Brightest Kind of Darkness Read online

  I’ve lived with this odd gift for nine years now, which hasn’t always been easy. There’ve been times when I’ve woken in tears from a friend’s betrayal or been crushed by a slam from a boy I thought was the cutest guy in the entire middle school. “Nara likes me? She’s a dog.” I’d overheard him tell his friend outside the boys’ bathroom.

  Growing up, I often choose to avoid the unpleasant stuff I know is coming. Avoiding situations doesn’t stop them from happening, but the “out of sight/out of mind” concept mostly works for me. Every once in a while, though, I’ve challenged a dream.

  When I was eight, I’d dreamed that a boy I really liked had given another girl in our class a heart-shaped box of chocolates. All he’d given me was a lousy punch-out Valentine card. As soon as I’d woken that morning, I’d desperately rubbed my Magic Crystal Ball (a birthday present from Aunt Sage, who was clueless about my gift).

  “Will he really give her that heart box of candy?” I’d asked the shiny ball. Digital words spelled out across the surface in reply, “Not sure, try again”. I immediately rubbed it again and got “Concentrate and ask once more”. One more vigorous scrub gave me, “Try again later”. So frustrating! At school that day, instead of going to the bathroom to avoid witnessing the hurtful scene, I’d stayed and hoped. And had my heart ripped apart all over again.

  My dreams had never been wrong.

  Not once.

  Which was why today was so out of the norm. I didn’t usually change the course of things for people around me. I’d tried once when I was seven, not long after my dreams began. In my dream, a girl named Sadie had fallen from the monkey bars and broken her arm. The next day, as Sadie sprinted off toward the monkey bars, I caught up with her and asked her to do chalk drawings on the asphalt. In my dream, I didn’t think much of the over-the-fence “homerun” baseball that had bounced across the asphalt and rolled to a stop in the grass. I’d been too busy watching the teachers hover over Sadie after she’d fallen. But that day, instead of bouncing innocuously, the baseball had clipped Sadie in the head.

  Sadie didn’t come to school the next day. Instead, she was in the hospital with a blood clot on her brain. I blamed myself for not paying attention to the details. If I had, Sadie wouldn’t have had to suffer through brain surgery. The hardest part was wanting to apologize to her but not being able to.

  After that experience, any “adaptations” I’d made had been strictly stuff that affected me. And even those weren’t often. I’d learned the hard way that altering an event could affect how the rest of my day was supposed to unfold. Knowing what was coming—even if I didn’t like it—was better than not knowing what would happen if I changed something. Avoidance worked for me. But last night was the first time a dream had left me with only one choice.

  My dream started out just like any other day—full of screeching tires and normal “I’m running right up until the bell” annoyances…

  It’s three minutes ‘til second bell, and I’m in such a hurry that I rush into the school bathroom and accidentally pick the stall with the lock that never works. Of course I’d pulled on the jeans with the stupid zipper tab that sometimes gets turned sideways. I always have to fiddle with it in order to unzip it. Not now. I grind my teeth and flick at the dang metal tab, hoping to get it to cooperate.

  After thirty frustrating seconds of flicking, I vow to cut the “jeans of torture” up the moment I get home.

  Someone shuts the stall door next to mine. “I’m at school. Where else would I be?”

  Still attacking my zipper, I roll my eyes and wonder, Why do people talk on their cells while in the bathroom? Eww.

  “Yeah, no one’s around. What’s up? You sound weird. Wha—What’d you say?”

  I pause my zipper attack.

  “You’re serious? Why are you doing this?” she hisses.

  A deeper voice comes through the phone, louder now, but I can’t make out the guy’s words.

  “I thought you were blowing off steam last night, bullshitting with Jay and Kurt.” Her voice lowers. “Just cause you’re pissed at the principal isn’t a reason to rig a frakkin’ bomb in the school.”

  God, no! A bomb? My urgent need to go evaporates and my hands start to tremble. I grip my waistband tight as the guy’s voice rumbles, sounding harsher. I strain to hear what he says, but my heart is thudding too loud.

