A Pocket Full of Posies (Book 2)

Chapter Eight (Part 2)

I find myself a table in the corner of the nearly empty room, and think harder than I've ever thought before. I think back to starting this dysfunctional road trip, the Trackers appearing, the party we had the first night at uni, moving from Sheffield and starting uni, living alone in a cramped flat for a year out of the pure principle of finally being able to do whatever the hell I wanted.

I take the train of thought back to when I was at secondary school, when I did exceptionally better than anyone thought I would in my GCSEs, and the time I got suspended when I was thirteen for getting into a fight with Andrew Mahon after he made fun of me because my foster mum was in her early seventies, and my first day at the school when I made Annabel check every room before I stepped into it to analyse the people in my classes.

I go back to primary school, when I broke my wrist after jumping off a tree and thinking the grass underneath would soften the blow, telling everyone that my sister was in the class too except she's older than all of us, and I'm so focused that it's the most vivid I've ever remembered any of it, and as I go further and further back and start creeping towards my early years of primary school, I feel like I'm going to remember. It's going to happen. The memories are going to keep spilling out, and I'm going to remember everything from day one.

Then I reach a cold, hard stop.

I feel embarrassed for ever entertaining the possibility.

I'm halfway through my second drink and feeling slightly buzzed when someone props a glass of water opposite me on the plastic table. I lift my head to see Ava sitting down in the seat at the other end of the table. Great.

"Whoa, hi," she says as if I'm the one who crept up on her. "Can't sleep?"

"Something like that," I mutter. "Don't worry, I'm not getting drunk or anything."

I briefly consider the water she's brought might be for me, but as I entertain the thought, Ava takes a sip from it. She opens her mouth and flashes her perfectly white teeth to speak, but I get in there before she can.

"Fancy flexing your aura reading muscles?"

We make base in her and Carmen's room. It's the biggest of the three cabins we have, and I need space for any melodramatic passing out I decide to do. Carmen is fast asleep. Ava and I sit opposite each other on the carpet at the end of the girls' bed, our legs crossed, and I let her work her magic. I still feel like an idiot when I participate in this stuff, but after a few minutes of having my eyes closed and trying to empty my mind, I begin falling.

I see an all too familiar scene. It's the accident. I figure it's the moments leading up to what happened in my last vision because I see my mother's corpse for the first time. She's hunched over, her back against the car, and there's a man scurrying towards me as I sit crying in the middle of the road. Annabel and my dad are still in the same place. The man swoops down and grabs me as a bolt of darkness flies in our direction, and we dart into the forest. From there, it's nothing new. I still don't recognise the man's face.

I don't pass out when I return to reality, but only just. I can't focus my vision, and my head is spinning. I almost growl in frustration. That's not good enough. I need a new memory. I ask Ava to do it again. She's hesitant, but agrees so long as I give it five minutes to regain myself. We try again, and it works a little faster this time. But it's still nothing new.

I pass out for around twenty seconds after this vision, but manage to convince Ava to do it again. I promise her it's the last try. This time, the process is almost instantaneous.What I see is the same night, but much earlier. When nobody is dead.

I can hear the patter of light rain on a car roof, Dad is talking in a rushed voice but the sound is muffled, and I can only assume we're speeding down the road we're due to crash on. I'm sitting on what I guess is someone's lap because my head is pressed into a woman's chest. If this whole memory is just me being dumb, deaf and blind then I'm going to be really pissed off.