C. Crawford Writing's Forum

It turned out the tri-fold poster really was perfect for our crime-board. It had plenty of space to hold our limited information, plus I’d be able to fold it and tuck it away somewhere when we weren’t using it. I snapped a photo of the page from Emery’s notebook with my phone, then sent it to my printer, and we taped it right in the center of the board. Around it went notes about my dreams—the ones of Emery at the water, which were mostly the same dream again and again, aside from her sometimes quoting Poe and sometimes not; and the two dreams I’d had about Chloe—the one at ProScoop with her talking to Devin and a hawk flying around her, and the one of the lizard-thing stealing her wallet from her backpack—along with a quickly jotted note about my suspicion that the few pages that had been torn out of Emery’s notebook might have had relevant information we were missing.  We also added a printed picture of Chloe and one of Emery, hand-sketched drawings of ProScoop and the beach where Emery had last been seen, and a list of the theories the cheerleader-hawks had given us: That Chloe may have been taken because she resembled Emery. That Chloe may have been taken as a way of targeting me. That Emery might still be alive.  Just taping that one to the board sent a tremor through my chest. We connected the relevant theories to each of the photos with taped-on strands of blue yarn from my old arts-and-crafts bin. Collin stepped back, evaluating our work. “You’re right, it’s not much to go on, but I like the yarn. It feels official.” I studied the board. “We missed something.” I grabbed a piece of paper and scribbled out another theory, then tacked it to the board with a strand leading to Emery—not an accident. I turned to Collin. “If any of what the cheerleaders had said was true, Chloe’s disappearance was either connected to Emery’s, or they were both connected to me, but either way, that means even if Emery did drown, if she isn’t still alive—then she didn’t just drown. It was part of something bigger. It couldn’t have been an accident. Right?”  I desperately hoped Emery was still alive, but even the cheerleaders hadn’t been willing to commit to that theory. Part of me leaned into the possibility that she’d been forced into the water that night, that there might be a reason for her death even if it meant she really was gone, while the other part wanted to run away screaming.   Collin’s eyes landed on mine. “Maybe. Or maybe these cheerleaders don’t know what they’re talking about.”  I thought for a second. “They knew about the gossamer web quote, though, Collin. And my dreams. And Emery’s notebook page. It doesn’t make sense for them to guess all that.”  He nodded. “Okay… but I saw three cheerleaders turn into hawks and fly away today, Aubrey. I’m not exactly banking on what makes sense right now.”  I stared at him. “How are you taking all of this so well?” I felt like I was on the brink of completely losing my mind, and he was just… Collin. He shrugged. “I watched a lot of Buffy with my mom when I was younger.”  I waited for the smirk, but he was serious.  A laugh escaped me. “You are a strange duck, Collin.” Somehow, he’d lifted my mood again, even in the middle of all this. Now the smirk came. “I prefer the term lone wolf, but I’ll take it,” he said, then turned back toward the trifold. “We can’t show this to pretty much anyone, Aubrey. You realize that, right? Your parents will think you’ve gone nuts, and outside of them and Lockley, we don’t know who else we can trust.”  He wasn’t wrong about my parents—I’d already come to that same conclusion. I couldn’t show them any of this until I had incontrovertible proof that it was real. Plus, if there was a chance Emery was alive out there somewhere, and my parents did somehow believe me… I couldn’t get their hopes up, only to crush them again. I looked at Collin. “Are you suggesting we should tell Lockley?”  He shook his head. “Not unless we have to. She’s not exactly a vault of secrets.”  But as I looked back over our trifold of scanty info, I realized suddenly, she was.  Lockley was exactly a vault of one very specific type of secrets: Emery’s.  “Ohhh.” The word seeped out as the realization hit me. “I need to talk to Lockley. Now.”  Collin glanced back at me. “That’ll be kind of difficult, since she’s on a field trip today.”  