Chapter 25
For someone who’s supposed to be taking it easy, I’ve got a lot of activity swirling around me right now. My grandparents just showed up after going to the salvage yard out on Highway 20 to clean out what’s left of the Camaro, and as they’re coming into my room to deliver my purse back to me, Mom’s phone blares. “Hello?” she huffs, immediately rolling her eyes to the ceiling once she hears who’s on the other line. “Mitch…seriously…we’ve been over this. You don’t need to drive all the way down here...Yes, she’s still coming to stay with you, and she’ll be good as new by then…”
That would be my dad, calling Mom for what’s bordering on the millionth time since last night. She’s so preoccupied with trying to keep him calm, she ignores the buzzing of our doorbell. “I’ll get it,” Gram volunteers, as Gramps sits down on the edge of my bed, where I’m lying propped up against both my pillows. “How’s my Zipperino?” he asks.
“Sore. Wishing Mom and Dad would chill out already.”
Mom’s pacing in front of my bedroom window, and on hearing me, she says, “Mitch, give me a minute, okay?” She covers the phone with her hand and walks out of the room, and I hear her say to someone in the hall “Ten minutes. Got it? She needs to rest.”
“Sure thing,” Kieran says to her over his shoulder as he comes in. Gramps stands up and shakes Kieran’s hand. “Hey there, Kieran.”
“Hi, Mr. Shipman. Hope you don’t mind if I spend a few minutes with Zip?”
Gramps pats Kieran on the back. “Of course not. I’ll give you two some privacy.”
He leaves and closes the door behind him, which tells me that when Mom told my grandparents about the accident, she must’ve left out the reason—or what she thinks is the reason—Kieran and I ended up at the river last night. Otherwise, Gramps probably wouldn’t be so eager to shut the bedroom door and leave us alone.
“So people in this town don’t bring flowers when they visit the sick?” I ask as he sits down on the bed, hoping he remembers the day we met. Apparently he does, because he starts laughing. “I ordered some online this morning,” he says. “The florist isn’t open on Sundays, but they should be here tomorrow, if you can wait.”
“I think I’ll manage. I’m not going anywhere for a while, obviously, so now I have something to look forward to. And you didn’t have to do that, by the way.”
“Yes, I did,” he insists. “It’s all part of this spoiling-you thing I started last night. Plus, you’re my superhero, remember? Buying you flowers is probably the least I can do after you rescued me.”
“Some superhero,” I grumble. “I don’t think superheroes wreck their mothers’ cars and end up in the hospital after thwarting the bad guy.”
“Minor details,” Kieran says, shrugging. He leans in to kiss me, but he pulls back when the doorknob clicks. My mom, still yakking away on the phone, pushes the door open and cocks an eyebrow at me that I meet with a heavy sigh as she pads back down the hall.
“Who’s your mom talking to?” Kieran asks, keeping his voice down. “She sounds pretty worked up.”
“My dad. Those two are in rare fighting form right now. She’s trying to talk him out of coming down here to check up on me, and he’s being all guilty and upset and insistent. Like, what would he do if he were here? Sit and stare at me all day? In two weeks I’ll be at his house for a month, anyway, so…”
“Well, if he does end up coming, I’d like to meet him.”
I give him a wry smile. “No, you wouldn’t. Thanks to my mom, he thinks you’re the guy who was planning to take his daughter’s virginity at the river before she ruined everything by smashing up the car. I’m guessing you’re not high on Dad’s list of favorite people right now.”
Kieran frowns, obviously disappointed. “Well, speaking of what we weren’t doing at the river, all I told our parents was that we went to the boat launch to be alone. The rest…well, they kind of went there on their own. I hope you know I’d never disrespect you like that, especially to our parents. Like I’d ever talk about that with them anyway…”
I thank him by raising his hand to my lips. “Awesome of our parents to assume the worst about their own kids,” I say, after dropping kisses along his knuckles. “I guess two teenagers going to the river to talk on Prom night is just too unbelievable for them.”
“Yeah.” Kieran grins. “Gutter minds. They should be ashamed of themselves.”
“Although if Frank hadn’t shown up at the farm, who knows what could have happened…” I match his grin with flirty one of my own, and Kieran swallows up my wondering with a kiss that leaves my head swimming even more than it already is thanks to my concussion. After he pulls away, he reaches his hand up to my forehead to graze the skin near my bump. “How are you doing?”
