Some Faraway Place

by Lauren Shippen

  But that’s not the fucking hilarious part, though her calling me behind your back to try and dig up dirt on you definitely gave me a little rush. I don’t want bad things for you, Mark, but god, I hope that blows up in her face. I hope you see that she’s not perfect either, that maybe no one is perfect and we should all just cut one another some slack.

  Anyway, the crazy thing Sam said was, well, she said:

  “We’re in love with the same man. I think that’s enough in common without calling us friends.”

  I bet you’d like to know what I said in response, huh? I don’t know, maybe you wouldn’t care. Maybe my answer doesn’t make a difference to you. It doesn’t matter anyway. I didn’t have a response for her.

  I’ve spent a lot of the past month wondering if leaving really was the right thing to do. I wanted to respect your wishes, wanted to give you space, wanted to … I don’t know, punish myself, I guess. I’m really lost, man. Maybe that’s why Rose and I clicked so fast. Maybe that’s why you and I clicked so fast. I mean, it’s different, obviously. The way I feel about you is something I didn’t hurt Rose as much as I hurt you.

  We’re all just going to keep hurting one another, aren’t we? Sam is gonna hurt you, and Rose is gonna hurt her family, and I’m gonna blow into some other town and break everything like I always do. I’m just a storm moving from coast to coast and I don’t know when I’m gonna run out of steam.

  Something has to break the cycle.

  APRIL 11TH, 2017

  BOY has it been a weird twenty-four hours.

  First off, inviting Emily to do trivia night turned out to be a good instinct, even if it didn’t turn out exactly like I’d been hoping. Things had been going well—I bought her a hot chocolate and the theme of the trivia tonight was nineteenth-century literature and she LOVES that stuff—but then an enormous wrench got thrown into our evening and now I’m worried that any potential good favor I’d built back up has been totally shattered.

  It all started yesterday morning when Mark texted me to tell me that he’d told Sam about my dreamdiving excursion at movie night. He had initially promised that he would keep it to himself but … I guess that didn’t last. I can’t begrudge him that. It was his head I was invading, his and everyone else’s, and he’s allowed to be pissed about that for as long as he wants. He’s allowed to tell anyone he’d like to, especially the other people who were there. I just wish I had been the one to tell Sam. It makes me feel like a terrible person that she had to hear it secondhand. At least Mark has promised not to tell Caleb and Adam. Then again, he made that promise while extremely drunk and Sam could tell them now, so who knows?

  Yep! That’s where my evening went!! With a random Atypical crashing my date with the girl who broke my heart and proceeding to get drunk while we sipped on our hot chocolate! Yikes!

  Honestly, the whole thing just made me really sad. Emily too—once I explained everything to her, after we’d poured Mark onto my living room couch (oh yeah, I’ll get to that), she looked totally sick at everything that had happened to him.

  “They just imprisoned him for years for no reason?” she hissed as we stood in the kitchen, trying to avoid waking up Mark or my family who were all asleep upstairs.

  “Yeah,” I whispered. “I guess that’s happened to a lot of Atypicals. I mean, it makes sense … that’s what always happens in stories about people with supernatural abilities, right? They get kidnapped and experimented on.”

  “But that’s fiction,” she said. “Real life shouldn’t be like that.”

  I just nodded, unable to disagree, but also unable to provide any evidence for life not being like that. I’ll never understand how people don’t instantly get why I like to spend so much time in the dreamworld.

  “Rose,” she whispered, “are you safe?”

  “Yeah.” I nodded again. “Yeah, I’m— My whole family has been going to the AM for years and, they’re not good, obviously, but they’re also…”

  “They’re the only ones who can help your dad,” she finished.

  “Not that they’ve been much help with him though,” I said. “They just treat it like he was a normal human with Alzheimer’s. Like there’s nothing they can do.”

  “And you don’t think that’s true?” she asked. I peered at her through the darkness, her soft brown skin a beautiful beacon of warmth in the otherwise cold kitchen. She was looking at me like she used to—like she cared.

