When Rose Wakes

by Christopher Golden

  “Get the… get away from me,” she said numbly, trying to clear her head.

  Courtney hauled back one foot to kick her. Rose saw it coming and white fury blazed inside her. When Courtney swung her leg, Rose sat up fast and grabbed on with both hands, taking the brunt of the kick in her side but latching on. Scrambling upward, shoving backward, she toppled Courtney. The girl’s arms flailed but she had nothing to break her fall. Her skull hit the tile floor with a crack.

  “Lunatic,” Rose whispered, wiping blood from her eyes.

  Obviously dazed, Courtney moaned and rolled over, struggling to get to her hands and knees. Breathing in shuddery gasps, Rose went for the door, grabbed the handle, and started to haul it open.

  “No, you won’t!” Courtney shouted, lunging up from the floor and reaching for her.

  They slammed against the open door and fell in a grapple to the floor of the corridor. Rose began to scream at her to let go, to get off of her. She beat at the girl, tore at her hair, tried to choke her. But then Courtney punched her in the forehead where she’d struck the mirror and glorious pain blossomed there.

  Courtney grabbed her ankle and started dragging her back into the bathroom.

  Rose struggled and screamed, caught the door frame and held on. Her shouts echoed along the halls, but no one came and that only enraged her further. When Courtney reached for her hands, trying to break her grip, Rose grabbed hold of Courtney’s head, twining her fingers in the girl’s hair. She kicked at Courtney’s belly and legs, still screaming.

  “I’ll kill you,” Courtney said, eyes slitted with pain and spite, and Rose knew she meant it.

  Then she heard people calling her name from around the corner of the hall. Dom and Kylie had come looking for her. Courtney’s eyes widened in panic and she looked around for a place to run. But Rose wasn’t going to allow that. She staggered up again, grabbed Courtney’s collar and a fistful of hair, and fought to push her back into the bathroom.

  “Let go of me!” Courtney said, the weight of consequences in her eyes.

  “Not a chance,” Rose snapped, fighting with her.

  Courtney tried to tear herself away, clawing and punching, but Rose had a handful of her hair and she held on tight. Footfalls echoed in the hall outside. The October wind gusted through the partially open bathroom window, cold and damp as it swept across the tiles.

  “Let go!” Courtney screamed.

  “Rose!” Kylie shouted from the hall.

  “In here!” Rose called back.

  Courtney let out a savage cry as a blast of wind rattled the window and the doors to the bathroom stalls, leaves whipping in from outside and rain pelting the glass. And then Courtney simply gave way in Rose’s hands, crumbling into bits of dry leaves and twigs. Rose nearly fell down as the wind scoured her, and in the space where Courtney had stood a moment before, there was nothing.

  The bathroom door banged open. Dom and Kylie stood there, staring at her.

  “Rose?” Dom asked, bewildered.

  “Holy shit, what happened to you?” Kylie said.

  Rose opened her fists. A few heartbeats earlier they had been clutching at Courtney’s hair and shirt. Now she held only orange and brown leaves, which fell from her hands and danced in the diminishing breeze, eddying around until they hit the floor, where they skittered along the tiles and were swept past Dom’s and Kylie’s feet and out into the hallway.

  “She’s bleeding,” Dom said, but not to Rose.

  Kylie said her name. Then they were both saying her name, coming toward her, trying to get her to focus, to get her attention.

  “Rose, you’re scaring me,” Kylie said, standing right in front of her, forcing Rose to meet her eyes. “Tell me you’re okay.”

  “Kylie,” Rose said.

  “Yeah,” Kylie replied, glancing at Dom, obviously encouraged. “What’s wrong? What happened?”

  Rose touched her face. “Are you real?”

  Kylie stared at her. “Am I what?”

  Shaking her head, Rose backed away from them. She glanced around the room, jumped at the sound of leaves skittering on the tiles, so much like the chitinous scuttle of cockroaches. The rain still pelted the window but she felt strangely warm.

