Chapter 10
It was the middle of the afternoon, so we just decided to stay around the same area that we were in since we wouldn’t have been able to go far.
I needed to do something to make me feel a little more normal, so I got up and started walking around. My body ached, but working my muscles felt wonderful. I walked a little farther away, telling Remy and Will that I’d be back in a few minutes, and started toward the trees.
I walked until I heard another bubbling creek. When I reached it, I saw that it ran into a small pond, surrounded by huge rocks. One rock was just the right height for me to sit on and put my feet in the water. I sat down on it and took off my shoes, which were a totally different color than they were a few days ago.
The water was only about two feet deep and, when I put my feet in, I was surprised by how cold it was. I looked at the water, watching it reflect the tree tops above me. On one side of the pond was a single lily pad with a beautiful pink flower right in the middle.
I looked up and around. I didn’t really see until then that the entire forest was beautiful. The trees were covered with moss in some places and ferns growing around them. The bright, setting sun and the fresh air made me feel alive, like I was a part of bigger thing. But at the same time, all of the thousands, maybe even millions, of trees made me feel very small. I was happy I was here, even though we were lost. It was better to be lost and alive than be found and dead.
My thoughts turned toward home. Surely our parents would have found out about the crash by now. Maybe they’d already found the wreckage and were looking for us. This place must have been pretty big if they hadn’t found us yet, but hopefully they wouldn’t stop looking.
I thought of school for some odd reason. I wondered what day it was, since we hadn’t been keeping track, and how many days we had missed. Spring break had to be over for a couple of days now. We’d probably been out here for almost a week and a half. It was hard to imagine school going on. I felt like I needed, maybe even wanted, to be there. I missed everything and everybody.
I felt an odd twist in my stomach just thinking about it. I didn’t know how long we would be lost for if they gave up the search for us, if they were even searching.
It made me start to tear up just thinking about everything. Everyone probably thought we were dead by now, but they would still want the search to continue, right? They wouldn’t give up until someone – or something – was found.
At least I had Remy and Will with me. They were the ones who kept me together, even though we had been through our few rough patches. Everything had been put in the right place now. There were no more secrets between us, except for the one that I didn’t know if I wanted to tell. I probably would eventually, even if Remy didn’t want me to. Maybe she wouldn’t even care.
I closed my eyes and leaned back against the sun-warmed rocks. It felt good, like a heated blanket covering my entire body on a cold winter night. It unwound my muscles that were knotted from sleeping on the hard, bumpy ground. I relaxed and tried not to think of anything.
I didn’t realize anyone was there until I heard someone sit down beside me. Of course it was Remy. She had to have known something was wrong with me.
“What’s up with you?” she asked.
She walked closer to me and got up on the rock next to me. She looked at me with worried eyes, trying to decipher what was going through my head.
“I don’t know. I just don’t feel right,” I said, rubbing my forehead. A pulsing started in my temples, radiating throughout my entire head.
“Is there something wrong? Is it from your fall this morning?” she asked, a worried look on her face.
“I don’t know,” I said. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I felt off somehow, but I didn’t think it was from my fall.
“I’m glad everything’s okay now,” she said. She smiled at me. “You and Will…it’s probably the best thing that’s come out of this entire experience, don’t you think? I mean…”
I couldn’t hear her then. The pulsing escaladed into a pounding and my hands went to my head, like I could somehow stop it from coming in another wave, only stronger. My vision blurred, blocking out the images before me. The pain radiated through my head. I felt my eyes close, but I couldn’t tell the difference because I still couldn’t see anything around me.
And then it stopped, just as suddenly as it came. The pain in my head was gone and I could see Remy’s face above me. I must have fallen back because I was lying on the ground.
“Reagan, are you okay? What happened?” she said her voice shaking with anxiety, her hand on my forehead. “God, don’t scare me like that! I’ve already thought you were dead once today. Don’t do it to me again!”
