Chapter 4-2
663 Words
Anne sat up, wild-eyed, desperate to make sure she was still out of the library. She could barely see, even when she blinked and rubbed her eyes. A blue glow, way too close to the horrifying dots on that TV screen, washed across her hands and arms. About the time her heart stopped pounding in her ears, she finally recognized the ceiling and shelves of her own bedroom.
Her face and her whole body were covered in sweat, so bad she could smell it. The sky was still dark outside. The clock beside her bed, the source of the glow, showed she had two more hours to sleep.
Sleep that might very well include more nightmares.
“Forget it,” she whispered, swinging her legs over the edge. “Not worth it.”
She dumped her pajamas in the hamper in the bathroom, thinking she’d probably need to do the same with her sheets. At eleven, she was pretty sure she was old enough to start doing her laundry herself, if nothing else to stop her mother from deciding to donate or throw away Anne’s clothes without warning.
Right now she had to get in the shower and get the stink of the dream off of her skin.
Anne turned the water up as hot as she could stand it, until steam was pouring over the top of the sliding shower doors. She stepped in, hissing when the spray hit her, but she didn’t turn the temperature down. She wished she could stand to turn it up a little higher, beyond the immediate reddening of her chest, arms, and belly.
Maybe enough scrubbing and soap with that scalding heat would get the reek of that library out of her pores.
After washing every inch she could reach and rinsing her pink washcloth until her fingers got wrinkly, Anne decided to go ahead and wash her hair. Might as well get ready to go to school, even if she had to try to sneak a nap during her afternoon classes.
She’d never had a nightmare quite like that one, and she’d had bad dreams as long as she could remember. It hadn’t felt like a dream at all, not really. Anne was sure if she pulled the clothes she’d been wearing in the dream out of her closet, they’d be covered in the same musty smell as that library. She decided to hold her breath and dump them into the hamper under her sheets just so she wouldn’t find out the truth.
Scrubbing her hair hard with a towel, hard enough that she knew she’d be combing out knots and tangles, didn’t quite drown out the low hum lingering in Anne’s ears. The same hum that awful book had made. She attacked her teeth just as roughly and with too much toothpaste, listening as hard as she could to the scratching of the bristles.
Anne started humming to herself when she walked back into her bedroom, and that finally replaced the sinister noise in her head. Or maybe her tuneless song only covered it up, but she didn’t care.
Her eyes went to the row of spiral-bound notebooks on the shelves above her desk. She often wrote down her strange or scary or disturbing dreams when she woke up, and the good ones she remembered sometimes too.
Evan had given her the idea not long ago, when they were talking about her Gemaw moving out. He’d said she could write them down and that might make her feel better. And if that didn’t work, she could take the notebook and tell her grandmother the next time they visited.
Anne was surprised at how often just writing it down helped, and she’d taken a bunch to read to Gemaw over the years as well.
She shook her head, humming a little louder without realizing it. She didn’t want to write this dream down. The captured words and images, black ink following the pale blue lines on the paper, would give an already too real dream even more weight and substance.
That felt a big step too close to making it come true.
- Writer