  A terrible thought took root inside her and began to grow. She glanced down at her hands, opened and closed them, then reached up and touched the cut on her head. Her fingers came back bright crimson. That seemed real enough, but the rest of the world seemed to be shifting underfoot, unreliable now. Courtney had been there, solid and vicious, and then she had been gone in a gust of wind, only autumn leaves left behind, no proof that she had ever been there at all.

  She looked at Kylie, then stared at Dom.

  “Is this a dream?”

  “No, Rose,” he said. “It’s not a dream.”

  Had she ever really woken from her coma at all?

  “Easy for you to say,” she told him, feeling a dark hysteria bubble up inside. “But how would I know?”

  “Rose, we need to get you a doctor,” Kylie said, so kind, so full of concern. “Was this an accident or did you…” She glanced at the shattered mirror. “Did you hurt yourself on purpose.”

  Rose started to laugh in disbelief, took two steps back from them, and then turned and ran for the door. They shouted after her, tried to follow, but she was faster than they were, as swift as leaves on the breeze, slipping down the stairs, her backpack and jacket and umbrella all forgetten.

  She ran out into the rain, wondering if she would ever wake up.

  The rain had become a slow drizzle but the sky remained a mournful gray and without anything to shield her from the storm, Rose was soaked to the bone. She walked with nervous purpose along the last block of Dartmouth Street toward the intimidating roar of Storrow Drive. Cars shushed past her, spraying water onto the sidewalk, but she paid them no attention at all. She focused on the numbers on the buildings she passed. Paranoia had its teeth in her and she glanced around from time to time to make sure no one was watching or following her. Mrs. Sauer, the lady from the school office who was also Courtney’s grandmother, lived on this block.

  But so did Jared.

  Rose had called him. She couldn’t even remember what words had come out of her mouth. She had babbled, perhaps even cried, and asked to see him, and he had told her to come right over. Jared had asked if she wanted him to come meet her somewhere, to find her, she remembered that much. But Rose didn’t want to wait at school and couldn’t have him come to her apartment, and the idea of a quiet cup of coffee in some Back Bay café seemed absurd to her now.

  Red hair soaked brown in the rain and plastered against her face, she almost missed the address. When she saw it, her heart leaped, and she realized a part of her had despaired of ever locating Jared’s place. She’d feared it might turn into that kind of dream, where she would be constantly in search of something that seemed forever just out of reach.

  He opened the door before she could knock and she felt hope. He had been watching for her.

  “What happened?” Jared asked. “Are you all right?”

  Rose stood on the front stoop. “Can I come in?”

  He nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, of course. I’m sorry. Come in.”

  As she crossed the threshold and came out of the storm, Rose felt some of her fear and tension sloughing off. The confusion remained, but her mind did seem to be beginning to untangle itself. She stood on the mat in the foyer and Jared reached for her.

  “No,” she said, trying to hold him back. “I’m all wet.”

  “Ssshh,” he told her, and pulled her into his arms.

  She thought she would cry then, but somehow the tears and sobs did not come. Maybe this is shock. It seemed a rational reaction to the impossible. Shock. Jared kissed the top of her head and whispered things to her that she barely heard.

  “Hey,” he said, his tone changing. “Let me get you a towel, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Do you want coffee?”

&n
bsp; For some reason this made her laugh. “No. No coffee.”

  Moments later he returned with the biggest, whitest, thickest bath towel she had ever seen. He wiped her face with it, careful around the cut on her forehead, but she winced at the bruising and swelling she only now began to feel. Her nose felt huge, the skin tight, and she wondered if it was broken. Her lips and cheeks were raw from the beating Courtney had given her, but her nose and forehead were the worst.

  Jared gently padded her hair with the towel, getting some of the moisture out of it, and then he wrapped it around her and led her up the stairs. Rose went along without thinking, happy to be guided, but when they reached the second floor and she realized he meant to take her to his bedroom, she hesitated.

  “Where are your parents?”