Right. I sighed. “I guess we have some time to kill, then.” That crawling-out-of-my-skin feeling was coming back. I hoped I could make it through the wait without losing my mind. Collin turned to face me. “You haven’t touched the nachos, but how do you feel about hot chocolate? I make it homemade.”  I looked at him, surprised. “That sounds great.”  Collin texted Lockley to ask her to come to my house when she got home from the field trip, then he got permission from my parents to use the kitchen, and left briefly to go home and get his homemade hot chocolate ingredients. As soon as Collin left, I folded up our trifold and tucked it under my bed.  Just in time, too, because my mom poked her head in. “You okay?”  I sighed. “Yeah. It’s just… a lot.”  My mom came in and sat down on my bed. “I know it is, honey. Is there anything I can do?”  She didn’t know the half of it, but I still appreciated her compassion.  I sat down by her and gave her a hug. “I just want to find Chloe.” And I desperately wanted to find Emery, too, if she was still out there—but I couldn’t say that. Mom pulled me tight. “I know. I promise, when I hear something from Mary, I’ll let you know. I won’t keep you in the dark.” It could be bad news, when news came. We both knew that too well. But knowing my parents wouldn’t hide it from me gave me a measure of peace. Hard or not, I wanted the truth.  I hugged my mom tighter. “Thanks.”   A few minutes later, Collin returned and started bumping around in the kitchen downstairs.  Mom leaned away to look at me. “You know, I think that boy likes you.”  I jerked back. “What?”  “He’s making you homemade hot chocolate, Aubrey. You think this is something he does for his guy friends at school?”  I didn’t think Collin had any guy friends at school—or any friends at all, yet—but that was beside the point.  “He’s Lockley’s brother,” I said. “He’s just being nice.”  Mom gave me a knowing smile. “If you say so. But remember to keep this door open, in case you think about kissing him. Your dad and I can hear you talking, you know. If it goes quiet, we’ll be checking.”  I stared at her. “Ew, Mom.”  Then my heart skipped a beat. “Wait, do you mean you were listening to our whole conversation?”  She smoothed my hair. “We can’t hear words from down there, just the murmur—whatever you needed to get off your chest, we wanted you to have space. We’re glad you have a friend here for you.” She eyed me. “But I’ll be listening for that silence.”  I gaped at her. “Again—ew.”  She laughed. “I’m going to go make sure he’s not destroying my kitchen.”  She headed downstairs. By the time Collin returned to my room with two steaming cups of hot chocolate, my mom’s comment had gotten to my head. Although I knew she was dead wrong about Collin’s interest in me, I couldn’t help analyzing every little thing about our interactions, even the way Collin looked at me as he handed me my mug.  “Careful, it’s still kinda hot,” he said. His eyes lingered on mine—but that didn’t mean anything. People look at people. I was overthinking. “Thanks,” I said, quickly taking the hot mug. I crossed the room and set the mug on my desk, then reconsidered and took a tentative sip not to seem rude. My mouth exploded with heat—it really was hot—but then the flavor hit me through the pain. “This is good,” I said, looking up at him in surprise.  “I added some secret ingredients. There’s nothing scary in there, though, unless you care about calories.” He smiled. Those dimples again. “You don’t seem like someone who cares about calories.” He stopped. “Not that I’m insinuating you’re—I mean—I didn’t mean that like it sounded. I just meant—” He was beet-red by the time he stopped trying to fix his sentence. “Nevermind.”  I could’ve taken his bumbling statement as an insult, but he looked appropriately mortified, and honestly, I didn’t usually pay much attention to calories because I only ate sweets here and there, and I was fine with how I looked even if it wasn’t catwalk-worthy. “You really do make good hot chocolate,” I said instead as I set my mug back down, and he relaxed. I sort of wished I’d pretended to be offended. It would’ve been amusing to watch him squirm. He gave me a tentative smile. “Thanks.” He set his mug down on the desk near mine. “Want to pull the trifold back out?” I considered it, but I didn’t know when my parents might come back to check in… which also meant we had to be careful about conversation.  I looked up at him. “Actually, do you mind if we take our hot chocolates to the backyard?”  *** The next episode is coming right up! Check my blog for the official posting schedule.  Want to reread a previous episode? Click here to be taken to the main Season 1 forum menu, where you can see all available episodes!