  The girl is Lila Jenkins. I recognize her “frakkin” comment. She’s a Science Fiction fangirl to the point she even bleached her hair blonde and cut it short like her favorite TV show character. Lila also dates David Donaldson, who was recently expelled for beating up a sophomore because the guy had the nerve to take “his” parking space.

  “I won’t rat you out. Don’t you threaten me, asshole. Everybody in this school’s a jerkoff anyway. I’m going out to my car until the fireworks are over. That is far enough away, isn’t it?”

  A couple seconds later, she flips the phone closed and mumbles, “Idiot” with a heavy sigh.

  I clench my jaw and wait for her to discover my presence. By the time she bypasses my stall, I’m so anxious my teeth are hurting. As soon as the bathroom door closes behind her, I count to ten and then burst out of my stall in a full run…only to jerk awake at four this morning.

  I didn’t bother flipping a coin. Instead, I quickly got dressed, then went hunting for a nearly extinct species—a payphone.

  Chapter Three

  “Don’t forget to make that eye doctor appointment, Nara.” Miranda wagged her finger toward me as she and Sophia walked down the hall. Sophia snickered, briefly pausing in front of me to cover one eye and squint through the other one, pretending to read an eye chart. “I see…a G, an O, an A, an L and an S.”

  “Trying to get your own stand-up TV spot, Soph?” I called after my teammates as they continued on their way, “Yesterday was a fluke,” I finished as I opened my locker.

  Sophia snorted, wrinkling her freckled nose. Miranda cast a captain-like “it’d better be” look, then turned away. Her dark, choppy hair flipped out in all directions—thanks to gobs of pomade. It also never moved an inch. I knew this for a fact, because her hair always looked the exact same after practice as it did before. Made me wonder how she got her fingers through the concrete mass to shampoo it.

  Sifting through the stack of books in my locker, I jerked out texts for upcoming classes. My teammates had teased me mercilessly yesterday for missing so many balls during practice, but Miranda and Sophia had been the worst. “But Nara, you’re so perrrrfect. You never miss,” they hissed.

  Sophia had especially enjoyed mocking me over and over. Once that girl sensed weakness, she circled like a vulture, ready to peck you beyond death. Neither of them would let up anytime soon. At least not until I proved I was back to my old “never let a ball find its way to the back of the net” self, which I was pretty sure Sophia secretly hated as much as Miranda secretly resented.

  I tried to refocus on the positive. It was good to get back to my routine. Even though I’d woken feeling drained (an annoying downside of dreaming one’s entire next day), my dream had also left me feeling tense and upset. People crowded around chitchatting, throwing paper balls and yelling down the hall to each other, but my thoughts were elsewhere. The stricken look on my mom’s face in my dream kept replaying over and over in my mind. I hadn’t seen emotion like that since I was five.

  In my dream, the phone rings around seven in the evening. I pause stirring through a bowl of trail mix for random peanuts and briefly glance at the caller ID. It’s a D.C. area code. We don’t know anyone in Washington, so I ignore it.

  “Inara.” Mom fusses and walks from the living room into the kitchen. Shaking her head at my laziness, she scoops up the handset. “Hello?”

  Her friendly smile fades and the look on her face gives away the caller’s identity as she grabs the counter.

  No way. The kitchen stool scrapes as I jump up, every nerve on high alert. What does he want? “Mom?”

  “Why
are you calling, Jonathan?”

  My dad, the lowlife who’d walked out on us when I was five, is suddenly calling after eleven years of complete silence? I’m fire and ice, furious and cool. My only memory of him is a hazy collage of images: strong arms hugging me close, a big hand palming my whole head and smiling green eyes framed by dark eyebrows.

  My mom’s light blue eyes tear up as she glances my way. She presses the phone harder to her ear. “Inara’s here. She’s fine.” Her voice quavers slightly and she shakes her head, running trembling fingers through her blonde chin-length hair. “She’s perfectly safe.”

  Hurt flits across her face and my chest tightens. He didn’t ask about her. He asked about me. My hands begin to shake. I worry Mom will slip back into the near catatonic state she’d wallowed in after he’d left us—the rapid weight loss, endless insomnia and twice-weekly visits to her therapist. She didn’t stop wearing her wedding ring until I was twelve.

