When Rose Wakes

by Christopher Golden

  “I’m going with Kylie, a friend from school. She’s going to come by so you can meet her.”

  “—and no kissing boys,” Aunt Fay finished. “You may not understand us, Rose, but I know that in your heart you know that we love you.”

  Rose lowered her hand from her cheek. “In my heart, maybe, but my face doesn’t feel that way right now.”

  Aunt Suzette slumped into the chair across from the one Rose had upended. “I’m sorry, Rose. But we do love you. Without your memory you might as well be a newborn. Boys can’t be trusted. They are guilty until proven innocent, and they will say anything to persuade or cajole, as long as they get what they want in the end.”

  “I agree,” Rose said.

  Aunt Suzette brightened. “What?”

  “I agree to the terms,” Rose said. “No traveling alone. Home by midnight. No kissing boys. But… were you serious, Aunt Fay? About going back to France? You want to move again now, just when I’m starting school?”

  “No,” Aunt Fay said. “Of course not.”

  But Rose did not think she sounded very sincere. She recalled her dream from that morning, something about lying with a man. A voice echoed in the back of her mind. All is lost, someone had said to her. And something about a witch making people fall asleep. But the dream had faded considerably in the hours since, and Rose thought that must be a good sign. If she could remember so little, her dreams must really be dreams, incorporating things from her waking life.

  Enough with dreams, she thought. It was time for her to live while she was awake.

  As for tonight, when it came time to surrender again to the fresh fears that slumber might bring… she would fight sleep as long as she could, and pray for a night without dreams.

  Rose trailed Kylie through the Harvard Square T station, ignoring the urine smell that blew up from the tunnels as trains bulleted in to disgorge passengers. On a Friday night, Cambridge swarmed with college students looking for a good time. People marched past a scruffy guy playing guitar, his case open to receive coins or dollars from those he entertained or shamed into donating to his personal cause. In the main chamber of the station a skinny bald woman in peach and tan robes passed out pamphlets that could have been for a new religion or a new café, and a burgeoningly fat man with charcoal skin sold individually wrapped flowers out of a plastic pickle tub.

  As they went up the escalator, Rose looked back, but Kylie barely seemed to have noticed their surroundings at all.

  “—should stop and get some coffee. Are you in love with coffee?” Kylie asked. “I am having such a torrid affair with coffee. I crave it, but I’m, like, a total slut for it, too. Coffee just has its way with me. Hazelnut? Cappuccino? Espresso? Frickin’ mocha vanilla blah blah breakfast blend? Take me now, coffee, I am yours to do with as you please.”

  Rose laughed, shaking her head.

  “You think I’m joking?”

  “No, I can see you’re quite sincere. You are coffee whipped.”

  Kylie nodded decisively. “I am coffee’s bitch.”

  “I take all this to mean you want to stop and get coffee on the way to the party?” Rose asked as they reached the top of the escalator.

  Kylie put one finger to the tip of her nose. “You are perceptive for a recently comatose person.”

  Rose gaped at her and then the girls both laughed, sighing with amusement and their contentment with each other’s company as they spilled out into Harvard Square. Kylie had come to the Acorn Street apartment and been introduced to the aunts, who had examined the girl carefully as though trying to make sure she wasn’t secretly a boy in disguise. They had not seemed all that impressed, but Rose had been glad they had at least been polite.

  From there the girls had taken the T from the Park Street station, talking excitedly about the party and about Jared, gossiping like they had been friends since the cradle. Kylie had seemed particularly excited when she realized that as far as music was concerned, Rose had woken from her coma a blank slate. She loved music, but she knew very little of it. Kylie had a mission now.

  “There’s an amazing place down the street, across from the Border Café, called Club Passim,” Kylie said. “It’s like this 1960s flashback… actually, it’s been there at least that long. Anyway, they’ve always got cool folk musicians coming in, like Common Rotation and Red Heart the Ticker, and it’s all ages. We should definitely go some time.”

  “Definitely,” Rose agreed. “I’m always humming but I don’t know what the songs are that are in my head. I know it’s weird. Coma Girl strikes again. I open my mouth to sing but none of the words are there. My aunts play classical music a lot in the house and I actually love that. Some of the stuff I’ve listened to online I like, but it’s hard to even know where to start.”