“I don’t know what happened. I just had this major headache for few seconds, if you want to call it a headache, but then it just went away,” I said, sitting up. A wave of dizziness came over me and I swayed slightly.
“You were like that for a couple of minutes, not seconds. I didn’t know what was going on,” she said, her eyes tearing up. “Do you think it’s from hitting your head this morning? Maybe there’s something seriously wrong with your head.”
I didn’t hear the last thing she said, though. I was still processing what she had just said. How could the pain last that long but it only felt like seconds? Horribly painful seconds? I didn’t know why this was happening and I hoped it wouldn’t happen again anytime soon.
“Don’t tell Will, okay? He doesn’t need to worry about this. It probably won’t happen again,” I said.
“But what if it does happen again? I need to tell him,” she said, and then started to get up.
“No,” I said, grabbing her arm and pulling her back down. The motion made me dizzy. “Please, don’t. If it does happen again, then you can tell him. But if it doesn’t, we’re not going to.”
“Are you sure?” she asked.
“Don’t tell him,” I said again, more firmly.
I stood up, swaying slightly, and had to grab on to Remy’s arm for support. Once I got past the dizziness, I felt a little better, but at the same time, I still felt weird. My head still hurt slightly, but not like it had before.
“Are you sure you’re going to be okay? Because if not, you just need to stay put,” Remy said. “I can go get Will and we can just stay here for the night. That would probably be best, since it’s not going to stay light for much longer.”
“Yeah, maybe we should just do that,” I said, sitting down. The dizziness had come back, making everything twist at odd angles. I had to close my eyes to try and make it stop. “Go find Will and I’ll stay here.”
“Okay,” she said. She sounded worried. “I’ll be back in less than ten minutes. Promise.”
I heard her get up and start to run back in the direction we’d come.
It was suddenly quiet. The only sound I could hear was the creek running into the little pond. I felt good to just sit there, even though I was still dizzy and praying that another one of the headaches wouldn’t come again.
It had to be well over ten minutes before I started to worry that Remy and Will wouldn’t find where I was. I opened my eyes again and everything was in its place. I felt better, and pretty sure I wouldn’t stubble again if I stood up.
Finally, after another five minutes of waiting, I heard Remy and Will coming.
“Reagan!” Will yelled.
Obviously Remy had forgotten where I was, so I helped them out a bit.
“I’m over here,” I yelled back, and I could practically hear them sigh in relief.
“Are you one hundred percent positive your okay?” Will asked for maybe the hundredth time.
When they finally found me, Will came right to my side and started asking if I was okay. I couldn’t really blame him for asking so much. I was acting a little strange. I really didn’t know what was wrong with me. I felt like something was going to happen, either to me or to Remy, and it wasn’t going to be good.
It was scaring me to think that something else was going to happen other than me falling off the cliff. I didn’t want anything else happening, not when everything was finally good between me and Will.
“I’m just really tired,” I lied. Will couldn’t know that I was scared something else bad was going to happen.
I looked over at Remy and I knew she knew I wasn’t telling the truth. She would probably ask me later when Will wouldn’t be able to hear. She would want to know everything.
I laid back and closed my eyes. A couple of moments later, I felt Will lay down beside me. I turned on my side and opened my eyes to look at him.
“What?” I asked, taking in the worried look on his face.
“Something’s not right with you,” he said. “You haven’t acted like yourself for the past couple of hours.”
“I know. I just haven’t been feeling right for some reason,” I said. “And I fell from cliff this morning. That’s probably another reason.”
“Do you feel sick or something? You’re head’s probably hurting you, isn’t it? If something is wrong, we’ll need to stay put for a day or two until you feel better.”
“No, I think I’m okay. I just feel like something’s going to happen again, something bad,” I said. There, I let it slip. I knew I shouldn’t have said anything, but I still did. “It probably doesn’t mean anything, though.”
