Glimmer
Authors: Phoebe Kitanidis
Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Family, #Siblings, #Fantasy & Magic, #Social Issues, #General
GLIMMER
PHOEBE KITANIDIS
For my parents,
Ranna and Peter Kitanidis,
with love and gratitude
Contents
I come to life with a gasp in the darkness. My heart’s hammering, jolted by a strangely familiar sense of dread.
A blank white ceiling stares back at me as reassuring sunlight from a distant window floods my retinas. Must have had a nightmare or something.
I brace with one elbow and try to sit up, but something’s pinning my right leg to the mattress. My other hand’s gone numb, trapped under something heavy and warm. Someone’s breathing next to me, deep regular breaths.
Is someone else . . .
in bed with me
?!
Calm down. Don’t scream. Not yet.
Stealthily I turn my head ever so slightly and stare at the blue pillow beside me. What I see is the face of a young guy, a face that’s arresting even in sleep. Maple-brown skin. Straight, buzzed black hair that frames his sculpted features. Bold eyebrows quirked like a question, curly long lashes. Soft, full lips above an angular jawline.
I’ve never seen this guy in my life.
Yet he’s here. So close to me, I can feel his body radiating heat onto my skin. His hair smells like sandalwood, like some exotic forest floor. It’s his broad shoulder that my hand’s caught under.
His bare shoulder. My bare skin. Oh my god. There’s nothing between my skin and his. (How?
How?
) Panic tightens my dry throat, nearly choking me. I turn away from him in stunned horror.
I’m naked in bed with a stranger.
I dive into clear, icy water and sink down deep. Cold shocks my body through my jeans and T-shirt, seeping into my pores as my boots shake dark mud loose from the rocky bottom. Sparse blades of underwater grass wave back and forth in the silence. And there, scattered on the lake bed all around me, lit by soft sunlight from above, I can see them. Hundreds of human bones. Femurs. Vertebrae. Skulls. Each resting on its own like lonely pieces of coral. Forgotten. But to me they’re reminders. This is the place where I am going to die too. I know this, but I’m not afraid.
I’m here for a reason.
A sudden vibration blasts my eardrums, a low rhythmic thumping that rattles every rock and bone in the watery graveyard. I flail toward the surface, toward awareness.
—
My eyes are closed, weighed down with sandbags. I’m warm and dry, breathing air, lying flat. My legs are sweating under a too-hot blanket, all tangled up with someone else’s. Long hair tickling my bare chest. Someone else’s arm is curled around me, skin that smells like peaches and sunscreen, and like girl.
Mmm.
Feels good.
I relax, head sinking deeper into my pillow, and the dreamscape slips back to me. Cold water flowing over me, underwater grass waving back and forth . . . but before the dream can claim me again, I’m floating to my senses. Millimeter by millimeter, my eyelids rise and brilliant yellow sunshine from the open window streams onto my face. It catches gold highlights in the girl’s hair, which drifts gently up and down as I breathe. Blond hair. Light blond. Bright, like wheat. I lean my head closer, wanting to bury my hands in that hair, to feel the wavy strands part between my fingers. But I don’t because—it hits me like a shot of adrenaline—because
I have no freaking clue whose hair this is.
I’m in bed with a girl I don’t know.
My heart skips. I pull back my hands . . . and zero in on a tiny scab on my right wrist. Like someone poked me with a pin. I prod it, trying to remember how it got there. Nothing comes to me.
Nothing.
Feeling light-headed, I follow the line of one slightly hairy brown forearm up to a defined bicep, a broad shoulder. A jet black squiggle on my chest catches my eye. Huh. What’s that? I strain my neck to examine the ink. A tattoo. A stylized, almond-shaped eye, centered between my pecs.
When did I get this?
Again:
nothing.
I’m feeling so dizzy now, I want to throw up. The ink eye, the blond girl, this bed, these hands, I’ve never seen them before.
No. I
must
have—they didn’t just appear out of nowhere.
Why don’t I remember?
My pulse is hammering.
Think back.
