Then the blue light was gone, disappearing somewhere in the red dust, and the desert drew a clean line across my life: before and after. And here I am, still reaching out toward something I lost.
I’m having the dream again.
A girl walks through a vibrant green forest flecked with autumn reds—lush and moist, nothing like the desert. Dead leaves carpet the ground. Blue sky stretches above a square black tower.
The girl is me. Someone whistles, and she turns to find a boy with freckled cheeks—my friend Ellis. “They’re coming,” he says.
Fear rockets down the girl’s spine; she hears them slithering through the leaves. “Let’s go!”
The boy runs, and she runs after him as the wind rises. A sickly blue light bleeds through the trees. Together they wriggle inside the tower, where a stink of old burning sears their nostrils. The tower is a smokestack rising to a ring of bright sky, and that brightness is the Glare. A good Glare, a light that will never hurt them.
But now clouds film over the sky, forming a shape like a grinning skull. The girl shivers.
The boy releases her hand. “You have to leave, Hedda. You’re already dead—did you forget?”
How can he say that? How can he abandon her? “I’m not!” she yells.
A wind swirls up from nowhere and drags the girl outside, away from the boy. She screams, but his back is turned.
The storm rips leaves from trees as the girl runs helter-skelter, looking for a tree with a safety rune on the trunk. Stray twigs sting her cheeks. A massive branch falls in her path, and she staggers backward. A high keening splits the air. They’re here.
All the trees are one tree, the leaves thrashing above and the deadfall crackling ominously below. Something stirs under those leaves, slithering toward the girl, and she tries to run, but her legs won’t work. Something perches on a branch above her, crouched to spring, and she screams and screams—
And I cry out and wake to my room, starting to lighten with the new day.
My heart’s racing, my body drenched in sweat. I throw off the blanket and breathe deeply until everything slows down to normal. The nightmare is as familiar to me as the lines on my palm. Ellis always deserts me in it, though in real life I was the one who left him behind.
Dawn creeps over the creek and the cottonwoods, the sky violet again from mesa to flat horizon, and I need Mom.
When I think of how we fought yesterday, a ragged void opens inside me. The two or three months we plan to be apart might as well be forever.
I tiptoe down the hall and ease the door of her room open. She doesn’t stir, a dark lump under the covers, her jaw swollen with the mouthguard that keeps her from grinding her teeth all night.
Part of me wants to creep into bed with her like I did when I was six and had the black tower nightmare, and part of me is pretty sure she’d scream bloody murder. She solves the dilemma by opening her eyes. At first they widen with panic, but then she wakes for real, her face becoming the calm, patient one she always had when she bandaged my scrapes and reassured me there were no monsters under the bed.
As she yanks the mouthguard out, I say, “I’m sorry.”
She holds out her arms, and I sink onto the bed and into the hug. Her breath is soft and even, raising fine hairs on the back of my neck as she says, “It’s a big change for us both.”
And I can handle it, something whispers deep inside me, still rebellious, but I stay still and let the warm cliff of her body protect me one last time, knowing that tonight I won’t sleep in the bed I woke in.
I’m going home. And when—if—I come back here, I won’t be the same.
The airport has acres of stainless steel and mirrors and clanking conveyor belts. Boxes of bluish Glare flicker everywhere—bolted to posts, on people’s laps, in people’s hands, on people’s wrists. Even children have them.
Is California like this? My experiences at Walmart, the feed store, and the county fair haven’t prepared me for this level of Glare.
It’s not the Glare that really fascinates me, though; it’s the girls my age. I’ve read every book in the town library about them: Carrie and The Runaway’s Diary and Go Ask Alice and newer books when I could find them. I know never to go anywhere with a stranger you meet at a bus station, never to assume a cute guy is also nice, and never to trust popular girls. I even know what texting and friending are, in a vague way, and how to hold a phone.
But these girls—they’re real. They wear ponytails and pin-striped shorts and frilly blouses and leggings and headwraps. They stretch out their long, tanned legs and yawn as if everything bores them. They tap on their phones like it’s the most natural thing in the world.
I know how to avert my eyes from the Glare so Mom won’t think it’s sucking me in. But how can I be friends with girls like this without using the Glare?
Mom must be noticing my furtive eyes, because she says, “You’re okay, Hedda. You know you’re okay.”
“I know.” I try to keep the sarcasm out of my voice. She’s already scrutinizing me for signs of losing control.
It hurt saying goodbye to the goats and the chickens. It hurt driving away, smelling the familiar blend of moist clay and gritty sand and animal dung. And it hurts as we stand at the gate and she folds me in her arms.
“Maybe you’ll find Raggedy Ann,” she says as we come apart.
She’s told me the story a hundred times: When we were halfway to Arizona, I wailed because I’d forgotten to pack my favorite doll. Dad promised to bring her to our first birthday dinner, then claimed he couldn’t find her.
“Maybe.” I think of those girls again, how they’d roll their eyes and maybe call me a freak. I’m not a child. Stop wishing I were.
“Your dad understands everything. He promised he won’t give you culture shock.”
“Okay.”
Mom’s crying, her eyes too bright in her wind-burnt face, the ranch’s scent clinging to her fleece. As her arms wrap tight around me, I feel cold, like she’s already gone, and I whisper, “I love you.”
It’s harder to ignore the Glare on the plane, where it’s right in my face. The back of each seat has a tiny screen embedded in it, and the instant the lights blink on, so do the screens. Their sharp-edged jewel brightness draws me in: winking, twitching, flashing. Like they’re trying to send me signals.
Did Mom know about this? Presumably not.
If my senses reached out into the desert and found only emptiness, here they’re overloaded. My stomach flips over, and for an instant I forget the Glare is no more dangerous than secondhand tobacco smoke. Probably less. Mom’s books disagree on what exactly glowing screens do to people’s brains, but lung cancer isn’t involved.
Mom gave me a pill to take in case my first flight made me nervous. I didn’t mean to use it, but now I reach into the front pocket of my backpack, pull out the dusty-rose tablet, and swallow it dry.
Once I get to California, every conversation with Dad will be crucial. For the past ten years, he’s obeyed Mom’s rules around me, never even openly questioning them. If I want to go to school, if I want to avoid a future of New Genesis or growing old with Mom on the ranch, I need to show him I can control myself, too.