The Fray Theory: Resonance (10 page)

Neve
can’t seem to take her eyes off of Elliot’s grave.
All she can think of is how the mound will eventually weigh down on itself,
becoming level with the field.
Flat.
Like the flat-line on a hospital monitor.

How did this happen..? He wasn’t
that
depressed, was he? Why didn’t he leave a note?
He
of all
people would’ve had
something
to say.

Neve’s bones feel too weak
to support her weight, so she sinks onto her folded legs with her eyes glued to
Elliot’s final resting place.

It’s not real yet. Despite
the pain ripping her from within, none of it feels real yet.

Neve glances over her
shoulder, half-expecting to catch Elliot sneaking up on her as if this has all
been a stupid prank. And she can’t help feeling cheated when the universe refuses
to play along.

She looks back at Elli’s
grave and suddenly finds herself mid-conversation with him—as if he’s sitting
right there in front of her.
“You just
wouldn’t shut up about your dad’s receding hairline,” she chuckles. “I kept
telling you it skips a generation, but
nooo
, we just had to take
pictures so that you could prove me wrong in ten years.”

And now you can’t
.

Neve’s
sorrow wells up inside, filling every cavity with
excruciating pain. So she presses the palms of her hands onto her lids before her
disobedient tears can spill over.

It won’t be easy
.
No one said it would be easy
.

She reopens her eyes to a
hazy world, and when she looks down, her focus closes in on a dandelion growing
out of the mound.

Her brows furrow when she
realizes the flower is sprouting from where Elliot’s heart would be. And it
wasn’t there a second ago. It couldn’t have been, or she would have seen it.

Neve scans the vicinity
for other dandelions, but there isn’t a single one. Except for long, untrimmed
blades sprouting from the base of headstones, there is nothing but obsessively
uniform grass.

When she returns her
attention to the flower, her eyes widen in disbelief.

The marigold petals are
now, mere seconds later, replaced with white, fluffy seed-heads. The kind you
blow into the wind. The kind you make wishes upon.

It doesn’t make any sense.
As far as she knows, it takes weeks for a yellow dandelion to transform into a
white globe.

Neve leans forward onto
all fours and crawls up to the lonesome flower for a closer look. It’s hard to
put into words, but there is a quality to it that makes it seem…
unreal
?
It almost looks like it’s glowing, but maybe the sunlight is illuminating it
from behind.

Like a naïve child who
still believes in magic, she closes her eyes and bargains with the universe to
wake her up from this nightmare. She then puckers her lips and blows softly against
the delicate orb.

If only it were that easy.

She opens her eyes to
watch the white umbrellas unfasten from the bulb. To watch the tiny specks fill
the air like an explosion of daylight stars.

Instead, her gaze crawls
up a pair of black, slim-fitting jeans and a gray sweater, and meets the wild
eyes of a young man with dark, shoulder-length hair.

Neve stares, stunned by
his sudden presence.

And she finds herself
tilting her head back as the young man ascends.

What
..? The numbing chill in her hands and knees is
creeping up her thighs and forearms. And when she looks down, she realizes it
is
she
who is sinking into the ground.

“Help!” she looks up just
as the young stranger vanishes into thin air. And her deafening scream rips
through the cemetery as her lungs squeeze out her fear. “No no, help—HELP!” she
rakes the soil, but the earth is swallowing her up. She’s sinking faster than a
boulder swallowed by quicksand.

“HEEELP!”

And then her thoughts are
even louder than her cries.
I’m not tall enough
!
I’m not tall enough
!
She starts to tremble, realizing she won’t be able to find footing on top of
Elliot’s coffin. If she keeps sinking like this, she will certainly suffocate
to death.

‘HELP ME!’ she screams as
her face becomes flush with the ground, but a strangled wheeze is all that squeezes
past her throat.
This can’t be it
, she weeps, bleeding hope and heat.
This can’t be how I die
.

The soil at the rim of the
cavity avalanches onto her face, taking all light with it. With her eyes firmly
shut, she gasps for air as the burrow closes in on her. She reaches up to the
sky like a dying tree desperate for rain, wondering if they’ll ever find her
body.

And suddenly, the grating
against her skin ceases.

Is it over? Did animal
terror numb her pain as she passed onto the next realm?

“NEVE!” a man’s voice
calls out to her from above, and she feels a tightness around her wrist.

A twinge of desperation
burns through her chest.

She extends her neck as
high as she can and flings her compromised vision onto the silhouette of her
savior.

“ROMER!?”

“HANG ON!”

Romer tightens his grip
and pulls with all he’s got, but all he manages is to keep Neve from sinking
any further. His knees have locked, his flexed arms are atremble, and his face
is flushed beneath a sheen of sweat.

