The Phoenix Girls, Book 3

Chapter 2-2

Is it a dream?

It didn’t feel like a dream, but it didn’t feel real either.

She was in a cave, small distant sounds echoing endlessly around her. Dripping water, the skittering of small claws on stone, a dislodged pebble. The light was low, but there was enough to see the girl standing a few feet away, facing her with the same curiosity. A face Penny knew well from her own mirror.

“Is this a dream?” Penny and her lookalike spoke at the same time, then smiled and laughed in unison. They took hesitant steps toward each other, paused.

“Who are you?” Penny reached a shaking hand toward the other. The doppelganger flinched back, then held her ground as Penny touched her cheek and ran a finger through the thick red hair falling over her shoulder. She was real enough, no phantom.

“Who do you think I am?” The girl relaxed visibly as Penny withdrew her hand, but continued to regard her with an intensity that made Penny want to squirm.

Penny bit back the first retort that came to mind, If I knew I wouldn’t have asked, and considered the question. She scrutinized the girl, a mirror image dressed in the same denim capris and tank top as herself, and Penny was again shocked by the changes she’d gone through in just a few months.

“Are you me?” As soon as the question was out, it seemed the obvious answer, and she decided it was a dream, or something very close to one.

“You are me,” Penny rephrased the question as a statement of fact, then nodded to reinforce it. “This is a dream.”

“If you say so.” Her doppelganger seemed almost indifferent. “So, is it my dream, or yours?”

“Mine!” Penny almost shouted. “If you are me, then this is my dream.”

“If you say so,” the girl repeated, and shrugged.

“What are we doing here?”

“How should I know?” Penny’s doppelganger asked, then vanished. Dimly, just another echo in the dark and empty place, the girl’s parting words found Penny’s ears.

“It’s your dream.”

* * * *

“Hey, wait!” Penny shouted, but she was already out of the dream. She stood in her pajamas, shouting at her own reflection in the Conjuring Glass, the large magic mirror she’d liberated from a murderous humanoid bird shortly after moving to her new home in Dogwood and which now hung on the door of her attic bedroom wardrobe.

She closed her eyes and clung to the last shreds of her dream, already fraying around the edges and well on its way to unraveling, and wondered what she’d been conjuring.