  “I don’t know what to think,” I whispered. She reached across the kitchen table to grab my hand and I felt more tethered to the world than I had since last summer.

  I didn’t sleep at all the whole night. I was too scared to. Even though I’ve barely dived in the past few weeks, I was terrified that having Mark in the house would send me careening into his head or him into mine. So I’m now running on thirty-six hours of no sleep. Emily stayed up with me for a long time, before going back to her dorm, and I think we ended up in a good place. I actually feel … hopeful.

  But the real reason I don’t feel like sleeping is because of the conversation I just had with Mark while I made him eggs and bacon. There was plenty of awkwardness when he rolled off the couch and into the kitchen, very hungover and confused about where he was, but I poured him a cup of coffee in the biggest mug we owned and eventually we pushed through the uncomfortable small talk and apologies and I got to the bottom of why, exactly, Mark thought it had been a good idea to crash my date, get wasted, and sleep it off on my parents’ couch instead of going back to Sam’s or Dr. Bright’s, both of which were ideas that were shot down immediately last night when Emily and I offered to bring him home.

  “Ughhhhh,” he groaned, putting his face flat on the kitchen counter. “I didn’t think it was a good idea. I didn’t think at all.”

  “Yeah, that was pretty obvious,” I said, feeling a little smug. This whole catastrophe made me feel like Mark and I are probably on even footing now. Taking care of him and letting him stay the night feels like as good of an apology for going into his dreams as any. Thankfully, he agreed.

  “You really didn’t need to help me,” he said after he’d had some eggs in him. “Especially after the way I treated you…”

  “I get it,” I said, shoveling eggs into my own mouth. “I would have reacted the exact same way, I think.”

  “Still, it’s not cool. I remember when my ability first started—I mean, hell, even now, I make mistakes,” he sighed. “Plenty of mistakes. And you’re so young, your ability is still so new to you … I shouldn’t have gotten so mad at you.”

  “It’s really okay, Mark,” I said. “I was an asshole. I knew what I was doing.”

  “Yeah, but I wasn’t just being a dick to you because of the dreamdiving thing,” Mark grumbled.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “It’s Damien,” he said. “I didn’t trust that … that he didn’t get to you somehow. That you weren’t…”

  “That I wasn’t like him?” I guessed and Mark nodded.

  “I don’t know how much he told you about what happened between us but it was … I don’t know.” He sighed again. “I’m still messed up over it I think. And it was hard to trust someone who was friends with him.”

  “I get it.” I nodded and took a bite out of a piece of bacon. “If it makes you feel any better, I also thought he was someone I could trust. I…”

  I looked at Mark, wondering how honest I could be. His face had the pallor of the very hungover but was open and inviting so I took a dive and admitted something I hadn’t before.

  “I liked him,” I said simply. It shouldn’t have been such a big confession, but it was, and I knew Mark would understand that. “I really liked him.”

  He nodded. “Yeah … yeah, I really liked him too.”

  That seemed to be the big elephant in the room, because from there we were able to talk openly in a way we hadn’t up to that point, and I finally was able to ask him about the AM. I didn’t probe him about his time there specifical
ly—I might be a curious person to a fault sometimes, but even I know when something is private-private—but I did ask him what he thought about the likelihood that the AM was hiding something that could help my dad.

  “I mean, the AM could be hiding anything,” he said. “But I don’t know what motivation they’d have to keep a cure to dementia to themselves. That’s something they could apply to humans too—I’m sure something like that would increase their government contracts tenfold.”

  “But what if my dad is the experiment?” I asked. “I mean, he was totally fine until September and then all of a sudden … he’s sick? I know he goes to the AM for his checkups, so—”

  “Look, I know that you want an easy fix for your family, I get that,” he said. “And trust me, I’m the last person to defend the AM, but I’m not sure even they would do something like that.”