“You need to say something if you don’t feel good, though, because something could be wrong,” he said.
“Other than being lost and having probably almost everyone thinking we’re dead?” I asked, smiling.
He smiled back. “Exactly. But seriously, you need to say something if anything happens. Promise?”
“I promise.” I moved over toward him so I was right next to him. “I love you,” I said for the first time since everything that had gone on earlier.
He put his arm around my waist, pulling me close to him. “I love you, too,” he said, and kissed my forehead. “Now get some sleep.”
I burrowed myself in the circle of his arms and remembered wishing that I could sleep next to him like this. It felt good, just lying there next to him. I put my head in the crook of his shoulder, closed my eyes, and tried to go to sleep. I had too many things going through my head, though.
What was with the headache that I’d had earlier? It was just too weird and I had no idea why it had happened. It obviously wasn’t a usual headache, because I would have remembered the few minutes I did have it. It felt like it had only lasted a few seconds, but I guess the pain took away my sense of time passing.
Will started snoring softly in my ear, so I knew he was asleep. I moved my head and opened my eyes. His face was so close to mine, but I could only make out some of his features in the moonlight. I could just make out the shadows of his long eyelashes the moon made on his cheeks and his lips that seemed to be in a little smile.
I closed my eyes again and settled in for another night sleeping in the woods.
When my eyes opened, I was in a hospital room lying in a bed, surrounded by deflated balloons and wilted flowers. No one was there with me, not even Remy. I sat up, swung my legs over the side of the bed and stood up. But when I looked back down at the bed…I was still lying there. I stared at myself in confusion.
The me that was lying on the bed didn’t move, didn’t open her eyes. I leaned over myself to see if I was breathing, but I couldn’t hear anything, not even a heartbeat. All of the monitors that were surrounding the bed were turned off. That didn’t seem like a good sign.
“Yes, that’s you, in case you didn’t understand,” I heard someone say from behind me. “And that will happen if you don’t change it.”
“What will happen?” I asked the shadow.
“You will die,” it said.
I froze, staring at it. “And why will I die?” I asked, scared and confused. Okay, what else could the shadow tell me to freak me out any more than telling me I was going to die?
“Because if you don’t learn to control your visions and what you’re seeing in them, you will choose to follow the wrong ones and they will hurt you and others. If you follow the wrong ones, you will be lost longer, putting you, Remy, and Will in harm’s way.”
I looked back down at me lying on the hospital bed. “But why would I die? I mean, it’s kind of weird, you have to admit. I know if you make one wrong decision and you have to pay the consequence, but why does that consequence have to be death?” I asked.
I certainly didn’t want to die. Who would? But why was it me who had to be the one to make the complicated decisions? Why couldn’t Remy be the one told this information and she try to help me, without even having to tell me? I didn’t want to have to deal with it.
“Remy wouldn’t be able to handle those kinds of decisions,” the shadow said, answering my unspoken question. “Since you were the first born, you have just a little bit more power than she does. You two still need each other, though, so don’t separate, even in your dreams. You alone would be able to make the decisions, but it is best if you do it together.”
“What kinds of decisions are you talking about?” I asked, warily. I probably already knew the answer, but I had to hear it.
“If you make the right choices, they will ensure your survival. But if you don’t…” It trailed off. It didn’t need to say anything else.
I knew what would happen. I looked back at my lifeless body on the hospital bed, trying to take in everything the shadow was saying. I suddenly remembered another dream, wondering if something there could change whatever was going to happen.
“What about the man in my other dream? Who was that?” I asked.
“I will say again, if you would have stayed on the path you were on at the time, he would have found you, but you wouldn’t have been in very good condition.”
“So if we wouldn’t have changed our path, we would have run into him?” I asked. “We would have been found by now?”
“No. You wouldn’t have found him for a couple of weeks. You would have run out of food and wouldn’t have found a source of water. Like I said, you wouldn’t have been in very good condition, any of you. So you would have pretty much been dead,” the shadow said.
