As I Wake (7 page)
Authors: Elizabeth Scott
Tags: #Fantasy, #Fiction, #General, #Juvenile Fiction, #Fantasy & Magic, #Psychology, #Love & Romance, #Cognitive Psychology, #Law & Crime
Because I will.
“Ava?” Jane says, touching my hand and I shake my head, pain sloshing around inside it, pushing back and forth from my eyes to the base of my skull. But the walls aren’t gray anymore and I’m not alone. I can feel Jane’s hand against mine.
“Are you all right?” Dr. Jabar says, and when I nod, says, “Good, good,” and then launches into a discussion about my brain.
“Can I get some water?” I ask Jane, because my head hurts and I don’t care about my brain, not when it hurts like this, and Jane nods and smiles at me.
I get up and walk out, heading through the main part of the office, where all the patients wait.
In the hallway, I wander around, half looking for a water fountain, half just not wanting to go back and look at him. Dr. Jabar’s office is in a building full of them, the hallway covered with doors that look the same except for the names printed on them. I bet all four floors are just like this one.
I find a water fountain hidden in a corner. It doesn’t work, only hisses when I press for water. The ladies room is right next to it, just behind me.
In the bathroom, I wash my hands, then cup water into them and drink. When I look at my face in the mirror, I don’t recognize it, it is alien but familiar in a way that twists my stomach. I turn away quickly, heading for the door.
As I leave, someone comes in, moving fast and bumping into me, and then I’m back in the bathroom, staring at a guy who is standing pressed against the door. Standing staring at me.
He is my age, and thin, with desperate brown eyes, and when he talks his voice is so thick with fear I can almost taste it. “Ava, are you okay? Tell me you’re okay. I didn’t know this would happen, I swear and now—”
He crosses to me, moving closer, and I can only stare, trapped by the fear and longing I see in his eyes, but the knowledge there, the knowledge of me and a million other things.
He knows me. The Ava I am.
He
knows
me.
knows
me.
And I—I
know
him.
know
him.
I know him from the attic, but in a blinding, crippling flash I see him looking at me in a desert, I see me looking at him in a hallway, I see us looking at each other, both dressed in long robes while fans flutter around us.
I have always known him, and I stare, waiting.
“I found you,” he says, his voice easing, and reaches a hand out toward my face, to touch me, and I, despite what I just saw, what I
know
—I take a step back.
know
—I take a step back.
He stops then, surprise on his face, and says, “I’m so sorry, I know you must be angry but please, I didn’t know this was going to happen, that she would do this. You have to know that. You have to . . .” He trails off, looking into my eyes like he should see something there, and then he is shaking his head, leaning forward and saying, “No, no, no,” in a broken whisper, pressing his hands against his legs.
He looks at me then, pleading on his face, on the curve of his lips, and I turn away, racing for the door. The mention of
she
has made me feel bad, so, so bad.
she
has made me feel bad, so, so bad.
Like I’m dying bad.
Like I-know-something-that-I-can’t-see-bad. I clutch my stomach.
When I reach the door, he says, “It’s me, Morgan,” his voice whisper-soft, like a prayer, and behind the pain in my head something sparks open, shaking free.
Morgan. MORGAN, 56-412, and I know that, I know those numbers, I know the word. The name. The place. We have always known each other but now I see the attic.
“I—” I say and then I am there.
I’m in the attic, pulling my headset off as I turned to see the voice I know but the face I should never see, the face that should never see me, and there he is, 56-412 looking right at me, brown eyes, short brown hair, my age and as surprised as I am, I see it in his eyes, he has eyes you can see everything in, and I say, “Morgan,” my voice as quiet as the ghost I am supposed to be.
“Ava,” Morgan says, and I am back in the bathroom now, mirror in front of me, reflecting sinks and toilet stalls and shimmering within them a tiny wooden room with an orange chair waiting. Two rooms, two places, except I have a feeling that if I looked closer I would see more rooms, more places, more of me and him.
Of us.
I blink, scared but not, awake like I haven’t felt since I first woke up in Ava’s house, in Ava’s bed, and look at him.
“I didn’t think it would be so hard to find you,” he says. “I didn’t even think I’d make it here. There isn’t a me here so I’m not supposed to be here. Also, everything is very strange, not at all like home and—” He blows out a breath, looking off to the side and then back at me as if he’s afraid I will vanish. There are freckles on his face, a tiny patch on his nose, and there are shadows under his eyes, deep and dark. A cut on his neck. Shadows of bruises on his jaw, faded faint yellow-green. I want to touch them, smooth them away.
I want to touch him.
He’s looking at me as if the whole world waits for my next breath, with an intensity that makes my heart pound and my palms sweat and then he smiles, a sweet curve of his mouth, and my breath catches, but then I freeze because there is something about it, something beyond it that I know, that makes my mind go blank with fear and pain. I shrink back and the room is a dream, the orange chair is a dream, I remembered Jane, I was here, I am here.
I look at him, and then I close my eyes. Maybe I’m crazy.
Maybe I’m scared.
“Ava,” he whispers, pleading, but I keep them closed. I have to find out what is real. I have to wake up for real.
“Hey,” someone says, and I open my eyes slowly, knowing Morgan will be gone. It is not his voice I just heard.
But he isn’t gone, he is still here, still looking at me. He is here and the only change is that now a security guard is too, peering at my face and pulling Morgan’s arms tight behind him, so he can’t touch me. Can’t reach me.
I don’t like that.
“Are you all right?” the security guard asks and I stare at him blankly because I thought I was dreaming when I closed my eyes and fell into the attic, into listening, into hearing that voice. Hearing Morgan.
