Annica's Point of View
Yesterday afternoon.
That kiss.
A regret.
"Why did I do that?" I mutter into my pillow as the small minutes that I couldn't fall asleep for starts turning into hours. I've been lying in bed for virtually 4 hours without a single wink of slumber.
These feelings that somehow pop here and there for Kenton . . .
I don't understand what they are and why they suddenly came upon me now but I know that they're something dangerous and I need to keep away from them. The pieces are slowly putting themselves together but just barely.
I've heard about situations like these and all I've seen them as are distractions. The girl gets pregnant, the guy leaves, or they're addicted to each other blah blah blah. Though I'm not saying that Kenton is a distraction for the road ahead – or am I? I can't tell.
I readjust my lying position for the 20th time and I feel something scuff at my shoulder. What the hey? I prop up myself up on my left elbow and grab the sharp object from inside my pillow case. It's super thin in my grasp and immediately I know that it's a piece of paper.
What? How did this get here? Why have I never noticed it?
I slowly unfold it, becoming unsure what this might lead to with every flattening of a sharp crease.
And when I complete the monotonous task of opening it up, 3 short lines are revealed in the dead centre of the paper. It's done in a dark midnight blue, ball point pen. The elegant, gothic handwriting has to be Kenton's.
I can't even bring myself to look at it; the unawareness of the content of this piece of paper scares me.
But being the stupid girl that I am, I force myself to stretch out my arm to turn on my snow white, porcelain lamp and read to it anyways:
As long as waves will connect us like liquid bridges
May something burn and flourish
My mind is no longer within equilibrium
After reading them the only thing I can think of is, "What heck does that mean?" I rub some sleep out of my eyes and tug the heavy sheets off of my body.
As I sit up my head spins and I lean against my snow white painted headboard. The room still slightly spins but I just focus my gaze on the paper, which luckily appears to be at a standstill.
"As the waves still connect us like liquid bridges." I mumble to nothing in particular. Then I turn to my dolphin 'Pillow Pet' – Cyan – that I just took out of the closet yesterday and ask, "What do you think Kenton's trying to say?" My stuffy just stares back at me like it usually does with its beady obsidian eyes and I smack my forehead, "Oh gosh, is this seriously driving me that crazy that I have to talk to my stuffed animal about it?"
Pause.
"Yup, yup it does."
So I look over the riddle once again and contemplate. "As. So we're talking about time here," I pick up my stuffed dolphin and put her in my lap.
For how long the waves will keep us connected. "Waves. Water. How long the ocean connected us together?" I chew my lip and pat my stuffy's head, "That's it. The water has been churning on this planet forever. And to make something that will burn and flourish for that amount of time." I wiggle my toes and scratch the back of my neck, "What on earth could that – wait. To try to keep a fire burning for eternity. A spark. A connection between two people to keep going." I smile, "I think we may be getting somewhere, Cyan." And just when the good feeling of achievement soaks in I look at the last line and frown, "Goodness, what do you think this is supposed to mean?"
My mind is no longer within equilibrium.
"My mind is no longer balanced," I repeat in a more basic format. No longer balanced? As in mentally insane, imbalanced? No, that can't be right.
I tap my chin contemplatively, "What was that thing that Carter said when we were younger?"
A balanced mind.
A balanced person.
A balanced life style.
"Balanced thoughts," my voice utters the words before my brain even realizes it. I furrow my brows and ruffle the bed sheets with my bare feet, "Ugh. What do you suppose, that means?" I look at my 'Pillow Pet' in the eyes to find nothing.
I sigh, "This is driving me absolutely mad!" I smack the paper onto my nightstand in annoyance and lie back down, shoving my face into my pillow. Although my stuffy falls down in the process because I wasn't holding onto her and she lands onto the floor.
"Rats," I curse and get up to grab her. And when I do my elbow knocks the paper that I sloppily smacked onto my bed side table, to the floor as well. So I end up having to snatch up both but what struck me surprised is when I just hold up the piece of paper for a second by the light.
A ghostly figure appears in a beige hue and so does a date.
I put down my stuffed animal and hold the picture closer to the heat of the lamp – which is best over top of the shade – and instantly it was if somebody set fire to the drawing.
I jerk the paper away but when it was done, dark mahogany markings replace the light beige ones, revealing a beautiful woman with elegant, curly hair, large curious eyes and thin lips. Freckles lightly dappled her cheeks and straight nose like how they mark Kenton's face.
