Mine (12 page)

He nibbled at his sandwich to be polite before saying, “I’m kind of tired. I’ll see you in the morning.”

“What time would you like breakfast?”

Though his schedule never changed, this was yet another thing she always asked.

He’d been annoyed by her unnecessary questions for a few months, but knew it was her way of staying involved in his life and justifying why she was still living with him. The truth was, despite Joel’s age, he didn’t need her help anymore. They both knew it, but neither ever mentioned it.

“Seven’s fine,” he said.

She gave him a hug. “Goodnight, honey.”

Joel was asleep no more than a minute after his head hit his pillow. At first his dreams were filled with a mix of molecules and equations and planets and the girl in his anatomy class who sat a few rows in front of him.

And then the wind began to howl.

And the dark closed in.

And a dim light appeared down a long tunnel, spinning around and around, flashing off walls like a strobe.

“Help me!”

A blurry-faced girl clung to the ceiling, her legs whipping behind her in the gale.

“Help me!” The yell coming from oh so far away.

He wanted to call to her, to ask what he could do, but like each time he’d had this dream, his voice remained mute.

A hand touched his arm and he looked over in surprise. He’d always thought he’d been standing there alone, but there was a girl with him now, someone who’d always been there, he realized.

And her face was not obscured.

He both knew her and had no idea who she was.

She looked at him, frightened and confused, mirroring his own feelings. With a gasp, she turned her attention back down the tunnel. He followed her gaze.

The girl on the ceiling wasn’t there anymore.

“Help me! Help me! Help…” Her yell faded in the distance.

Suddenly, the twirling beam of light shined on her as she said a final, whispered, “Help me!”

Joel took a step forward. If the girl beside him hadn’t gripped his arm, the wind would have sucked him up and flung him down the tube. She yanked him back, and….

Joel woke with a start. For a moment he remained wrapped in the terror of the dream, but then a pain more intense than anything he’d ever experienced raged through him. He fought hard to keep from screaming. He hurt nearly
everywhere
—his shoulder, his ribs, arms, nose, his jaw.

He tried to tilt his head to take a look at himself, but even the slightest movement sent searing shockwaves racing in every direction. From the corner of his eye, he could see something was wrong with his right shoulder. It looked off, out of place.

Dislocated
.

What was the cause? A car accident?

Though he knew the pain would last only seconds, it felt like forever before it began to recede. Once he was whole again, he sat up and looked at his shoulder. As always, the damage was gone.

What was surprising was that unlike all the other times he’d experienced a premonition, it was still dark outside.

He looked at the clock—11:17 p.m. He’d been in bed for barely thirty minutes.

Confused, he lay back down. The other events had all come in the morning.

Why was this one different?

What in God’s name was going on?

T
WENTY-NINE

Leah

W
HEN THE FLASH
dissipated, Leah found she was still in the bedroom, the unconscious girl still on the bed. But now the girl’s clothes were gone.

Three others were present, all guys. One stood on each side of the bed, the guy farthest away holding a palm-sized video camera, and the guy nearest her holding a smartphone in video record mode. One had helped her onto the bed earlier, while the other was someone new. The third guy—the other helper—lay naked on top of her.

“Stop!” Leah yelled.

No one twitched.

“Stop!” she yelled again.

She ran over and tried to grab the camera from the guy nearest her, but her hands slipped right through him. To the three guys, she wasn’t there.

Though she knew it would make no difference, she couldn’t keep herself from yelling, “Stop! Stop! Stop! Stop!”

Flash.

The scene the same but different. Now one of the other guys was on the girl, and the first guy, still unclothed, held his partner’s camera.

Oh, God!

Flash.

The inevitable. Guy number three in the starring role.

Flash.

A different bedroom. A girl’s bedroom. A dorm, maybe? Leah had never been in one, but the layout looked like ones she’d seen on TV. Someone was huddled on the bed under the covers.

Leah approached the bed, and could see a face peeking out from under the blanket. A girl’s face. The unconscious girl from the other room. Her eyes were red, her cheeks tear stained.

Leah knew the assault would forever mark the woman.

When the light flashed again, Leah was afraid to open her eyes, afraid she might be presented with a vision of the girl wandering through a destroyed life, or worse, dead at her own hands.

But what she saw instead was the apartment bedroom again, empty and unlit like it had been when she first arrived.

And then she knew the truth. She knew the attack had not happened yet.

For a moment, she felt elated. There was still time to save the girl. But how? How was she supposed to do that?

The thread pulled her forward as the light flashed again, and kept pulling after the white had disappeared.

She was in the living room of a different apartment, this one nicer, cleaner. The TV was on, showing a movie she’d seen before.
Good Will Hunting.

The thread urged her toward the hallway. As she passed the couch, she noticed a woman slouched on it, asleep. There was something vaguely familiar about the sleeper’s face, but Leah’s guide didn’t allow her time to study it, as it kept her moving into the dark hall and down to the closed door at the end.

She reached for the knob like she had before, and once more all went black for a moment as she transitioned to the other side.

A bedroom, average size, with a desk, bookcases, a bed, and a closet. The only adornment was a photograph tacked to the wall next to the bed. The dim light slipping in through the window was enough for her to see the picture was of three boys, though it was too dark to make out their faces. If the person sleeping in the bed was one of them, then the picture must have been taken long ago. From the shape under the covers, she could see he was a man now. Or perhaps the picture was of his children.

The thread urged her closer to the bed. The man was lying on his side, his profile partially covered by the sheet. The thread’s anchor point suddenly switched from her heart to the tips of the index and middle fingers on her right hand, and tugged them toward the man’s shoulder.