  Kylie had stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. Heavy traffic flowed through Harvard Square, both cars in the street and people beside it. A skate punk with a face full of piercings and green hair almost collided with them and gave them a dirty look as he went around.

  “Sorry,” Rose muttered, tugging Kylie to one side behind a trash barrel. “Why did you stop?”

  “You sing?” Kylie asked.

  Rose shrugged. “I don’t know if I sing well, but I like to. Why?”

  Kylie punched her lightly on the arm, rolling her eyes as if that were the stupidest question in the entire history of questions.

  “You need to join chorus.”

  “What?” Rose said, pulse speeding up. “No. I’m not… I don’t want to do anything that… public. Not right now. Not until people forget about Coma Girl. The last thing I need is to give them more reasons to torture me.”

  Kylie grinned, looped her arm in Rose’s, and propelled them both into the flow of people crossing the street at a red light.

  “First of all, I’m sorry to break it to you, but Coma Girl is here to stay. For as long as you’re at St. Bridget’s, you will be Coma Girl. So just give up right now any hope you have of escaping it. You are she. She are you.”

  Rose sighed. “I know. I’m pretty resigned to it. We’ve covered this.”

  “Good. Now back to chorus. You’re the new girl. You need some kind of extracurricular something to get to know other kids at St. B’s. Since you seem not to love the basketball bitches or to have any special obsession with sports, and since you like to sing, I’m thinking chorus. Which would be nice, because I’m in chorus. We’d have so much fun! You’d love it. They’d love you.”

  Rose felt a creeping nausea enter her gut. “What if I can’t sing?”

  Kylie nodded. “Okay, if you suck that would be bad. But you could sing for me first, just to be on the safe side.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “But—”

  “We’ll see.”

  Kylie grinned, hipchecked her, and they did a mad dash across Mount Auburn Street as cars roared toward them.

  “I’m so glad your aunts let you out tonight,” Kylie said.

  “How do you think I feel?” Rose replied. “They’re driving me nuts.”

  “They seemed really nice.”

  “They are. It’s just…”

  “Just what?”

  Rose hesitated, uncomfortable with talking about the recent strain on her relationship with her aunts. But if she couldn’t talk to Kylie, she couldn’t talk to anyone. They’d only known each other a couple of days, but Rose thought she was smart and funny and understanding. She didn’t seem the type to judge, and that set Rose at ease. But how could she really be sure she could trust Kylie enough to share her secrets and her fears?

  You can’t be sure, she thought.

  And yet she did want to talk. Now that the possibility had entered her mind, she very badly wanted to let it all come spilling out of her. Which was precisely what she did.

  “They’re really peculiar,” Rose began. “Maybe even a little crazy. I feel like I’m betraying them or something just talking about it, but they’ve got all kinds of old-world superstitions. Every ni
ght I’m supposed to drink this special tea that they think is going to help me sleep and keep nightmares away. And they hang these little handmade whatevers in the windows of my room like they’re warding off evil spirits. It’s all so… I don’t know, so old-world, y’know? Never mind the obsession with boys.”

  Kylie held the door for her as they entered a tiny coffee shop called Java Man, whose strong aromas formed a delicious cloud around Rose as she walked in.

  “That’s old-fashioned even by old-fashioned standards,” Kylie said. “But… and I know you probably don’t want to hear this… when someone you love’s been in a coma for, like, two years, you’ve got to have a pretty flexible definition of overprotective, right?”

  Rose let out a breath, watching Kylie as the other girl scanned the menu behind the counter. They were third in line after a gay couple and a woman in a power suit.

  “I’m not against old-fashioned,” Rose said. “I’m pretty old-fashioned myself, as far as I can remember.”

  She did a little half twist to show off the burgundy skirt and cream top combo she had chosen for tonight. The outfit had a crinkly, almost hippie style that made it less formal than some of the other clothes in her wardrobe, but she suspected she would still stand out at the party. Kylie had on rust-colored jeans, a green-ribbed cotton shirt and a light brown jacket. Somehow it all worked on her, maybe because almost anything went with the amused sparkle that always lit her eyes.