Speaking of him, the older looking woman reminds me of him. Not just because of the freckles but because of the way she smiled. Her lips her tight but her expression was yet sincere. I've seen Kenton make this face before but without teeth showing. He only loses his eyes to his eyelids when he pretends to smile or is laughing really hard, so I know that the smile is not a fake one.
But this couldn't possibly be his mother because I saw her in the videos. Or did I?
I look at the clock and in a glowing vermillion red it reads; 2:36 AM.
He's obviously asleep but I'm not in the mood to wait; though generally I would let something wait till morning but this is not something that you should be patient for.
I bring the paper with me and walk up to the doorframe and open it up to the hallway.
My feet gently touch the floor as I stride over to the guestroom. My ankle is slightly feeling better and I'm okay with walking on both feet as if there were no pain. Turns out the band has jammed needles into my ankle, which of course is how blood would be taken away from my body every 3 hours to make sure I don't have enough energy to dissipate.
I finally reach the opposite end of the hallway and open up the door. Only to be welcomed by Kenton's heavy breathing.
Surprise, surprise the guy doesn't always snore like a grizzly bear during hibernation.
I stalk over to the side of the bed that he's lying on – not bothering to turn on any lights because the stream of light coming from the window is good enough – and immediately regret even thinking about waking him up. But I need to talk to him about this as soon as possible.
So I grasp his shoulder and roughly rock him back and forth, "Kenton." I whisper but of course he doesn't even flinch at the sound of his name.
I do this again except a bit louder and yet I get the same results.
"Kenton!" I yell and suddenly he jerks awake, grabbing me by the forearms and throwing me onto the bed. He's now on top of me straddling my hips, looking at me with hard eyes, "What the heck was that all about?" I can feel his fast paced pulse through his hands that are still gripping my forearms tightly. His blood shot eyes scare me a bit but the way he said those words, dripping with venom, I could start screaming but I don't.
"It's something really important," I say with my voice leveled. And yet he doesn't get off of me.
"So important that you couldn't wait until I wake up on my own?" He raises a brow, annoyed. He's not letting up.
"Yes," I sigh heavily. "Now can you get off of me? You're really heavy," I squirm beneath his weight and I can feel him tighten his legs around me but then he does eventually get off.
What was that all about?
I timidly get up and pass the paper to him. "I found this in my pillow case a few minutes ago and I was wondering if that was your handwriting." He puts on his far-sighted glasses from the nightstand, barely gives it a glance and nods, "Yup, it's mah girly handwriting alright. Now can I get thome sleep?" I cross my legs and frown, "If it's your writing then –"
"It izz mah writing. I am 100 perkent sure." He cuts me off rudely.
His words seem a bit oddly pronounced and I notice that he's wearing a retainer.
I purse my lips, "Well, apparently there is also something on the back that I find connected to you, also." I slightly lean closer to him and flip the paper, "Do you recognize this woman?"
I see his green hazel eyes grow large and he licks his teeth, deep in thought. That goofy expression is so Kenton that it's almost laughable.
"I am extrehmely sthorry but I don't recognize her. The only thing I know from this picture is thaht she's the female version of me." At the last part, the right side of his lip quirks up the slightest bit.
"Just as I thought," I grumble. My very irritated and fatigued friend beside me leans against the wooden head board and sighs, "Just asth you thought wha?" I chew my lip, "Hold a second." I get up and go back to my room to where I keep my stuff from S.O.L.O. that they allowed me to bring and I take out the sheets of papers that we found while fighting those people. Something about the texture of the paper and the ink colour feels odd familiar.
I hurry back to the guestroom and I see Kenton pacing the room. And abruptly he stops in midstride to look at me who's awkwardly standing there at the doorjamb, hands full of a bunch of papers.
He looks at me with curious eyes and looks down at my hands, "Are those the sheets that we found on those criminals?" I nod in response to his question and curtly pass him to lie all the sheets out on the bed.
All of them have the same type of paper, with the same type of ink but not the same type of writing. The others are written all in confidently stroked capitals. I flip them all onto their backs to see nothing. Then I pick up the first one that we received from Ved and turn on the bedside lamp.
Light floods into the room and I can feel my pupils' sting from the sudden change.
Kenton – being him – is left completely unaffected by this and walks up so close beside me that I can feel heat being thrown off of his willowy figure.
