Red is for Rememberance

  "Come this way or you will pay," she repeats.

  She has a child's voice, but I don't recognize it. "Who are you?" I demand, confident that it isn't Maura.

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  She appears before the light once more and I'm able to see her silhouette. She has long, flowing hair that blows back with the intensity of the glow. It appears as though she's draped in a gown of some sort, and she's carrying something--maybe a stick or a wand. It has long, star-like spikes that spout from the tip.

  "I'm not coming any farther unless you tell me who you are," I shout. She reaches for something in her pocket. I think it's a ball. She sets it on the ground and I hear it roll toward me--a low, pattering sound against the ground. As it gets closer, I notice that it's making a trail of liquid. I reach down to stop the ball from rolling, but just as I do, it sinks into the rising stream, as though it's sprung a leak.

  "Why the frown? Scared to drown?"

  "No!" I shriek from the mere toxicity of the word drown. I go to step out of the water, but it's all around me now, up to my ankles and getting deeper by the moment. I reach down into the water again, in search of the ball, hoping that if I pull it out, the water will stop. I think I feel it; there's a round, rubbery object by my left calf. I go to pull it upward, but something grabs my wrists. I hear myself scream out. Water flows in harder, up to my knees now. Using all the strength in my legs, I pull upward. There's a pair of the palest hands wrapped around my wrists. It's the girl. She's strong, almost stronger than me, and she wants to pull me under.

  "No!" I scream out. My breath quickens. My legs shake. I twist and turn my wrists, trying to pry her away. I kick

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  around under the water, but the weight of the rippling stream makes it difficult. Taking a giant breath, I anchor my weight into my feet and thrust my arms upward. The girl's grip on my wrists breaks and I see the water wave, a giant ripple that crashes against my thighs. There's a glow of light that swims its way up the stream, beneath the water, back toward the source of light at the end of the tunnel.

  "Who are you?" I shout out.

  It's silent for several seconds, but then I hear her breathe; it's all around me. "I may look like a little girl to you, but I'm really a mother of a girl so blue. She needs your help, that's no lie. And if you don't, that boy will die."

  "Die?" I ask. "Who?"

  "Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead," she sings.

  I wake up with a gasp. The phone is ringing. Amber is sitting beside me in bed. And I'm still breathing hard.

  "Stacey," Amber says, squeezing my hand. Are you okay?" I shake my head, trying to get a grip.

  "Don't freakin' tell me," Amber says. 'Another nightmare?" I nod.

  "Holy freaking funk." She pulls at her cherry-red pigtails in frustration. "Not again." The phone is still ringing. Amber grabs it. "Hello?" She looks at me and shakes her head.

  "She can't make it to the phone right now--she's got a raging hangover." Amber holds the phone away from her ear and gags a few times to make the excuse sound legit. "Not pretty," she explains to the caller. "Can I take a message? I'll 33

  have her call you when she's done dry-heaving." Amber winks at me, grabbing Janie's grocery-labeling marker from atop the fridge. She writes the message across her palm, grimacing the whole time.

  "I can't believe you just did that," I say, once she's hung up.

  "You have bigger flounder to fry, sweet pea."

  "Why? What's up?"

  "President's office, that's what."

  "Oh my god." I look at the clock--it's after four. "I missed the meeting."

  "What meeting?"

  "It doesn't even matter." I take a deep breath, noticing how my legs still feel like they're shaking.

  "What doesn't?" She plops back down beside me. "Stacey, what's going on?"

  "I don't know. All I know is that I'm having nightmares again."

  "Yeah, but no visible spew." Amber takes a moment to inspect me. "No blood, no urine, no bodily excrement to speak of. A good sign, no?"

  In the past several years, Amber's seen me have several bouts of nightmares--recurring dreams that turned out to be premonitions warning me that something horrible was going to happen. Each time my body would have a physical side effect--impromptu bedwetting one time; projectile vomiting the next; nosebleeds, nine months later. Years before I'd met her, when my nightmares first started, they were accompanied by horrible crippling headaches. Eventually I

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  realized that each reaction was my body's way of forcing me to deal with my premonitions and, at the same time, lead me to the answers--to what I needed to do to stop the impending danger.

