Amelia Atwater-Rhodes - Token of Darkness

Cooper could barely keep his eyes open after dinner. True to his word, his father hadn’t mentioned his brief sojourn from class to his mother, and their awkward chatter barely masked the conversations his parents obviously wanted to have with him, but couldn’t. The effort exhausted Cooper, and he crawled into bed without taking off anything more than his shoes, too tired to even experience the anxiety that usually accompanied the descent into sleep.

The instant the rain began, he knew bad things were coming. It started with patchy clouds, barely wispy, but as he continued driving down the endless highway they darkened and spread. Soon a fine mist was falling, but if anything, it seemed like the weather had improved visibility, since before the cloud cover built, the afternoon sun’s glare had been blinding.

But he knew better.

He couldn’t remember the details of what happened next, but he remembered the emotions and the physical sensations. He struggled against them. He knew he was dreaming, and he pulled his car over to the side of the highway and got out—

As soon as his feet touched the pavement, he was back in the car.

This time he just took his foot off the gas, and let the car coast to a stop—

Then it was back to seventy miles an hour, and the brakes didn’t work anymore, and the car wouldn’t slow down.

Black tendrils began to rise from the pavement, waiting for him. The highway went on forever without a single exit, and tall concrete barriers rose into the darkening sky on each side.

Cooper screamed with frustration, put one hand on the wheel, and spun it as fast as he could to the side.

The car began to spin like a top, incredibly fast for impossibly long.

Cooper shot upright, a scream trapped in the back of his throat. People had told him the gist of what had happened in his accident, and he was grateful he couldn’t recall the rest.

Except in his nightmares.

He shuddered and stood, eliciting a sharp pain in his hip. He should have stretched before falling asleep.

He took a warm shower, hoping the pounding water would dull the ache that ran up his side from his knee almost to his shoulder. It was ten at night, and his parents were sleeping like the dead—

Wrong simile.

The sound of running water wouldn’t wake them, anyway.

After his shower, he stopped in front of the full-length mirror attached to the inside of the bathroom door. With a towel around his waist, he examined his physique with a critical eye.

He had never been big, compared to most football players, but he had certainly lost muscle mass since the accident.

During the day, his long sleeves covered the scars that crisscrossed up and down his arms. Some of them were starting to fade to shiny pink-white, but many were still darker, revealing the depth of the initial wounds. Those same sleeves covered the ragged patch on his shoulder, now mottled pink and brown, where most of the skin had been ripped off by the hot pavement; his pants normally hid similar marks on his left hip and knee. The clothes also hid the surgery scars, and the faint—almost gone, or was the color entirely in his head, these days?—bruises that lingered on his ribs.

Clothes, those simple defenses, hid all evidence of the accident from sight. They made him appear whole. Now if only his mind could agree. During the day he could barely remember anything, but during the night the floodgates opened. If he closed his eyes, he would see … hear … smell … taste …

“So vain,” Samantha teased as she walked through the wall.

“Ever hear of privacy?” he snapped as he checked that his towel was snugly in place. The words were sharp, but he was pretty well resigned to the fact that Samantha didn’t care about his privacy or anyone else’s.

“Don’t remember,” she replied glibly. “Maybe I heard of it and just forgot.”

“Well, would you leave so I can put on some clothes?”

“Don’t be a prude. They say you used to be a football star. You must have changed in plenty of locker rooms.”

“Yeah. With guys,” he answered. “You’re not a guy.”

“I’m hardly a girl, either,” she argued. “I’m dead.”

“Fine. Dead. Whatever. So why do you want to stay?”

“Because you’re sexy-cute,” she replied promptly.

“Out!”

She sighed, and wandered back through the wall, mumbling, “Sometimes I wish I was the invisible kind of ghost.”

Cooper shook his head. Why couldn’t he have gotten a guy kind of ghost? The kind of ghost who would certainly never show up while he was in the shower or encourage him to track down and be friendly with guys from Q-tech.

As soon as he had pulled on his pajama pants, Samantha appeared again. Cooper had a sneaking suspicion she had been watching, but didn’t want that confirmed and wouldn’t trust her if she denied it, so he didn’t bring it up.

She sat on the bed beside him, one leg tucked beneath her, and one dangling through the piece of furniture. He wondered what kind of effort or thought it took to keep her from falling through floors or furniture more than she chose to.

“I found Brent,” she said, “but no luck there. He was passed out with a pillow over his head.”

“We’ll find his number and call him as soon as school is out tomorrow,” Cooper promised. He didn’t want to do it, but he owed it to her.

Samantha smiled, but her expression seemed halfhearted. “I hate nighttime,” she confided. “Everyone going about, sleeping, dreaming or snuggling with other people or partying or something. And then there’s just me.”

“Trade?” Cooper proposed. He would have been happy to stay up alone, if it meant he didn’t have those dreams Samantha envied.

Samantha lay back. Cooper was about to yell at her about the whole “girl” thing again, but she wasn’t flirting this time. Instead, she took a funeral pose, with her arms crossed neatly across her chest. She closed her eyes and sighed.

“To sleep, perchance to dream and stuff,” she misquoted softly. “I’m really bored, Cooper. I’m getting kind of desperate.”

Without thinking about it, he reached out to awkwardly pat her shoulder. He realized what he was doing and pulled back before actually touching her, but her eyes had cracked open, and she half smiled.

“I’m going to go wander,” she said. “Look in windows. Or something.”

She sank through the bed and out of sight.

Cooper was almost certain Samantha had actually left this time, but still, he found himself staring at the spot where she had just been—his bed, which he had come to see as a kind of enemy, one he seemed to battle nightly.

Sometimes sleep didn’t come at all. He would spend hours lying there, fighting to keep his eyes closed and his body relaxed, but every time he started to slip into sleep, it was like he could feel the nightmares reaching for him. If he cracked his eyes open in that state, he saw shadows that didn’t match any light source. They lingered around him and even more thickly around Samantha, and upon seeing them he would jerk back awake with a start.

Instead of going back to bed now, he took some time to try to read the assignment for English, but couldn’t absorb most of the words. Lately his memory was simply shot. He did a couple of math problems and read three or four paragraphs of his history textbook, and then chucked the book across the room—only to cringe as it narrowly missed the window. He didn’t want to explain shattered glass to his parents.

He booted up the computer, and lost himself in Wikipedia for a while, then spent a good half hour looking at cat macros before he broke down and logged into his MMORPG pirates game. He couldn’t quite resist opening the one e-mail in his account, which was from Delilah, but all it said was, If you’re in trouble, Cooper, you can talk to me. I might be more understanding than you would expect.