“Better, after that kiss. Seriously, though, I’ve got a little headache and I’m sore everywhere. I probably won’t be at school for a few days.” I think I remember Mom saying something about my being checked for internal injuries from the seat belt, which brings up the memory of the beeping heart monitor I was hooked to last night. “Are you okay?” I ask, reaching out to touch his chest. He doesn’t wince, but instead covers his hand with mine, his heart pounding against my palm.
“A little bruised up, but I’m fine,” he says, shifting his eyes away from mine to the floor. “But, there’s still some stuff about what happened last night I need to tell you, if you’re up to it.”
He’s given me this opening, and I decide now’s as good a time as any to reveal the dreams I don’t think are coincidence anymore, especially after last night. “I have something to tell you, too,” I whisper.
“Ladies first.”
Breathing in, I start with “Okay. Um…I’m not even sure how to explain this, but I’m pretty sure I knew something bad was going to happen last night.”
“What do you mean, you knew?”
“I…I dreamed all of it.” Kieran stares at me and doesn’t say anything, so I continue. “Right around our birthday, I started having these dreams about the two of us dancing at Prom and then all the lights went out. I mean, what I was seeing happened at school and not the Stanley Farm, but…and I kept having these dreams with sunbursts—”
“You know, I draw sunbursts a lot,” he points out, apparently subscribing to Kayla’s “coincidence” theory, which I quickly shoot down: “But when I dream them, they’re in color, just like Frank’s tattoo.”
Kieran squeezes his eyelids shut. “I dream them like that, too—in color.” He opens his eyes and leans in to cradle my face in his hands, confusion in his eyes. “This doesn’t make any sense, though. How…” he begins, before he’s struck with the answer. “Oh, God. Frank? You think…but how did he…?”
“Remind me to stop drinking so much diet soda. Apparently, it’s not good for me.”
Pressing his lips to my forehead, a safe distance from the bump, he whispers against my skin, “I can’t believe…oh, God…I’m so, so sorry. If I’d had any idea hanging out with me would put you in danger of ending up…like me…I mean, Kayla has all these bat crap crazy theories about stuff, but I never …”
“She told me—the poisoning and cults and stuff. So I brought up what I thought might be happening with me, but by the end of the conversation, she had me convinced I was just overreacting. Now, I’m not so sure.”
Kieran lets out a ragged breath, and I take his hands in mine as best I can with a giant bandage around the fingers of my right hand. “Kieran, I’m fine,” I say impulsively, more concerned with making him feel better than with whether what I’m saying is true or not.
“Have you noticed anything else? Sleeping or anything?” he asks, voice low so as not to tip off my mom or grandparents to our conversation.
“No. Just the dreams. I’ve written down everything I can remember.” I nod toward my desk. “Grab my laptop.”
Kieran crosses the room and brings the laptop back with him to the edge of the bed. With the index finger of my good hand,
I log in and pull up the file containing my dream descriptions. “Here,” I tell him, the two of us in a more technologically advanced version of the day in his room with the boxes full of notebooks. “Read.”
He takes a few minutes to scroll through the entries, and I watch his face change—his brow furrowing and relaxing, his lips tightening before spreading into a smile—depending on what he’s reading at the time. “I like the one about me outside with the trees,” he says after he’s finished. “It seems…peaceful or something.” He squeezes my hand and reviews the description I’ve written of him staring at the mountains one more time. “Does anything seem familiar to you?” I ask him.
“Could be North Carolina, I guess. Not enough details. And a lot of what you’ve written here could have been influenced by things I’ve told you or that you read in my notebooks.”
So he’s back to the Kayla Lanier Coincidence Theory. “Kieran…” I start to protest, but he cuts me off by scrolling through the file and turning the computer back to me so I can reread my second dream about Prom. “Zip, you’re clearly describing the gym here,” he says, pointing over the top of the screen at lines I’ve written depicting the scoreboard draped with white lights. “There’s another one after this where you’ve got us next to the bleachers. But the lights didn’t go out while we were in the gym.”
“So? They still went out.”
“But they went out at the farm. When I dream, I don’t mess up details like that.”
Strangely insulted, I twist my mouth into a frown. “Guess I’m just not as good at this yet as you are.”
