Stealing Snow (5 page)

“You really don’t know, do you?” he said solemnly. “They’ve dulled your magic and your wits.”

“What the hell?” I snapped. Sleepy’s effects were starting to wane, and this guy’s riddles were starting to piss me off. He clearly was a new patient off his meds.

“Just remember the Tree…”

I started to sit up farther, ready to show this guy just what kind of princess I really was. Then the boy abruptly turned around and walked toward the plastic mirror on my closet. And he did something that stopped me cold.

He stepped right through it.

I squeezed my eyes shut and pressed my palms into them. This was a dream. Yes, it would be my weirdest one yet, but still. A dream. Had to be.

I opened my eyes again. They adjusted to the dark quickly this time. The room looked normal. No strange boy to be seen. But when I stared into the mirror next to my desk, I swear I could see the silhouette of a boy in an oversize white coat, growing smaller and smaller … receding in the reflection. And in the background was the faint outline of a large tree, the Tree.

When I blinked again, the Tree and the boy were gone.

Even though I could barely see in the dark, I grabbed my sketchbook and began to draw the boy’s face. I wanted to get it all down, every detail. Whether it was all in my head or not, I didn’t want to forget him.

As the line of his jaw emerged from beneath my fingers, I shuddered. He called me “Princess.” Whatever the reason why, I didn’t like it.

I had been called worse, and I had earned every nickname with my words and my teeth. I looked down at the sketch again. Recording my dreams on paper was my own personal exorcism. Afterward, I always felt free of whatever it was that had haunted me the night before. But this time when I looked at the picture of the boy, I almost felt like his eyes were staring back at me.

I must have fallen asleep like that, gazing at my own handiwork, because the next thing I knew I was waking again to the sound of the door opening. Daylight was streaming through the
barred windows. Vern was holding the pill tray. The boy from last night rushed to my mind, and I snapped the sketch pad shut. I had fallen asleep with the charcoal clutched in my hand. I didn’t know if he was a patient or an orderly, or if Sleepy concocted him out of my imagination and put him into my dreams. Either way, I wasn’t ready for Vern or anyone else to see the sketches of him.

“You’re already up? That’s a first.”

“It was Grand Central Station in here last night,” I said, thinking about the orderly again.

She raised an eyebrow.

“Dr. Harris stopped by. And a guy who dubbed me a princess.”

“Princess, huh?” Vern snorted. “Yardley, you’re as much royalty as I am.” She said it almost affectionately, but then she held out the tray with the day’s pills, and I thought about what the boy had said. Even if he was just a figment of my imagination, maybe my subconscious was telling me that enough was enough.

I knew each pill did something different. But eventually the effects wore off, and Dr. Harris would start something new. My medication changed more than most. We patients would compare sometimes. Chord and Wing were almost always on Sleepy. It kept them in place. For Wing, it kept her from flying. And for Chord, it kept him from blinking through time. Sometimes Dr. Harris added Happy, because there was a lot of depression involved with not getting to be exactly where he wanted to be.

I assumed that Dr. Harris was trying really hard to get the right combination that would level me off. Make me normal. Stop all the anger. Put my monster to sleep.

But what if what the boy said was true? What if the drugs were masking everything and not solving anything? The idea of giving up all the drugs terrified me. I hadn’t been completely clean—not for as long as I could remember.

“Which of the seven dwarfs is it today?” I asked, assuming the answer had to be Dopey. Given my behavior yesterday, my mom’s visit, and my Sleepy dose last night, I was sure rest was the continuing prescription of the day.

But this pill was new. It was black with little tiny dots. I wanted to recoil, to ask Vern what was in it, to refuse to take it. But if I did that, they would make me take it, or worse—they would give me a shot of it straight to my veins instead. So I hid my reaction and pretended everything was normal—well, at least normal for me. Instead of swallowing, I slipped the pill under my tongue and felt it threatening to melt. The plastic casing softened as I waited for Vern to check my mouth. She barely looked, either because she trusted me or because I had never skipped a pill before.

When she glanced out the window to exclaim, “Look at that! We weren’t supposed to have snow today,” I spit the pill into my palm. She looked back at me, expecting a response about the weather.

I just shrugged and felt a twinge of something—not guilt—but a shift in our dynamic. I had a secret. I hadn’t said a word, but it was the first lie between me and Vern in a long time—maybe ever.

Hiding the pill in my pocket, I took my sketch pad, and we silently marched to the common room. It was time for
The End of Almost.

Vern turned on the television and took a seat next to me.

We settled into watching her story, and I realized at some point it had become part of mine, too. The lives on-screen were a window to another world where anything could happen—even the impossible. Today the show was focused on the family’s matriarch, Rebecca Gershon. She was like a chameleon and could make herself whoever she needed to be to get what she wanted. She had had as many careers as husbands, and she was currently working on Love #7. The characters vacillated between good and bad and back again. It was a world that wasn’t real, but also one filled with forgiveness and second chances. By comparison, I hadn’t even had my first job or been on an actual date.

“Why doesn’t Rebecca just tell the soldier guy how she feels?”

I knew his name was Lucas. I liked to pretend that the stories meant more to Vern than they did to me. But I knew every detail, every subplot and history and twist and turn from Rebecca’s first husband to her tenth, and I was pretty sure that Lucas was the one true love for Rebecca. He wasn’t as handsome as her other lovers over the years. But he was the first to love her unconditionally. Only he could not actually say what was so completely obvious to me and to Vern.

