Reaching Peace

Part 2: Dream Fever.

Forever. With each passing second I began to feel more and more trapped. I knew I was being stupid; I was dead, where was I going to go? Ava didn’t seem to notice that what she had said was driving me crazy, all she cared about was moving on to my next memory. 

I spent days avoiding looking to her. I alternated between sleeping, trying to sleep or pretending to sleep so that Ava wouldn’t talk to me. I spent my time trying to convince myself that if I waited long enough I would somehow wake up in a different room. I tried to convince myself that I would wake up in my room and that this was all just a bad dream.

Weeks passed in the room and hoping to return to my life was all I could do to keep myself going. Sometimes I would wake up and Ava would be gone. Only then, when I was completely alone, could I allow myself to cry. I would curl up and weep, forcing my body to stay awake because I knew Ava would be there when I next woke up. Gradually I came to terms with my death. Even though I didn’t want to, I couldn’t seem to help replaying that night over and over in my head. The way that Craig had subtly led me almost half a mile in the wrong direction and the way he pulled the knife seemed practised. It was as though he had rehearsed the whole thing a hundred times. As hard as I tried, I could not find a reason that he was so intent on hurting me. What had I done to deserve that? I settled on the answer that I knew my mom would have given.

Some people are just evil.  

Being trapped in the room was worse than any of the theories about what happens after you die. The pristine white walls seemed to be sucking the life out of me. But every time I thought that I had to remind myself that there was no life left to suck. My moods changed by the day; every time I thought about looking at the train wreck that had been my life I felt a little worse. It took just a few more weeks for me to reach rock bottom. I became a shell of my former self, with no reason to carry on with the pointless memory watching but no way to escape. 

I went thirteen days not making a sound before the dreams started. They were faint at first, just quiet whispers of voices that I recognised, but they built up to the most vivid nightmares I had ever experienced. The worst one was the running. I ran and ran through the Las Vegas backstreets, but all I could make out was that I was running towards the freeway. The freeway screamed safety to me; the roaring traffic that meant constant supervision from strangers. It took a while to become clear why I was running, but once the dream was in full swing it became painfully obvious. 

I was fifteen and at the time I had a boyfriend. His name was Austin Piper. He was from a neighbourhood that was worlds apart from my own, where you couldn’t hear screaming through the walls and sirens from cop cars didn’t make up the soundtrack of his life. 

“Wait, Ree!” he called, he was much bigger than me, so I had the advantage when it came to climbing fences and dumpsters. I just laughed the little girl’s giggle that I had been cursed with and carried on running. Austin was training for his school’s track team, and I would help out from time to time by racing him from The Strip to the freeway. It was a good six miles and he never once won the race.

 I knew the streets of Vegas like the back of my hand; they were my home away from home. After a couple of miles, I gave in to Austin’s pleading and we took a break on top of one of the warehouses. “So, how am I doing?” Austin smiled. I leaned into his side and rested my head on his shoulder. “Well…. I’d say you’ve improved in the last few weeks. You got at least three minutes off your time today!” I praised him. 

“I might even try out for hurdles, I could probably handle it with all the dumpster jumping you’ve been putting me through!” he laughed. Being with Austin was easy, effortless. We talked and laughed for hours without a care in the world, but it started to get dark.