Siren

Chapter One: A Perfectly Normal Birthday, Don't Ask About It

I sat in class, completely incapable of paying attention. All my mind would focus on was trying to decipher the dream I'd had last night.

It had started like a normal dream, or I guess as normal as any dream could get. It was some vague recreation of the school day I'd had, with some normal dream weirdness sprinkled in: a bee flying around my head on the bus in the morning, disappearing every time I tried to swat it away, a bottomless moat surrounding the school building, my teacher giving us a skyscraper stack of homework papers. The scary gym teacher from freshman year, and plenty of the usual frights. But then it got weirder.

Suddenly everything in the classroom I sat in had a different feel to it; the scene before me became less dream-hazy, more focused, like I was looking at it all wide awake. The background sounds became clearer and fuller, and I could feel every disturbance in the air around me. It made all the hairs on my neck and arms prick up.

Suddenly, everyone else was gone but two people: Josiah Vengar, the biggest jerk in the twelfth grade, and a woman at the front of the room who was now standing where my teacher had just been. She pierced me with a sharp, avian-like stare.

"Camryn," she said.

I wanted to ask something along the lines of who are you and what's going on? but my voice wasn't working for some reason, as it so often was in my dreams. When I didn't reply, Josiah rolled his eyes. What was his problem?

The woman gave him a look, then turned back to me. "It's almost time."

....okay?

I raised an eyebrow at her. She did the same back at me, grinning a bit.

"You're confused."

"Obviously," but it hadn't been me that had voiced my thoughts. It had been Josiah. The woman gave him that look again.

"I'm sorry we can't explain right now. But we will. Until then, stay wary. And please, please, please, stay home on your eighteenth birthday. Just trust us."

Then the dream faded to black, and I woke up immediately after.

The 'stay home on your eighteenth birthday part' seemed like it must've spawned from my constant thinking about my birthday this week. I had been hoping my dad would let me stay home that day anyway; maybe my dream was a premonition, or maybe just my hopes rising. But those hopes had been squished this morning when I stepped onto the bus.

I tried not to think about the fact that Josiah had been in my dream (and what that might've implied about my subconscious thoughts about him) and instead thought about the way the whole experience had felt: too vivid, too sensory, too....real. Realer than real. It had freaked me out so much that I had woken up sweating, and started sweating again just thinking about it.

"You good there, girl?"

I looked up to see Andrea Walker turned around in her desk in front of me, her elbow resting on the edge of mine. I must've been sweating more than I'd realized. I wiped my forehead and cheek. Oh, I was sweating a lot, wasn't I?

"You look like a vampire, and you're sweating buckets. And honey, it's not a good look."

"Oh, yeah....just forgot to do the homework." It wasn't a lie, either, so technically I had every reason to look that nervous.

Andrea shook her head. "Cam, you can't keep doing this. You wrote it down yesterday, didn't you?"

I bit my lip, "....yeah, of course I did."