I hold up the paper in front of the lamp and slowly the form of a face begins to burn into the parchment. Though before it can finish the lightbulb explodes and I scream.
"Calm down, it's fine." He says reassuringly and gently takes the paper from me, making sure that a good amount of our hands touch during the process.
Something in my hand begins to tingle but I just shove those redundant thoughts away.
He squints at the sheet and suddenly a stream of light comes out of his eyes, instantly burning the rest of the invisible ink.
And the sight image makes my heart skips a beat.
Kenton can sense this also, "Wait, isn't this –"
"My dad," I finish for him. He passes it to me so that I can take a better look at it. Every single detail is almost perfect except one thing. He wasn't smiling.
My dad might have been a crazy scientist that loved his work but doesn't mean he didn't take the time to at least smile.
"Why is my dad at the back at one of these pieces of papers?" I say mostly to myself. "And why is there is a picture of some unknown woman at the back of your riddle? Do you have any clue about this that might help?"
"Well my dad," he starts off, "isth a detective – or at least I think he still is – for the police force. I was apparently really desperate to write that riddle down in hopes that you'd see it. Oh yeah, by the way I wasth 13 when I wrote it. And I never knew what happened to you guys."
A beat of silence takes its place between his words.
"So yeah. Anyways, I use some random blank sheet of paper that I manage to scrounge from my dad's office. It was on the shelf organized with different types of paper, loose-leaf, legal sized, weird yellowing paper. The works. So I just grabbed a basic 8 by 11, printer sheet that was lying in a stack on his desk. Then I wrote it down and kind of – broke into your house to put it into your pillow case."
I put my hands on my hips and smile tightly, "Wow, like I really needed to know that you snuck into my room. Thanks." His face tinges with a rose colour and he looks to the ground, "Well yeah. And I knew about that because I made it into a documentary. And I watched it later on after you left the room. Man, was I a klutz! Nearly fell out the window 3 times!"
I'm about to laugh when a sudden idea hits me. Then I chew my finger nail to lack the look of suspicion and ask, "Wait a second. How could you've gotten into my room through the window and there not be any signs of you trying to brake in?" He smiles at this, "This is quite simple actually. On the side of the house where your window liesth, there is a morning glory vine that travels up near your window. And what happens is that connected to the vine is this "dead leaf" – aka a lock pad designed to look like dead botanical – that has the diminutive letters C, A and D inscribed within the veins of the "dead leaf". In order to unlock your window and open it up, you have to tap the letters within the sequence of how your names go."
I raise a brow at his so called "simplicity". "So ADC?" He grins knowingly and cheekily, "Exactly."
"Anyways," he brings us back on topic, "Do you know what type of date this is for? I-If you don't mind me asking." His finger is pressed against the date in the bottom right-hand corner.
That day seemed all too familiar to even take a second guess at. "Death date. My father died on that day so I'm guessing if we do the rest of these sheets like we did with these 2, then we'll just show up with the rest of the people and their deaths." A huge wave of excitement/sadness strikes me and I turn to Kenton who's rubbing his eyes with his fists and yawning.
My bubble of excitement/sadness suddenly pops, "Oh gosh. I'm so sorry for waking you up so early. I was just so engrossed in the clue that I couldn't back away from it!" I keep babbling when suddenly I notice that I'm not even looking at him but at the floor.
I feel him reach out and tilt my head up with his fingers gently so that I'm gazing right at him. His touch is so soft and yet so electrifying that I can't even imagine not wanting him to have his hands all over me.
To not wanting to have his lips kiss every inch of my skin.
To not wanting him to love me.
And as if this whole moment were a dream, slowly but surely Kenton leans down the slightest bit so that his face is leveled with mine and is so close that our noses brushes against each other and heat shoots down from my head ending with an exhilarating tingle at the soles of my feet.
My heart thrums euphorically, ramming against my ribcage so hard that I'm pretty sure Kenton can hear from outside. Never have I felt like this and neither do I want it to stop.
But of course, my conscience does.
My chin just tilts the slightest bit more and his feverish lips just miss mine by a millimetre.
He doesn't jerk back in surprise like I thought he would, instead he let's his lips linger on my skin for just a second longer.
Then I feel him draw away and intake a sharp breath; frustration set deep in his expression. He opens his mouth, preparing to say something but he just closes it back shut.
I awkwardly stand there then pick up the papers off the bed, trying hard not to make any eye contact.
It was a mistake just to want his help in the first place.