CHAPTER 6

Around nine, I couldn’t find Jamie anywhere, so I went out to get some air.

The night air hit me immediately—not exactly fresh, but a great change from the smell of booze and smoke. I saw a swinging bench, and went to sit there. Leaning my back on the rest, I looked up at the sky. It was star-less. Not much to see. Just a whole shade of deep blue.

The sound of door opening made me turn my head. A guy, drunk, puked out his guts at a plant. I wrinkled my nose. Another guy followed him out, but he walked towards me.

“Want a drink?” he asked me.

I straightened, ready to bolt in case he meant violence. “No, thanks.”

“Too bad,” he said.

I was just about to relax when he turned away. And then he spilled his drink all over me.

I jerked away, trying to wipe off the alcohol. “Hey!”

The guy sneered, and threw a lit up cigarette at me. I ducked, but not fast enough. The small fire caught the alcohol, and started from my dress to my skin.

I’m going to burn alive.

My breath came out in gasps. The guy had gone away. I screamed, panicked. I needed water. Water. The fire licked my skin, and I screamed at the pain.

Cold water was splashed on me, putting out the fire immediately. I whimpered, clutching my body. God. It hurt.

“You’re okay,” I heard a voice said. “You’re okay. See? Just your dress. You’re not burned.”

It took me a moment to realize that my savior was Armand. “I’m—I’m burned,” I gasped.

“No. Look.”

I looked then, at my skin. It looked fine, all smooth and pale creamy yellow. “But it hurt!” And it did. I was sure it wasn’t psychosomatic. It really hurt, like I’d been burned.

“I know.” Armand took my hands, trying to get my attention. “Hey, listen. If anyone asks you, just say that your dress has been burned, but you got lucky. Okay?”

“What’s happening here? That guy did it on purpose! And the fire—”

“It doesn’t matter. No one is going to believe you.”

“But you saw what happened!” Something dawned on me. “And your warning just now, about me being careful—”

“Not now.” Armand helped me get up. He took his can of beer to me. “Here. Drink this for the pain. It’ll fade soon. I’ll help you find Jamie and Nick.”

It was all too much to take in. I didn’t argue.

Jamie was livid when she saw me.

“What happened to you?” She whirled on Armand. “What did you do to her?”

“Me?”

“It got burned,” I said. My tongue itched to say the truth, but I held it back.

“How? Are you okay?” Jamie looked for any injuries on me. “Did you get burned, too?”

“No,” I lied. Even now, as the pain starting to fade, I still felt the licks of fire on my skin.

Jamie cursed. “God, we can’t go home with you like this. Dad will be so mad.”

I shrugged. “It’s just the middle part of the dress.” My stomach was left bare now. Smooth skin and all. “I can wear a jacket.”

“It was a new dress,” Jamie said with a wince.

“I’m sorry.”

“How did you say it happened again?”

“I didn’t. Well, this guy tripped a drink on me, and—”

“And my cigarette got in her way,” Armand continued. “It was my fault. I’m sorry. I’ll pay for the damage.”

I looked at him warily, trying to figure out why he would lie for me.

Jamie gave him no less skeptical look. “You smoke?”

“You can’t tell anyone at school. I’ll get suspended.”

“You don’t smoke.”

“I do.”

“You don’t.”

“He does,” Nick said.

We all looked at him, having forgotten that he had been there in the first place. Jamie gave Nick an incredulous look, and Armand took that moment to shrug off his jacket.

“Here,” he said to me. “You can wear this.”

I stared at it.

He moved forward to slip it around me, and as he did, he leaned down to my ear and warned quietly, “Don’t tell anyone.” His voice was so low, that I was sure the words were just meant for my ear.

Then he closed the jacket zipper up and stepped back with a smile. “There. It’s done.” He turned to Jamie. “Send me the bill. I suppose you may want to go home now.” He glanced at his watch. “Don’t you have a curfew to catch?”

It was two a.m. when I sat up from my bed and gave up going to sleep.