  “They won’t be home for at least an hour,” he said. “But it’s fine, Rose. Really. They’ll be worried about you, too. They’ll understand.”

  How could they? I don’t even understand, she thought. But she only nodded and went with him, and then they were sitting on the edge of the bed and he kissed her bruised cheek and traced his fingers along her arm, sending a delicious shiver through her. It woke her up a little. She turned and met his gaze, feeling like she could focus for the first time since she arrived. Since…

  Jared studied her, and she saw the sadness and sympathy and tragedy in his eyes.

  Rose dropped her gaze. “I must be so ugly.”

  “Don’t be crazy,” he said, lifting her chin and giving her a single, chaste kiss.

  She chuckled, and the sound made her feel sick. “Too late.”

  “Okay,” Jared said. “You have to talk to me now. I can’t… you have to tell me what happened. I’m freaking out here.”

  Something unraveled inside Rose then, releasing the tension that had bunched itself up within her. His sweetness, his concern, his very ordinariness, allowed her to exhale. And then she thought about it again, and a chill snaked its way through her. Jared’s brownstone was warm and so was his touch, but even with him beside her and that thick towel, she couldn’t seem to thaw out.

  “Rose,” he said.

  She looked up at him and finally spoke.

  “It was Courtney.”

  His face contorted with anger and dismay. “Courtney did this to you?”

  Rose nodded. “At school. In the bathroom. And then…”

  “Then what?”

  Eyes wide—playing the scene over in her mind—she stared at Jared’s bedroom window and shuddered.

  “Then she vanished.”

  •

  Jared’s bedroom was almost exactly as she had imagined it, though she hadn’t predicted it would be so neat. In addition to his bed, bureau, and desk, he had several tall bookshelves filled with rows of hardcovers and paperbacks. She wanted to take a closer look, to continue to learn things about him that she couldn’t find out just from kissing. His backpack sat beside the bed. The books and notebooks he had taken out to do his homework before Rose’s arrival had been dumped unceremoniously on the floor with a scattering of shoes and the uniform he’d worn to school that day. He had jeans and a Hollister T-shirt on now, warm and dry, but Rose lay beside him in her damp uniform, her wet hair on his pillow, and burrowed closer to him.

  He had listened to her tell the story, occasionally stroking her hair, and only interrupted her once or twice to clarify something. Somehow, during the telling, they had ended up here in his bed, and now that she had told him all of it, she became aware of the closeness of this moment, the intimacy that they were sharing.

  As she had begun to tell the story, she had grown upset, her voice and hands shaking, and he had led her to the bed and urged her to lie down out of concern. Rose believed that. Jared wanted her, she knew that and could feel the desire burning in him, but bringing her to his bed had been an act of tenderness.

  At first he had only sat on the edge of the bed, but when she reached the part of the story where Courtney had smashed her face into the mirror, she had faltered, remembering the horrible feeling that no one would come to help her, that her friends would not hear her screaming, that she was alone. Jared had lain down with her then and pulled her close and held her against him until his warmth had stopped her shivering.

  Now that she had told him the rest, Rose did not want to look at him. She wished she could focus on anything else—the Tom Brady poster above his bed, the orderliness of his bookshelf, or the photographs taped all around the mirror above his dresser—but they were face-to-face, there on the bed, and she did not want to turn away from him. Instead, she gazed down at the narrow space that separated them, at his hand resting on her hip, and she waited.

  “I’m…” he began, but she didn’t look up. “Rose, I’m afraid for you.”

  “You don’t think I’m crazy?” she whispered, so afraid that he would echo her own fears.

  “I don’t know how to define ‘crazy,’” he said.

  She felt sick, and at last she raised her eyes. “It was so real.”

  Jared caressed her face. The swelling had begun to go down, but her forehead still stung and the bridge of her nose ached. He was gentle, and he never looked away.

