CHAPTER 1

Jamie jumped out of her Hello Kitty blanket when I slammed the bedroom door behind me.

“Um, Lena? You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”

“Maybe I have.” I struggled to catch my breath, my chest still heaving from running and dashing for the stairs after locking every door downstairs. I swiped a damp strand of hair away from my face and shivered. Pulling, my arms across myself, I held onto my soaked sleeves, thinking back. “Maybe I just did.”

Jamie went to the bathroom and brought a towel to drape over me. “What happened?” she asked.

“The alley. Dark. Rain. A guy. Hot guy—”

“How hot are we talking about? Sam Winchester or Dean Winchester? Or Castiel? Because—”

“—and I offered him an umbrella,” I continued, now frantically. “He said a word—Japanese, I think. He dropped our umbrellas. Touched my face. Said my name again. Kissed me. Best kiss ever. Disappeared, and—and— Poof! Just poof!”

I was out of breath when I finished. It felt like a dream. Unreal even to my ears now.

“Okay…So, what’s his hair color? And his eyes? Maybe I know him. One of the guys who have a crush on you.”

“How many are they—like, ten or eleven?” I half-laughed at the ridiculous notion. “And none of them can possibly look like him. He had these amazing eyes I could write hundred of poems about. Gray eyes. And his jaw, and the look on his face—I swear it’s all so unreal, like straight out of my dreams—”

I broke off and swallowed. Oh my. “Jamie, could you please get my sketchbook here?”

“But you’re all wet! What if—”

I was almost hyperventilating at this point. “You can hold it in front of me. I just need to see. Please.”

She went over the bedside and opened my sketchbook for me to see.

There. The guy in the alley. Or at least the semi-silhouette of his shadowed face. His face was never clear in my mind, and I didn’t even know if he truly existed. But that face had been lingering like a haunting presence in my mind since the dreams started.

The dreams. They were always there. Sometimes I would be running in a field of grass. Sometimes I was in the woods, listening to the gentle humming of the birds. In some rare ones I would be by a beautiful lake, letting a peaceful serenity come over me while I hummed a tune I always heard the birds do.

My therapist had told the Cadwells that any dreams I had might be real memories, the ones pre-amnesia. But Mr. Cadwell always said that if it hurt to think about them, I didn’t have to pursue them. I once heard him tell Jamie that my dreams of the woods might be because of how I was found in the woods, after the animal mauling. I had woken up in the hospital after Mr. Cadwell found me. I had no recollection of anything, including how I ended up in the woods, naked and heavily injured. No family came for me, no one from anywhere nearby our town claimed to have ever seen me at all.

That was until the Cadwells pitied me and took me in. They enrolled me in the same high school their daughter went to. Jamie became my closest friend, my guide through everything.

“Do you think,” I thought out loud, “that he might know me from, you know, before?”

The word 'before' sounded like a taboo word to us. We just rarely talked about it.

Jamie crouched down in front of me and took my hand in hers. “Elena, if he knew you from before, why would he only find you now? Why years after the day you showed up in our town?” She squeezed my hands. “If he’s someone who cared about you, he would have looked for you long before now. You know the news about you was practically nationwide.”

“And what about that word he said?” I protested. “I think it was my name.” My East-Asian features are strong. I was probably a Chinese, Japanese, or Korean descendant. One look at me was all it had taken for the police to file me away as an illegal immigrant suspect. “Eiko,” I tried the word in my tongue. It felt right.

“You don’t even know any Japanese,” she said, not unkindly. “How did this guy look? Come on, tell me. Our age?”

“It was dark.” I shook my head, and shrugged. “I don’t know. Older, I think. Like a college guy. But he looked nothing like a frat boy.”

Jamie drew me into a hug. “Oh, Elena,” she said. “Sometimes I forgot how new you are at this. When a random guy kisses you in a dark alley, it might be dangerous and—”

I pulled away from her, irritated. “I’m not that naïve. He’s not a rapist or a serial killer, if that’s what you’re going at. He’s—”

“A psycho stalker.”

“—familiar. I could feel it when he kissed me. Like, you know, when I drank tea for the first time. Like I have tasted it before. Like I have known him before. He felt familiar. He is not a figment of my imagination—”

“Lena…”

“I know, I know! You think I was delirious from the cold. I thought so, too. When he vanished it was like I had just been with a ghost. But—” I broke off, and shivered. But I know he’s real.
Jamie took my hand and helped me up. “Alright, alright. Let’s see then, when he shows up again. If he really knows you from before, he’ll find you again, right?”

I nodded, feeling like a child humored.

“Now, let’s get you into a hot shower. I’ll make you a hot chocolate.”

Yeah, definitely. A kid being kid.

When I returned to the bedroom, warm and clean, Jamie was rummaging through her closet, leaving a pile of clothes on the bed. She heard me closing the door behind me and asked in an exasperated tone, “Aren’t you the least bit enthusiastic about tomorrow?”

I grinned to her back and sat on the bed, toweling my hair. “Well, let’s see,” I said. “The first day of school… Hmm. I don’t think I’m over enthusiastic about the coming SAT preps or getting bitched over by cheerleaders. Giving teachers a hard time sounds nice. But then I don’t have a not-so-tall caveman boyfriend whom I’ll try to look sexy for tomorrow.”

Jamie sent me a glare over her shoulder and turned back to her closet as she said, “That’s such a bullshit. You’re so smart I could see you as the valedictorian this year. And Nicky is not as short as you imply. You’re the tall one. I don’t know why you two can’t get along—you’re almost alike, you know.”

Hmph. Yeah, when hell freezes over. “You ever try telling him that?”

“Of course I did. No boyfriend and best friend of Jamie Cadwell shall go after each other like cat and mouse, I told him.”

I narrowed my eyes. “I do hope you didn’t mean I was the mouse.”

“Sure I didn’t.”

“Sure you told him that, too.”

“Sure I did.” I could hear a mischievous grin in her voice.

I sighed deeply. “I’m never gonna make it.”

“Make what?” she asked as she threw away another pile of shirts.

“The valedictorian thing. That redheaded weird-nosed devil is so gonna beat me.”

Jamie snorted in laughter. “Weird-nosed?” she asked incredulously. “A lot more than half of the female specimen at school would slit your throat for that.”

“And I don’t get what they see in him. No guy with red hair and crooked big nose could be hot. Especially when the guy is such a jerk like him.”

“He’s only a jerk when it comes to competing with you, Lena.”

“Yeah, whatever— Hey, that green one looks good on you!”

“This one?” Jamie grimaced at the lime-green sweater she was holding in her left hand.

“Noooo!” I pointed at a deep green silk blouse on the hanger. “That one.”

Jamie picked it up from the hanger and held it to herself, facing the mirror. “And what would this one go with?”

“The dark skinny jeans! It’s perfect match.”

“The jeans? I don’t think so…it’d look better on your legs. Mine are too chubby.”

“Chubby? Chubby is Mel Sidney’s thing. She’s so cute I could shrink and shove her into my pocket. Anyway, those are toned, Jamie. Not fatty.”

She held it to herself reluctantly, a wistful look in her eyes. “I wish I were like you. You’re, like, the tallest Asian at our school. Like a model. Exotic model.”

“I think I’ve got Caucasian hereditary. It’d explain how my nose looks like. I mean, Asians are known to have flat noses, right?”
“Oh my God! I swear, Elena, if I didn’t know better I would say you have a fetish for noses…”

And the night faded into pillow fight and laughter, the guy in the alley all forgotten.

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