Chapter 73
“Right. I hope so.” There was no way for me to tell Lucy things were never going to be normal again, not for me anyhow. And I wondered if Elliott would actually show up at my school in the next few days. I seriously doubted it. He was probably just messing with me. But if he did, well, there would go any shot of anyone thinking Cassidy’s life was back to its previous mundane existence. “What’s wrong with Emma?” I was actually a little surprised I had a chance to ask that before Lucy launched into another soliloquy.
“Oh, uh, nothing,” she said, but I knew if I stayed quiet she’d tell me more. “She’s just, uh, being a little paranoid. A little more paranoid than usual.”
“What? Did her mashed potatoes and turkey touch each other on her plate at Christmas dinner?” I joked. I was trying to lighten the mood, but I was actually a little concerned myself.
“Ha, no,” Lucy said, giving me a polite laugh for my effort. “She seems to think… someone may be watching her.”
My breath caught in my throat, and for a moment, I felt like I couldn’t breathe. “What?” I asked, literally grabbing at the comforter on my bed like I was in the ocean and beginning to sink. “What do you mean?”
Lucy must’ve heard the panic in my voice because she tried to alter hers. “It’s not a big deal, Cass,” she assured me. “She’s just being a little… silly, I guess. I mean, it’s not like she’s freaking out. But she looks out the window a lot, and the other day when she was coming over, she had on a hoodie and sunglasses. I’ve never seen her wear anything like that before.”
“Me neither,” I admitted. “Although… it has been cold.” That explained the hoodie, maybe, but not the sunglasses. “And she says she thinks someone is watching her?”
“Yeah, a couple of times.”
I remembered how bizarre Jack had been acting the last time I saw him, not long before he died. He had been so afraid someone was spying on him. He looked terrible, like he couldn’t sleep. And then he got super sick and had to be hospitalized. Honestly, I wasn’t as surprised as I should’ve been when he died, which is really saying something since he was an eighteen-year-old athlete. “How does she look? Is she feeling okay?” The idea that I could lose someone else I love, could lose Em… I couldn’t even consider it.
“Oh, yeah. She looks fine. She’s not sick or anything. Just a little more neurotic than usual, I guess.”
It had to be serious for Lucy to use that word. Emma was always a little different. She has high-functioning autism for one. She’s super smart, too, which also makes it a little hard to relate to her at times, but that’s okay. Pretty much everyone knows that’s just Em, and Lucy and I love her like a sister regardless. I realized there wasn’t much I could do right then. Hopefully, at school the next day, I’d see for myself, and if Emma wasn’t acting anything like Jack had been, I could put my mind at ease.
“Well, I hope she’s okay,” was about all I could manage to say to Lucy.
“Yeah. I’m sure it’s just because so many odd things have been happening. I mean… Drew, and then Jack. Your sister dropping out of school. You know, it’s just a lot of change.”
I would’ve found it odd that Lucy ranked my sister dropping out of school as just as odd as two of her best friends dying, but I assumed that, even if she wasn’t fully aware of it, somewhere in the back of Lucy’s mind, she knew more than she could consciously process right now. She must know that Cadence’s new job had something to do with Drew and Jack. Of course, I honestly didn’t know either of those things for certain myself, except for the fact that Elliott hadn’t denied any of it. I took a deep breath and let it out, thinking I should just call it a night.
But Lucy wasn’t done. “I had a really weird dream last night,” she said slowly, as if she wasn’t sure she could trust me enough to tell me, or she wasn’t sure if she should even speak it aloud.
“What was it about?” I asked, trying to keep my voice light, like it wasn’t a big deal. Something told me it was.
I heard Lucy swallow, as if she was gulping down air, before she said, “I can’t even remember all of it, but I was outside, at a festival or party or something. It was kind of cold, but not like it is now, and the sky was really clear. It was full of stars. There was a big bonfire, and people were dancing. Everyone was really happy and having a good time, but they were dressed funny. Anyway, I was walking along, and I didn’t really know anyone, but then I saw your sister. She was standing off to the side with this strange group of famous people that had, like, nothing to do with each other, and then across from her, I saw Drew and Jack. But they weren’t their normal selves.” Her voice got quiet again, and I gave her a moment to decide what she wanted to say. “They, uh, were all pale and had long, sharp teeth.”
“You mean, like… vampires?” I asked, wondering if saying that word would trigger any memories for her.
“Yeah,” Lucy said. “Weird, huh?”
“Not really,” I replied, trying to keep my voice nonchalant. “I mean, it was just a dream.”
“Right.” She grew quiet again.
“Did anything else happen?”
“Yeah, your sister and her friends went running at them, and they started fighting. I woke up before I saw who won or anything. I was just standing there watching… and then screaming for them to stop. It was so weird. It seemed like I was actually there.”
I gave her a second before I agreed with her. “That is weird. But, hey, like you said, it was just a dream, right?”
“Right,” she said again. “Maybe I was just thinking about Jack and Drew dying so suddenly and mixed it up with some weird movie in my brain.”
“Well, you said my sister was with some famous people? Do you remember who?”
“That was another of the crazy parts,” she said, and I thought I heard her slump down, like she’d been standing and now she was sitting on her bed. “Those people didn’t go together at all.”
I laughed nervously, trying to make her feel a little better. “Who was it?”
“Uh, well, there was the coach’s wife on Friday Night Lights, the guy who plays Ross and Monica’s dad on Friends, Jamie Dornan, and that guy from White Collar. What’s his name? Matt something….”
I would’ve answered her if I could’ve breathed, but I was choking again. I reached for the bottle of water I kept by my bedside, but taking a drink had me sputtering, and if I hadn’t been unable to swallow before, I certainly was now.
“Cass? Are you okay?”
I started coughing and had to hold the phone away from my mouth so I didn’t burst her eardrum. It took me a long time to be able to get anything, air, water, whatever, down my throat, let alone formulate words. Lucy was threatening to come over and check on me or call an ambulance when I finally managed to say, “I’m fine. I just swallowed water wrong.”
“Yeah, drinking is hard,” she said sarcastically, and I was glad to hear at least that much hadn’t changed. “You okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“Anywho… it was just weird.”
