skinblade

Start from the beginning and read Dream #1

I thought I might throw up.

Now that she had asked about the dreams, I didn’t know what to answer. I was about to grab Delilah and get us the hell out of there before I really said something I shouldn’t, but then Cindy tossed me the most beautiful smile. Her eyes lit up and she began to laugh.

“Don’t worry,” Cindy said laughing, “you’re secret’s safe with me, Mike. Besides,” she stopped laughing, looked deep into my eyes, “I already knew.”

“What do you mean, you already knew? How could you?”

“I don’t know,” she paused for a second. “Sometimes… sometimes, I can just feel things from people. Don’t you remember how we met?”

I thought back to that day. It was a couple of weeks before mama died. I was in the school library during lunch writing poetry in a small notebook. I was sitting by myself at a round table, next to non-fiction, facing away from the library entrance.

I remember I was writing a poem about mama, about the cancer, about how she’d never leave us, even if she died, when suddenly, I felt a warm hand on my shoulder. I closed my eyes. The warmth in the hand seemed to vibrate throughout my body, and I was frozen in place as if the warmth had somehow penetrated my heart. The warmth left me slowly, and when I finally opened my eyes, there she was, Cindy, sitting beside me.

“It was my first day of school,” Cindy began telling the story. “My parents had just gotten a divorce, and my mom decided to move here, to El Centro and try to get a new start. And I remember a numbness in my chest. I was walking around like a zombie for half the day, until we were let out for lunch. I walked around campus, trying to pin point the source of the numbness, when I found you. You were

hunched over your notebook, concentrating so hard, and it was that concentration that was making me feel numb. As soon as I touched you, I felt it. I felt the numbness go away, and it was replaced by a calm crashing of waves in my soul.”

“Did it ever happen to you before,” Delilah asked.

“A few times, yes. But that was the first time I had ever felt anything so strongly, and for some reason, I knew exactly what it was.”

“And what exactly do you think it was?” I tried to ask her without sounding like I didn’t believe her.

“Magic,” she said.

I glanced up at her alarm clock. It was getting close to supper time.

“We gotta go.”

I helped Delilah up to her feet, then Cindy. We walked out of her bedroom, I said good-bye to Cindy’s mom, and Cindy walked us outside. She closed the door behind her, and waited for me to turn around. I did. Slowly. And when I was facing her again she reached out to me, took me in her arms, and her face started coming close to mine.

I freaked out. I didn’t know exactly what to do, so I went in for a full hug and missed her lips. All this time, and I had never kissed her. I could tell, by the look in her eyes when I pulled away, that she was disappointed. Not disappointed in me necessarily, just disappointed in general. That I wasn’t ready, I suppose.

It was starting to get dark. The sky took on an eerie red that I had never seen before. We began to run home because we knew the consequences of being late.

Continue reading: Dream #7 - Danny's Legend