“That’s because it’s not happening to you,” he insists, shutting my laptop as if doing so would put an end to the conversation. “And it’s not like you get better or worse at dreaming details over time. Things get clearer, maybe, but I always see the same details…the right details.”
“Kieran…”
He moves my laptop next to us on the bed and gathers me to him. “Zip, listen—I’m not trying to talk to talk down to you, I swear. But you’ve read my notebooks. You’ve seen how this works. I dream these tiny scenes of things, these moments, but everything’s exactly how I saw it when the scene happens later in real life. And how do you think all of my dreams end?” I open my mouth to say…I don’t know what I’m going to say. But Kieran answers his question before I can babble out anything that may or may not make sense. “Everything just ends. It all fades to black, just like your dream about Prom, or I wake up the middle of something happening.”
I sit back, still in his arms but far enough away that I can study his face, his jaw set with determination, his eyes glowing with confidence. “So you don’t think Frank got to me?” I ask.
“I don’t think Frank got to you,” he confirms, before shifting his gaze to my laptop. “I refuse to believe Frank got to you.”
“Those are two very different things, you know,” I point out, putting a finger underneath his chin so I can ease his face back in my direction. “Refusing to believe something doesn’t automatically make it untrue. Trust me—I’ve been trying not to believe this for a few weeks now, but after last night, I just don’t know.”
“Well, maybe whether it’s true or not doesn’t matter.” Kieran slips from my grasp and stands up, fishing a folded slip of paper from his back jeans pocket. “What is this?” I ask as he hands the paper to me.
“Open it. This is what I didn’t get the chance to tell you about last night.”
I don’t hear my mom harping on my dad anymore, which means she could be coming to kick Kieran out any second now. So I unfold the crinkled paper and quickly scan its contents:
There are things you need to know. We should meet. Call as soon as you can. Morgan.
Morgan’s penciled a phone number below the angular handwriting that reminds me of Kieran’s. “I found this last night when we were still at the river,” Kieran explains. “I guess he slipped it into my tuxedo jacket while we were both out.”
“Have you called him yet?” I ask, anxious. “Are you going to?”
“I wanted to tell you first,” he says, sitting back down next to me, and since he seems to be looking for my opinion, I tell him what I think.
“Well, if he’d wanted to hurt you or kidnap you or whatever last night, he would have. He had every chance, and he called for help instead.”
“That’s what I was thinking.”
“I’m still a little scared for you, though,” I admit. “I mean, from everything your dad—Jim, I mean—told us, the guy’s totally shady. What if he’s trying to trick you or something?”
“I know,” Kieran agrees. “On the one hand, he’s my crazy, drug-cooking biological dad who didn’t give a crap about me when I was a baby. But on the other hand…”
“On the other hand, he really got us out of a bad situation last night,” I finish for him. “So which Morgan do you think we’re dealing with here—Convicted Felon Morgan or Reformed Criminal Morgan?”
“Well, he kept saying he wanted to make things right,” Kieran points out. “If he’s serious, maybe we can get him to give us the formula for this…stuff and we can figure out how to treat me…or, us, maybe, if it turns out that you…” Kieran moves his head back and forth as if he’s trying to shake the thought that I’m having dreams right out of his head.
I think back to the night of our birthday, right before our first kiss, when he said he would gladly dump his sleeping disorder but had mixed feelings about losing the dreams. “You’re sure you want it all to go away?” I ask. “The dreams, too? Because not too long ago, you weren’t so sure, remember?”
“I know,” he says, nodding. “But we were talking in hypotheticals then, for one thing. I’d still sell my soul to be able to go to sleep when I want to and wake up when I want to like a normal person.”
“And the dreams?”
He hitches his shoulders towards his ears. “All I need to know about the future is that you’re in it.”
His voice seems small and desperate somehow, so I pull him to me. “Of course, I’m in it,” I breathe against his skin, just below his ear. “I’m not going anywhere—I promise.”
“Except to your dad’s for a month,” he grumbles.
I lean back against my pillows. “Except for that. But what I meant was, in the grander scheme of things, I’m not going anywhere. I want to be a part of your future, Kieran.”
Kieran reaches out to trace the line of my jaw with his index finger. “That’s all I need to know. I can live without the dreams. The best one already came true anyway.”
