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Rei
Ithink she wants to stay the night, but there’s the issue of where she would stay, and I don’t know if I want to have that conversation. I offer to drive her home. She tells me that she needs to pick her car up, but I tell her we’ll pick her up first thing in the morning, and then we can drive her to get her vehicle.
She agrees pretty quickly. I think it’s because it guarantees she’s going to the exorcism tomorrow and she seems to be looking forward to that. She’s not very talkative as I pull into the parking lot.
Then she turns to look at me, her brown eyes wide. “Thank you,” she says. “For standing up for me and asking me to go tomorrow. I really appreciate it.”
“Of course. You need to feel like you’re part of this,” I tell her as I park the car right in front of her building. “It would be cruel not to allow you in when you probably have a million questions.”
She swallows, and I watch her pretty throat work as she throws her head back on the headrest. Her eyes look darker right now, and with only the sliver of light coming from outside, she looks like a younger version of herself. Her breathing has quickened a little bit. Then she turns to look at me, her eyes narrowing. “Something happened when you guys came into town,” she says.
“Yes, I know,” I say. “Something fun.”
She laughs, but there’s no humor in her voice. “No, not that. That too. But something happened to, I don’t know, my judgment,” she says, rubbing her temple as if she wants to show me the inside of her head.
“Oh?”
“After the thing with Tom happened, I went to the crisis center,” she says, her eyes still closed. “I needed to talk to someone, anyone, to get an opinion from a person who wasn’t in this world and figure out if I was losing my mind.”
I don’t say anything. I just wait for her to continue. Her eyes shoot open and she flashes me a smile.
“Are you a figment of my imagination, Rei?” she asks, reaching out and stroking the outline of my jaw. “Because you feel real. It would be a shame if you weren’t.”
I tilt my head to take her finger in my mouth, biting down softly on her. It makes her yelp, and I open my mouth to let her go. She laughs. “What was that for?” she asks.
“It was so that you know I’m real,” I tell her. “Did it work?”
She shakes her head, a smile still on her face. “No, it just hurt,” she says. “I’m pretty sure dreams can hurt, just like real life.”
“What do you mean?” I ask her.
She waves me off. “It’s stupid,” she says. “I guess it’s just been my brain trying to process all of this, but ever since the exorcism, I’ve been having these dreams, and they seem so realistic.”
“What kind of dreams?” I ask, inching closer to her. She’s dropped her voice a little, as if this is a secret she doesn’t want to admit to.
She laughs, shaking her head. “Like I said, it sounds so silly,” she says. “I think it’s like sleep paralysis or something. I don’t know. I wake up, I’m in the same room I went to sleep in, and when my eyes open, it’s different from the way it was before.”
“Right…”
“Sometimes the room looks like it’s been abandoned for decades, and sometimes it looks like there are vines and plants growing all over the walls,” she says, so quietly I have to strain to hear her. “Sometimes, when my eyes open, I feel like I’m submerged under water. It’s so weird. I never know how it’s going to be, but it’s always the room I fell asleep in, and it feels like I’m pinned to the bed.”
I resist the urge to ask her how it’s affecting her day-to-day life, choosing to listen instead. I wonder how much she’s going to disclose. This seems like it’s difficult for her.
“And there’s a guy there,” she says, cocking her head and closing her eyes. “He’s a…I can’t tell how old he is, but I know that I know him. Sometimes he talks to me. Sometimes he doesn’t. It feels…”
“What?” I ask her when she trails off.
She shakes her head. “This is embarrassing, but sexual,” she says. “Like he’s in my dreams because we set a date to have sex.”
“Do you?”
She laughs a little bitterly. “No,” she says. “It never gets that fair. I always feel like I’m gasping for breath at the end of the dreams.”
I nod. “Okay,” I say. “So that…that, and the precognition, they only started happening after your exorcism?”
“As far as I know,” she says, then exhales through her mouth. “My mind felt perfectly sound before all this. To be completely honest with you, I always had a hard time empathizing with my mom, especially when…”
She trails off again, and I put my hand on hers, wrapping my fingers around hers. If she doesn’t want to talk, she doesn’t have to. But she looks at me and her expression softens. “When my mom started to lose her mind,” she says. “She would wake up in the middle of the night shrieking. It was so loud, I was worried the neighbors were going to hear us, and we lived out in the country, so they weren’t close to our house.”
