Canvas

11| The Crooked Morning

Warmth.

It was the first thing Alice registered as she stirred in the early light of dawn. She rolled over and stretched, her eyes still sealed with sleep. Soft blankets tied themselves around her ankles and soft cotton sleeves fell past her wrists. She was somewhere soft and warm, and while this should have alerted her right away that something was wrong, the feelings were so comforting she let them slip over her skin and only skim across the surface her unconsciousness. 

Lazily, she opened her bleary eyes and stared at the high white ceiling above her. Her mother would be expecting her up and dressed soon, she thought to herself, if they were going to have breakfast with her father before he left for work. A soft sigh washed over her like steam; she would give her right arm if she could just sleep for another hour. But the mornings, her mother liked to remind her, were precious and all too often wasted by the youth of today.

Alice was a youth of today, and she had a very different definition of ‘waste.’ She rarely woke without smelling heavily of smoke and feeling the dizzy throb of an angry hangover from the night before. Phantoms from the speakeasy seemed to always hang on her like a large cloak; it pulled her under a haze of last nights’ and secrets. Today, though, she smelled like rain and metal, and—mercifully—her head was clear and light. She was still sleepy, but more from laziness than actual exhaustion. Her limbs felt like they were filled with water, running refreshingly cool through her veins.

She threw her arms out next to her, spreading them as wide as she could and letting her fingertips curl over the edge of the soft mattress, and slowly sat up. The room was blurry as she floated up through the last of her sleepiness. She broke through the surface and into the day, lit a sharp orange by the bitter winter sun.

She couldn’t breathe.

Everything was different. The dresser, the dark wallpaper, the thick wooden floors, even the placement of her closet and the bedroom door was reversed. She backed up into where her cushioned headboard should have been but she hit a wall—brick. Wrong. Her mind danced, trying to replace expectation with reality in a dizzying waltz. The world was crooked, and if she couldn’t right herself soon, she would slip off the face of the earth. She looked around, panicked, and just before she opened her mouth to call out to her mother, she saw a boy slumped over the dark leather chair next to the window.

Charlie. 

With the fumes of her dreams still making her a bit lightheaded, she couldn’t help but notice how handsome Charlie was. She’d seen it the other day before he kissed her, and the other night when his white shirt stuck close to his chest and stomach. But in the morning, sleeping, he was an entirely different creature. He was all limbs, much too tall for the chair that sat low to the ground. His arms wilted over the armrests and his fingers dangled just above the floor, swinging ever so slightly back and forth, a pendulum marking his breathing.

Last night came back to her, but unlike the easy, fun memories of nights before the crash, there was nothing fuzzy about this one. She had no gin to steal her memories—that was waiting for her back at the bank, along with a thousand other things that could distract her. Now she had the crystal clear memory of freezing rain, Charlie’s window, and art. 

Alice couldn’t shake the strangeness of almostin Charlie’s room. It reminded her too much of everything she lost so long ago.

Not mine, she reminded herself.

This wasn’t her room. This wasn’t her home. Her mother and father wouldn’t be in the next room, nor would her best friend be sleeping in her heavily blanketed feather bed two floors down. For just a moment, she thought she had awoken from a horrible, vivid nightmare and would resume the daily monotony of her old life. How could she have forgotten that miracles like that don’t happen? That there was no waking up from this…