He looks away and out my window, the slight blush in his cheeks telling me he’s a little embarrassed at what he’s just said, and I can’t help but pounce. “Awww,” I tease. “How is it you always know the right thing to say?”
“Because that’s just how I roll,” he says, looking at me again with narrowed eyes. “You know me—Mr. Suave.”
“Well, Mr. Suave, I think you should call Morgan,” I tell him, returning us to the more important topic at hand. “But I’m going with you, just in case something’s up.”
Kieran shakes his head so intensely pain shoots through my forehead. “Zip, come on—”
I jump in before he can say anything else. “I should be okay enough to go with you if he can wait a few days. We’ll take Kayla, too—safety in numbers.” His chest heaves in frustration, but I persist. “Look, I’m going whether you want me to or not. He took care of us last night, and I want to thank him in person. It’d be rude not to.” Even though I’m arguing with him, I’m smiling, and he joins me, leading me to think for a second that I’ve won him over.
“How about if I promise to send along your best regards? Bring him a thank-you card or something?” he says instead.
“Kieran,” I warn.
“Not talking you out of this, am I?”
I don’t get to tell him “no,” because my mom pokes her head into the room. “Sorry, Kieran—times up.”
He nods at her and le
ans in to whisper, “I’ll call you,” before giving me one last kiss on the forehead. He slips past my mom and out the bedroom door as she walks over to sit next to me on the bed.
“Did you get Dad calmed down?” I ask.
“I think I did this time,” she says, sighing. “He’s concerned, obviously, but there’s no sense in him taking off work and driving here when he can’t really do anything but sit around and be in the way. I reminded him he gets to worry about you all he wants in a few weeks, and I’ll be the one wondering if you’re okay.”
“Oh, please. Like you sit around all day while I’m at Dad’s and stress about me.”
Mom brushes my bangs off my face, careful not to graze my bump. “Well, sure, I go to work and live my life, but you’re always in the back of my mind. Even when you’re here, that’s true. You’ll get to experience this special brand of torture someday with your own kids—just wait. And don’t get me wrong, I totally trust your dad, but I always wonder if he’s letting you stay out too late or get into situations where you could wind up in trouble. It’s hard giving up control, I guess.”
All this talk of control and wondering about being okay, and I can’t help myself. “Do you ever wish sometimes you could see into the future and know what’s going to happen?” I ask.
Mom laughs a little and lightly strokes my hair at the crown. “What a weird question. You’re sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine. You were just saying stuff about wondering what happens to me when I’m not here…” I don’t finish my thought, and Mom gazes at the ceiling as if she’s giving my idea serious consideration.
“You know,” she starts, looking at me again, “if I could have seen into the future and stopped everything that happened last night, I would’ve in a heartbeat. But like I said, even though giving up control over your kid is hard, in some sense you never have control. I mean, I can’t be with you every minute of the day.”
“And thank God for that.” I smile, prompting another sigh.
“As far as seeing the future, there are things in my life that turned out badly enough that I probably would’ve liked to know they were coming,” Mom continues. “Then again, I would’ve missed out on so much if I could have changed things. If I’d known your dad and I were going to split up when we first started dating, maybe I would’ve saved myself some trouble and not gotten involved at all. But then we wouldn’t have had all the good times we had, and I wouldn’t have had you. So I don’t think I’d want to find out what’s going to happen in the future because having everything figured out kind of defeats the whole point of life. It’s all about taking the bad with the good and learning from what happens.”
I swallow hard and think about how if I’d given in to my fears of all the bad I’d seen coming last night, I would’ve stayed home and missed out on so much good—talking with my friends at dinner, laughing at Kayla and Brad trying to dance, swaying in Kieran’s arms in the gym and at the Stanley Farm, feeling him against me in the backseat of the Camaro before Frank came along. Not to mention finding out Morgan Levert may not be the Boogey Man we thought he was.
“Okay, now my head hurts after all that,” Mom says. “You should probably get some rest.”
Tired enough I can’t argue, I rearrange my pillows with Mom’s help and slide down until the covers meet my chin. “Sweet dreams, kiddo,” Mom whispers, kissing my forehead before she stands and walks out, closing the door behind her.
Sweet dreams. I hope so, Mom—I really do.