Dreamwalkers: The Awakening

CHAPTER 4

"What am I going to do without you for a whole week?" I whine to Zoë as I sit lazily on her bed watching her pack a suitcase. She folds a tank top and stacks it on a pile of bathing suits. "I have my phone in my hand twenty-four-seven. Not like I'm ever really unreachable."

"Yeah, I'm sure you'll be super eager to video chat as you zip line over a volcano."

She giggles and a burst of excitement explodes out of her. "I can't believe I'm going to Hawaii. Best place my parents have ever had to travel to for work."

The thought of sitting on a white-sand beach, surrounded by palm trees, crystal clear water, and eighty degrees of sunshine makes me pea green with envy. "I'm high-key jealous. Take me with you."

She reaches out and rubs my cheek. "I'll bring you home a little tiki guy to remind you of the vacation you never had."

"How thoughtful."

With a chuckle, she returns to packing. Mrs. Carver knocks on Zoë's open bedroom door. "We're leaving for the airport in one hour." She looks down at Zoë's half packed suitcase. "Zoë! I've been telling you to pack for days. You do this every time we go out of town."

"I work best under pressure, mom. You know this."

Her mom scowls at her. "Don't expect me to buy you replacements for all the things you forget."

Zoë smirks and shrugs as her mom turns to leave. "She says that now, but she never really means it," Zoë says quietly.

"Oh, I mean it!" Mrs. Carver retorts as she walks into her bedroom down the hall.

Zoë grabs a basket full of clean laundry and plops it on the bed in front of me. "Make yourself useful," she offers with a wink.

As I fold t-shirts, she runs through her motherly checklist with me. "Don't forget to study for that history exam on Monday. And make sure you keep up with the reading for English. You don't need another Beowulf incident."

Little flashbacks of the horror that was me trying to convince myself I could manage the entire three thousand lines of Old English poetry two nights before my exam haunt me. "My brain was not built to comprehend stories that were written a thousand years ago."

"Well, lucky for you, Shakespeare is on the table now. His stories were only written four hundred years ago."

"You can text me the Cliff Notes from the beach," I tease. She tosses a shirt at my face.

"Fold faster. I have to grab my makeup." When she reappears, she closes the door to her bedroom offering us privacy. Envisioning the upcoming lecture on safety in dreamwalking, I sigh. Her voice is quiet as she asks me, "have you talked to your dad yet?"

"Not yet. Jonah and my mom will be out of the house later. I'll catch him then."

"I'd be lying if I said I wasn't worried about leaving you," she complains, cramming her makeup bag into the last available bit of space. "The fact that you aren't more worried is what concerns me most."

I sigh, knowing she's right and wondering why I'm not getting the sense of danger she is. "It concerns me too. Maybe it's my intuition telling me that it's not a big deal." Unwilling to let her convince me of lurking danger, I offer up a more lighthearted suggestion. "Maybe there's a new dreamwalker in our neighborhood and that's their way of reaching out to connect with us."

"I never thought of it that way. Your dad just has danger so ingrained in me. Maybe it's because he knows you don't listen and he trained me to be your bodyguard out there."

"Funny," I reply with an eye roll.

She leans her upper body on top of her overstuffed suitcase and tries unsuccessfully to close it. "Text me afterward and tell me what he says," she huffs as she struggles with the zipper. "I'll probably have my phone off, but if I turn it on and there's no message from you, I'm getting right back on the plane and coming home. And how will you feel when you ruin my vacation?"