To Live Again

Chapter One: Second Chance

Daniella felt herself falling and falling and falling through the darkness, waiting for the impact that would surely kill her.  She finally collided with her body and jerked awake in the bed with a gasp.  Her heart was beating heavily in her ears.  Her heart was beating.  She was breathing.  She was alive.  She peeled open her eyes and stared at a ceiling that was both familiar and wrong at the same time.  It was not the ceiling of the hospital room.   It was not even the ceiling of the apartment she shared with Duke.  This was the ceiling of her childhood bedroom in her sister’s house.  She turned her head slowly, looking around.  Everything looked exactly the way it used to, from the green carpet to the cream colored walls.  Green lace curtains hung over the window, and pale, early morning sun streamed into the window from the east.  Daniella sat up slowly, feeling dizzy and disoriented.  How had she gotten here?  Hadn’t Bev turned this room into a sewing room after she had moved out?

She reached for her cellphone on the stand, and hesitated before her fingers closed around it.  This wasn’t her latest iPhone.  It was an older android model, the one she’d had back in high school.  Daniella was absolutely sure she’d dropped that phone in the bottom of Lake Bomoseen when she’d gone boating with friends the summer after her senior year.  But there it was, sitting on her nightstand, exactly the way she had left it every night, with the same faded koala bear sticker on the back.  With a shaking hand she picked it up and flipped it over to look at the date. 

Not. Possible.  

She fumbled around with the password, trying to unlock the phone.  Her iPhone opened with a finger print.  But Bev had bought her this phone, and when she set it up, Bev had used the last four digits of her own phone number so that they would both remember it.  The screen opened, and Daniella checked the date again.  “My birthday,” she whispered.  “My eighteenth birthday.”  She shook her head in confusion.  She must be dreaming.  She yanked open the drawer to her nightstand and looked inside.  Everything was there, including the diary.  She distinctly remembered that diary, with a pretty etched horse on the front of it.  Every year for her birthday, she would start a new journal, and she would write out her goals for the year.  It was a cheesy tradition, but she’d been doing it since she was old enough to write.  And she knew that she had filled up this journal, and then packed it away with all her other remembrances.  But when she flipped open the journal, it had only one entry, the entry she’d written the day before her 18th birthday.

Goals

-Graduate High School

-Lose 50 pounds.

-Get a job and save money for college

-Go to college

-Kiss Duke Hardigan

Seeing Duke’s name written out in her pretty, tight cursive handwriting, made Daniella feel queasy.  “If I’d known then, what I know now…” she mumbled.  But when was now?  Was she dreaming? 

She pushed herself off the bed and padded over to the mirror that was screwed on the back of the bedroom door.  She inhaled sharply when she saw her own reflection.  She was looking at the 18 year old version of herself.  Her dark hair, her milky white skin, her own young, beautiful face.  Back then she’d thought herself so fat.  Like so many teenaged girls she’d been obsessed with body image, and had done some pretty heinous things to try and slim herself down.  “What was I thinking?” She said, turning in the mirror to look at her own profile.  “I look good.  But…why?”  Why was 24 year old Daniella staring at 18 year old Daniella in the mirror.  It had to be a dream.  She pinched herself hard enough to get a bruise, and yelped.

What was going on… it was like the last 6 years of her life had never happened.  But it wasn’t – she remembered everything.  She knew who would be elected president.  She knew about all the world events that had happened since she turned 18.  She knew about pandemics and toilet paper shortages. How could she have dreamed up six years of detailed history?  How could she remember everything?  At age 18 Duke had been no more than a wistful crush.  By now she knew him intimately.  She even knew about the birthmark on his right butt cheek.  And she knew what he’d done to her.

Daniella shivered as she stared hard at her reflection.  She remembered dying.  She remembered the shadow man who had whispered to her, “Don’t disappoint me.”  She’d thought she was hallucinating.  She remembered the darkness closing in around her, swallowing her up until she was falling into the black abyss.

And then, she woke up here.  

Had she just been given a second chance?