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Luke
Iwas running through green hills on packed earth that formed a circular track. Up and down, up and down, and Jake was there in one of the valleys, lying with Hailey and JJ on a blanket. They called to me with faraway voices: Yes, go, yes, go.
Suddenly, Jake yelled and I could hear him better. “They’re picking us off from the northwest hill.”
Which one is the northwest hill?I shouted.
A gun sounded right next to my ear.
I opened my eyes.
I was lying on Cassie’s couch.
Still dark. I reached behind me to the table next to the couch, feeling around the ashtray and roach clips and guitar picks and diabetic-candy wrappers for the edge of the lamp, working toward the lamp cord.
I needed distraction. I needed to slow my heartbeat down.
Cassie had stacked her magazine subscriptions next to me on the floor. SPIN, featuring a girl with buckteeth and braids—read that one; Rolling Stone from September, August, July, and June—read those. I knew more about the evolution of David Bowie’s career than I’d cared to.
I clutched the couch cushions to pull myself up to sit, swinging my gimp leg around. I’d been here about a week now, and every day I’d try to get into the chair on my own. Mostly I could do it.
I rolled my chair in front of my legs, and locked the wheels. The scars winked at me. They looked like bad bruises that would never heal, with dark holes where the pins went in. I grasped the back of the chair and pushed with my good leg, up, up, up, and for a second it seemed like I could swing the momentum of my hips over to the target.
Then the slightest twist of my ankle on the floor and the pain came streaming back. And just like that I felt the bullets again. The metal spikes stabbing, stabbing, stabbing.
I was on the floor, rolling. Wetness on my cheeks. Stabbing, stabbing, up through the bottom of my foot and from the sides, my bones were made of pain. A gunshot sounded near my ear.
It’s not real.
Footsteps.
Cassie knelt and bent over me, her hair on my face, smelling like sleep. “Did you fall out of bed?”
“No,” I said, and I wanted to explain exactly what happened, but the stabbing dominated my thoughts. The red polka dots on the dust. A pair of boots. I pulled them toward me.
No.
Open your eyes.
“One, two, three,” she whispered, and I was sitting upright on the floor in the pile of old magazines.
Her eyes were half open, her tank top thrown on backward and inside out, a strap falling off her shoulder. “Can you get back on the couch from here?”
“No,” I told her, avoiding her eyes.
She put her hands underneath my armpits, the skin of her chest in my face. I turned my face away, blood rushing to my head.
I propped my hands on the edge of the couch, ready to push.
“Were you having a bad dream?” she asked.
“No.”
If I told her what I saw, she might think it worse than that, but it wasn’t. It was just a bad dream that happened to come when I was half awake, half asleep, sometimes all awake, mostly all asleep.
“Yeah,” she muttered. “Right. One, two, three.”
When I was back on the musty cushions, Cassie straightened, gave me a weak smile, and sat on the floor.
