INVISIBLE || E. Dockery

8

I POP awake, gasping for air, the dancing flames on the ceiling receding to a dark, quiet room. I wipe sweat from my eyes with the comforter and shake away the remnants of the familiar nightmare, only with time with a twist: this time, the person in the bed wasnt me. This time, the person in the bed was prettier than me, smarter than me, braver than me.
this time, the person in the bed was Marta.
My sister has made the occasional cameo in the dream, basically the same dream as when I'm the one about to be burned alive, only she dosen't scramble for the window like I do. She sucks in her breath and lets the flames race along the comforter until they lick her and swallow her whole.
I'm sure I wont be able to go back to sleep. I never can. I've taken to an early bedtime, early for me, anyway- ten o'clock usually -knowing that sometime between two and four in the morning, I'll be engulfed in flames, then up for the day.
So I put on some coffee and boot up my laptop. The breaking-news e-mails come at all hours of the night, so I'll have plenty to keep me busy.
I make the mistake of passing a mirror and looking at my reflection. Not a pretty sight. The first signs of grayin my locks, and im too stubborn to color my hair, too proud to succumb to modern technology's  answer to female aging, which is to change yourself in every way possible, to hide your flaws. I put on minimal makeup and shower most days and brush my hair and figure I've done enough. No wrinkle creams or hair coloring or push-up bras for this gal. I'm supposed to be impressing someone with this attitude, aren't I? So far, no line has formed to congratulate me.
Your're your own worst enemy, Marta always said to me. You don't need anyone to torment you because you do it yourself. Marta was, in many ways, the polar opposite of me. Fun-loving when I was brooding. Glamorous when i was granola. Waving pom-poms and cheering on the football team while I was joining the PETA protest of the slaughter house outside of town. Partying on Friday nights with the popular crowd while I had my nose in one of the classics or some book on statistics
She was two inches shorter than me, had darker and silkier hair, and wore a cup size larger than me. How two girls born within the space of eitght minutes could be so different was anyones guess.
"Damn, I miss you, girl," I say to nobody in the kitchen. I cant even say that line without an acknowledgement to her; it was what she always said to me at the end of our phone calls, her patented sign-off, when we were across the country from each other during college,  or when she went off to grad school in Arizona while I, for some reason nobody could figure out, joined the G, the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
I still remember her reaction to the news that I was signing up with the FBI. Her face read stunned, confused, like she'd heard it wrong, a left-wing protester joining the establishment, but her words came out softer. If it makes you happy, it makes me happy. I'ts okay to want to be happy. Coffee's done. I carry a mug into the second bedrooom and start scrolling through the usual websites and checking e-mail. Nothing I see immediately raises the hair on my neck. A single-family home up in flames in Palo Alto, no casualties. Afire in a subsidized-housing complex in Detroit, several believed dead. A chemical plant ablaze outside Dallas. No no, and no.
But this one might be interesting, a fire that happened only hours ago in a place called Lisle, Illinois. A stand-alone townhouse. A single victim.

Her name is Joelle Swanson.