"I swear, if I'm dying tonight because of you, I'm gonna haunt your ass so hard, Harrington!"
"Oh yeah?"
"Yeah! I'm gonna go full Poltergeist and shit!"
"Then bring it, Graveswood."
"Challenge accepted."
***
In which after years of suppressing their...
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Chapter Six: The Brother
(The Weirdo On Maple Street, Pt. 2)
***
When Rowan woke up, it isn't with a scream in her throat.
Instead, she's greeted by the sun's soft rays, the thunderstorm breaking up overnight, the quiet where the screech of an alarm should be, as buying a new one had become a less-pressing issue in light of recent events. The muffled sounds of her family getting ready, the smell of breakfast cooking and music playing softly. Rowan frowned, rubbing her eyes, as if expecting it to break and find herself in the grips of a nightmare.
In fact, when she tries to think of her sleep, she hadn't had a single nightmare; no broken children or screaming girls with shaved heads or slick-skinned monsters with a mouth that opened up like a demented flower filled with rows upon rows of teeth had tormented her sleep last night.
She tried not to think about it, how it unnerved her that her sleep had been, surprisingly, peaceful.
Still, she crawled out of bed and shambled into the living space. She's greeted by the sight of Alistair having breakfast and her aunt making it while music played from the record player—this time, it's a Queen album—but it's not the same sight; it's more subdued, the tension and fear and worry still coating them like a miasma, heavy and unbearable, but at the same time sticking to them because they're not willing to shrug it off and talk.
Rowan decided to follow example and just slid into her seat, waiting as her aunt gave her breakfast. Aco tried a smile, but Rowan can still see the shadows of her aunt's breakdown lingering in the corners of her eyes, the creases in her forehead and along her mouth, the way she is less put together than usual.
"Enjoy, kid," she murmured, ruffling Rowan's sleep-mussed hair and making it more unruly. Rowan only nodded and dug in, letting the food fuel her and wake her up.
The family ate in silence; Alistair's the first to finish. He stood up and washed his plate before going to his room, not looking at Aco, and Rowan guessed he's still frustrated about the grounding. He does give her a look, though, a look conveying all the words he wanted to say. About the girl he and his friends found in the woods. The girl who supposedly had powers. The girl they refused to let their aunt know the existence of.
The girl who, if Alistair was right, was the same girl Rowan had been seeing in her dreams for the past four years, who she'd been convinced wasn't real but somehow is.
A moment later, Rowan is also standing up and taking care of her dishes before heading into her room to get ready for school. She does so semi-automatically, like someone else has taken control of her body. When she's done, she noticed she has some time to kill, so she put the Led Zeppelin tape Eddie let her borrow into her Walkman, slides the headphones on and pressed play, letting the lyrics and booming music drown out everything inside her.