  “So what is it that really bothers you about all of this?” Kylie asked.

  Rose exhaled, hanging her head in thought. When she looked up, pushing her hair away from her eyes, she knew.

  “They’re hiding something from me.”

  “What are they hiding?”

  “No idea,” Rose said. “But it’s like they’re awesome and they love me, and then sometimes they put this wall up that I’m not supposed to get past. I have these crazy dreams and they’re really upsetting and it feels like they’re trying to tell me something, but my aunts keep brushing it off.”

  “What do you dream about?” Kylie asked.

  But then it was their turn to order and Rose felt too self-conscious to talk while they were at the counter, so they waited for their coffees in silence. Kylie got a mochaccino with a caramel swirl, which seemed more like ice cream than coffee to Rose, who had a frothy café au lait. Only when they were walking out of Java Man and headed out of Harvard Square did the conversation begin again.

  “You were going to tell me about these dreams,” Kylie said.

  Rose almost brushed it off with a joke, uneasy at the thought of sharing the content of her strange nightmares, but she needed to talk to someone. Haltingly at first, and then with more detail, she revealed the parts of her dreams that she remembered most vividly, everything from the evil presence in her bedroom and the woman built of cockroaches to her impending wedding, the fairy women of the forest, and the story about all of the people in the kingdom falling asleep.

  Kylie sipped her mochaccino. When Rose fell silent, they walked on together a few more steps and then Kylie chuckled quietly.

  “Hey, don’t laugh,” Rose said. “This is really bothering me.”

  “I know. I’m sorry, I wasn’t… you really don’t see anything familiar in these dreams?”

  Rose frowned. “You do?”

  Kylie shook her head in apparent amazement. “Must be your wonky memory. It’s like a broken computer. The files are there; you just can’t access them. Otherwise I figure you’d already have seen the connection. You were in a coma, now you’ve woken up, and you’re dreaming about the princess with the fairy godmothers.”

  Something did seem to be stirring in the back of Rose’s mind. “What are you talking about?”

  “Sleeping Beauty. Not the Disney movie, obviously. The fairy tale. Fairies come to a celebration of the birth of a princess, give her gifts of beauty, wit, blah blah blah. Wicked fairy who didn’t get an invite casts a spell on the princess that she’ll prick her finger on a spindle and die—which always struck me as oddly specific. Good fairy changes the spell so the chick will fall asleep for a hundred years instead and then, when it happens, puts the whole kingdom to sleep with her.”

  Rose stared straight ahead, barely focused on the shops and restaurants that lined the road. The foot traffic had thinned but she walked slowly, pondering as she drank her coffee, which had turned oddly bitter as it cooled.

  “I don’t think I remember the fairy tale,” she said.

  “I think you do, and you don’t realize it,” Kylie countered.

  Forgetting her coffee for the moment, Rose compared what Kylie had said about Sleeping Beauty with her dreams. There were certainly similarities, and she could see how her frustrations with her aunts could have mixed with knowledge of the story to create the weird dream-world she’d been visiting in her sleep.

  “You’re Coma Girl,” Kylie went on. “Basically, you are Sleeping Beauty. Subconsciously, you’re totally identifying with the story and your aunts’ whole weirdness is twisting it around.”

  “Do you really think so?” Rose asked.

  Kylie shrugged. “I’m not a shrink, but it does make a weird sort of sense, doesn’t it?”

  Rose smiled hesitantly, and then with more confidence as a weight lifted from her. “Yeah. Actually it does. Maybe I’m not completely nuts after all.”

  “Well, not completely,” Kylie said.

  “Hey!” Rose said, bumping her gently so as not to spill any coffee. Kylie laughed and tried to return the favor, and this time they both spilled a little.

  “Noooo!” Kylie cried theatrically, licking rivulets of coffee from the side of her cup.

  They both giggled a little and then Rose thanked her.

  “For what?” Kylie asked.

  “For listening and not thinking I’m weird.”

  Kylie smiled. “Oh, you’re definitely weird.”

