CHAPTER TWO
Twist woke in the dark. "Yet another useless nightmare cure," she muttered, listening to the wind whisper at her window and rattle the window panes. This one had even made the nightmare worse, something she would have thought was impossible.
If fighting the nightmare meant even creepier nightmares, she'd rather stick with the howling wind and the three cloaked figures who never asked her unsettling questions that made her feel she belonged in some YA fantasy novel where the chosen heroine had to battle bad guys non-stop to save the world.
It made sense that a girl who'd been dumped without a memory in a storm ditch by a tornado might have nightmares about wind, though she could have done without the hooded figures and the cackling laughter and incomprehensible whispering. She blamed it on too much Wizard of Oz when she was young and impressionable. Dorothy and she had had something major in common and she'd really identified.
When would she ever be rid of this thing? She snatched up a quilt and headed for the sanctuary of her closet floor. She couldn't hear the wind from there.
A pulsing light caught her attention, for a second reminding her of the skulls with their glowing grins. It was only her laptop, blinking to let her know it was on standby. She picked it up. She wasn't going to be able to sleep until the adrenaline of the dream had pulsed out of her body, maybe she could research more nightmare cures.
She closed the closet door, relaxing imperceptibly as the sound of the wind was silenced at last, and opened her laptop. She wrote down more cures in her journal by monitor light. At the suggestion to write down her nightmares, in order to banish them, she paused. Write the nightmare down?
Why not? She couldn't let anyone read it, but now that idea had been planted in her mind, she needed to write down her story - all of it. If it banished the dream, so much the better.
She opened up a new document, and began to write, starting with what she first remembered. Her true seminal moment. The day the tornado dropped her in Bob and Sylvia's Kansas corn field without clothes, family, or memory. She didn't need to add any talking chickens to make this story interesting.
When her alarm clock sounded, she rolled out of her closet, squinting against the morning light. Quickly, before her mom might find her sleeping in the closet, Twist gathered up the well-worn family quilt and folded it neatly on the bottom of her bed. She checked to make sure there were no signs that she had slept in her closet last night.
Sleeping in the closet was no big deal, but her mom probably wouldn't see it that way. Twist didn't want any questions. It was one thing to wake in a tangled sweat in the bottom of her closet every night. It was entirely another to have her mom worried about it.
She plugged in her laptop before she headed for the shower. It had gone dead in the night. She wondered if the story she'd written had been lost. Had she saved it? She couldn't remember. She hoped it had been lost, that way no one would ever see it and know the girl they thought was weird, was even weirder than they thought.
Showered, she surveyed the closet for any left behind clues that she'd slept in there. She took her journal out from under her pillow and scratched off "relaxation technique" from her list of nightmare remedies. The next one was "hot milk before bed." She wrinkled her nose. Maybe it was time to stop fighting the nightmare and just live with it. Live with being weird.
She'd hoped that her life would be perfect if only she could just once sleep for eight hours straight without being chased by hooded figures and, no matter how she fought, sucked up into a tornado that left her curled and shivering in the bottom of her closet. Falling asleep with her iPod playing Mozart hadn't worked - and neither had Bach, Rachmaninoff, Cold Play or Enya. She held out no hope for hot milk.
She sighed as she picked out a bright blue t-shirt and her favorite pair of jeans to wear. She'd learned in the eight years that Bob and Sylvia had been her mom and dad that some things were totally out of her control, like getting blown away from her home in a tornado, and having no memories of her first eight years.
Other things were in her control, like what she took out of her closet to wear, or what she chose to do about the secrets she accidentally eavesdipped - what she called it when she read thought dust. But, no matter how she tried, she couldn't move the nightmare from the 'out of her control' column to the 'in her control' column where it belonged.
She opened her laptop, and double-checked that she'd actually saved the talking chicken story to the class folder on the school server. She didn't want to get a zero before school had even officially started. A document titled "The Last Maiden" popped up, complaining that it had not been saved properly before the shutdown, and did she want to save it now. She scrolled through, reading what she had written, feeling what she had felt that day. She could never share this story with anyone. Not ever. But she didn't want to erase it either. Not yet. She clicked save, closed the laptop, and shoved it into her backpack.
Remembering the strange turn her nightmare had taken last night, she yanked open her junk drawer and rummaged around, looking for the marble figure she had gripped in her hand when she landed in the corn field. It was in the very back, an old peppermint candy stuck to it.
She took it out and ran her fingers over the smooth marble. It was the only thing that she had from her old life. Besides her odd-colored eyes and her ability to read people's thoughts.
She closed her fist around it, remembering what she had said in the dream. "You're going in the bay this morning when I do my chores," she whispered. Maybe that would end the nightmares. She pulled off the peppermint and threw it in the trash, stuck the figure in her pocket and headed down the stairs to start another school year.
Every new first day of school began the same way for Twist Rhodes. A hope that this year would be different; that she would be different. That, finally, she would find she fit in with her classmates. That she belonged. It wasn't that they didn't all have secrets, like she did. It was that their secrets weren't nearly as freakish and scary as hers.
The wind whined and rattled at the drafty windows that provided light to the narrow staircase of the old New England farmhouse, as if the tornado from her nightmare was trying to reach her even though she was awake.
On the broad oak newel post at the bottom of the stairs, she saw a little wrapped package with her name on it in her dad's handwriting. He'd told her he had to be at the college hydroculture farm early, to check on an experiment, and would miss breakfast with her on her first day of school. Naturally, he'd left a bit of encouragement for her anyway.
She opened the package to find a perfectly heart-shaped piece of red sea glass to add to her collection. Where he had found such a rarity, she couldn't imagine. But things like that happened to him for no reason at all. Like Twist showing up in his storm ditch. His note said what he would have said if he were here this morning, "To thine own self be true...and have a little fun."
True. That was the word the skulls had used. Was she true? Once, not long after her dad had agreed to leave his beloved Kansas behind to take her to Maine, far from both tornado country and curious questions from his neighbors, she had asked him if it was a mistake that she survived the tornado. He'd hesitated - not as quick to reassure as her mom, more thoughtful - which was why she'd asked him in the first place. They had been pulling carrots and onions from the much smaller and rockier New England garden for dinner and he pulled six without a word. But then he'd said, "Twist, I'm quite sure you landing in our ditch was meant to be."
For a second that was all he said. She knew he had done things to keep her safe, things that were not legal. She waited, wondering if he would tell her of those things. The two of them squatted there, uprooting fat onions and patting down the disturbed earth. And then he asked, in one sharp breath, like he knew he had to no matter how much he didn't want to, "Have you remembered something?"
"No." Twist didn't consider her answer a lie. Exactly. Sometimes she thought the shadowy dream figures might be her real family, somehow, turned bizarro by the dream process. But if they were, why did they scare her so much? She would have liked to ask him that question, but even though he was good at answering questions, he was even better at asking them. She'd learned that some secrets one kept to oneself. Just like her mom and dad never mentioned their lost daughter, Abigail, even though they thought about her every day.
She tucked the heart shaped sea glass into her pocket and stepped into the warm yellow light of the kitchen, where her mom hummed happily -- something she only did when she had hatched a scheme of some sort. No doubt her parents had plans to double team her again. They were good at it. Her dad had softened her up with the sea glass and note. Now it was her mom's turn.