My door protested squeakily as it eased open, and I stiffened as the whisper of fabric and footfalls approached me from behind. A moment later the bed depressed slightly and a viselike hand gripped my shoulder. I made no move to fend off the attack, and had only a moment to wait for the sharp pierce of the knife as it drove into my flesh. The pain was excruciating, and I gritted my teeth against it. Fresh tears leaked out of my shuttered eyes. With my right hand I reached up to grip the knife, holding it to me as I sank backward onto the bed where I let my limbs fall. My last act of will opened my left palm to expose the note: payment for the deed.
A shadow hovered over me before the note was lifted away and then the shadow departed and the world above me blurred. I inhaled one final ragged breath, but I couldn’t hold it in. I exhaled on a wave of release. And then, the house of cards crumbled completely and the soft rays of dusk carried me up and away, toward Spence.
IN THE CENTER OF MY CHEST there’s a birthmark that looks like a bloodstain. It’s red, elliptical, but the bottom trickles away from the center, like blood leaking out of my heart.
It’s one of those things that, when I look in the mirror, seems completely foreign to me, even though it’s been there my entire life. It’s not the imperfection of it, but the implication that bothers me. It feels sinister, like a terrible memory of a horrible event I try to recall but can’t.
Sometimes I swear I even feel it burn.
And I’ve never been able to figure out why it always hurts the most the morning after a recurring dream I keep having. Recurring nightmare actually.
The dream has always been the same—it has never, ever varied. It begins with me running toward a field. It’s dark out, but the field is lit by fire, and yet, there’s no smoke. The flames are alive with movement, pulsing over the grass of the meadow, but there’s no heat.
I’m fueled by panic, but I don’t know why. I just know I need to run toward the middle of that field. And then I come to the center and there lies the most beautiful boy I’ve ever seen. He’s staring up at me, a half smile on his lips, but his eyes are lifeless. I drop down beside him as the flames lick across our skin. I take him into my arms, willing for life to come back to him, but he’s cold against me. He’s already gone.
And always I feel as if I’m the one dying.
I’ve woken up crying every single time, shaken and so profoundly sad that I think it’s a wonder I ever knew joy. In those moments, the birthmark burns, and I always touch it with my fingers and then check to see if there’s actual blood.
There never is, but I can’t shake the feeling that there should be.
I don’t know who the boy is, and I don’t know why I keep having that nightmare, but I do know that I’ve been having the exact same dream since I was four. I think it has importance. I think it means something. But what that could be I have no idea.
The dream had been intermittent, never coming more than a few times a year, but it’s been waking me up every night for the past two weeks, ever since Mom and I moved into my grandmother’s guesthouse.
I know most people would say that the dream is happening more often now because of the stress from the divorce. But what’s weird is that I was so much more stressed-out when my parents were fighting under the same roof. It was bad. Every single day they just shouted accusations and obscenities at each other. My dad cheated on my mom, but really, I felt like he cheated on all of us; the us that’d been a family until he’d gone off and gotten himself a girlfriend.
And as if my life wasn’t miserable enough, in the final week of my sophomore year I’d found out that Tanner—my boyfriend of two years—was cheating on me with Sophie—my best friend since first grade. At least their secret had come out at the very end of the school year and I was spared the humiliation of having to see them together in the hallways and hear the whispers about poor, pathetic me.
Soon after summer vacation started, Mom came to me to tell me that Grandmother Bennett had learned about my dad’s affair and the divorce, and, disgusted by her son’s behavior, she’d reached out to Mom to offer us a place to live on her estate. Grandmother had also used her influence on the board at the hospital in Fredericksburg to get Mom placed as a resident there.
She’d asked me what I’d thought about moving out of Richmond, and I’d told her I could be packed in a day. I wanted nothing more than to run away from all of the reminders of how messed-up my life had become.
So we’d packed our stuff and, toward the end of the summer, we’d moved.
Through all of that mess, I hadn’t had the dream of the boy in the field even once, but ever since we’d settled into Grandmother’s guesthouse, I’d woken up in a cold sweat every night, breathing hard, trembling, and crying.
The boy’s death always had the same devastating effect on me, and I knew it was impossible to fight the tears, so I settled for allowing them to rinse the heartbreak from my muddled, sleep-deprived mind before chancing a look at the alarm clock next to my bed.
I groaned when I read the time: two thirty.
“Why?” I whispered, putting fists to the side of my head. “Why, why, why?”