And she is not even budging.

Neve’s heart is drumming
in her ears. What if he can’t pull her out? What if he isn’t strong enough?

Her emotions flare once
again, racking her body with sobs. “Pull me out, please,” she begs, her flesh dense
and prickling.

Romer strives for a better
grip, but Neve’s wrist slides out of his grasp. Screaming, she sinks into the
mound another few inches, the soil’s texture grating against her skin.

“NO!”

Romer grips Neve’s wrist, her
face now nearly a foot below grade. And this time when he pulls, an icy glow
emits from his eyes.

The soil starts to grate
downward on Neve’s skin, the friction breathing warmth into her. And darkness
wanes as she inches closer and closer to the surface.

As Neve’s line of sight rises
above the ground, she catches a glimpse of a tombstone further ahead.

There is a brownish stripe
at the base of it that’s becoming thicker and thicker. And Neve suddenly realizes
what she’s looking at is the buried section of the tombstone, rising above
grade.

Every time Romer pulls,
the stone block rises by a few inches, and once uprooted, it topples over with
a quaking thump.

And it’s not the only one.

Neve’s terrified gaze leaps
from one tombstone to another as one by one they collapse around her. It’s like
Romer’s attempts at uprooting her have spread to his surroundings like cancer.

“I think you’re stuck,” he
grunts.

She hears him, but she can’t
rip her gaze from the tombstones.

“Neve—” he strains,
“listen to me—just relax!”

“I
can’t
!”

“Yes, you can! If you just
relax, I can pull you out. Just try it!” He steadies himself, his chest rising
and falling, and then pulls with everything he’s got.

But Neve’s glimmer of hope
is extinguished at the sight of the toppled tombstones slithering towards them.
Every time Romer pulls, they creep closer and closer, converging like a pack of
ravenous wolves.

“NEVE! FUCKING DO IT!”

And like a bolt of
lightning ripping the sky in half, Romer’s eruption slices through Neve’s
focus.

Before the paralyzing
terror of her circumstances sinks back in, she finds the soil grating down on
her once again.

He’s doing it
!

She unclenches at the
thought, and with one final pull, Romer plucks her from certain death.

He grips the small of her
back and secures her against his frame.
And
Neve wraps her arms around his waist, staring at countless tombstones bowing to
them in concentric circles.

She’s never seen anything
so terrifying.

“Romer—” she tightens her
grip as the drumming of Romer’s powerful heart fills her ear.

When Romer doesn’t
acknowledge her, she looks up to find his focus outside of them. But it isn’t
on the fallen tombstones. His gaze is stern and distant,
darting about the cemetery at large.

“Romer?”

“It’s okay,” he mutters absentmindedly
and starts to rub her back. “You’re okay.”

Neve’s brows knit. “What’s
wrong?”

He looks over his
shoulder.

“We’re being watched.”

Like
streaks of charcoal dragged across a canvas, tattered
clouds stripe the ashen sky. The soft breeze is spreading the gloom of the late
afternoon, and urbanity is slowly dragging its feet home.

With Neve clasped onto his
back, Romer pulls up to her building on his custom Harley.

Neve glances up at her
apartment unit, dreading being by herself. Would it be wrong to ask Romer to come
up? To keep her company until it doesn’t feel like the world is going to crumble
all around her?

Romer’s metal insect
growls, rattling under them.

“See? Told’ja,” he grounds
his feet. “You wouldn’t be able to tip this thing over, even if you tried.”

With her cheek resting on his
upper back, “you don’t know me,” she says softly. “I break things.”

Romer turns off his engine
and leans his bike onto its kickstand. As it tilts over, Neve tightens her grip
around his waist.

“Sss—” he winces. “I think
you’ve crushed enough bones for today,” he chuckles and then peeks at Neve over
his shoulder.

Neve can tell he’s trying
to lighten the mood, but she just can’t bring herself to join in.

“We’ll figure it all out,
okay?” Romer says through his jacket’s collar and rests his hand onto Neve’s.

His skin is soft, and
surprisingly smooth. Not at all what Neve would expect from a carpenter.

“Want me to help you
down?” he asks.

Neve exhales a somber sigh,
and then unwillingly pries herself off of him.

Romer tightens his grip of
her hand and steadies her as she steps off the bike. “Just swing your leg over
and—there you go.”

Even once grounded, Neve
can’t seem to gather herself. After the ordeal she’s just endured, keeping her
emotions at bay is just about all she has energy for. So she just stares
through him, feeling broken.

“You okay?” he asks. “Need
a front-hug?”