But trying to think back is frustrating, painful, like trying to unpack a suitcase in the dark with just your pinkie finger, and then finding nothing but other people’s stuff in it anyway. I remember English words. The rules of baseball. That the stock market crashed in 1929, kicking off the Great Depression. But no matter how deep I dig for it, I can’t quite get a picture of my own face. Or my home—where am I from? Who are my friends?
The only thing I can recall is my dream. My dream of dying underwater.
Who
am
I?
A loud
thump-thump
sound invades the air, making my heart leap toward my throat.
But it’s only the alarm clock on the nightstand. A tinny male voice joins the thumping bass, crooning,
“We’ll nev-er feel bad any-mo-oh-oh-orrrrre . . .”
Then mystery guy’s powerfully built arm swings over my head and punches the clock radio. It dies without a whimper.
Son of a bitch, he managed to hit snooze on the very first try.
In his sleep.
This is his bedroom.
My relief at coming up with that brilliant explanation doesn’t last. I know where I am, but how did I get here?
Squinting at the sun’s glare, I scan the room helplessly, searching for anything familiar. On the window wall are three Harry Potter movie posters. Framed. Signed. On the other wall, to my right, a row of photos in bottle-green glass frames. A dark-skinned woman, smiling mysteriously from astride a camel, a sweep of endless dunes behind her. That same woman, clutching a small boy’s hand as he gazes up at her with a sweet gap-toothed grin. Then a high school portrait of a guy with playful lips and an angular jawline. His dark eyes sly and intense in their gaze. So that’s what he looks like when he’s awake. Dangerous.
And still unfamiliar.
And yet last night I walked into this boy’s house. Crashed on his twin bed with its faded blue-and-green tartan comforter. Stripped my clothes off . . .
Or did I?
My breathing’s gone fast and shallow. What if the reason I don’t remember is I never did those things? At least not willingly. Not sober. What if . . . ? It’s almost too ugly to think about. But my mind’s already there.
What if this guy next to me slipped something into my drink, drugged me, and lured me here?
It’s sick. It’s scary. It makes him a disgusting dirtbag. It’s also the only thing that makes sense.
I have to find my clothes—they must be on the floor somewhere—and sneak out. Now. Before dirtbag wakes up.
Only, when I turn back to check on him, his eyes are open wide. Staring right at me.
I let out a shriek, and before I can think, I’m scrambling out of bed. At the sight of my naked body, his mouth gapes open. I back away from him, clapping my arms over my chest protectively, wishing I had more arms. “Stay away from me, don’t touch me!” I’m surprised my voice doesn’t shake, because I’m definitely trembling.
The boy averts his gaze. “You seem to be cold. Take this.” He pulls the comforter off himself and throws it to me.
Only, I don’t think he realized the sheet was tangled up in the comforter. It flies away toward me, leaving
him
naked and exposed. Muttering a curse, he grabs a pillow to cover himself and sits back on the bed.
I wrap the covers around myself like a dress, tying them off at my shoulder, and turn toward the door.
“Excuse me. Wait.” He sounds older than he looks. Sophisticated. “This is embarrassing to ask, but . . . how’d I get here?”
I spin around to glare at him. “How stupid do you think I am? We both know this is your room.”
“
My
room?” He touches his chest as if affronted by the notion.
I point to his family photos on the wall. He’s definitely the guy in the high school photo. Dark brown eyes, almost black, hardly any difference between his pupils and irises.
He shrugs his eyebrows, unimpressed. “Am I supposed to know these people?”
“That guy is
you.
” Doubt creeps into my voice though. Does he really not recognize himself? “Or I don’t know, maybe that’s your twin brother.”
“I have a twin?” He narrows his eyes at the photo, tilts his head to either side, lets out a low breath, like he’s trying to calm himself. He turns back to me. “Tell me he’s not evil, ’cause I’ve got enough problems.”
“You’re the evil one,” I say, though his responses are rattling me. He sounds just as confused as I feel. “You lured me up here,” I say, clinging to my story, a story that made sense in my head. “Last night.”
“I don’t remember last night.” He looks me in the eye. “I don’t remember anything. At all.”
“But you
have
to.” I hate the pleading edge in my voice. We woke up naked, tangled. One of us has to remember it, even if it’s because he’s the one who drugged me. Somehow neither of us remembering is even worse. Then it’s just meaningless, random, out of anyone’s control.
