The Girl Who Wore Jordans

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Eight

      “Lizzie, wake up!” someone called faintly. I looked around, but didn’t spot anyone. All I could see was blankness—vacancy and an oddly placed basketball hoop. Suddenly, an orange ball materialized in my hands, as if a magician had conjured it up. I brushed my fingers over the orb, feeling slightly hazy as I stroked the bumpiness, a smile forming on my face in recognition. It was a basketball.

      “Lizzie!” I heard again from a distance away. I couldn’t quite discern where the noise was coming from, for all I knew was that I was handling a basketball and there was a basket right in front of me. I didn’t see anyone or anything in sight, and the pressure of secrecy was no longer a burden. Being myself wasn’t something I needed to fear or keep classified. Everything was at peace in my world, and the only thing I could logically think of doing was shooting the object in my hand into the slightly larger piece a ways away.

      Grinning, I elevated the athletic article and my arms above my head, merely flicking it out of my grasp. It was as if I were playing a sport on the Wii—fake, and requiring little to no effort. I watched as the ball soared overhead, flying towards the tall net. My feet were weightless, neither touching anything, nor sinking down to a pit of nothingness. A sense of calm was set about in my mind, the situation feeling too surreal.

      “Lizzie! Wake up!” the words seeped into my ears just as easily as they poured out. Nothing was real. I continued to watch the basketball, now just a fuzzy speck of orange smaller than a golf ball. The voice sounded again, more urgent than before, “Wake the fuck up, Liz! This isn’t funny anymore!”

      I felt someone shaking me, but couldn’t spot a single individual insight. Everything was white. “Wake up!” I wanted to appeal to the request being thrown at me, but couldn’t figure out what was going on. Everything was one big muddle of misperception—

Abruptly, my eyelids were forced open by a set of fingers, also shoving me out of the fantasy in which I had been. Barely able to tell reality from what I had just experienced, I began frantically looking around, searching for answers. I needed something—an indicator to tell me what was occurring. Everything was so confusing and so hard to understand. It was as if I had been dreaming, and was rudely woken up, only to be placed in the state of perplexity. In fact, that was exactly what it was like. So much so, that I was fairly positive that that was what was happening.

      “Lizzie, are you up?” someone frantically called.

      “What?” I was barely able to ask.

      “Fuck, yes! You’re not dead!” the same tone let out a breath of gratitude.

      In a hazy state, I tried to look around, and quickly recognized my surroundings to be in a vehicle of sorts. I was seated, strapped in by the ordinary safety precaution that was a seatbelt. The interior of the automobile wasn’t new by any means, and looked worn down. I had been in this car before.

      “Where am I?” I blinked, slowly registering that there was another individual inhabiting the same basic five-foot radius of me.

      “Fuck,” the other person replied not as an interjection the word was generally used for, but rather as an answer to my question.

      “Ex-excuse me?” I stammered, my voice croaking, as was acceptable for having just woken up.

      “Fuck,” the phrase usually exclaimed after stubbing one’s toe or stepping on a Lego was repeated calmly, “my truck.”