She couldn’t touch him, she thought. She would pass right through him like she had with the guy in the other apartment. But when her fingers reached his shoulder, they tapped against his solid flesh.

The man stirred.

At the insistence of the thread, she touched him again. He rolled onto his back, the sheet falling from his face.

Leah stared at him, sure she was seeing things. But then of course she was. This was a dream, right?

Right?

The face belonged not to a man but to a teenage boy. A boy she had known. A boy her same age. Though he had grown considerably in the three and a half years since she’d last seen him, there was no mistaking the shape of his mouth or that of his nose or his brow.

Joel.

The boy she had almost forgotten.

He was sweating, his forehead creased in worry. She tried to reach out to stroke his hair and calm whatever was troubling him, but before her hand could move, the light flashed again, and she was once more standing in the bedroom of apartment 319.

The girl. The boys. The cameras.

Flash.

Joel’s room.

As much as she’d been trying to convince herself otherwise, this was not a dream, not really. It was the world as it was, or as it soon would be.

But was everything she’d seen already written in stone?

No, she thought. The thread was presenting her with an opportunity to change the outcome of what she’d witnessed, the dream-that-wasn’t-a-dream showing her that Joel and apartment 319 were not far apart. Nothing else made sense.

With a gasp, Joel’s eyes shot open.

Leah started to lean toward him, but jerked back in surprise.

Something was horribly wrong with his shoulder, and there were bruises on his arms and face. His nose also looked broken. She couldn’t understand it. A moment before he’d looked fine.

His face clinched in pain, his breaths rapid, almost desperate. She wanted to do something for him but didn’t even know where to start. Then right before her eyes, his bruises began to fade and his shoulder eased back into its socket as his breathing slowly returned to normal. Several seconds later, it was as if nothing had happened at all.

Was this another premonition brought on by her dream state? Had it made her see things that weren’t there? Clearly that was possible. But his reaction, that had been real.

Joel’s gaze swept past her to the digital clock on the nightstand. He hadn’t seen her. She reached out to touch him but her hand passed through his arm.

He let out an exhausted breath and fell back on his pillow, looking at the ceiling.

Flash.

The girl, alone and unconscious. The men standing together in one corner, looking at the playback on one of their cameras as they smiled.

Flash.

Joel blinked a few times and started to close his eyes.

Without even thinking, she yelled, “Get up!”

Nothing.

“Get up!”

Still no response.

“Joel! Get up now!”

He sat up in a shot and looked around, but again his gaze swept through her without stopping.

Maybe he couldn’t see her, but apparently he could
hear
her.

“Get up! Get up! Get up!”

He froze, his eyes staring almost, but not quite, in her direction.

She tried to grab his arm but of course she passed right through it. Frustrated, she shouted, “On your feet and get dressed! Hurry!”

He jumped from the bed.

It’s going to work
, Leah thought.
Oh, please, let it work.

T
HIRTY

Joel

J
OEL! GET UP now!

Joel pushed himself up and looked around. The voice—he couldn’t tell if it was male or female—had come from somewhere in the room. But he was alone.

Get up! Get up! Get up!

He had no idea how it was possible, but the voice seemed to be coming from
all
sides of his bed.

On your feet and get dressed! Hurry!

Urgency bloomed in his chest. He had no idea why, but he knew he had to listen to the voice, to trust it, do as it asked. He jumped out of bed, grabbed his Stanford hoodie off the floor, and donned it and his jeans. He didn’t bother with socks, just shoved his feet into his shoes and tied them faster than he ever had before.

As he crossed the room, the voice spoke again.
Quiet
.

He eased the door open and crept down the hallway. When he reached the living room, he peeked in. His mother was at one end of the couch, leaning to the side, asleep. On the coffee table sat an empty wineglass and the TV remote, the tableau of her nightly ritual.

He snuck past her with more caution than he knew was necessary. If she stuck to her pattern, it would be another few hours before she woke enough to shuffle off to bed.

Focus! There’s no time to waste.

Within seconds, he was downstairs, standing outside his apartment building. “Which way?”

Instead of hearing the voice again, a map appeared in his head of an area near campus. A red dot glowed on a street about a mile and a half from where Joel stood.

His seventeenth birthday was a few weeks away but he had yet to get his driver’s license, so he ran. He covered the distance in less than nine minutes, arriving only slightly winded, and feeling no other strain from the exertion.

The glowing dot on his mental map had led him to another apartment building. Unlike the complex he and his mother lived in, this one appeared to be primarily occupied by students. A banner hung from the roof, wishing someone named Aaron a happy birthday. At least twenty people milled about out front, most holding cups that reeked of beer.

Inside. Apartment 319
.

While Joel’s Prodigy reputation had abated, his face was still known by a lot of people, so he pulled the hood over his head and weaved through the crowd, his gaze on the ground. No more than a handful of partygoers glanced in his direction.

Inside, he bypassed the elevator and took the stairs. The first floor was empty but the second was packed with more students, drinking and talking and laughing. A portion of the crowd overflowed into the stairwell, and Joel had to push past them to keep heading up. Whoever Aaron was, apparently he had a lot of friends.

On the third-floor landing, a boy and girl were pressed together in the corner making out. For half a second, Joel felt a tinge of jealousy. He’d never come close to kissing a girl before. He’d never even held one’s hand.

Or had he?

Joel! Move!

He turned away from the groping couple and hurried into the empty corridor.

Left
, the voice said.

He jogged down the hall until he reached the door for apartment 319.

He wasn’t sure if he should knock or what. He didn’t even know why he was here. Or what he was supposed to be doing.

Open it!

He checked both ways to make sure he was still alone, then grabbed the knob. It was locked.

Hurry! Hurry!