  They heard the party before they even saw the house. A left turn off of Mount Auburn put them on Walpole Street, where a shop selling candles and scented oils sat on the corner beneath a darkened second floor whose window glowed with a neon sign advertising psychic services. Beyond that, however, Walpole Street turned into a quiet oasis away from the trendy sprawl that extended blocks away from Harvard Square. Trees grew in the narrow spaces between houses that had long ago been converted into apartments for students who hadn’t, for whatever reason, managed to score housing on the Harvard campus. Music thumped the night air, rattling windows, and Rose could feel the rhythm exploding against her as she and Kylie passed several tall pines and saw the house, its second floor lit up with festive colors. People milled about behind the windows, their voices a blended murmur even at a distance.

  A birthday party, Jared had revealed via text this morning, in honor of a girl named Chloe King, whose sister was a part-time model and part-time Harvard student. The description had summoned a certain glamour in Rose’s imagination, but the reality quickly proved less impressive.

  “Are you sure we shouldn’t have brought a present?” Rose asked as Kylie led the way up the front walk.

  “For Chloe King? No. She’s a bitch.”

  “Then why are we here?”

  Kylie glanced back at her. “You’re here because Jared invited you. Which, by the way… totally jealous. He’s not just hot, he’s sweet. It’s like he’s all soulful and reads classic literature and stuff, but he’s funny and so damn cute, but he doesn’t even know how cute.”

  “Wow,” Rose said. “So, you like him? You should’ve said—”

  Kylie brushed it off. “God, no. He’s not my type at all. I like them big and kind of dopey. Besides, a guy like that’ll break your heart, and I want to be the heartbreaker.”

  Rose laughed, not sure if she was joking, and wondered if Jared Munoz would break her heart.

  “Anyway, that’s why we’re here. You’re here for Jared, and I’m here because I like parties. This thing is going to be crashed by a ton of people… from St. B�
�s, from Harvard, and probably just from the neighborhood. Girls like Chloe operate on a more the merrier philosophy. She wants attention. The more out of control the party gets, the more she thinks she’s awesome. The cops will probably break it up in a few hours—”

  “Cops?” Rose said worriedly.

  “—and Chloe will think that makes her a celebrity, or something,” Kylie finished, grabbing Rose by the wrist.

  The storm door hung crookedly on its hinges and creaked as Kylie opened it, a screech so loud it was audible even with the music and the voices. Rose allowed herself to be tugged across the threshold even as a whole host of second thoughts filled her. Two guys with beers and cigarettes pushed past them, headed out onto the front steps presumably to light up. One of the guys, older and tragically handsome, gave her an appreciative look that made her face flush with embarrassed heat. A bar had been set up in one corner and two girls in tight tops and short skirts were pouring drinks.

  Rose leaned in toward Kylie so she would be heard over the music. “Won’t they be arrested if the police come?”

  “Maybe!” Kylie said. “It depends on who they catch drinking.”

  A dreadful anxiety settled in the center of Rose’s chest. She had imagined there would be things going on at this party that her aunts would deem inappropriate, but this was so much worse. So much more. In the front room people laughed and talked and drank, some of them clustered around a table arranged with hundreds of dollars’ worth of Chinese food and stacks of paper plates. In its midst was a cake. But in the back, through a short hallway Rose glimpsed amidst the gathered revelers, people danced to the thumping rhythm, guys and girls grinding against one another in a manner that didn’t quite shock her but certainly made her uncomfortable.

  Perhaps this had been a bad idea.

  “I don’t know about this,” she said.

  Kylie linked arms with her. “I’m not drinking. Nobody’s going to care if you do or not. Come on, let’s find Jared.”

  Together they weaved through the crowd. Kylie introduced her to half a dozen people in the space of just a few minutes and Rose tried to file the names away for later. A guy named Dom, who was in chorus with Kylie, turned out to be very funny, and when Kylie mentioned Rose might join, he chimed in with her attempts to recruit her. They managed to locate a cooler full of sodas and drank those. Despite the volume of the music, Kylie kept a running commentary going, trying to familiarize Rose with the gossip on those people they saw from St. Bridget’s. But after half an hour they still had not run into Jared. Rose checked her phone several times to see if he had texted her, but no luck, and Kylie refused to let her text him.