I opened the sketchbook in my hand, trying to see beyond what my mind allowed me to. Could they be memories? I remembered how the fire felt just now. How my skin got away smooth and clean, but still felt like it was burning.

My dreams didn’t make sense.

I was a logical, rational person. I believed only things that had proofs. Or so I thought. The events that had been happening to me—they didn’t seem random. A guy trying to stab me. Another guy trying to burn me alive.

They were connected to each other. And, somehow, to my dreams, and Duane. I just knew that. I was truly a hypocrite, I thought, for believing something that even my mind had told me wasn’t real.

Careful not to wake Jamie, I practically tip-toed to the door and turned the doorknob. I winced at the loud sound of creaking door and closed it behind me. I slipped into one of the cotton slippers outside our room and went down the stairs quietly.

My heart thundered in my chest. I must be crazy, but I didn’t know how else to convince myself that I wasn’t crazy. Which was totally ironic. The kitchen door was locked, but I knew where the keys were kept, so I went to the counter, opened the upper drawer with a master key, and took the key-set. I tried to keep the keys from clinking too much.

Once I was inside the kitchen, I pulled up a small chair for myself and sat. A part of me was trying to talk the other part of me out of this. My eyes darted to the stove.

I shook my head at my thought. There was a box of matches and candles at the upper cabinet. I lit up a candle and place it in front of me. The small fire flickered at my breath. I raise my hand…

My nerves got to me. This was suicidal. How could I even be thinking of this?

I held my breath, ready to blow the candle and go back upstairs. But the lingering curiosity got the best of me. I released my breath, watching the light flickered, and went to the dishwashers. I got a bowl and filled it with tap water. I placed the bowl beside the candle.

Alright, I told myself. You can do this. Just touch the candle, if you get burned for real, just throw your whole hand inside the bowl. Easy peasy.

I took a deep breath, closed my eyes before I lost my guts, and put my index finger on the candle.

Searing pain burned me. My eyes flew open. Ow, ow, ow—

My blurry eyes focused. It stung, but the skin was unharmed. I bit my cheeks. Maybe it didn’t really touch the fire. After all, my eyes were closed.

This time, with a great wince, I opened my eyes wide as I dipped my finger to the fire.

Pain. Pain. Pain. The tip of my index finger was completely dipped in the fire now. Gritting my teeth, I slid it until the fire licked my whole finger.

I drew back my finger. The skin remained intact, as if the fire hadn’t even touched me, but I still felt the lingering pain. I cooled my finger inside the bowl as my mind went wild. This was…impossible. Thoughts jumbled in my head. I pinched myself a few times, even tried to slap myself and opened my eyes very, very wide like Jim Carrey did in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but I didn’t wake up—because it wasn’t a dream.

I cleared everything up and locked the kitchen door, put the keys back, and went upstairs. Careful with the door, I slipped inside the room and went under my covers, knees drawn up to my chest.

Restless, I gave up thinking and decided that I wouldn’t sit in the a.m. like an insomniac who was halfway into losing her mind.

I opened the laptop Jamie and I shared. In the search engine, my fingers started to type: dreams and memories. The results showed up. They varied from songs to psychological researches. A phrase caught my eyes, and I searched it.

Dissociative  amnesia is one of a group of conditions called dissociative disordes, mental illnesses that involve disruptions or breakdowns of memory, consciousness, awareness, identity, and/or perception.

Which was exactly what I’d been diagnosed with. My fingers hovered over my keyboard in hesitation as I was about to type. Biting my lip, I typed the words: dreams and past lives.

I held my breath as my eyes skimmed over the results.

The words reincarnation, soul, and hypnotherapy kept repeated in the webpages. In one of them, I read a story about how a woman claimed to have been a man who left his family in woods to survive alone, and found that they had been killed by beasts. In the other I found a story about a guy who claimed to have once been a soldier who got shot on his side—that was why he still felt the pain until now.

But that was all they were, right? Stories. I deleted the search history and closed the laptop, my mind reeling. That night when I went to sleep again, I didn’t dream.

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