Aubrey Lance, S.S. (Supernatural Sleuth) -- Season 1, Episode 11: Nachos & Supernatural Messages I’d planned to spend time alone while I sorted through my thoughts, but when Collin dropped me off, he offered to stay… and I decided it actually might help to talk through things with someone who already knew what was going on. Even if the someone was Collin.  My parents looked surprised when we walked in, but when I explained I’d abandoned the attempt to do school before even stepping inside the building, they both came over and gave me a hug. I was suddenly wrapped in the familiar combination of Dad’s woodsy cologne and Mom’s citrus perfume. “Understandable, kiddo,” Dad said, pressing a kiss to my head. “We’ll call the school and let them know you won’t be there today. Mom and I were about to make a mid-morning snack. Want anything?”  I shook my head. “Not right now.”  “Collin, you staying?” Dad asked. He didn’t insist Collin return to school, which was odd, since my parents couldn’t exactly call in an absence for Collin. But Dad just smiled and offered him a snack, too.  “I could eat,” Collin said with a shrug. How could he be hungry after what had just happened? I shot him a sideways glance.  He either didn’t notice or he ignored me. Mom and Dad moved back to the kitchen counter.  “We’re going to head up to my room,” I said, hoping my parents wouldn’t make a big deal of that. Collin and I couldn’t exactly talk through things right in front of them. Dad looked over at me. “Door stays open.”  “Of course.” I nodded. I knew I wasn’t allowed to be alone with a boy with the door closed… not that I’d ever tried to.  Dad smiled. “I’ll bring Collin’s snack up in a few minutes.”  Collin smiled back at him. “No worries, I’ll just wait down here until it’s ready and save you the trouble. That okay, Aubrey?” He cut me a glance with raised eyebrows. I was fairly sure he was intentionally giving me a few minutes to be alone, even though he was staying, and I kinda loved him for it.  “Yeah, sure. I’ll be in my room.” I hurried up the stairs. Once in my room, I ran to my desk and pulled Emery’s notebook out of the drawer. It was easy to flip to the page I wanted—it was just after the little clump of pages that had been torn out, plus I’d turned to it so many times, the top corner of the page was starting to fray. I sank into my desk chair and scanned the page again. I’d looked at this page thousands of times in the past two years, but even before what the cheerleader hawks said, I’d been unable to shed the feeling that I was missing something…   I’d been poring over the sketches and quotes for several minutes when Collin knocked on my open door frame When I looked up at him, he smiled. “Your dad made nachos, so I brought extra for you. I know you said you weren’t hungry… but it’s nachos. I thought that might make a difference.” He held out two plates piled with chips covered in cheesy goodness and a plethora of toppings.  My dad knew how to make great nachos.  I offered Collin a smile, then gestured to the end of my desk. “You can set it there. Thank you. That was really thoughtful.” Collin set my plate down, then looked back at me, still holding his own plate. “You’re welcome.”    I glanced around for where to tell him to sit. Besides my desk and its chair, the only place to sit in my room was on the bed, and I didn’t want nachos on my bed.  Collin saved me the trouble of figuring it out and plopped right down on the floor with the plate of nachos in his lap. He fixed those gorgeous green eyes on me, a chicken-and-jalapeno-laden chip in hand. “Find anything that helps?”  I sighed. “No. None of this makes any more sense than it ever has. Probably even less.”  He set the chip back down and wiped his hands on his pants. “Can I see?”  I wasn’t keen on handing Emery’s journal to anyone—especially not someone with nacho hands—but Collin seemed to catch that quickly.  “You can just hold it up for me,” he said. I did. He spent several moments reading the page, then looked up at me. “So, if what the cheerleaders said is true, these are some kind of coded messages from Emery to you?”  “Yeah, maybe? But I have no idea how they would know that.” I kept my voice low, not wanting my parents to overhear. Collin shrugged, but lowered his voice, too. “I have no idea how what we saw today is even possible, but here we are. The cheer hawks said there was no need to pay them because they were ‘on the case’—as in, already on it. I’m not sure if they meant Chloe’s case or Emery’s or both, but I’m guessing they know even more about all this than they said.”  Cheer hawks. The fact that was even a phrase uttered unironically was crazy enough. The possibility that they might know more about what was going on with Chloe, or even what had happened to Emery… I couldn’t decide if that was comforting or disturbing. I stood and paced in front of my desk, thinking out loud. “They said Chloe might have been taken because she resembled Emery. They do look a bit alike, but I hadn’t thought much of that.” Chloe did have the same color hair as Emery, and a similar build, but to me she was just Chloe. “That would mean whoever took Chloe didn’t know about what had already happened to Emery, though, right? That seems to contradict their other theory that Chloe was taken to target me, doesn’t it?”  Not to mention that anyone targeting me made zero sense. I was no threat to anyone—I could barely keep track of my own socks. Collin looked up at me. “Maybe. I mean, if you were the target all along, then I suppose even what happened to Emery could be—” He stopped, seeming to realize how that sounded. “Or maybe they’re wrong, and whatever’s going on with Chloe has nothing to do with you or Emery at all.”  I appreciated his pivot to spare my feelings, but what if it was all connected? As much as it hurt to think that any of this—or all of this—might somehow be my fault, ignoring that possibility wouldn’t get us any closer to the truth.  Collin’s eyes sparked with an idea. “You know what we need? A crime board. One of those crazy boards with the pictures and strings and push pins and all that.”  “We don’t have anything to put on it, yet,” I said, though I did like the idea. “We know Chloe is missing, and that she didn’t run away. I’m sure of that. And we know Emery drowned—or if we’re to believe the cheer hawks, then maybe she didn’t?” I was right on the edge of allowing myself to grasp the possibility that Emery was still alive, but it felt like staring over the edge of a mile-high cliff hoping there was an invisible bridge to catch me. If I leaped, and I was wrong, the fall would kill me. I hurried on. “Either way, we have no evidence, not even any clues. Except…”  Except for my weird dreams. And the notebook I was still holding.  Were the cheer hawks right? Had my dreams about Emery and the water been warnings? Could there be more to the notebook page Emery left for me, like I’d always felt there was? And if the dreams about Emery were more than just dreams, then were my recent dreams about Chloe more than just dreams, too? Three days ago, I would’ve slammed the mental door shut on those possibilities immediately. But then, three days ago, I hadn’t just seen three cheerleaders turn into hawks and fly away. They had asked me about gossamer webs…. I set the notebook back on my desk and ran to my bookshelf.  It took me no time to locate my Poe short story collection. I flipped to “The Pit and the Pendulum” and scanned it until I found the quote: In the deepest slumber — no! In delirium — no! In a swoon — no! In death — no! even in the grave all is not lost. Else there is no immortality for man. Arousing from the most profound of slumbers, we break the gossamer web of some dream. Yet in a second afterward, (so frail may that web have been) we remember not that we have dreamed. “Even in the grave, all is not lost.” My heart raced as I looked up at Collin. “This was a message for me.” I was suddenly certain. “Emery quoted the line about the gossamer web in one of my dreams. She was whispering it as she stared out at the waves. It’s too much of a coincidence for the cheerleaders to ask me about that exact phrase. Isn’t it?”  “I’d think so,” Collin said, looking up at me with a stunned expression. “It does seem awfully specific.”  