Chapter 8-1
1299 Words
Chapter 8
Anne covered her mouth with her hand, trying to stop what had to be her hundredth yawn this afternoon. Her watering eyes blurred the drawing of one of the blue-ridged mountains Evan constantly talked about after his visits to Virginia. The sharp colorful pencil lines morphed into a shimmering watercolor, then back.
The thick crust pizza the teachers had brought in for lunch sat heavily in her belly. Anne was afraid she’d start burping up pepperoni even worse than her smelly garlic breath any second now.
Evan sat next to her, his elbow occasionally brushing against hers. He hated drawing, and at thirteen he was two years older than everyone else in the class. Every time she glanced at him, he was scowling and chewing his lip.
Knowing he was only there because of her stirred up warmth in Anne’s chest.
No one else at school knew how often Evan and Gwen came to Anne’s house when their parents were fighting. Less than when they were all younger, sure, but more than he’d want anyone else to know.
Evan was the only person on earth who knew about her dreams, and the only one she could imagine ever telling. Talking to him helped somehow, forced most peoples’ faces to go back to normal.
Anne yawned again, shaking her head to try to wake herself up as the teacher started talking about distance and perspective. The freezing cold classroom raised chills on her bare arms and legs but didn’t help her fight off an intense need for a nap.
Evan grinned at her, his pale blue eyes merry, then went back to his labored drawing.
He was too nice to point out how this mid-summer art class had been Anne’s idea in the first place, but here she was falling asleep. He’d never do that, not when he knew how little she slept at night.
Anne’s eyes drifted closed, her fingers dragging a purple pencil through the middle of her pale green mountain lake. The teacher’s voice faded. She tried one last time to shake herself, to stop the dream paralysis from taking over. For a second, she was more upset about falling asleep in front of everyone than whatever the dream might turn out to be.
That feeling didn’t last out her next breath.
A woman sat in a bright yellow kitchen, her face buried in both hands. This didn’t look like the things Anne been seeing during the night: strangers starving and fighting and dying in lands she didn’t recognize. The woman and the house looked familiar, and she realized they felt familiar too.
Evan’s house, and Evan’s mother. Evan said she’d been home all week with awful headaches she got sometimes.
Mrs. Griffith looked up, and her face was all wrong. Her skin was pale and tight, like her whole body was clenched up. Like her whole body was tearing itself apart.
Anne tried to scream, no longer caring if everyone in the classroom heard her, but the sound never reached her throat.
She couldn’t watch this. She’d seen too many people die in too many different ways in her visions and nightmares. She knew the look.
Evan’s mom picked up her coffee cup and got to her feet. She grimaced and staggered, trying to catch herself against the counter. She fell hard, the cup shattering around her. She didn’t move anymore.
Anne was caught, frozen, unable to even try to scream again. The other deaths she’d seen play out in her mind had been gory and sharp and horrible, but none were even close to this.
She knew this woman.
Evan’s mom had always been kind to Anne, and Evan adored her. They were so much more alike than he was like his moody sister or his scary father. Now something awful had happened to Mrs. Griffith, and Anne couldn’t remember what was going to happen next.
Couldn’t remember? That didn’t make any sense, but it did feel right.
This didn’t seem like a nightmare anymore, far in the future, surreal and too vivid. This felt more like a memory, but Mrs. Griffith had seemed fine when they’d left Evan’s house that morning.
Was this happening right now?
The horrible image inside Anne’s mind got a thousand times worse when it split into three. In each one, Evan’s mom was on the floor, her black hair covering her face. Motion in all three at once made Anne’s head hurt.
She knew, somehow she knew she had to pay attention to everything.
Evan’s father Ed walked into the kitchen, dropped his black briefcase, and knelt beside his wife. He touched her throat right below her jaw, then sat cross-legged beside her. He started to cry, the first time Anne had ever seen him do that. Ed was much more likely to shout.
He sobbed, rocking and holding his sides. After what seemed like hours and hours, he slowly got up and walked out of the kitchen.
When he came back, Anne couldn’t quite make out what he had in his hand. Something black and metallic. He sat down again, with the thing in one hand and the other on his wife’s shoulder. He looked at her for a long time, then brushed her hair back from her face.
Her eyes, pale blue like Evan’s, wide and staring at nothing.
Mr. Griffith leaned down and kissed her. He put the thing in his mouth, and just as Anne realized what it was, a crashing boom jerked his whole body. She remembered that sound too well from too many nightmares. He slumped forward over his wife’s body, a dark red lake growing all around them.
The last thing Anne saw was Evan, walking into the room alone.
At the same time…
Evan found his mother. He shouted and fell sobbing to his knees beside her. Anne saw herself in this memory, walking into the kitchen, panting from running through the painful heat outside. When Evan turned toward her, his broken, terrified eyes made her want to disappear.
In that instant, seeing how her friend was falling to pieces, she understood why Mr. Griffith put the gun in his mouth.
At the same time…
The third memory was the worst, so bad that Anne tried to keep herself from seeing it at all. Evan got home after his father, but not so long after. He walked in to catch his dad getting the gun out of the hall closet beside the front door.
After staring at Evan for a long time, ignoring the questions, Ed Griffith’s face turned hard and empty. He hugged Evan, something else Anne had never seen him do, then put an arm around him as they walked toward the kitchen.
Anne tried to reach out somehow, to stop them, to get Evan’s attention, to make even one small thing change. In the end, at least she didn’t have to watch. She only saw the kitchen door swing closed. Evan screamed a second before the crashing boom. She heard a second shot.
It was all over.
In the same instant, Evan’s father got home alone. Evan got home alone. Evan walked in the front door and saw his father with the gun.
In the same instant, Evan’s dad slumped over his wife. Evan fell to his knees beside his mother. Two gunshots rang out.
They were all memories.
They were all true.
None of them had happened yet.
“Hey, wake up!”
Anne jumped, focusing on the room around her, on the voice of her friend.
Evan.
He still didn’t know, he didn’t know anything. His mother was dead, but that was the least of it.
He was going to go home and his father was going to be dead, too. He was going to go home and find his mom, lying cold and still. He was going to go home, and his father was going to kill him, then kill himself.
Anne couldn’t let any of those things happen. She couldn’t imagine how she could stop them.
Anything she did might make the worst memory come true.
- Writer