“I—” Neve gently lets go
of his hand, desperately hoping what’s brewing inside isn’t registering on her
face. But what started as a trickle of emotion is fast becoming a roaring
flood. “I mean—you saved my life,” she wells up in spite of her best efforts. “It
kind of doesn’t get any bigger than that.”

With her remark, Romer
begins to rub his wrists.

“Are you hurt?” she looks
up just as his pupils constrict, his gaze fixed onto something behind her.

Neve turns around to find Dylan
standing in the doorframe of her building’s lobby, staring. And at the sight of
him, she remembers her promise to call him after her therapy session with
Galen.

How worried must he have
been to come over to her place? How many missed calls—

The ferocious growl of Romer’s
bike startles her, and she leaps back as he rides off, the stench of his bike’s
exhaust lingering behind.

σ

Neve stares
vacantly at the shower tiles. At the thin layer of condensation, and the veiny
paths droplets of water carve on their way down.

She closes her eyes and leans
forward.

Warm water seeps into her hair, combing
the earth from her tangled tresses. She tilts her head back and welcomes the drumming
of liquid bristles onto her face, desperate to erase the sense memory of being buried
alive.

She steps back from the showerhead,
wipes the heavy film of water from her face, and looks down.

The murkiness pooled around her
feet is slowly vanishing into the drain. Out of sight, but not out of mind.

She sinks into deep thought.

It’s always the same whenever it
happens. Her body starts to feel tight and prickly, just like when her leg
falls asleep. Any kind of movement becomes painful, and for as long as it lasts,
she’s incapable of forming a coherent thought.

It is always a limbo of intense,
painful stimulation she can’t seem to control. And now, coupled with her
foreboding nightmares, she is beginning to wonder if something is terribly
wrong with her.

σ

Neve
leaves the bathroom in a cream, lacy tank-top and black pajama shorts.

Dylan looks her way, then
puts Neve’s sketchbook down and rises from the couch.

Looking at his
soot-covered shirt,
she remembers how
he pulled her into a deep embrace when she told him about Elliot’s grave. It
was the longest he had ever held her, or so it seemed. It was as if the ground
could swallow her up at any moment.

She hangs her towel on the
door handle.

“What am I going to do?” she
mumbles, then looks at Dylan. “How the hell am I supposed to explain all of
this?”

Dylan puts his hands in
his pockets, squaring his shoulders. “I honestly don’t know.”

Neve looks into her modest
bathroom, at the pile of her soot-covered clothes on the floor, wondering if she’ll
ever be the same again—if she’ll ever able to banish the image of those prowling
headstones.

“Back at the cemetery—” Dylan
draws her focus, “you said Romer thought you were being watched?”

Neve pulls her damp hair
behind her ears. “Yeah. He was pretty convinced.”

“Did he say what the guy
looked like?”

“I don’t think he actually
saw anyone.”

Dylan squints. “So it was…
what? Just a feeling?”

“I don’t know,” Neve glides
her fingertips under her eyes as though wiping away invisible tears, and nestles
her rosy cheeks into the palms of her hands. She stares into space, thinking of
the stranger who spawned and vanished right before her eyes.

“Talk to me,” Dylan starts
to approach.

“I think there’s something
really wrong with me,” she mumbles, eyes unblinking.

“Look—what you’re going
through isn’t easy.”

“I don’t expect you to
believe me,” Neve’s hands slide down her face, arms dangling at her sides. She walks
past Dylan and plops down onto her bed. “It’s fine. I don’t blame you.”

Dylan remains silent for a
moment.

“I don’t know if there’s
anything I can say to make things better,” he walks over and sits down next to
her. “But for what it’s worth… I do believe you.”

With her gaze glued to the
hardwood floor, Neve shakes her head at what she’s about to say. “I sank into
my best friend’s grave, Dylan. I dreamed about his suicide.”

Dylan opens his mouth to speak,
but holds back.

Neve huffs. “I don’t think
I can ever sleep again. I mean—how can I?” she pulls her hair back. “Maybe I really
do belong in a psych ward.”

“Don’t say that,” he
pleads softly.

“I’m not kidding, Dylan.
I’m terrified of going to sleep. I mean—people are at their most vulnerable
when they’re sleeping. It’s when they’re supposed to feel their safest. Put the
day’s stresses—”

“There’s something I need
to tell you,” Dylan cuts her off. “Something I’ve never—something less than a
handful of people know about me.” He licks his lips and looks down.

A swarm of possibilities inundates
Neve’s mind, each more disturbing than the last.
Is he sick
?
Is it cancer
?
Is that why he suddenly moved away
?
To get treatment
?

