I blinked and it was night again. I wavered, disoriented.
Bryn grabbed my arm. “Okay?”
My heart was racing in my chest. “Does it always do that?”
“Sometimes.” She looked up. “2003. Tucson, Arizona. I was eleven.”
I followed her eyes and the sky was on fire, stars blinking in long trails leading into infinity. There were thousands of them winking in and out, swirling, falling.
“Is this real?”
She smiled, words caught in a sigh. “Does it matter?” She stared up at the sky. “I haven’t seen this one in a while.”
“Are they on a rotation or something?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes they seem random but other times they’re not.” She started walking towards the tree line, still looking up. “Sometimes I’ll see an old photo from a trip I took when I was a kid and then I’ll fall asleep and suddenly I’ll be back there.”
I was stiff, staring into the trees. I wasn’t sure if I was ready to go back in there.
But then Bryn looked back at me. “You coming?” She reached out a hand, her face soft. “It’s okay.”
And something in her smile made me think it was. I reached back.
A dull light radiated from the trunks of the trees. Little plastic stars were stuck to the bark, the kind people used to stick on their pop-corned ceiling.
“They were my cousin Dani’s,” Bryn said, peeling them free. The stars rested in her hand and as we walked she stuck them to the trees we passed. “To light our way back.”
The two of us dodged rocks and low hanging limbs before coming to a large hill. There was a small fire at the very top, flames cinched in by large stones. Ashes spit onto the grass, wood crackling. Bryn sat down at the edge of the fire, letting the shadows of the flames dance along her open palms. I sat down next to her, spotting a large tent, fishing poles stacked on sleeping bags.
“This wasn’t here earlier,” I said.
She gave me a sly smile.
“Right,” I said. “Nothing here makes sense.” Though I wished something did.
“It looks different,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know, brighter, if that’s possible.” She lay back, pointing. “That’s the milky way.”
I leaned back, my head resting on a few strands of her hair.
“Have you ever seen it before?” she asked.
I was quiet. I wasn’t sure.
“Sorry,” she said.
“It’s okay.”
I stared at the stars, low and pulsing as if they were strung along the tops of the trees. There were so many. I tried to remember if I’d ever seen them before or anything like them but every preconception I had felt duller; artificial like some movie still or a page out of a magazine.
I heard Bryn exhale. “Sometimes it’s better than the real thing.”
“What do you mean?”
“When I think about that camping trip, I don’t just think about the stars. I think about the heat and my uncle burning our dinner and he and my mom and I huddled in our tent eating beef jerky while some coyotes sniffed at our tent. I think about getting lost trying to find the place and someone running off with our travel chairs and lanterns while we were sleeping.”
“Sounds like a blast.”
“And I didn’t even mention my hair almost catching on fire,” she laughed. “But here it’s different. It’s filtered and perfect and no coyotes.”
“That you know of.”
She was quiet and I bristled.
“Don’t worry,” she finally said, her voice hesitant. “You’re safe here.” But the words felt forced this time, something strange in her eyes.
“But I’m still lost.”
I looked up when I heard the explosion. A long flame tore across the sky, climbing at an angle. A rocket. Bryn wrinkled her nose, watching as it shrunk to a small ball of light before blinking out completely, and I wondered what memory it had come from; if it was something she’d been thinking of.
My hand brushed hers in the dark.
Bryn rolled over, facing me. “I’m going to figure out who you are.”
“I hope so.”
“I will.”
But her voice was thin, unsure. What if she still didn’t believe in me? What if she still just thought I was some kind of dream?
“You think I’m…real don’t you?” I said. “I mean, you think I’m out there? Somewhere?”
Her chin slipped into her hand. She looked right at me, flames tangled in her green eyes. “I think you are very real.”
I tried to believe her but I was still afraid. Of being lost forever. Of Bryn finding a cure and leaving me here alone.
Her face grew dark. “You worry.”
“You don’t?” I asked.
“All the time.”
I tore at a tuft of grass, not sure if I should say what I was thinking or how. I inhaled, not looking at her. “What’s it like?”
I felt her almost flinch at the words. Shit. Why did I open my mouth? But then she sat up, her back to me.
“Being sick?” she asked.
“Yeah. I mean you don’t have—”
“It’s like drowning.” She hugged her knees. “This wave pulls me under, completely out of nowhere, and then I wash up somewhere else. I don’t remember how or when. Entire weeks get stripped from my memory and all I do when I’m awake is try and put the pieces back together.”
I felt that familiar ache in my throat because that’s exactly what I was doing. Flailing and trying to stay afloat. Trying not to get sucked into the fear that I might be lost for good. That I might never find a way out of this. That I was only temporary. That I was no one. I was still trying not to drown and Bryn had to do the same thing every time she woke up.
“But you go to school?” I asked.
“I try. Catching back up though, it’s hard. Right now I’m just trying to graduate.”
“What will you do after that?”
“I don’t know. I wanted to go to school out of state.” She let out a tight breathy laugh. “Ridiculous, right? I spend half my life as a vegetable and I think I can still pretend to be normal. That I could actually survive on my own. That’s the problem, the worst part of all of it.” I sat up and she looked at me. “If I don’t get better I’ll need…someone forever. Like a child,” she said, voice cracking. “I’ll never be able to get by on my own.” But then she was solid again. She cleared her throat. “But that’s life, I guess. Everyone’s a little fucked up right?”
“Right…yeah, I guess so.” I didn’t know what to say. “But I don’t think you’re fucked up.”
“You don’t?”
Her cheeks were flushed and I couldn’t tell if it was from the fire or something else.
“No.”
“Well, I do.” Her voice was hard. “Something’s…changed.”
“What do you mean?”
Her voice rattled as she tore at the grass. “Strange things have been happening.”
“You mean besides me?”
She nodded.
“Like what?”
She looked into my eyes. “Like I‘ve been seeing things. Out of order. Like I’m seeing them before they happen.” She shook her head. “I don’t know how to explain it.”
“Maybe it’s nothing,” I offered.
“Maybe,” she breathed.
I didn’t like that look on her face, shadows replacing her blushed cheeks and starlit eyes. My fingers crawled across the grass, curling around her thumb. But the second our skin touched, I flinched. Again. Fingers trembling. Not because it reminded me that I might not be real but because it made me feel, for certain, that I was.
Bryn stared too, at our hands, at the shadow of the flames dancing across them. But she wasn’t marveling at their closeness, she was marveling at my skin. At how it burned red, my veins ignited like the fire in front of us.
I pulled away, cradling my hand to my chest, t
he light climbing to my wrist, to my elbow. Bryn reached for me.
“I saw it before,” she said. “When you were sleeping.”
“What’s happening?”
“I don’t know.”
She maneuvered my wrist, spreading my fingers, my open palm pressed against hers. Whatever was inside me reached back, surging. There was a shock, Bryn parted her lips, feeling it too, and then she was gone.
I stared down at my hand as the light started to dull, the only heat now coming from the flames in front of me. I crept forward, kneeling over them, and as I led my hand into the fire I didn’t feel a thing.
Chapter 15
Bryn