“Sometimes saying something is harder than not saying it. You wouldn’t know because you have no filter, but out there in the world people spend most of their lives afraid to say what’s really on their minds.”

It sounded like Vern was calling me brave … or crazy. Maybe they were the same thing.

I wondered about Vern’s life outside this place. I knew she
had a husband and a kid who smiled at me from her smartphone. Tall, but not Vern tall. And the way Vern looked at Lucas and Rebecca on TV made me wonder if there was a lost love in her past—someone who would have altered the course of her everything. And just as the idea floated through my brain, another thought popped up: the boy. Not that he was going to really alter the course of my everything. He was just a new shade of crazy that I hadn’t seen before.

I picked up my sketchbook and began to finish the drawing of the boy from last night.

“Who’s that?” asked Vern during a commercial break.

“The new orderly.” I was testing her for information.

“He’s cute. But he doesn’t work here. You didn’t actually see him, did you?” Vern asked pointedly.

I shrugged. “I guess it was a dream.”

I was at home in my mother’s room, staring into the full-length mirror by her dressing table. Suddenly Becky appeared. She smiled and shook her pigtails—but something was wrong. She was covered in blood. When I looked back at the mirror, it was broken and I was covered in blood, too. Beyond the shattered glass, I saw a giant tree glistening in the snow. Next to it was the boy from last night. Instead of wearing a stolen white coat, he had on a leather vest and bloodred tunic. A brown satchel was slung across his chest. He waved to me.

I pulled Becky’s arm. “We have to go,” I said, but she wouldn’t budge. I pulled again and looked back at her, but then she was gone and Bale had taken her place.

“Bale,” I breathed. It had been so long since I last saw him, since I touched him. I looked down at my hand around his wrist. He was covered in blood, too. “You’re hurt.” I turned to inspect him closer, but he took both of my hands then, intertwining his fingers in mine. He was okay.

He looked at me, really stared, his long lashes almost distracting me from the dark amber of his eyes. “I can’t go with you,” Bale finally said.

I turned back to the mirror and saw the orderly-boy still waving, the tree towering over him, and all around him on the ground people were kneeling, heads bowed in my direction. I wanted to go, but Bale wouldn’t move.

“I can’t,” Bale said more firmly.

So I pulled him toward the mirror, as hard as I could, and he let go of my hands. I stumbled back, expecting to crash right into the cracked glass, but instead I felt only air. Cold air.

I found my footing again and looked to Bale, but when I turned around to face him, he was on fire.

I screamed myself awake and knew I had to see Bale. Tonight.

That night after dinner, Vern walked me back to my room.

When we turned the corner to the main hallway, we passed Wing and Sarah.

“Sno-o-o-o-w.” Wing drew my name out and reached for me.

She was wearing a pink scrunchie today and had glitter on her cheeks. She loved colors, but the Whittaker uniform didn’t allow for much else.

I brushed my fingertips against hers. “Hi, Wing.”

“Got into the art supplies again today, Wing?” Vern scolded affectionately.

It was impossible not to love Wing, but sad, too. It was like being friends with a bird whose wings had been clipped. Her whole self was wrapped up in what she believed was her sole purpose in life. She could not think of anything else but flight.

“No, no, no, no, no.” Wing shook her head rapidly. “No, no,
no. This is my Sparkle.” She pointed to her cheeks. “I need my Sparkle.”

Wing’s “Sparkle” was like her magic dust. She said she needed it to grow her wings back so she could fly. We all had our dreams here, I guessed. I wished that there was a pill that could give her a different one.

“Come on now, hon.” Sarah gently guided Wing into her room.

Wing reached for me again, and again I let her fingers brush mine. She smiled, and I did, too. But my smile turned quickly to a scowl when I heard another voice.

“Why are you still here?” Magpie hissed as she passed us. Cecilia immediately told her to “hush” and pulled her along faster.

Vern gave me the side-eye. Magpie was trying to get a rise out of me, and Vern didn’t want another fight to break out. But I ignored them both. I was focused on my plan.

My mind and heartbeat both raced. It was happening. Tonight I was going to see Bale. We’d talk and leave this whole business of his breaking my wrist in the past. I had let too much time pass. The dream was my wake-up call. I had let what had happened after the kiss come between us. We were more than that moment. I would make him see that what happened had to have been a bad reaction to meds. It wasn’t him. It wasn’t me.

The heavy-duty duct tape Vern had hung my pictures with came in handy. While she was pulling out my nightclothes, I covertly stuck a piece against the lock of the door so that it wouldn’t click shut.

“You okay, Yardley?” she asked as I dressed.

“Yeah,” I lied. “Why?”

Vern just shook her head and held out my night’s dose. It was the little black pill with the dots again. I didn’t know what it was or why I should be taking it three times a day, but I didn’t question it again. Instead I tossed it into my mouth and took a big gulp of water.

“Open up,” said Vern. She examined my mouth a little closer than usual, but she still didn’t see it hiding under the back of my tongue. “Okay then.”

When I said good night, Vern paused in the doorway and looked back at me as if sensing that something was off. I held my breath, hoping that she wouldn’t brush against the duct tape and pull it off onto her scrubs. Or worse yet, see it there.