After Dusk

Chapter Two

When I wake up, I'm back in my bed. I lay still for about twenty breaths, too afraid to move. Cautiously, I look to the left, at my alarm clock. Noon. I stare up at the ceiling, scared to hope.

Was it all a dream? Did I only imagine the woman and the man? Oh, please let it have been a dream. I lay in bed for another eternity, trying to gather the courage to get up and find out if it was real or if my prayers had been answered.

After a long pep talk to myself, I sit up slowly, stretching. The mirror on the wall shows me my reflection.

My heart drops. My hope shatters.

The mirror shows me the same stranger I'd seen earlier. My hair is still so, so dark and my eyes are still a shining, pale blue. Tears leak from those foreign eyes.

Pulling my knees to my chest, I continue to stare at the stranger in the mirror. Maybe if I stare at it long enough, it'll go away. I glance over to a picture framed on the wall beside the mirror. In it, I smile next to my best friend, Becky, and my boyfriend, Josh. In the picture, my straight light brown hair swirls around my tanned face. My hazel eyes stare up at me from within a scrawny, unwoman-like frame. How could I change so much over night?

A soft knock on my bedroom door pulls me from my stupor.

"Laila? Honey, are you awake?" my mother's breezy voice asks.

Quickly, I wipe the tears from my eyes.

"Yeah," I say, hating how my voice shakes.

In the silence I can nearly see her worried expression.

"Get dressed, okay honey? We have company waiting to see you," she says slowly as if trying not to upset me.

Company? Mom and dad never mentioned anything about guests coming over.

"Okay," I say softly, sliding off of my bed.

After a moment's hesitation and a soft sigh, I hear her soft retreating footsteps.

I throw on a pair of jeans and a blue t-shirt before heading to my bathroom. I brush my teeth swiftly, immediately feeling a bit better. I brush my long, dark hair before tying it into a bun. There, I think hesitantly. When it's all tied up like that it doesn't look so different. My eyes, however, are an entirely different problem. I slip on my glasses that I've only ever used for reading. They make my eyesight blurry, another change in my anatomy, and don't really hide the vivid blue of my eyes but they make me look almost like myself again, so I keep them on.

As I walk down the stairs, I hear voices from the living room. When I walk into the room, all conversation stops. And if that didn't make me uneasy, the fact that the family therapist -if you could even call her that- is sitting on the couch across from my parents certainly did.

"Laila, you remember Mrs. Clark, don't you?" Dad says, gesturing to the therapist.

I nod slowly. Mom hired her when grandma died, "to help with our loss" as she'd put it. I never liked her. She was truly terrible at her job. The only thing she ever accomplished was making everyone feel worse and gathering a bunch of gossip about the family. Why is she here now of all days?

She must have seen the question in my expression because she says, " your parents have told me that you saw somebody in your kitchen earlier today. Somebody that your parents couldn't see?"

I freeze.

Crap.

They must have called her right after I passed out. Mrs. Clark probably rushed right over, hoping to get cash from the worried parents.