  “What about ability suppression?” I asked. “My dad is a telekinetic, his ability is based in the brain—what if that’s somehow causing the disease? That’s happened before, right? Someone’s ability interacting with the rest of their biology in a destructive way?”

  “I mean, yeah, I guess so…” He looked thoughtful for a moment. “I have heard about ability-specific suppressants being developed, but those are pretty controversial. The AM wants Atypicals who are powerful, not ones who can’t use their powers, and most Atypicals don’t like the idea of their abilities being taken away from them. They’re a part of us.”

  “But you think the AM is developing it anyway?” I asked.

  “I think they would be stupid not to,” he said darkly.

  We didn’t have a chance to talk about it more because that was when my parents came in, completely baffled to see a total stranger eating breakfast at their kitchen counter at eight in the morning. But that’s enough for me to go on—if the AM is developing something that could stop a power long enough to reverse or slow the effects of an illness, then I need to convince my dad to go back.

  APRIL 13TH, 2017

  When I walked into the kitchen, tea was making itself.

  For a brief moment, I just sort of thought I’d wandered into a dream for the first time in weeks, despite the fact that I didn’t remember ever falling asleep.

  But it was just my dad was using his telekinesis to make breakfast.

  “Someone’s feeling good,” I said, going for chipper. My dad turned around and shot me an unconvincing smile.

  “Is that someone you?” he asked as a plate of muffins floated toward me.

  “Did you go to the bakery today?” I asked, grabbing a muffin off the plate and watching it float back to place itself on the table in front of where my dad was sitting.

  “Yep,” he said.

  It was really odd—the whole kitchen was bustling around him, buzzing with activity, like it was a normal morning from a year ago, but my dad seemed sullen. I sat down across from him, putting down my uneaten muffin.

  “Dad, are you okay?” I asked.

  “Have you been dreamdiving, Rose?” he asked bluntly. I blinked, trying to read in his face why he was asking, what I could have possibly done to make him want to ask.

  The truth is, I hadn’t. I told him as much. That I hadn’t dived since Sam’s house (though I didn’t tell him the details of that particular evening), that I felt trapped in my own head.

  “I miss it,” I admitted.

  “Why do you like it so much, Rose?” he asked, so soft and genuinely curious and fully focused on me and I wanted to cry.

  “None of you have ever asked me that,” I whispered. He didn’t have anything to say to that, but I saw his hands tighten around the mug.

  “It…” I started, trying to figure out how I could possibly articulate what it’s like to be in a world in which anything and everything is possible and there are no consequences.

  “It makes sense,” I found myself saying.

  “I know that sounds backward,” I continued, “but it’s true. There’s something about the dreamworld that’s … clear. Uncomplicated. Even though it’s the most unpredictable place I’ve ever been, there’s a comfort in it. A safety. It helps me understand you all better.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “The dreams you all have, they’re … I don’t know, they’re perfect distillations of who you are. You dream about big, broad canyons, so much that I’ve started to dream about them too. Mom always dreams about forests and oceans, and Aaron … Aaron dreams about real life in a way that feels even realer than actual life. Does that make sense?”

  “I’m not sure,” he said, huffing a laugh. “You know, your mom and I went to the Grand Canyon right before we had Aaron. I wonder if that’s why I dream about it so much.”

  “It’s a place that you and Aaron like a lot.” I nodded.

  “You know, Rose,” he said, leaning forward a bit to catch my eyes, “we’re here. We’re not in there, in that dreamworld—”

  “Aaron is,” I said. “Not always, but I can talk to him in there. We can … share it, in a weird way.”

  “And when was the last time you talked to him? In the dreamworld?”

  “Okay, yeah, I haven’t lately,” I admitted. “But I haven’t been dreamdiving at all lately.”

  “We just miss you, Rose,” he said, sounding sad. “I know you’ve got work and Emily and your friends, but even when you’re here, you’re … you’re somewhere far away.”

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I’ll do better, I promise.”

