I joined her.
I came back into the present with a smile on my face. I missed Lisa. It seemed silly because I’d just seen her the day before, but I was supposed to spend the whole weekend with her. I’d been looking forward to it.
I stared at the empty wrapper in my hand. I’d eaten the rest of my candy bar. Dax’s empty wrapper was on the coffee table as well. I mentally calculated the rest of our food again. It hadn’t multiplied. But we’d be fine. People survived in the wilderness for longer and with less. Why did that thought make my heart race? Why was my breathing becoming more rapid? No, I wasn’t going to freak out over this.
Sometimes anxiety would hit me sideways like that, when I wasn’t expecting it. When it didn’t seem logical. When I thought I’d done the perfect job of talking myself through the trigger. It’s like my heart wouldn’t listen. I knew this whole situation was overwhelming and that my body was deciding to play catch-up, but I didn’t want to do this here, in front of him. He was already judging me enough.
I stood, trying to hide my uneven breathing, and left the room. This place made me feel trapped. I needed some fresh air. There had to be a window I could open somewhere in the building. My mind raced as I remembered trying every one of those windows the night before. I went for the stairs, climbed floor after floor searching for one I hadn’t tried. I arrived breathless at the very top—the fourth floor. It was a storage space of sorts. A room with boxes and boxes of stuff—old decorations, bolts of fabric, tablecloths. So much stuff. A maze of stuff trapping me.
My heart felt like it would burst from my chest. I leaned up against the nearest wall. Stop stop stop stop stop. Stop it. My eyes were watering; my ears felt plugged as my heartbeat pounded in them. I was freaking out over freaking out and that never helped. “It’s okay to freak out,” I said, but didn’t believe myself.
I saw a door across the way—a nondescript white one with a metal bar spanning its center. One I hadn’t seen before.
I tripped over my own feet as I nearly ran to it and pushed it open. The door led to a circular metal staircase. Each step creaked, and the whole staircase seemed to be a screw short as it wobbled under my weight. I held tight to the dusty handrail until I reached the top. Another door waited for me there, a creepy wooden owl on the last bit of banister watching guard over it. I yanked open the door and almost stepped onto the roof, but caught myself in time. The roof was peaked and wouldn’t have been safe even without the layer of snow, but a rush of cold air hit me across the face, immediately drying the sweat that clung there. I gulped in icy breath after icy breath, cooling my insides as well.
My heart slowed; my breath evened. My legs were still shaky, though, so I lowered myself to the ground at the top of those narrow stairs and looked out at the snow-blanketed roof. Was it unreasonable to think I could sit up there for the rest of the weekend? The sky was darkening and soon the stars would be out.
I thought of being in my bed, staring at the glowing stars on my ceiling in the dark. I would be there in a couple of days, maybe sooner. I thought about the things that helped me relax—my mom brushing my hair, my dad humming while he cooked eggs at the stove, my older brother driving me to get ice cream on the weekends he came home for a visit. The rest of my body settled down with these thoughts.
I wiped at my eyes with the heels of my hands. They watered sometimes during episodes like this. It was annoying. It wasn’t like this happened very often. Just once in a while when things or events I didn’t expect overtook me. This situation seemed to be triggering something in me. It wasn’t surprising considering how out of the ordinary the last twenty-four hours had been. I’d be back to normal as soon as this was over, I kept telling myself. I just had to get through it.
I leaned back on my palms. “Why can’t I just control my mind better?” I groaned to the ceiling. No, not the ceiling. I realized I was staring at the underside of a large bell, a rope dangling down below it. This was a bell tower. Of course it was. I had seen the bell tower many times from the outside, I just hadn’t thought about it at all from the inside. I was sitting in a bell tower under a bell that was never rung.
I jumped up, grabbed hold of the rope, and tugged. Someone would notice a bell that never rang, ringing. They had to.
CHAPTER 11