I turned back to the quote. “The whole quote is about dreams, but also death. It’s about the barrier between sleeping and waking, and how the dreams are so fragile, they just slip away…. We may not even remember them.” My heart was pounding now. How much might I have forgotten, and not even remembered I dreamed? “But the other point is that life might be the same way—just a gossamer web, so frail it breaks and even the memory of it drifts away, or even that there’s a possibility of moving back and forth between life and death, like we move between waking and sleeping, else there is no immortality for man. In the context of the story, the character was facing death, and at that moment, everything felt so surreal to the character that he truly wasn’t sure if he was awake or dreaming.”  “That’s a lot to get from one paragraph of a story,” Collin said.  I looked at him. “I think Emery was telling me she’s still alive, Collin.” I paused, knowing the rest of what I was about to say sounded absolutely crazy. “I—I think she was talking to me through my dreams.” To even think it might be true felt insane. My heart was pounding. Collin stared at me. “I’d ask if that was possible, but I feel like we’re probably beyond that question after today.”  I stared back. “Is it possible, though? I mean, I know we’ve redefined the term possible today, but—” I swallowed, clenching the book to my chest. “Collin, I feel like I’m losing my mind.” The quiver in my voice betrayed my fear; I couldn’t help it.  He set the nachos aside and stood, then wrapped his arms around me.  I wasn’t sure what cologne he was wearing, but he smelled like spicy trees. It was nice. I leaned into his chest, desperate for the sense of stability his hug gave. Yes, it was Collin—Collin, and it’s not like I was entertaining romantic thoughts toward him or anything—but he and I had seen some stuff today, and right now, he was the only person who could understand what I was going through.  “Listen,” he said softly after a moment. “Are you willing to reconsider the crime board? Because I love me some crime shows, and sure, maybe those detectives aren’t usually dealing with dream-omens or shapeshifting cheerleaders, but the boards do seem to help them figure things out.”  He said it so softly and yet so seriously, I couldn’t help but chuckle. Just like that, he’d shifted me back to something solid. How did he keep doing that?  I stepped out of his arms and looked up at him. “I don’t have crime photos or a corkboard or push pins, but I’ve got a tri-fold poster, a printer, and some tape.” He grinned at me. “That’s perfect.” *** Click here to read the next episode! Want to reread a previous episode? Click here to be taken to the main Season 1 forum menu, where you can see all available episodes!

Aubrey Lance, S.S. (Supernatural Sleuth) -- Season 1, Episode 10: Poe Quotes and Paranormal Cheerleaders As soon as we rounded the corner out of sight and earshot of pretty much everyone, the three cheerleaders spun to face Collin and me.  “How much do you know about gossamer webs?” Tory asked, stepping toward me. What kind of crazy question was that?  I stared at her. “You mean like the line from Poe’s ‘Pit and the Pendulum’?”  I’d always found that term fascinating—gossamer webs. Even in his short stories, Poe had a unique way of phrasing things. But right now… why was she asking that?  “Yeah, exactly like that,” Tory said, glancing back at her friends. “I guess.”  Behind her, Jillian and Meredith exchanged a look, then Jillian fixed her stare on me. “You heard about our detective agency. Did you hear anything else?”  It was clear they were hinting at something, but if they thought I knew what, they were wrong. I had no clue what they were talking about.  I shook my head. “Just that you’ve all been friends a long time and were in cheer together at your old school. That’s it.” Tory drew a long breath. “Oh.”  “Okay, listen,” Meredith said, stepping up next to Tory. “We know you have dreams, Aubrey. Like, sometimes weird ones, right?” “How did you—” I started, but something in her expression made me want to answer. “Yes. I do.”  Collin shot me a surprised look, but I ignored him. I was focused on Meredith.  “And sometimes—like maybe even the time your sister disappeared—your dreams seem to hint at things that happen in reality. Right?” Meredith continued.  By the time Meredith finished her statement, my heart was racing. I’d dreamed of Emery at the beach, at the water, trying to tell me something. But that was easily explainable. Just my brain coping with what had happened, like the therapist had said.  Except… Deep down, part of me still believed it wasn’t. I’d had that dream before we knew where Emery had last been seen or that she’d even been at the gulf. I’d had it the very night she went missing.  