts, I drifted silently into sleep as light spilled through my curtains, laid across my face and helped warm me to sleep. At least I was lucky enough to enjoy the first nap of the school year.
My dreams were typically strange and made little sense, or rather they made sense but were completely inapplicable to myself. I could never understand how people could find some hidden meaning in their dreams. Mine were more like glimpses into other people’s lives. But this one was different.
No; this one was familiar.
This dream I’d had a few times, or rather I had dreamt of this person’s life a few times, just at different moments in their life.
In this dream, I was someone I’d been many times before. I saw myself as her more times than I’d been anyone else. I recognized it was her by the two moles on the outside of her thumb. In this dream, I was waking up in a light room, my room. My sheets and blankets were all light and warm, the windows covered by gauzy curtains and a full length mirror in the corner. The sun laid itself gently across my face, rousing me from my sleep, and I remembered I needed to write a letter to my aunt. I needed to ask her for some advice about how to deal with dreams. I’d been dreaming about an angel for some reason. Dreams about being struck down by one. I had long since stopped waking in fear and shakes, but today was different than normal. I thought I could remember the angel’s face this time. Every time I had the dream, every detail about the angel quickly disappeared within moments of having awoken, but the ideas remained a little longer from this one.
Dark skin? Was there a mark, too?
Sitting up in the bed, the wind flowed quietly through my open window, and I put my head in my hands in concentration. There was a canyon, the sky was yellow and orange, there were people on the ground, but I can’t remember anything about me. Who I was in all of that. After a few minutes of fruitless concentration, I gave up. Reaching to the side table, I plucked a cigarette and lit it, inhaled silently. I looked bleakly off at the window, at the light streaming through the curtains.
I was growing frustrated with these dreams. They’d been growing gradually stronger and stronger, and Kane wasn’t around to soothe me this time. Kane . . . he’d been growing distant from me lately. I pictured his face in my head. Shadowy green eyes and sunburned cheeks above an auburn beard. A crooked nose—a fighter’s nose—with an endearing scar slicing through a thick eyebrow. He had his father’s face. Thinking back to when we were just kids, I wondered if I knew I’d fall in love with a face like that. We were just kids then.
Putting out the cigarette in the ash tray beside the bed, I swung my legs over and walked towards the vanity. I may as well have gotten started on that letter. Kane wasn’t something I could work on here and now. My dreams, this angel in my dreams, I needed help. I didn’t know how long I’d be plagued with the damn dreams. Maybe they wouldn’t be so bad if I didn’t feel every single time it killed me, or if it didn’t kill me a different way every time.
Without warning, the wind stopped blowing, the curtains falling flat. The skin crawled on the back of my neck. Without understanding why, my heart began to beat rapidly in my chest and the blood rushed in my ears. Then I heard it; a loud and unmistakable thud on the roof of the house. I flinched and my eyes went wide as I froze in my spot, eyes glued to the ceiling where the thud had sounded. It was then that the mark on my back began to burn, and I wondered why it had to have such inconvenient timing.
Footsteps walked deliberately across the roof above me, heading in my direction, and I all but stopped breathing as the silence seemed to grow stronger in between each step. My bones felt like concrete in my body and I couldn’t move. I couldn’t think of where I was going to go or what I was going to do even if I wasn’t so focused on trying to figure out what could have landed on my roof and was now apparently walking to me. Russell was barking wildly outside then, running around the house trying to scarethe intruder on the roof.
Those were human-sounding footsteps.
What human could have possibly climbed all the way to my roof?
Who would climb all the way to the roof?
I was still frozen as the footsteps approached closer and closer, until it stopped directly above me. I glanced at my windows then, suddenly remembering they were wide open, and I darted to the nearest window as fast as I could, slamming it shut and quickly running to the next one. Something slammed into the closed window, but I couldn’t see it because the curtains had fallen over it. I darted quickly from window to window until I got to the last one, but I was too late. A black figure flew through the window, the curtains billowing around it and obscuring its full image from my sight. I happened to be standing in front of the full length mirror. Without warning, I turned to look at myself, almost against my will.
I stared myself in the eyes intensely, but it wasn’t me staring at me; it was Madison Grier, Kane Grier’s wife. A willowy blond with a long oval face and ocean blue eyes and—and a blood red triangle just beneath her right eye. Isosceles, two arms stretching down to her mouth. I was frozen, staring at the triangle, but she was staring at me with those endless eyes, and I was more terrified of that look than the thing that was in my room. I’d almost forgotten about the thing in the room until I heard its long nails scratching against the floor as it ran at me, but I did not turn to face it. I was still staring intently at the triangle on her face as she stared at me. The creature lunged at me, but before it could actually land, Madison said, “It’s time.”
I jumped awake and out of my sleep, my neck and waist burning where claws had sunk in to rip out my organs. I was sweating and hyperventilating, and the sun had gone down, darkening my room and casting me into darkness. For a moment, I thought I was dead, but I could feel my heart slamming a little too vividly to be dead, I concluded. Placing my head in my hands, I rocked back and forth for a second, trying to tell myself it wasn’t real, that it was just a dream. I’m okay, I’m okay. It wasn’t real, I’m okay, I chanted in my head. It’s not real.
Someone chose to call my phone then, and I jumped, startled again. I shook my head, feeling silly at my reaction. I didn’t have bad dreams, in my opinion. I had dream deaths. In the last few months, the last few lives I’d witnessed, each sequence was getting longer and longer, and each dream death coming faster and faster. Each dream death was getting worse, but this was the first time someone had actually talked to me. I wasn’t sure if I was more put off by how I was killed or the ominous message. It was as if I could feel her directing the message to me. It wasn’t some random dream. This felt like a warning.
Shaking my head, trying to clear it of these heavy, anxious feelings, I reached over to see who might want to talk to me at the same time I was waking up. It was an old girl friend of mine, checking to see if I went to the same school. I sighed and sent a quick response, then got up to go downstairs. I was parched. I moved quietly not knowing if anyone was awake in the
house, and not wanting to interact with them anyway. I was still miffed from the dream, and I knew it would be a while before I could feel fine. Maybe I’d fall back asleep since I was still tired. Thankfully, no one seemed to be awake, so I could get my water quickly, but the entire time I was feeling my way around the dark, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something bad was going to happen, which intensified the bad feeling. My bad feelings weren’t ever really wrong, but they presented themselves in the most unexpected ways. Sighing, I just hoped it wasn’t anything too catastrophic, or even anything that had to do with me, but I wouldn’t know. Heading to the bathroom, I washed my face and changed into more comfortable clothes. Returning to my room, I laid down on my bed and turned on the TV, allowing the noise to comfort me and make me feel just a tad less alone.
Letting myself sink into the mattress and my limbs grow heavy, part of my brain closed itself and drifted off. I was still in the gravity of sleep. With the TV spouting old sitcoms and the audience laughing quietly in the background, I let myself drift back to sleep, ignoring the dark feeling. I was really good at ignoring feelings.