Escaping Fate

Escaping Fate Chapter 2

Chapter Two

 Gasping, I sit up in bed and draw a thin blanket up to my shaking body. The dream had come again. For the past two nights I have dreamed of the strange girl. Each night the dream begins again, adding a little more each time. Every night reveals more of the helpless child’s story. Child, I think with a shake of my head, she looks like she’s the same age as me. At fifteen, I have never experienced anything as horrible as what the poor girl faces in my dreams.

The night the first dream came, I woke with my heart racing. I had seen the girl drug from her house, bound, and carried away from her family. Her screams echoed in my mind as I sat in bed, willing my speeding pulse to calm down. I passed the first dream off as a nightmare, just another reaction to stress. When the dream continued the next night, the real fear started to seep in.

The only thing that remains constant in the dreams is the immense terror I wake with every night. I am gripped with the girl’s awful fear. The haunting look of desperate horror in the young girl’s face pulls at my soul, begging me for rescue. I watch with pity and anger, frustrated that I can do nothing to ease her fear.

As I wake tonight, I am so fearful that I can’t force myself to close my eyes again. I fear slipping back into the dream and having to feel such desperate pain once again. Lying in my bed, I watch the curtains sway in the breeze, seeking something familiar and innocent. Slowly, my mind and body come back to my own time. The haunting faces disappear, letting me escape into a welcome and dreamless sleep. Resting in the stillness of my own mind, I swim in the blackness until awakened by the familiar warmth of the sun.

As dawn’s orange shadows fall across the unfamiliar floor, I slowly open my eyes and blink away the last traces of the dream. The beige carpet and neutral toned walls immediately make me grimace. I am not yet used to waking up in a room I don’t recognize as my own. Nearly a week ago, I moved from my former life of popularity in Manhattan, to a painfully, mind-numbingly boring little town in rural Maine, hours away from anything.

I love city life. The constant noise and activity of living on an island filled with one and a half million people is invigorating. Every day holds the promise of something new for me, but for my parents, every day holds new dangers. My parents made the decision to move from our stylish Manhattan apartment to escape the violence and crime, as well as to be closer to my aging grandfather.

Hours from Manhattan, Grainer is the absolute opposite of what a town should be. With a population of less than fifteen hundred people, Grainer has fewer stores in the entire town than Manhattan holds in a single block. I hate everything about this place. The first few days have been miserable, but ever since the dreams started I have become increasingly convinced that the move was even more of a terrible choice than I first realized and I long to go back.

Holding my misery close to my heart, I crawl out of bed and pick my way between unopened boxes on my way to the bathroom. I tug a pair of denim shorts and an off white linen peasant top from my still-packed suitcase as I stumble along. The rest of the house is slowly being put away, but my room looks the same as it did when the boxes and bags had been first unloaded a week ago. It’s a worthless attempt at protest.

The bathroom floor is surprisingly neat. I didn’t leave it like that last night. I sigh, knowing my mom must have snuck in after I fell asleep and cleaned up the piles of dirty clothes. My mom is desperately trying to make the transition to my new home town as painless as possible. I feel a small measure of guilt at my obstinate behavior, but not enough to give in.

I made my opinion of the move very clear to my parents from the start. In the end, their fears outweighed my objections. The apartment was packed up within a month of the decision, and one by one the boxes and furniture were carried down to the waiting moving van. I sat in the room that would no longer be my own and cried. The worst part of moving is being alone. I left all of my friends in Manhattan. My only ally, my brother David, stayed behind, ready to start college in the fall. Now, I am alone, alone in my own home.