“I’m sorry,” he says quietly. “I don’t even know your name.”
Furious, I open my mouth, ready to spit my full name at him, first, middle, and last. But nothing comes out. Because I can’t think of it.
It’s not on the tip of my tongue either; I don’t even know what letter to start with. Jennifer? Anne? Esmeralda? No name sounds right. I try to swallow my panic, to focus my mind and think back to the last time someone called me by my name. But it’s hard, because I can’t picture who that someone would be. My mother, my father? I try to picture their faces, to remember the last time I saw them, or even anytime I saw them. I try to think back on my friends. My teachers. To mentally call up my favorite subject in school, my favorite sport. But it’s all a blank.
My vision’s blurring a little; I’m feeling so dizzy, I can barely stand.
It’s not just the last few hours I don’t remember. I also don’t remember the days, months, or years that came before them.
“This isn’t happening.” My shaking hands rush to my face to feel the contours of my nose, my cheeks, my chin. I grab a few stray strands of hair and hold them up in front of me. Blondish. “This can’t be happening to me.” Me, that’s the only name I have for myself. I’m the voice in my head, I’m the heart pounding like a rabbit’s. Nameless, faceless Me. I could be anyone.
“Hey, I’m really sorry.” He lowers his voice. “Believe me, I know that’s not right. That I don’t remember your name. If it helps, I . . . I don’t remember mine either.” He gazes at me searchingly. “Do
you
know my name?”
For a moment I can glimpse the trusting little boy from the picture in his face, and I feel a stab of sympathy despite myself. His terror and confusion match mine. I lean closer, something deep inside me wanting to believe him. “I don’t remember anything either,” I tell him.
“Serious?”
“Yeah. So . . . if you didn’t drug me, how did this happen?”
His eyes widen, then flash with hurt. “Fuck, you thought I roofied you? You think I’m a
perv
?”
A twinge of guilt tugs at me. “Well, what am I supposed to think? I wake up”—
naked
—“in a strange guy’s room . . .”
“I told you, this isn’t my room. Anyway, what drug could wipe out your whole memory?”
I fold my arms. “How would I know? I don’t
remember
anything.”
“That makes no sense,” he informs me. “I may have forgotten who I am, but I remember all kinds of other stuff, and so do you or we couldn’t be having this conversation.” He’s right. “And there’s no drug I know of that does this.”
“Then poison, whatever.” How else could this happen to two people at the same time?
“What poison?”
I throw up my hands. “I don’t care what did this, I just want my memory back!”
“And I don’t think we can fix it till we know what it is.” He swallows. “It
could
be some new drug. Highly experimental. Classified.”
A cool shiver runs down my back. Exactly what are the two of us mixed up in? “Let’s find our clothes and get the hell out of here,” I say. “We can argue when we know we’re safe.”
“Deal.” He points to a corner by the door, to an untidy mound of white fabric. “That looks promising.”
Cautiously, not disturbing my blanket-dress, I bend to investigate. White Keds, a stretchy white top, and a jean skirt. Something pink and lacy slips out of the skirt and tumbles to the floor.
I hold the skirt up to my body. It’s tiny. An ultramini. “These aren’t my clothes.”
“Well, I doubt they’d fit me.”
“I would never wear that skirt.”
“Hey.” He shivers. “Right now
I’d
wear it if I could get both legs in it.”
He’s right. Who cares if it’s mine, it just has to cover me while we escape. “Fine. Could you, um, face the back wall, please?”
“You want me to roll over?” He gives me a look. “I’m kind of naked here.”
Like I hadn’t noticed. “This may be hard for you to believe, but I have no desire to stare at your ass.”
“Okay. Whatever. Not worth arguing over.” He shrugs and turns around. And I can’t help it. I check out his ass. Just for a second.
Then I grit my teeth and pull the tight little top over my head. I step into the miniskirt, and am shocked when the zipper actually fastens to the top. I slip on the Keds, then look down at myself. The outfit kisses my every curve and contour like a second skin.
It’s a perfect fit.
