We both chewed in silence and that moment of awkwardness I’d been dreading seemed to have arrived.
“So, what did you want to tell me?” he asked almost casually.
I set down my burrito. It was time to fess up. I’d come up with a plan during school, and it was super-risky, but I didn’t think I could convince him any other way.
“Okay,” I began, having rehearsed my speech a number of times in my head. “This is kind of a long story, and you’re probably gonna think I’m nuts, but just promise that you’ll hear me out before you decide.”
Cole furrowed his brow and cocked his head slightly, as if waiting for me to deliver a punch line. “Okaaaaaaaay…” he finally said.
I took a deep breath and dove in.
“I started having this recurring nightmare when I was about four years old,” I told him. “It was always the same dream, starting out with me wearing a light-blue dress and entering a field that was on fire. There was always this feeling that I needed to reach the middle of the field or something terrible would happen, and I had to dodge the flames as I went. Each time, I tried to get there as fast as I could, but no matter what I did, I was always too late. Every time, once I reach the center of the field I find this boy—he’s about our age—and he’s dead. He’s staring up at the sky lifelessly, and each and every time I discover him, it’s like a knife right to my heart. It’s the most heartbreaking thing I’ve ever felt. It destroys me, and I sink down next to him and try to hold him close to me, but I always wake up at that exact moment, and I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve just lost someone I loved more than anyone else in the world.
“Now,” I continued, “the really weird thing is that, until yesterday, I had no idea who the boy was.”
I snuck a quick glance at Cole and he was looking back at me, intrigued. “I’m with you,” he said with a nod of encouragement.
I took another deep breath. “I used to have the dream only once or sometimes twice a year. It always cropped up right around spring. But then, when we moved here, I started having it every night. Like, every night. And I couldn’t figure out why. And there’ve also been small things that I haven’t been able to explain. Like, there are parts of Fredericksburg that seem so familiar to me, but I swear I’ve never seen them before. And that goes for some of the people, too.”
I bit my lip, staring once again at my lap. Man, it was hard to say this stuff out loud to somebody who I was really beginning to like. I didn’t know if my recently broken heart could take it if Cole ended up thinking I was crazy.
“Anyway,” I continued, “a few days after we moved here and the nightmare started showing up every night, I also started having panic attacks. Mom thought they were from all the stress of the move and lack of sleep and the divorce and stuff, but when I had that really bad panic attack at your grandmother’s house, Mom took me to see a shrink.”
My lip quivered with the arrival of unexpected emotion. Even though I knew it was misplaced, there was a part of me that felt a little ashamed at having to go see a psychiatrist to talk about what was going on with me. I cleared my throat.
“So we saw this guy, Dr. White, yesterday. He said he wanted to hypnotize me to see why my subconscious kept creating the nightmare. I thought it was a little weird, but I’m so tired from not being able to sleep that I figured it couldn’t hurt. He recorded the session, which I don’t remember at all. It was like I was listening to his voice one second and then I was asleep and he was waking me up again. It felt like I’d just nodded off, and then I jerked awake, but that’s not what really happened.”
Again my lip began to tremble and my vision blurred with tears. I didn’t know if Cole could tell I was close to losing it or not because my gaze was fixed on my lap. I tried to get ahold of myself, but I couldn’t seem to push back the wave of emotion enough to risk speaking again. So I sat there for a minute and just focused on breathing in and out.
“Lily?” Cole said gently.
I swallowed hard and said, “Yeah?”
“What really happened?”
I lifted my chin and found Cole leaning toward me, his expression earnest and sincere. Instead of answering him, I lifted my phone out of my backpack along with a set of earbuds. Dr. White had sent me home with a copy of the video, and I figured the only way to convince Cole that I wasn’t flat-out crazy was to have him see it for himself.
“Here,” I said, crossing my fingers that I was about to do the right thing by tapping the screen to call up the session. “See for yourself.”