  He patted my hand, and I couldn’t tell if it was a pat of appreciation, that he believed I would do better, or if it was a pat of consolation, knowing that I would try and try and continue to fail. But I needed him to understand. I needed him to understand that I wasn’t distracted by the thought of the dreamworld, I was distracted by the thought of him getting better.

  “Dad,” I said after a moment, “can I ask you a question?”

  “Of course, Rose.”

  “You’re using your telekinesis today,” I pointed out. “You haven’t been using it very much but today…”

  “It’s hard to access sometimes,” he said, confirming what I’d been thinking for months with a single shrug. “I think the … well, you know…”

  I nodded.

  “I think it might be messing with more than just my memory,” he said. “But today, I woke up feeling okay. So I thought I’d take things out for a spin.” He gave me a real smile then, looking out at the kitchen, which was now dutifully cleaning itself. I never understood how he was able to do that—to keep his focus so perfect that he could be controlling so many objects at once, making them move just so, all in different ways, all at the same time. What has that kind of effort done to him over the years?

  “Would you give it up?” I asked. “The telekinesis, I mean. If it helped you?”

  “What?” He looked at me with confused surprise.

  “It’s just … I’ve heard some stuff,” I explained. “About how abilities can … well, they can hurt us sometimes. Atypicals, I mean.”

  “Our abilities are a fundamental part of our biology, Rose,” he said calmly.

  “I know that,” I said. “But a lot of people—normal humans—have fundamental parts of their biology that hurt them, or make it hard to live—”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Has the AM thought about how your power interacts with this disease?” I asked. “I mean, really thought about it, examined every single possibility?”

  “Of course,” he said. “Rose, they’re doing everything they—”

  And that was when he collapsed.

  Without warning, my dad slid out of his chair and onto the floor, where he started to seize. I jumped up immediately, kneeling down next to him, yelling out for my mom, for Aaron, in a complete panic. What happened from there is a complete blur—they both came rushing down the stairs (thank GOD they were home), my mom calling the emergency number, Aaron moving our dad’s body away from any furniture that could h
urt him, while my shaking hands hovered above him, wondering how and if I could possibly help.

  We’re sitting in the AM now, waiting for them to finish running tests. I don’t know how long we’ll be here—how long he’ll be here—or what any of this means. But whatever hope Mark might have given me the other day has been effectively soured by watching half a dozen doctors gather around my dad’s pale form as he lay unconscious, unreachable, even to me.

  IV

  CANYON

  05-10-2017, morningwaffles, text post

  Hi, everyone. I’m sorry for being so absentee the past few weeks. Things have been … intense. But I’m done with my finals for the semester, I don’t start my summer internship for another two weeks, so I thought I’d catch up on things here. And catch you up on what’s been going on.

  I’m still going to be posting Stucky fic from time to time, though now that somewhere a place for us is done, I might stick to drabbles. I even have some super earnest poetry from sophomore year of high school that I wrote about Destiel that I’m far enough away from now to find vaguely amusing and not just bone-chillingly mortifying. But it might be a while until I really dig into another chunky, multi-chapter fic.

  Without going into too much detail, the past few months have been really tough. Things with my girlfriend got kind of intense and dramatic and then stuff with her family got intense and dramatic and I really want to be there for her right now. We have a lot of our own stuff to work through, and I’m not sure exactly where we’re going to end up, but she’s going through something that she shouldn’t have to go through alone.

  Some of you have been in my in-box wondering if my big blowout post about somewhere a place for us from a few months ago was about something more than just fic. Guess what? Y’all are right! It was. Turns out, Daisy had some pretty big secrets that she’d been keeping from me and I kind of let it bleed into my writing. There was … a lot I needed to process, and no I will not be talking about it here so don’t even ask. It was such a huge, monumental, life-changing kind of thing that we actually broke up for a little bit. Or, I don’t know, I think we’re still broken up? It’s really hard to say. I saw her two weeks ago and I’m seeing her again before my internship starts so … we’ll see.