  I’d always thought that if something had happened to him, like if he’d been killed in a car accident, that would’ve been easier for my mom to deal with.

  Mom doesn’t demand to know why he left us. Instead, she calmly says, “Please don’t call here again.” But the moment she hangs up, she bursts into deep, heart-wrenching sobs. I want to hug her, but I know she’ll pull away. I refuse to ask what my dad wanted. I don’t care. All I could do was helplessly stare in frozen fury.

  The moment I opened my eyes this morning, sadness had kicked in. After my dad left, Mom pulled away…until the early memories of her kissing me on the forehead, singing while brushing my hair and snuggling close to read me a story had faded like rock-skipping ripples dissipating in a pond. Mom was as smooth as glass now. She never hugged me. Never showed any emotion, yet I knew she loved me. I thought Mom was impervious, indestructible even, but now I knew that wasn’t true. Dad’s desertion had left us suspended. On Pause. And all it took was one call to rewind us eleven years.

  Tired as usual, I reached for the quarter on my nightstand and instantly thought of my Gran. Mom didn’t visit her mother’s older sister. She claimed spending time with Corda was a sad reminder of her own mother, who’d died in a car accident with my grandfather when I was a baby. Instead, Mom sent me a few times a year as the family envoy. It was during one of my visits when I was thirteen that I’d complained about my gift.

  “There just aren’t ever any surprises, Gran.”

  Gran’s wiry eyebrows shot up under puffy gray hair. “What about when you do something different than what happens in your dreams?” she asked as she shoved a couple of rainbow colored gummy worms into a potted plant.

  “I think it’s going into sugar shock,” I said, nodding to the plant’s droopy leaves. She’d ignored me and added another worm. Sighing, I answered her question. “It’s not the same. Then I know I’m going against my dream. Anyway, you know I rarely do that, which means…there are never any unknowns.”

  “Ha, you think so?” Gran set the bag of gummy worms down, then pulled something out of the pocket of her light blue cardigan sweater. She always wore a cardigan, no matter the time of the year. Her deep green eyes glistened as she held the quarter up. “Sugar high money”, she said with glee. The retirement home vending machines only took quarters. Shuffling over to her desk, she slowly lowered her petite frame into a straight-backed chair. She made a show of flipping the coin, then set it on her desk where she covered it with a piece of paper.

  I gestured toward it as she rubbed the quarter’s face on the paper with a pencil. “I knew you were going to do that.”

  “Smarty Pants.” Gran made a face and hunched around her rubbing. When she was done, she quickly tucked the folded paper in her cardigan pocket.

  “I knew you were going to do that too.”

  “So, what does it say?” Gran gave me a hoity-toity look (at least that’s what she’d call it) “Heads or tails?”

  I shrugged. “You didn’t tell me in my dream.”

  Satisfaction flitted across her thin, deeply-lined face. “And I won’t tell until the next time I see you. That’s one thing you don’t know about today, Inara Collins.”

  When Gran was lucid, her insight was razor sharp. As I sat in the morning light, worrying that my Dad would make a random, utterly useless call after all these years, I rubbed the quarter between my fingers. Taking a breath, I thumbed it into the air. Heads meant YES and Tails meant NO.

  Slapping the coin between my palms, I slid it from my hand onto my nightstand and covered it with paper from the 3x3 paper cube next to my hand-painted jewelry box. After I’d made my “blind” pencil rubbing, I brushed the quarter into my nightstand drawer, then quickly folded the paper into fourths.

  While sliding the folded paper into its slot in my backpack, I realized I didn’t have one from yesterday, since I’d rushed off to find a payphone. Now, I desperately wanted to pull the new rubbing out and look at it, but I held off. The question I’d asked of the coin was always the same, Should I act on something I’d dreamed about?

  As I grew older I’d given Gran’s coin-toss a dual purpose. It became my way of asking for an unbiased opinion, even though I never looked at the answer until the following morning. I still wanted at least one tiny thing about my day to be “unknown”.