  “Here’s what I’m thinking,” Jared said. “People don’t vanish. They just don’t. There are only a couple of possibilities. Either you did this to yourself and you don’t even know it, or Courtney was really there and she hid when Kylie and Dom came in. Maybe they caught her, but you ran out too fast to know it.”

  Rose closed her eyes. “But either way, I’m seeing things that aren’t real. Hallucinating.”

  He kissed her eyes and she opened them again.

  “It’s possible,” he said. “I have a cousin with bipolar disorder. She’s schizophrenic or whatever, too. I don’t know, I’m not a doctor. But she used to have all of these hallucinations and paranoid delusions or whatever, hearing voices and talking back to people that weren’t there. She thought everyone in the world was pretending, like they were actors in a play, and that there were, like, secret overlords or something that were mostly invisible who were like the directors, and she wanted to talk to them about the play and would get angry when they wouldn’t talk to her, or when her family and friends wouldn’t stop ‘acting’ and talk to her about the invisible directors.”

  Rose stared at him. “Oh my God.”

  Jared responded with a pained smile. “Yeah.”

  “And you think that’s what this is?”

  “Look, the thing is, my cousin Charlotte got help. She’s on these meds now and she doesn’t hear voices anymore and doesn’t talk to invisible people. She knows there’s no one hiding behind some kind of curtain, that people aren’t just acting out scenes from a play. She’s okay. She’s sorted out what’s real and what’s not.”

  Rose did not reply. She tried to imagine the life Jared’s cousin must have been living prior to getting on medication and attempted to compare it with her own. What had happened with Courtney had seemed so real. The girl had vanished from her grasp, leaving only autumn leaves in her place, blown away by a gust of wind. Or maybe she had beaten Rose so badly that somehow reality had slid away and Rose had imagined Courtney disappearing, and the girl had still been in the bathroom when she ran.

  But that version made the least sense of all.

  No, if she had imagined it, then logic suggested she had imagined it all. Which meant she had inflicted these injuries upon herself. Rose could not accept that, but there wasn’t any interpretation of the day’s events that felt true to her.

  “How is any of this possible?” she whispered.

  Jared edged closer, his face only inches from hers. He ran his hand lightly along her arm and leaned in to kiss her forehead. A tremor passed through her. She wanted to just curl into his embrace, to slide under the covers with him and let his hands roam freely. Her clothes were still damp and cold and she wanted them off, wanted to be warm, wanted his warmth.

  She knew she was being foolish, that she barely knew hi
m and rushing into something physical would be idiotic. Now was not the time. His parents would be home soon and she ought to be home—her aunts had probably left messages on her phone already, but she had turned it off—and if she really couldn’t tell the difference between reality and hallucination, how could she even think of getting naked with some guy, and who knew what else?

  You can’t, she thought.

  But his kindness melted her. All he seemed to want to do was soothe her and that made her want to cling to him all the more. Her life felt out of control, like she had fallen off a bridge, and she needed someone to catch her.

  Rose kissed him, gently but urgently. Her face hurt but she didn’t care. She felt a hunger in her, a cold void that needed his heat to get warm.

  “Hey,” Jared said, stroking her hair, pulling his face back slightly. “Rose, maybe this isn’t…”

  Her face flushed with embarrassment and she pulled back. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think. I mean, I wouldn’t want to kiss me either, looking like this. I’m a mess.”

  “That’s not it,” he said.

  She searched his eyes, her skin prickling with new heat. Her heart fluttered. They were so close that when he exhaled and she inhaled, she breathed him in. She felt intoxicated by that moment. She reached up and touched his face, pressed her knee between his legs so she could move closer to him.

  “What is it, then?” Rose whispered.

  “You’re not yourself,” he said. “I’d be taking advantage of you if anything happened now.”

  Jared’s breath had started coming quicker. He stared at her as if mesmerized and Rose kissed him again, brushing her lips against his, relishing the solidity of his body beside her. She kissed him deeply, pushing her body up against him, pressed so tight up against him that she could feel his heart beating against hers.

  “I just need to feel something I know is real,” she said.