  "Maybe it was just a random nightmare," I say. "Maybe it wasn't a premonition at all." But why am I still shaking? And why do I feel so cold?

  "Yeah. I mean, unless there's a present in your pants that you're not telling me about--" she slides a few inches away on the bed--"I wouldn't worry about it."

  "You're so gross."

  "Me? You're the one with the present."

  "There is no present," I snap, shifting a bit in my seat, just to be sure. "But I don't know. It felt like a premonition. It was like she wanted me to join her, to be with her."

  "Who?"

  I shake my head and swallow hard, pulling the bed covers around my shoulders to temper the chill. "She sounded young, like eight or nine, but then she said she was a mother of a girl so blue, a girl who needs help ... or else some boy will die."

  "Slow down," Amber says. "You dreamt about blue people'? Are you sure they weren't green and driving a flying saucer?"

  "Be serious," I say.

  "I'm trying."

  I sigh. "I know; it doesn't make sense and it certainly doesn't help that she was speaking in rhyme."

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  "Rhyme? Are you sure you didn't maybe just take some of Janie's funny dust before bed?"

  "You know me better than that," I say, thinking about my bottle of tranquilizers.

  "I'm kidding, of course," Amber says. "Did it sound at all like--"

  "Maura?" I ask.

  Amber nods.

  I shake my head and look away.

  Maura was the little girl I used to baby-sit five years ago. I ignored the premonitions I was having about her, telling myself that they were insignificant, that they were just a bad bout of dreams. The next thing I knew, Maura was missing; she'd been abducted, the victim of a pedophile. Shortly after, her body was found in an old, abandoned shed in the woods.

  Three years later, I was having nightmares about Drea. I dreamt that she was going to be killed by a mysterious stalker. In the end, I was able to save Drea, but I wasn't able to save Veronica Leeman, a classmate who got herself mixed up in the stalking. I found her body on the floor of our French classroom. She'd been hit over her head; there was a pool of blood surrounding her neck and shoulders. Sometimes when I close my eyes, I can still see her looking up at me, her piercing emerald-green eyes disappointed that I didn't get there in time.

  This past summer I lost Jacob, my one and only soul mate. I was so preoccupied trying to save Clara, a girl I'd just met, that I couldn't save him. Shortly after I arrived at the cottage on Cape Cod, I started having nightmares about

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  Clara--that she was going to drown, that her body would be washed up on the beach. I kept getting this tightness in my chest, nearly cutting off my breath. I chalked the feeling up to stress--to the pressure of trying to save Clara's life. But I knew there was something more. I just wasn't able to figure it out. I didn't spend enough time listening to my body and what it was trying to tell me.

  And now Jacob's gone.

  I close my eyes, remembering the stream of water running through my nightmare, wondering what it's supposed to symbolize. And then it hits me.

  "Stacey?" Amber asks. She rubs my back, the way Drea used to. 'Are you okay?" I nod and wipe at my eyes, my heart rapping hard inside my chest. "It's Jacob."

  "What's Jacob?"

&nb
sp; "My nightmares . . . the water . . ."

  "What water?"

  "There was water in my dream. Maybe it's supposed to represent the ocean. Maybe there's something Jacob wants me to know."

  "Stacey," Amber says, taking my hands. "Listen to yourself. I mean, I know you've been through a lot, but you're starting to sound like a loon."

  "You don't understand," I say, snatching my hands away. "I haven't dreamt in months."

  "And!"

  'And, now that I am, maybe I'll dream about Jacob."

  "I think you're overanalyzing this," Amber says. "You know as well as I do that not all dreams are premonitions. I

  37

  mean, I have nightmares all the time--about getting warts on my ass, about going to class dressed in my mother's granny-panties--but it's not like those things would ever happen."

  "I can't believe you're saying this--after everything I've been through. My dreams are real."

  "I didn't say they weren't."

  "Then what? If there's a chance that I can be with Jacob again--even in my dreams--I'll take it. Can't you understand that?"

