Robbin

3. The Next Morning

The day after...

It was four hours later when she came to.

Terra's eyes fluttered open. She blinked. Was that a chime in the background? It was like a doorbell... A grandfather clock ringing the hour.

No... it was faster... more annoying. Like a ring tone.

In fact, it was more annoying than that, because it kept going. Why was it still ringing?

That was when Terra realized.

"Oh!" she exclaimed as she rolled groggily from her bed to her feet. She shuffled to the dresser where her alarm clock buzzed it's warning, telling her through its blaring speakers that it was six o' clock: time to get ready for school. She slammed her palm to the off button, holding on to the shelf of her dresser to keep herself steady in her haze of awakening.

Memories started to come back. Terra closed her eyes. Her mind called to recollection the images of long black figures, and the face of a stranger who seemed very real to her. She shook her head, staring wide eyed at her stable and familiar new room. The box she had opened that previous night was still dumped in the middle of her clean carpeted floor, papers and photos spilling from its small cardboard depths. Her bed was still made as it had been before she had collapsed atop it with Gran's letter. Gran's letter was still there as well, in fact, where she had set it to fall asleep...

But her eyes seemed to skip over all of that and focus on the one idiosyncrasy. There was dirt on her bed. Dirt. Where she had been lying.

In the atmosphere of near quiet that had settled over the room since Terra had turned off the alarm clock, Terra now wandered from her dresser to the bed where she had been lying. The faint gray morning outside cast small sheets of light across the carpet from her two uncovered bedroom windows, though shadows still overtook most of the space.

And there it was. Terra hovered above the light yellow sheets. Dirt.

She shook her head. Impossible. It was a dream.

She looked down at the necklace still chained around her neck. She pinched the ring hanging from the chain between her fingers. It was cold, as it should have been.

But the last time she remembered feeling it, it was... hot, like a furnace.

Terra shook her head again. It was a dream. As she thought this, tried to convince herself of this very rare possibility, she noticed something else: her clothes, the clothes she had fallen asleep in. They were filthy. It was with this final realization that Terra decided to bolt for the bathroom.

She paced to the upstairs bathroom across the hall only to find it already occupied by none other than Sarah. Not bothering to even pause over her own misdirection, Terra readily turned from that bathroom to another one even further down the hall. It was in their parents' room. Since their parents weren't home, Terra figured they wouldn't mind.

She barged through the double doors of the master bedroom and past the wide space to the bathroom entrance. She closed the door hastily behind her and paused only then to take a breath.

The person she saw staring back at her in the mirror looked extremely haggard: hair in a knot of dirt mixed with blonde curls; face red with confusion though dirty as well; shirt and jeans lathered even moreso than her hair with dirt.

Terra leaned her elbows on the spotless white counter top of the master bathroom and buried her head in her hands. As she did so, bending over, she felt a slight tinge of pain in her left hip. No.