“Okay?” she pulls her legs
onto the bed and wraps her arms around them. And she waits, shielded and prepared
for the blow, but Dylan keeps staring at his wrist—at the veins bridging his palm
and forearm
.

What are you thinking
?
What are you going to say
? “Talk to me,” Neve
whispers.

Dylan opens his mouth, but
doesn’t look up. “Ever since I was just a kid, I’ve had these—” he swallows, “dreams…
where it’s impossible to tell the difference between what’s real and what’s not.”

Dreams
. Neve’s eyes narrow. “How do you mean?”

Dylan exhales a shaky
breath. “When I wake up, it’s not like waking up at all. Everything I was
feeling in the dream stays with me. And it feels…
real
.”

“Dreams usually do.”

“Yeah, while you’re still
dreaming,” he looks up, “but what about when you wake up?”

“What about it?”

“When you open your eyes
you’re supposed to have this moment where you realize it was all just a dream.
It’s supposed to be a relief, knowing none of it was real.”

“Right…” Neve says as a
sense of unease washes over her.

“Well, what if that wasn’t
the case? What if your nightmare followed you back to reality?”

Neve stares, unable to
breathe. The sharp stench of chlorine is suddenly flooding her senses. What on
earth does Dylan mean by that?

Calm down
.
This has nothing to do with Elli
.

“That’s what it’s like for
me,” he says. “What it’s been like for as far back as I can remember.”

“Hold on,” Neve rests her
hand on his lap, “what are you saying? That your dreams come true?”

Dylan nods, his lips
pressed together. “Sometimes right away, and sometimes it can take months. Even
years.”

Neve’s face darkens. “Like
me,” she says, her voice completely devoid of emotion.

Dylan drops his head, his face
a portrait of guilt.

A murky feeling is pooling
in the pit of Neve’s stomach. If there’s any truth to what Dylan is saying, then
her premonition about Elliot’s death was not a coincidence.

And if she’d known it to
be possible, she would’ve never been so quick to dismiss her nightmare. She
could’ve intervened. She could’ve topped Elliot from downing that bottle of pills.
Everything,
everything
would be different!

“Why are you telling me
this now? Why not when I told you about the red river dream? Or three years ago
when we spent—oh I don’t know—
every waking moment
together?”

“I didn’t want you to know,”
he admits. “I didn’t want to give you a reason to leave.”

“So
you
left
instead?” her voice breaks. “You did to me, what you were so afraid I would do
to
you
?”

“That’s not what happened,”
he shakes his head.

“Then what? What, Dylan?
Do I actually
need
to beat it out of you!?”

“Look, it’s—” He starts to
rub his face. “You were better off without me, anyway.”

Neve cranes her neck back.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Doesn’t matter. Forget it.”

He
grabs his jacket and rises from the bed.

“Dylan.”

“Don’t worry about it.” He
makes his way towards the front door.

“Dylan, what did you mean
by that?”

“That I don’t dream about
rainbows and puppies, Neve!” he snaps in a way he’s never done before.

And for a moment, Neve
feels like she’s looking at a total stranger. “Then what
do
you dream
about?” she asks and watches Dylan’s eyes fill with terror.

With chaos.

His lips are pressed
together, damming the words he dares not utter. But then, like a crack in the
dam’s foundation, the truth spills from his lips. “Have you ever wondered what
it’s like to be choked to death? Doused in gasoline and set on fire? What it’s
like to try and breathe with blood jetting out from a slit in your throat—”

“Jesus, Dylan—”

“
I
don’t have to,”
his index finger jackhammers his chest. “I know
exactly
what it’s like.”

“But—you said your dreams
come true…”

Dylan’s stiff posture
slackens. “It’s just a matter of time.” He starts to put on his jacket.

Neve’s heart sinks as she
imagines
herself across Dylan’s
tombstone, sobbing with no end in sight.

“Is that why you
left? Were you in danger here?”

“I never meant to
leave,” he says dispassionately, like someone who’s already given up on
defending himself. “It’s just how things played out.”

He reaches for
the knob and opens the door, but it slams shut under Neve’s hand.

The world stops
spinning with their eyes locked, Neve’s heart pounding so hard it’s making her
entire body tremble.

And suddenly she
is pinned back against the wall with her wrists at the mercy of Dylan’s firm grasp.

Her lips clasp
onto his like a magnet, and he leans in and kisses her so hungrily, she can’t
feel anything else but him.

His soft, hot lips devour
hers, the sensation equal parts pain and pleasure.

She needs her hands
free. She wants to touch him all over, but he pulls her arms up and crosses her
wrists. He grips both of them with one hand as his other roams all over the
contours of Neve’s body.

The pleasure of
his touch is over-whelming. She missed him so much. His voice. His smell.