I twisted—there were no monsters, just Cameron’s panicked gaze. “Emmy … Jesus! You
were screaming.”
Apparently the person screaming behind me in my dream had been me. I looked at Cameron, and,
while the daze of my nightmare wore off, I could feel the flow of tears involuntarily
increasing. Cameron clasped his arms around me and held me while I buried my head.
“It was just a dream,” he shushed, almost abrasively.
I recovered slowly and lifted my head. Embarrassment colored my cheeks, and Cameron looked ill.
“Sorry,” I sniffled. “I didn’t mean to scare you like that.”
Cameron’s lips were pressed together in an unconvincing smile. “Well, looks like we’re good
at scaring each other.” There was no humor in his voice. “No more talking about what I do,
otherwise you’ll never sleep again, and you’ll give Meatball a heart attack.”
Meatball was stationed by the coffee table with his ears flat to his head. I called him,
drumming my knee, and he pattered over. I reassured him with a rub of the ears.
“Cameron, this had nothing to do with you … I dreamt that I was falling out of an airplane,”
I lied in vain.
“Don’t worry about it,” he reassured while the dark veil was expanding over his face.
He fingered his watch but didn’t look at it. “It’s getting late.”
He got up, hesitated, and listlessly grazed my shoulder. “Get some sleep,” he ordered.
Without saying good night, he left the room. I heard the door gently click behind him.
I rubbed Meatball’s ears until he was well recovered and sat in the darkness of Cameron’s
room.
Chapter Thirteen:
Therapy
I saw a plane today. I happened to walk to the window and looked up, and there it was—a little
white dot spearing through the clouds. It triggered something that had been buried deep inside
me: a fading memory of that other world, the one that must still have existed beyond the
sweeping forest, beyond the hidden farm, beyond Cameron. The house in the slums of Callister,
the closet-sized bedroom, the cycles of school and work and surviving … I wondered at which
point that life had started to feel like someone else’s. I wondered how long it had been since
I had left that other person’s life—the days, the weeks were becoming blurry to me. I wondered
if anyone from the outside even noticed that I was gone.
I slowly—very slowly—climbed down the stairs, attempting to drag out the inevitable. I was
still horribly, utterly mortified by my banshee screaming episode of the previous night.
Foregoing sleep, I had spent a good chunk of the dark hours concocting stories that would better
explain my wimpy reaction to Cameron’s confessions. The rest of the night was burned up
searching for ways to make myself look and sound convincing when I would have to lie to Cameron
’s face. All I could hope for was that Cameron had forgotten; but from the wounded expression
on his face before he ran out on me—a picture that was now cruelly engrained in my brain—hope
was fruitless.
I let Meatball out of the house. He raced full speed away from my misery while music pulsated in
the distance. Griff, who was standing guard at his usual spot on the property, looked as
miserable as I did. I considered further delaying the inevitable, going out there and merging
our gloom. But I didn’t. It was too hot outside, I was entangled in enough turmoil, and Griff
had glowered even more the second he had noticed me standing in the doorway.
The drama boiling in the kitchen only firmed up my decision to not deal with Griff, postponing
another unavoidable. I closed the door and followed Rocco’s loud and agitated voice into the
kitchen.
“This is stupid. I’m not doing it!” I heard Rocco yell.
“As long as you stay here, you will do what you’re told.” It had sounded like Cameron, except
that the tone was unforgiving.
I shivered and stepped through the threshold just as Rocco was whizzing by, almost crashing into
me.
He halted in front of me, his eyes slit.
“You put him up to this,” he accused me.
While the list of things that I could have done to wrong Rocco ran through my head, my eyes
sought silent assistance from Cameron, who was sitting at the large table, absorbed in the
paperwork in front of him.
He glanced up, barely looking in my direction, and went back to his papers. “Emily had nothing
to do with this, Rocco. You will do this. End of discussion.”
Rocco stood affronted and huffed. I stood recovering from Cameron’s use of Emily versus Emmy.
Rocco stomped down the hall, slamming his bedroom door.
I gathered the papers strewn by Rocco’s recently vacated seat—forms of some sort.
“Did I miss something?” I was surprised by how quiet my voice sounded—like my vocal cords
were walking on eggshells.