“Okay. Another question,” I said then. “Do you have any explanation for the killer headache I had earlier?”
“You’re having headaches?” the shadow asked, sounded startled.
“Yeah. It hurt more than anything I’ve ever felt before. It felt like only seconds, but Remy said I was out for a few minutes,” I said.
“Has Remy had them, too, or just you?” the shadow asked. It seemed like it was trying to figure something out, but was unable to.
“No, I don’t think so. Besides, I would have known if she did. We don’t have that many places to get away from each other,” I said. “Why?”
“This shouldn’t be happening so soon,” the shadow said softly, more to itself. And then it turned toward me, or at least that’s what I made it out to be. “Since this is happening now, something bigger is on the horizon. You must trust it and go, or else this…” The shadow seemed to turn toward the body – my body – on the bed. “This will certainly happen.”
“Then why am in a hospital if we were never found?” I asked.
“I didn’t say you would never be found,” it said. “You would have been found eventually, but they wouldn’t be able to do anything for you.”
I looked around the hospital room again. Everything looked…I don’t know. Depressing. The mood in the room seemed to drag everything down with it.
“Then what’s with the balloons and flowers?” I asked.
“Many people thought you would have recovered, but you just…wouldn’t.”
I was still confused about everything. It was weird that one wrong decision could lead to your death, especially if you had almost made that decision the day before.
“What about Remy and Will? If I would have ended up like this, what would have happened to them?” I asked.
“They would live. But without you, both of them wouldn’t have anything to live for. A large piece of both of them would have died with you.”
The scene abruptly changed into Remy’s bedroom. She was sitting on her bed, knees pulled up to her chest and looking straight ahead, and looking more lost than I’d ever seen her. She didn’t look like her usual self. It didn’t even look like she cared what happened to her anymore. There were dark circles under her eyes, which were glistening with tears.
She looked toward me, maybe more like through me, and said one word.
“Why?”
And then she bursted into tears, burying her face in her hands.
The setting changed again.
This time, we were at a funeral, my funeral. All of my family and friends were there, including Will.
He was standing beside the casket. He looked like Remy, both his and her faces a blank mask. His eyes were rimmed with red. I didn’t even seem like he was breathing. But when he did, more tears escaped from his eyes. I walked toward him and stood beside him.
“Now I’m really glad that this didn’t happen,” I said, looking up at him.
“Yes,” the shadow said from beside me. “It would have changed way more than you would have thought. Nothing would have been the same.”
I watched as everyone walked away from the casket. As it started to lower into the ground, Remy and Will stayed right beside it as they watched it descend into the earth. I started at them for a moment, and then at the headstone with my name, birth, and death dates.
The scene changed back into the hospital room. Only this time instead of having no one in the room, everyone was crowded around my hospital bed. Remy and Will were there, surrounded by doctors and nurses. My parents and Will’s were just running into the room. They stopped up short when they saw Remy and Will, and then me, lying on the bed with tubes and wires going every which way.
Once Remy saw Mom and Dad, she ran to them, tears streaming down her face. Mom wrapped her arms around her as Dad walked to the bedside. He took my hand in his and knelt down beside the bed, tears in his eyes. I had never seen my father cry before, even if this was just a dream.
“My girl,” he said. “My sweet girl.” He turned to look at the doctors and nurses. “Is there nothing you can do?”
Just seeing him like that made tears flood my eyes.
“Why is it different?” I asked.
“This is your future now, if you stay on the path you are going,” it said. “Like I said before, something is on the horizon. The headaches lead to it. No matter how or when it happens, you must go.” The shadow faded before I could ask what it meant.
I walked over to the bed and looked at Remy and Will’s hopeful faces, even though there were tears in their eyes. They were standing on either side of me. But then their hopeful faces turned to panic as the heart monitor beside the bed flat-lined. Remy started crying, making tears come to my own eyes again.
