To Keep You

Chapter Sixteen: Neither Here Nor There-

      The dreams kept switching up on me, getting even more confusing day by day, night by night; putting people in different places with different roles. It was Connor on the railing, with Parker beside him. Then it was Jaime and Parker, with Connor beside me. We both reached out together. We both failed to hold on.

      There were flashes of hospitals and white halls and a boy sat in a chair, by a bed. I couldn't quite make out the face but there was this familiarity about him as I watched the scene drift by. 

      There was running. A lot of running. A woman smiling in a wheelchair. The oak tree from the garden flickered through my mind, hung up like a century old painting in every winding corridor I wandered down. It was like passing a person on the street whose face you knew, but had never met before. 

       I was crying. I was crying all the time. I could feel it. There was just sadness, always sadness. And then there was Arthur. He was crying, too. Except we weren't in the mansion, we were sitting together on a dark step and he turned to me to say, face blurred around the edges, "We'll get through this together, Rob." And he smiled that warm smile of his.

      As it reached the end, it all began to fade and I was back in my bedroom, with my eyes wide open but I didn't feel awake. I stared up at my ceiling, trying to gather my thoughts. The dream's images still lingering.

      Jaime bounced into my room acting as my alarm clock, shouting, "Morning sunshine! Time for school!" In his annoying sing-song voice. I groaned at the blinding light of the rising sun as Jaime ripped my curtains apart, tying them off at each side to keep them open. I felt like I hadn't slept at all.

      He turned on me with a grin. "Come on, get up. We don't have long and you know it takes you ages to get your lazy ass dressed."

      "I don't want to go." I mumbled.

      Jaime sighed. "You say that every morning and every morning you eventually get up. Today isn't going to be any different so come on." He lunged forward and tore my duvet away from my body. My knees instantly curled up against my chest so my arms could hug them, desperate for warmth. "I refuse to let you become a recluse." He stated.

      I forced my legs to straighten out, throwing them over the side of the bed and planting them firmly on the carpeted floor, except that it wasn't carpeted any more. I lowered my hands from my eyes, where they'd been previously rubbing at them in an attempt to wake up, only to find that I wasn't actually in my bedroom. I was sitting at the kitchen table.

      Amy hummed to herself as she cooked up some bacon in a frying pan, but I couldn't hear the oil sizzling. A bowl of cereal sat in front of me, untouched. That's when I realised that I was also fully clothed in my school uniform. The sizzling oil finally pierced my hearing and I dragged both hands down my face, clawing away the shock.

      Had I done all this on auto-pilot? Had I blacked out from mental exhaustion and only just snapped out of it? That had to be it. It had to be. "Where's Jaime?" I asked. Amy glanced up at me and smiled, but I received no answer. Maybe she just hadn't heard me.

      I left the kitchen and wandered into the small lounge with the fireplace, that I'd come to call 'The Den', to find Parker standing in the centre of the room. That wasn't unusual. He popped up where and whenever he felt like it. I sat down on the sofa to catch a breath, trying to understand my confusion.

      "Pain is the mind's way of understanding. Right?" Parker said, sitting beside me. I didn't dare look up at him. Instead, I focused on my black school shoes. "Are you in pain?"

      My eyebrows furrowed at the question. "I'm always in pain." I whispered. "This constant emotional pain, Parker, it's always there."

      "Then don't you think that, maybe, something isn't right?"