  Glancing at the hammered metal wastebasket beside my nightstand, I worried my lip with my teeth. The basket was full of past paper rubbings; every single one was Tails. I hadn’t acted on my dreams in so long, it had made sense that they were all Tails. Like the coin agreed with me. But was it possible I’d somehow subconsciously controlled the outcome? If I’d taken the time yesterday morning to flip the quarter, would the rubbing have been Heads?

  An image of my sobbing mom reappeared in my mind. I glared at my backpack. “If Tails is on that paper, I’ll eat it,” I snarled before grabbing the cordless phone and punching the Talk button.

  Silence. Had someone left the phone off the hook? “Hello?” I hung up, but before I turned the phone back on, I closed my eyes and tried to visualize the DC phone number from my dream. As all ten digits quickly flashed through my mind, I wrote the phone number on the paper cube. Turning the phone back on, I waited for the dial tone.

  “Don’t,” an eerie whisper threaded through the crackling across the line.

  A cold, heavy chill prickled my skin and the tiny hairs around my face began to cling to my skin as if drawn by a magnet. Brushing them away, I immediately punched the End button.

  Three seconds passed before I got up the nerve to turn it back on. Oppressiveness still tugged at me, but at least a normal dial tone rang in my ear. I didn’t like this newfound guilt that had me imagining weird voices and heavy, cold chills.

  My conscience could take a hike. I wasn’t letting my mom go through that. Better to have an emotionally distant parent than an emotionally wrecked one. Been there, done that. Squaring my shoulders, I dialed the phone company.

  As I pretended to be my mom, unease clung to me like a nauseating perfume. I kept glancing over my shoulder, half-expecting Mom to catch me in the act when I told the operator we were tired of receiving telemarketing calls and I wanted to put a block on all unsolicited calls. After I gave a list of approved phone numbers, I hung up and felt much better. The guilt, worry…whatever it was, had completely disappeared.

  At least I’d prevented one tragedy today, even if I couldn’t stop the other, considering it had already happened. This afternoon, after fourth period, Lainey would rush up to share the latest gossip. In my dream and even now, the news left my heart heavy with regret and deserved guilt.

  Wham. A heavy thump jerked me out of my musings just as something banged my locker door. As the door swung wildly toward me, I reached up to stop it at the same time a hand landed on mine.

  “Sorry.” Apologetic blue eyes sought mine as the loner guy’s hand fell away. “My elbow caught your door.”

  I eyed the pile of books he’d just dumped onto his locker’s metal floor. “Why’d you move lockers
?”

  “My old locker’s been confiscated.”

  “Confiscated?”

  His longish-bangs partially covered his eyes with his nod. “My locker had the bomb in it.”

  Oh. My. God. “No way! That must’ve freaked you out.”

  Pushing his shoe against the tumble of books, he shut his locker door, then tucked a book and notepad under his arm. “No biggie.”

  “You could’ve…died.” I was babbling, but I couldn’t help thinking, I saved this guy’s life yesterday.

  “It’s all good. I’m Ethan Harris. You’re Nara, right? I think we’re in History and Trig together.”

  I was so thrown off by the fact this entire conversation with him was: one, happening at all, and two, new to me, that all I could think to say was, “Yes. Nara.”

  His eyebrow shot up. “Nara of the no last name?”

  He must think I’m a total moron. “Oh, it’s Collins. Inara Collins.”

  “In-ara. I’ve never heard that name before.”

  The way my name rolled off his tongue, that deep baritone enunciating each syllable, made my stomach flutter and my heart thump. “My parents intentionally picked a rare name.” How lame was that? Why couldn’t I have come up with some great philosophical reason?

  I missed what he said because the first bell rang. The noise in the hall grew louder and everyone scattered like ants. When a football player zoomed by, bumping Ethan from behind, I realized Ethan’s shoulders were almost as wide as the other guy’s.

  Ethan didn’t spare him a glance. Instead, he suddenly zoned as if he were seeing something else instead of me. As he rubbed his left forearm, I could tell he was miles from the locker hall.

  “Ethan?”

  He blinked, but his gaze remained hyper-focused.

  I touched his arm. “Are you okay?”