“No!” she cried.
The doctors and nurses pushed Remy, Will and both our parents out of the way of the bed. In a flurry of motion, they were trying CPR and bringing in the crash cart. But nothing was working. They worked on me for a few more moments, but when nothing worked, they turned off all of the monitors.
“No!” Remy cried again, staying by my side even as the nurses tried to push her out of the way.
Everything seemed to be going in slow motion. The doctors were shocking me, trying to get my heart beat going again. They were trying everything but nothing was working. Remy was still screaming, but Dad was holding both her and Mom, tears running down all of their faces.
I felt something shake my shoulder then. But when I looked behind me, nothing was there.
My eyes were still streaming, just looking at everyone as they looked at the monitor. I looked over at Will, and was startled to see that he was looking straight at me. Not my body on the bed, but me, standing there across from him.
“Reagan, wake up,” he said. “Wake up.”
I looked at him in confusion. I felt like I was being shaken again, only harder this time. I looked around me, but there was nothing
“Its okay, Rea. Wake up,” he said again.
Only this time in the dream, Will didn’t say it. It was coming from somewhere else. Everything started to get darker until I couldn’t see anything.
“Wake up.”
I bolted up, tears still streaming down my face from the dream. It was Will who had been shaking me, trying to get me to wake up. He still had his hand on my shoulder. I wiped my face with the back of my hand, making sure the tears were gone.
“Are you okay?” Will asked anxiously. “I tried to wake you up because you were crying in your sleep.”
“It’s okay,” I said, still wiping my eyes. “It was just a bad dream.”
“Do you want to tell me about it? That always helps.”
I shook my head and stood up. The tears wouldn’t stop, so I held my hands over my eyes, trying to block them.
“Hey,” Will said, standing up. “What is it?”
He wrapped his arms around me and I leaned my head against his chest, letting the tears fall freely. I tightened my hold on him as I waited for my tears to slow.
“I dreamed that I was dead. It was my fault. We were lost for a long time, and when they did find us, it was too late,” I said. I took a shaky breath as I leaned away to look up at him. “I was dead.”
“Rea,” he said, tucking my hair behind my ear. “You’re not going to die. We’re going to get out of here before long. Nothing bad is going to happen to any of us.”
“Nothing bad happened to you in my dream,” I said. “It’s just me.”
“Well, if that did happen, I would say something bad happened to me,” he said. “Because you’d be gone, which I wouldn’t want.”
“I don’t want it to happen,” I said, shaking my head fiercely. “I don’t.”
He wiped away my tears again, cradling my face in his hands. “Of course you don’t,” he said. “And I say again, it’s not going to happen.”
“I don’t want it to happen,” I whispered again.
Without even thinking, I leaned up and kissed him. I didn’t know why, but it felt like it could be one of the last times I would be able to. When I pulled back, I wrapped my arms around his neck. I never wanted to let go.
“We’ll be okay,” he said. “I promise.”
I nodded. He sighed and kissed my forehead.
It was a few minutes later when I saw someone walk out from the trees. But it was only Remy.
“Where have you been?” I asked.
“Where do you think?” she asked, holding up the water bottles.
“There’s a pond right here,” I said. “Why did you go somewhere else?”
“Maybe I just wanted to enjoy the scenery,” she said walking over to put the bottles in the backpack.
“The scenery is the same everywhere we go here,” I said. “And this is probably the prettiest place we’ve seen in all the days we’ve been here.”
“Still,” she said, shrugging.
I started to walk toward her, but then I could feel another one of the headaches coming on again, only a little more painful than the last one.
Lights flashed before my eyes and the fire burned in my head. I clutched my head again, trying to smother the flames, but nothing was helping. I opened my eyes, not realizing they’d closed, and looking at Remy and Will, who seemed to be moving in slow motion.
The last thing I saw before I had to close my eyes was Remy running toward me.