  "Sure, but don't you think if this were truly about Jacob, the dreams would be all squishy and romantic? Not about some pale-ass death-girl who chants in twisted rhyme about some blue girl. I mean, I hate to sound like a mega-beeatch or anything, but just because you dream about water, it doesn't mean that you're dreaming about Jacob." I take a giant breath. "It's not just about the water," I say. "What about the boy?"

  "What boy?"

  "I told you." I sigh. "The boy who might die if I don't help the girl-so-blue. What if that boy is Jacob?"

  "Stacey, honey--Jacob's already dead. I know you don't want to hear that or deal with it or whatever, but he is."

  "Believe whatever you want," I snap, "but I think the mere fact that I'm dreaming again is a good thing . . a hopeful thing."

  "I guess," Amber says, propping herself up on her elbows, looking at me like I'm a giant puzzle.

  I reach into the fridge for something cold, wet, and fizzy, forgetting for a second that its contents are labeled and

  38

  spoken for. I slam the door shut and collapse back in bed, trying to put Amber's doubt out of my head, trying instead to trust my instincts.

  39

  Stacey

  Amber makes a deal with me: if I agree to go straighten things out with Mr. President, she'll agree to treat me to a chocodile sundae at Ice Cream Coma downtown--a fair deal, especially considering that the tuna sandwich Amber brought back for me from the cafeteria last night is now warm and fuzzy. Not to mention that I really would like to get all this president business straightened out. Suddenly the idea of going back home, having to face a much-disappointed

  40

  mother who never even had the opportunity to go to college, let alone to do so on a free ride, isn't so appealing.

  I phone the president's secretary back and she gets all snippy with me, telling me that Dr. Wallace waited over a half-hour for my arrival before heading off to a meeting, for which he ended up late--on my account, of course. I try to slip in an apology, but she's talking so fast, going through his jam-packed schedule, reiterating how busy Dr. Wallace is, how he doesn't have time to wait around and meet with tardy students. Finally she finds me another open slot, apparently squeezing me in before his meeting with the college provost.

  "Can you be here in an hour?" she asks.

  I grunt out an affirmative, hang up, and then dial in to get my phone messages. I have four of them--one from my mother, one from Drea, another from Chad, and one from the Student Activities Director, announcing the week's worth of on-campus festivities. I delete Mr. Student Activities' voice right away and focus on the others. Drea and I have been best friends since our freshman year of high school. She and Chad, her on-againnow-off-again boyfriend, my ex-boyfriend, went off to Payton College this past September, over four hundred miles away. They both want me to call them back, but it doesn't sound like it's anything big. Ever since Jacob's disappearance, they've made it a habit to call me every couple days to see how I'm doing--to be sure I'm still breathing, more likely. My mother wants me to call her back as well. Unfortunately, they'll all have to wait.

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  I head over to the main campus to search for his office. Standing in front of the student center, facing the tall iron clock, as Amber suggested, I take a deep breath and look down at my campus map. The place is absolutely huge, like Hillcrest Prep times twenty. There are buildings scattered all about--ivy-covered brick ones, a couple bulky glass ones, tall ones, short ones, and a bunch of cobblestone revivals in between. Amber's marked a giant red X over the quad area, and drawn a winding line that leads me to Ketcher Hall. It appears as though my most direct route involves walking up three brick pathways, crossing one duck pond, going across one footbridge, and cutting through two playing fields. I sigh at just the thought of it. If I start now, I should be able to get there in just under an hour and, hopefully, I won't turn into a Popsicle along the way--it's got to be at least ten below with the wind.

  "Are you lost?" I look up from the map. There's a guy standing there. He's dressed from hat to hiking boot in Gap-like attire--weathered baseball cap, artfully faded teal-blue sweatshirt under an equally faded charcoal pea coat, and khaki cargo pants.

  "What?" I ask, even though I clearly heard him.

  "You look a little lost. Are you a freshman?" He adjusts his cap, his short, gelled-up brown hair sticking out just a bit on the sides.

  "Is it that obvious?"

  He smiles, his muddy-brown eyes squinting ever so slightly. "Don't worry. It'll be our little secret."

  "Well, I hate secrets."