Two years of therapy and many, many hours of self-coaching had told me that my timeline was mistaken, that it must have been after, that I was crushed and weary and I’d remembered the order of things wrong. But in those early days right after Emery disappeared, I’d insisted I had the dream first, and that she’d been trying to speak to me in it. That she was still out there somewhere, waiting for us to find her. For me to find her. Even though I knew it didn’t make sense, even though I knew the explanation had to be that I was either mistaken on the timeline or the dream was just a bizarre coincidence, I’d been sure. That, plus my discovery of that strange page from Emery’s notebook, the one marked Tell Aubrey, where every quote seemed to hint at something deeper…  I’d felt like I was going crazy, back then.  I probably had been. I couldn’t go down that rabbit-hole again. I shook my head. “No. I have weird dreams sometimes, sure, but that’s it.”  Meredith leveled her gaze on me. “So you never feel like the dreams are trying to tell you something? Trying to warn you?”  Jillian locked her stare on me as well. “You never feel like, for example, your sister may have left you clues as to what happened to her and wrote them down somewhere in hidden messages that only you would be able to interpret?”   Emery’s notebook. I felt the blood drain from my face. “How did you know about that?” I whispered. I’d always felt there were more to those quotes and sketches, but—that was crazy, right?  Collin looked at me. “Aubrey? What are they talking about?”  Meredith watched me for a long moment. “Did your sister ever talk to you about us?”  I narrowed my eyes. “No. You weren’t even at this school, yet. How would she have?”  Collin stepped close to my side, then turned to the girls with frustration. “This is cruel, whatever this is, and you need to stop. If you can help us find Chloe, great, but I’m an inch from changing my mind about that, too, and we’re all about to be late for school. If you actually have something helpful to say, can you get to the point?”  They stared at him for a long moment while my heart raced.  Then Meredith crossed her arms. “We’re not going to school today.” “Then why are you even here?” I spat back. She laughed. “For you, of course.”  I gaped at her. “What? Why?”  Tory looked back at the other two, then shrugged. “She’s not ready. We should go.”  They turned to walk away. I tensed. “No, wait! Ready for what? Can you really help us find Chloe?”  I was freaked out, but these girls could be my only chance at finding my best friend.  They glanced back and stopped, looking at one another.  Tory turned to face me again. “Have you had any recent dreams about her?”  I thought about the weird dreams I’d had recently—Chloe, hawks, ProScoop, a lizard stealing her wallet… and my stomach plunged to my feet.  Tory saw the recognition on my face. She looked deep into my eyes. “We came to this school because we heard someone was being targeted here. We didn’t figure out Chloe was the target until it was too late—but it’s possible they took Chloe by mistake, thinking she was Emery. They do resemble each other. Or maybe they took her as a way of getting to you. You and Emery may have both been targets.”  I gaped at her. “What?”  “Our trail for Emery went dead a while ago, but we’re not giving up, Aubrey,” Tory said. “On her, or on Chloe.”  I was pretty sure my heart actually stopped for a second. “Are you saying… Are you saying you’re looking for my sister?”  They glanced at each other, then Tory nodded. “Yes.”  “But she’s—” My throat tightened so much my next words came out as a whisper. “Are you saying you think Emery is alive?”  “We’re not saying that for sure,” Jillian answered, shaking her head. “We can’t say anything for sure, yet.”  My brain was spinning so fast it was about to burn out. “But she could be?”  The girls exchanged another glance, but didn’t answer.  My heart was about to jump out of my chest. I stepped toward them. “Please. I don’t understand. Who are you? Why are you looking for Emery? You said you think someone was targeting her. Why? And Chloe—” As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t help the tears from starting. “Why does this stuff keep happening to me?”  Collin moved close and put one arm around my shoulders.   