December 24th [COMPLETED]

13. Paradise

The dream came every night. Without fail, when George closed her eyes, there it was, waiting for her. The locations in the dream changed and shifted and what she looked like and what age she was varied. But at the core of it, the dream was the same.

She was standing at the edge of something. That was another part of the dream that changed. Sometimes she was standing on the edge of the front steps leading into her apartment building in New York about to step out onto the sidewalk. Sometimes she was on the edge of a large stage in some stadium somewhere. The worst was when she was on the edge of the cliffs outside her mom's house in Malibu, looking down at the beach below, her toes mere inches from the edge.

And then, the voice. The same voice, every time, crying out one word, every time. Every night George heard Felix calling to her just as she was about to fall. Every night he called out 'Georgie!' and always he was a second too late. She was already falling.

And then George was standing on the edge of her balcony looking over the bustling streets of the village below her when Felix's voice called out to her from the apartment behind her. Again he was too late. She was falling, falling, about to crash when-

George woke up with a jolt. The first thing she heard as she regained consciousness was the captain speaking through the intercom to let the passengers know that they would now be descending into Albany's airport. George felt someone's eyes on her and glanced to her right. Sydney was staring at her with that concerned look she had been wearing recently. George turned to her window instead to watch as the plane landed in upstate New York.

There was a big black car waiting for them. This wasn't unusual. What was unusual was the large hulk of a man in sunglasses that came with the car. George glanced first at Sydney on her left and then Jamie on her right to make sure they were seeing him too.

"Sydney, is he-"

Jamie's question was cut off by Sydney's short, informative reply.

"No."

He was not the driver Sydney had hired, then.

Sydney was the first of them to approach, leaving the trolley of big black traveling cases with Jamie. Silent words were exchanged and then Sydney gestured for them to approach. Jamie shoved her shoulder into the back of the trolley to get it moving. George had to add her weight to it to get it to shift. Sydney spared them both thrown out shoulders by grabbing the handle with one hand and leading it to the awaiting car.

They left the airport with the luggage securely piled up in the back, the car headed for the hills, it looked like. The further they drove in stony silence, the farther apart the towns became, the narrower the highway got, the higher the piles of snow along the side of the road grew.

Mini-malls and homes bordering the highway soon gave out to long stretches of evergreens that cut the drivers off from any sign of outside civilization. The mountains that had seemed so far away from the airport drew closer and closer. And then the highway itself was no longer there.

After a long, quiet forty-five minute drive, their driver pulled onto a dirt road spotted with snow and sent the car bumpy over rough terrain, the road winding in and out of trees until it came to a large opening.

"George, look."

Jamie had to point out the sign to George otherwise she would have missed it entirely. There, on the side of the road, stood a sign worn and faded with age. The balloons, however, along with the large paper sign looked new. The sign read, in faded green paint, "Paradise Summer Camp". The large paper sign taped to the bottom of the sign read "Welcome George and Co!". The colored balloons tied to each signpost were a nice touch as they stood out against the field of blindingly white snow behind them.