AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Blink and the hallucination will go away, Cameron. Shut my eyes tight and open them and she’s still there, all bright and shiny and smiling.
“Hullooooo,” she trills, waggling her fingers at me.
“Please,” I croak out. “I—I’m not ready.”
“Not ready for what?” She sits next to me on the bed and hooks the heels of her combat boots on the metal frame. She pulls a bag of candy from behind her breastplate and offers it to me. “ChocoYum?”
An involuntary laugh-squeak escapes me, and then I go right back to being freaked out. “You’re not real. I’m hallucinating.”
“Do I seem real to you right now?”
I nod.
“Well, there you go.” She gobbles down a handful of ChocoYums. “Oh my gosh, these are seriously amazing. So often there’s no truth in advertising. But these really are both choco and yum.” She catches me staring at her wings. “Go on. Touch them, if you want.”
“Huh-uh,” I say emphatically. If I don’t touch her, she doesn’t exist.
She scoots closer, singsongs, “You know you want to. …”
“Okay, could you not do that? Makes me feel dirty.”
She makes a show of zipping her lips.
“No offense, but this is just”—I swallow hard as my fingers move toward that broad expanse of wings—“just, um … sometimes my brain kinda throws a switch, see? And …” They’re the softest thing I’ve ever felt, velvety as a baby duck. “Shit!” I snap my hand away. “Oh God. Oh crap. Felt real. Oh wow.”
“‘Wow’ is a palindrome! The same word backward and forward. Isn’t that cool?”
I stare at her. “Who … who are you?”
The room grows brighter with her smile. “I’m Dulcie. Pleased to meet you.”
“My hallucination has a name.” I try to grasp at some semblance of sanity. “Right. You—you’ve been following me,” I say like some annoyed headmaster reprimanding a student. “First at my house. At Buddha Burger. In the school gym. You left me a feather.”
“And still you didn’t call. Men.” She points to the unopened pudding cup on my hospital tray. “Are you gonna eat that?”
“No,” I croak.
“Do you mind?”
I can only shake my head.
“Thanks. Oh, hey, watch this.” She puts the spoon on the end of her nose and slowly takes her hand away. It balances there for a second before dropping into her waiting palm. “Cool, right?”
“Yeah. Cool.” I’ve got a lump in my throat the size of Chet King’s manly hands. “So … are you just, like, visiting? Or is this … am I … ?”
“What?”
“Dead?”
Her eyes widen in surprise. “Oh yowza! No! Don’t be such a Goofy Gloomer.” Her smile fades fast. “But we’ve got a lot to talk about and we don’t have much time.”
“What do we have to talk about?”
“Your mission,” she says through a mouthful of chocolate pudding.
“My … mission.”
“Your mission. We need your help, Cameron.”