I didn’t fight it when he did—I was coming apart, and at the moment, his touch was all that was holding me together. Tory’s eyes locked on mine. “Because you’re special, Aubrey. Emery is, too. The same way we’re special… and others like us. Haven’t you figured that out yet?”  I gaped at her, too confused to even respond.  Tory gave me a comforting smile. “We’ll let you know more when we can. Until then, go to school like normal. Stick to your routine, but don’t go anywhere alone. And don’t mention this conversation to anyone.” She turned her gaze to Collin. “No need to pay us anything. We’re already on the case.” And then, right in front of us, all three cheerleaders turned into hawks and flew away.  They turned into freaking hawks! Human girls standing there with clothes and all, then poof, hawks flying off with talons and feathers and no clothes. Hawks! I was definitely questioning my sanity, now. I stared at their winged shapes disappearing into the distant clouds.  Then I slowly turned to Collin. “Uh, Collin?” He was still staring blankly at the spot in the grass where the cheerleaders had stood. “Yeahhh?” His voice cracked, but he kept staring at the grass. In the distance, the starting bell for school rang. “Collin, did you just see—”  He sucked in a sharp breath. “Yeah.”  “You didn’t—that wasn’t—I mean, they turned into hawks!” I accentuated my panic with frantic hand gestures. “Their clothes, them, everything, just—bam! Hawks. Hawks!” He turned to look at me. “It wasn’t a bam, it was more seamless, but I do have eyes, Aubrey. I was standing right here. It might not make any kind of sense, but I know what I saw.” I, on the other hand, was doubting what I’d seen. And my sanity. And basically the entire fabric of reality.   Wait—I’d dreamed about hawks. Was I dreaming again?  I stared at him. “Pinch me, Collin.”  “I’m not doing that.”  “Fine.” I pinched myself.  Nope. Awake. Unless that thing about pinches not hurting in dreams wasn’t true. But if you couldn’t even rely on that, then how would anybody know what was real and what wasn’t? How could I know anything, ever?  Collin stepped in front of me. “You’re freaking out.”  I gaped at him. “Of course I’m freaking out, Collin! They turned into hawks!”  I could feel the whirlpool of what-this-all-means swirling in the back of my mind, threatening to suck me in.  I needed to move.  I spun and took off toward the parking lot.  “Hey! Where are you going?” Collin called after me.  When I didn’t stop, he jogged to catch up.  He ran a bit in front of me, then walked backwards to look at me as I caught up to him. “Aubrey, wait. Where are you going?” He looked directly into my eyes, searching my face for… signs of a panic attack, maybe?  But this was way worse than a panic attack. This was the cataclysmic coalescence of dreams and reality all into one big, confusing mess and I did not like it.  My body just wanted to run.  “Somewhere, Collin. Anywhere. I don’t know.”  “They said to go inside, to stick to routine,” he said, still speed-walking backwards to continue our conversation.  “I’m not going to school after that.”  His eyes locked on mine. “They said not to go anywhere alone.”  “I’m not taking orders from cheerleader hawks, Collin!” I yelled, finally stopping my frantic getaway.  Though maybe I was obeying some of their orders, since I surely wasn’t planning to tell anyone what just happened.  I sighed. “Okay, fine, I know what they said, but I can’t do this right now. Not here. I need to think. I need to be—” I looked at him. “How are you so calm, right now?”  He narrowed his eyes on me. “I’m not. I’m freaking out. I just do it all inside, like a man.”  I huffed a frustrated breath and dodged around him. “Aubrey, wait. I was joking… kind of. I mean, I am freaking out, but I like to go through the stages first, you know? Shock… disbelief… I’ll get to the utter unraveling of my sanity in a few minutes, probably, if that makes you feel better.” He caught up to me and grabbed my hand. “Aubrey?”  I yanked it out of his grasp. “This isn’t funny, Collin.”  He moved around in front of me again, forcing me to stop. “Hey. Hey, I know. I’m sorry. I just—humor is a coping mechanism, probably a terrible one—but I’m here, okay? I saw what you saw, and I’m freaking out, too, and what they said about Emery, if that’s true, I mean—I don’t even know what to think. But I’m here, Aubrey. I’m here with you, all of it. Okay?”  I searched his face.  He looked entirely genuine.  