“Yeah. That. Sheesh. Joke gone horrendously wrong.” I laugh, and it feels weird, like I haven’t laughed in days.
Trey still holds a deadpan look. “So, to confirm: You’re not having an alien Antichrist baby from the seed of Angotti.”
“Ah, no. Correct, I mean. Gross terminology threw me off.”
“I will deliver the news thusly.”
I stare at him. “Did he send you up here to ask me that?”
“No,” Trey says, shifting his weight and relaxing on the bed. “I just read it in the worry lines on his forehead and figured I’d find out sooner rather than later, because I was wondering too.”
“You?” I say, incredulous. “I am completely befuzzled by that. Don’t you think I’d tell you if I managed to get close enough to Hottie Angotti to get pregnant?”
He shrugs and picks my cell phone up off the dresser. “You don’t seem to tell me much at all lately,” he says. He starts playing with it, pushing things on the screen.
I narrow my eyes and he turns so I can’t see. “What are you doing? Searching my contacts or something?” I reach for the phone and he pulls it away. “Hey!”
“Calm it down, Demarco. I’m just playing Angry Bunnies.”
“Oh.” I struggle to sit up. I can feel my hair is all matted on one side. “Really? Or are you just saying that?”
“Yes, really. So what’s going on with you?” he says, his eyes on the game, but I don’t think he’s actually playing it. “You’re acting extremely weird these days.”
At his words, memories of the vision pop into my mind again. I let my head bump against the wall, and I close my eyes. Like a rain cloud, all the dread, the helplessness, the fear, rush over me again, a waterfall of hurt, and I start to drown in it. A sigh escapes me, and then another, and another, until the sighs admit they are sobs and the bed starts to quiver.
“Aw, dang it, Jules,” Trey says. “Come ’ere, then.” Trey tugs on my arm; I bury my face in his shoulder and the tears come pouring out, a flood of them, and I can’t stop it.
This is what I tell him through the sobs:
I am afraid of my life.
I am afraid of turning into Dad.
And, sometimes, I see things that aren’t there.
• • •
He doesn’t freak out, thankfully. But he’s seriously concerned.
“What kind of things?”
“I don’t know . . . .”
“Well, like giant spiders, or clowns, or imaginary friends, or ghosts, or what?”
I suck in a breath and let it out, beginning to regret the last five minutes with all my heart. I shouldn’t have told him. “Like . . . a crash.”
“You see car crashes that don’t actually happen?” He sits up straight, forehead wrinkled in alarm. “What, so you’re crossing the street, and boom, there’s a crash, metal crunching, people getting mangled and all of that, right in front of you?”
“No, not an actual crash. Just, like, a movie version of it. It’s not physically happening in the street, I just see . . . pictures. Like a film. Like, everywhere.”
“And you’re aware . . . I mean—” He stares hard at my phone now, and I know what he’s asking.
“Yes,” I say, my voice turning clinical. “I’m cognizant of the fact that this is not normal, yet I can’t stop it.”
He blinks. “I don’t get it.”
“Me neither.”
Trey stares at me for a long moment and puts my phone on my bedside table. “Kiddo, I know you don’t want to hear this, but I really—”
“No.”
“Jules, I mean it—”
“No, Trey,” I say again, firmer this time.
“I think,” he says even more firmly, “we should tell Mom.”
“No!” I say. “No! Please—I trusted you. And we can’t tell her. No way. She’ll . . .” I imagine all the things she’ll do, unable to decide which is the worst. Freak out. Pretend everything is fanfreakingtastic. Or worst of all, tell Dad. “Ugh,” I say, sliding down in the bed, turning to face the wall, and pulling the covers over my head. And then I say softly, “She’ll put me in the hospital, Trey. Like Dad.”
At first, I can’t tell if he hears me. He doesn’t deny it. He doesn’t answer at all. And then, once time begins again, he sighs deeply, and I feel his hand squeeze my shoulder. “Okay,” he says. “We’ll think about it. Talk it through, figure out what to do. All right? Let me know if it gets worse.”
I close my eyes and let out a breath of relief. “Yeah.”
Twenty-One
All night I dream about it—the crash, the explosion, the nine body bags in the snow, the fire. Sawyer’s dead face. But in my dreams the events happen in random order. At the end, the body bags stand up and dance around in the snowy, fiery night, as if they are ghosts trying to get out of their containments. Sawyer’s eyes fly open and he cries out to me for help, but I just walk away, going into a hospital that magically appears next door. Doctors take me by the hands and I begin to shrink. As I get smaller they swing me like a little kid down the hallway, and then they let go and I soar into a jail-like cell with bars on the doors. The doors clank shut. I hear someone muttering and cackling, and when I look up, a toothless, red-faced scary guy is locked in my cell with me.