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  "Then I'll tell everyone I know." He turns, looking around until he spots someone familiar. "Hey, Nelson," he calls out. "I found myself a lost freshman."

  "That's nice," Nelson shouts back.

  "I should probably go," I say, suddenly feeling a bit awkward.

  "Wait," he says. "What are you looking for?"

  "Ketcher Hall."

  "Sure." He explains the route, using my map, adding only that I should watch my step while walking across the duck pond because the bridge is sometimes slippery with ice.

  "I'd take you over to Ketcher myself, but I'm already late for a meeting," he says.

  "I'll be fine. You've been a big help." I go to turn away, but he stops me with a touch to my forearm.

  "I don't even know your name," he says.

  I pull away, feeling even more uncomfortable. "Stacey."

  "Well, it's great to meet you, Stacey. I'm Tim." He extends his hand for a shake, a broad smile across his face. "Maybe I'll see you around some time." I fake a slight smile and turn on my heel, grateful to get away It's not that I think he had any weird motives; it's just ... I don't know. I don't want anyone to get the wrong idea about me. Not that he would. I mean, let's face it--I look like Morticia Addams without her makeup.

  After just twenty minutes or so of walking, I spot Ketcher Hall just up ahead. I eke the heavy wooden doors open and ascend a shiny mahogany staircase, the smell of old pine mixed in mahogany wood all around me. I arrive in a large,

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  open waiting area and Ms. McNeal, a stout, gray-haired woman wearing a tan corduroy dress, tells me to sit a moment while she checks to see if the president is ready to see me. The place is oppressively dark, lit only with soft yellow lamps. There's classical music playing in the background and thick, velvety curtains that line the windows and block out the light. I pick a spot on a shiny leather couch with tarnished-gold studded trim, noticing how the floor creaks beneath my step.

  There's another girl here as well, maybe fourteen or fifteen years old at most. She's dressed in dark layers--a mixture of smoky gray and navy blue. Her long blond hair hangs in her face, her eyes barely peeking out from the bangs. She's sitting on the floor in the corner of the room with books propped up all around her--to block what's she's doing maybe
. She catches me looking at her and narrows her eyes at me.

  "Stacey?" Ms. McNeal calls out from her desk. "Dr. Wallace will see you now." I feel my eyebrows furrow slightly. "She was here before me," I say, gesturing to the girl.

  "Don't worry about her," Ms. McNeal says. "She's fine." The girl gives me a dirty look. She drags her barricade of books inward, like this is grammar school and she's a seven-year-old. It almost tempts me to go over there and sneak a peek at what she's doing. Ms. McNeal opens Dr. Wallace's office door wide and clears her throat, perhaps trying to get me to hurry up.

  I move into his office and Ms. McNeal closes the door behind me, leaving Dr. Wallace and me alone. He looks much

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  different than I imagined, not the white-haired, wool-suited, bifocal-wearing college president that I was expecting. Except for the giant giraffe tie he's sporting, he looks almost normal--medium height, salt-and-peppery dark hair, and black wire-rimmed glasses.

  "Stacey," he says, standing up from his desk. He drops the Magic 8 Ball he's holding and extends his hand for a shake. "I'm Dr. Wallace. It's nice to finally meet you."

  "Sorry about earlier," I say, noticing how big his office is.

  "Not to worry," he says, still shaking my hand. "You're here now; that's what's important."

  I nod, trying my best to smile.

  "I've heard a lot about you, Stacey Brown."

  "You have?"

  "Please, sit down," he says, ignoring the question. He finally pulls his hand away and gestures to the buttery leather chairs in front of his desk. *

  "So," I whisper, practically scrunching down in the seat. The man is openly staring at me-almost as if he's trying to size me up, not in a skeevy way but in a "I want to know what she's about" kind of way.

  "Yes," he says, snapping to attention. He leans forward in his chair. "How are you enjoying the campus? Did you get all the classes you wanted?" I nod, wondering what I'm doing here, why he cares about my schedule. "Do you meet with all the scholarship students?"

  Instead of responding, he continues to stare at me, turning my insides to nervous mush. 45

  "I won't miss any more classes," I say, out of nervousness. "My mother really wants me to do this--to be here, I mean."