I sighed. “Thank you. And I appreciate that, I do, but…” I was one thread away from losing it. “I can’t be here right now. I need to go home. No one would expect me to be at school today, anyway.” I stared at the parking lot.  Oh, yeah. Collin was my ride. I sighed again. “I don’t want to go inside. I’ll just sneak out through the gate and then call my parents to come get me.” Collin stared at me. “Don’t be ridiculous. I’m right here. I’ll drive you.”  “What about school?” He was so uptight; I doubted he was the type to skip.  Not that I was, usually, either.  “You said nobody would expect you at school today? Well, nobody expects much at all from me.” His tone was deadpan, but there was pain behind it.  Before I could reply, he headed for his car.  For a moment, I just stood there.  He looked back at me. “You want to get caught before we make our getaway?” he asked, then started walking again.  I jogged to catch up to him.  He glanced over at me as we hurried through the parking lot. “Here’s the deal. We are possibly experiencing some weird airborne hallucinogen, but let’s set our mutual insanity aside for now. If there really are shapeshifting hawks—or worse—mucking about around here, I don’t want your mauling on my conscience. And even if there aren’t, it would be very ungentlemanly of me to let you sneak outside the fence and wait for a ride when I have a car right here. If you want to skip school today rather than simply calling your parents from the front office like a reasonable human and waiting for them to pick you up legally, then I will be the accomplice to your burgeoning delinquency, but only if you let me drive you so I can make sure you’re safe. That’s my limit on misbehavior for the day. Otherwise, I’m heading straight to the office to report your truancy.”  I rolled my eyes. “Technically, this would only be an unexcused absence. It’s not considered truancy until—” He cocked his head. “You gonna pull out Webster’s Dictionary every time I make a comment?”  I crossed my arms. “No.”  He stared at me. “You want a ride or not? The longer we stand out here, the more likely we are to get caught leaving.”  I could’ve waited for my parents, but that would’ve meant standing there on campus—or outside the gate—until they got there…or going inside to call them the proper way, which would require giving the office some reason for doing so, then waiting to be signed out, which I did not have the mental fortitude for at the moment. I sighed. “Yes. Fine. Thank you.”  Collin nodded, then crossed the remaining distance toward his car, unlocked it, and opened the passenger door for me before hurrying around and getting into the driver’s seat.  I slid in and shut my door.  He started the car. “Where to?”  “Home.”  He laughed. “After all that, you want to go home? I thought the whole ‘I’ll just call my parents’ thing was a ruse.”  “Yes.” Home would be safe—a good place to melt down in peace and hopefully find a way to make this make sense.  He eyed me. “Okay. Home it is, then. You planning to tell your parents what happened? Or what the cheerleaders said about Chloe and Emery?”  I drew a tight breath. “No. Not yet.” My parents had been through enough when we all questioned my sanity the first time, especially right on the heels of what happened to Emery.  This time, with everything going on with Chloe and the possibility that Emery might still be alive… I had to cover my bases, first. I couldn’t put them through that on so little information. Before I told them anything, I needed to know whether it was true. I needed proof. I’d always thought there was something more there on the page she’d written for me, some message I wasn’t seeing, and after what Jillian had said…  I needed to get home and look back at that page from Emery’s notebook.  My chest clenched. “I need to go home. Now, please,” I said with an increased sense of urgency.  “You got it,” Collin said, backing out of his spot and heading for the exit gate. “Thank you,” I said, reassuring my frayed nerves with the knowledge that it was a short drive. I glanced at Collin, and a random question occurred to me. “Wait. The limit on misbehavior for the day… was that for my misbehavior, or yours?”  Collin smirked, but then quickly squashed it and focused on the road. “Let’s get you home, Truant.”  *** AUTHOR NOTE: Enjoying this story so far? Please consider supporting my writing via a monthly subscription to my PirateCat reading portal! 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