I stare and Morgan says, “I’m sorry, Ava, I’m so sorry, maybe if there was a place here for me things would be better, maybe you and me—” and then jerks his arms free, the security guard stumbling back, saying, “Hey!” and grabbing at empty space as Morgan pulls the bathroom door open and runs through it.
The guard runs out into the hall, leaving me standing there in the bathroom. In the mirror I see my face, my open eyes.
I close them. After a moment, the door opens again. “Ava?” Jane says. “Oh, Ava,” and her voice is shaking and she is shaking, and the security guard is saying, “I’m so glad that woman called and said she thought she saw something, I’m so glad I got here—wait, hold on. Jerry, what do you mean you don’t see him? He ran down the stairs, how could you not see him?”
“You’re all right?’ Jane says, touching my arms, my face, my shoulders, and I draw back, nodding, thinking of him looking at me. Of me looking back.
Of how I remember something other than that brief, strange glimpse of a faraway, different Jane and me.
I remember him.
I remember Morgan in a way I didn’t—can all that I saw be memories?
I know at least one of them is for sure.
I know that I am from a place that is like this one but different, so different.
But how did I end up here?
And what did Morgan mean when he said there wasn’t a him here? How can that matter?
I don’t know. I just know that Morgan—that I know him.
I know him better than anyone here.
21.
JANE FOLLOWS ME
around when we get back to the house, asking if I need anything. Something to drink? To eat?
around when we get back to the house, asking if I need anything. Something to drink? To eat?
“I’m fine,” I say, sitting on her sofa and trying to think—to remember—even though it makes my head pound so hard spots of yellow and red dance in front of my eyes.
I’m not from here. That’s the drumbeat of words in my head, pounding along to the pain in my skull.
I don’t belong here. I’m not the Ava who’s supposed to be here.
I’m from somewhere else.
Somewhere that isn’t here.
“I have to check my work voice mail, but I’ll be right in the kitchen,” Jane says. “Call me if you need anything.” And then she stands there, hovering, waiting.
Looking worried.
“I really am fine,” I tell her, the words coming out poorly, shaking, and she looks like she wants to cry and hug me. In the end, she settles for squeezing one of my hands, gently, and saying, “Anything, okay?”
Anything. Tell me why I’m here. Tell me where I came from. Tell me why I remembered you, but a different you.
Tell me who I am.
I get up, head for the front door. Jane comes out from the kitchen, hand over the phone. “Ava?”
“I need to—I want to go out,” I say.
“Out?” Jane says, worry in her voice. “But what if the boy from before . . . ? You have to stay on the porch, all right, Ava? And you should leave the front door open too. You have to stay safe.”
I nod and walk outside. Jane sounds so scared.
I look back in the open door. Jane is peering into the hallway, glancing at me as she talks on the phone.
She hadn’t said anything as the security guard walked us out of the bathroom, and when he asked her, gently, if she knew “the young man,” she shook her head, looked bewildered and terrified.
“Why did he come here?” she’d said. “What did he—why did he come after Ava?”
When she said that, I wondered what had happened to her Ava. Why she—I—whoever I was—woke up knowing nothing.
What if it wasn’t an infection no one had noticed?
What if it was something else?
Jane had asked me if I knew him—Morgan—on the way home, her hands holding the steering wheel so tight they were stone-white, bloodless looking.
“I—I’ve never seen him here,” I said, because I hadn’t—not here, not in this place—and I didn’t think what was in my strange, empty but not empty head would count.
But it did. It does.
“I was so scared,” Jane said. “I can’t bear another—I don’t want anything to happen to you.”
Now I look at her, watching me, and wave, to show I am all right. That I am here. She relaxes, a little, and after a few minutes, turns away frowning and holding the phone like she can only hear it twisted a certain way, walking back into the kitchen as she does.
I look around. The lawn; the grass I stood on that first night, it still looks the same. The street still looks the same. It looks like the moment when I realized I didn’t know where I was. That I don’t know who I am.
My skin goes cold suddenly, goose pimples rolling up my arms, and I watch a car turn into the driveway, rolling to a stop just out of sight of the front door. Just out of sight of Jane.
I start to turn to call her, but then the car door opens and Clementine gets out. My heart starts to beat fast, skipping and stuttering in my chest, and when I try to look away from her, I can’t.
When she smiles at me, the goose bumps grow sharper, and a chill races up my spine.
“Stopped by to give you this,” she says, and hands me a box with a pie in it.
I turn away and she leans over, places it next to me on the steps. She smells strange. Cold. I didn’t know cold had a smell but it does, a bitter chill that makes my insides sting.
“You look tired,” she says. “Has anything . . . stressful happened to you today?” There is a note of something in her voice, under the sugar-sweet softness of her tone.
She sounds . . . worried.
I look at her now, watching her face. “Like remembering who I am?”
“Well, that’s a given. You’re supposed to do that, right?” Clementine says with a smile that pulls at something inside of me. That reminds me of something. Someone—
I don’t know.
I can’t remember, and my head is starting to ache again.
“Why are you making my head hurt?”
Clementine blinks at me, looking surprised, but then says, “Headaches are normal for people who’ve—”
“It only happens when I think about certain things. People.”
“That shouldn’t be happening,” she mutters, but before I can ask her what she means, Jane says, “Clementine?” coming to the door. “I thought I heard a car. What are you doing here?”
“I just stopped by to see how Ava is,” Clementine says, picking up the pie and giving it to Jane.
“You shouldn’t have done this,” Jane says, and she sounds very nice. Very polite.
She also sounds like she means what she said, that she doesn’t want Clementine to have come here.
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