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I pulled out my book, study guide, and some
paper, and got busy with my next self-assigned homework set. I was
up to graphing now, which was about as straightforward as you could
get.

I made pretty good progress, pausing from
time to time to stretch my neck and look around. The girl had
flipped her card over to the red side, and had a tutor with her, a
clumsy-looking boy who looked like he might be a senior. Based on
the glasses, and the fact he had to have picked them out without
any input from a girl younger than forty, I figured he was in
debate, or maybe the chess club. He was probably incredibly nice,
and boring as watching paint dry. Exactly the kind of guy my mom
would turn cartwheels over. I'd have to make sure they never
met.

I took the opportunity to look a little more
closely at the girl. Seen from profile, she wasn't quite as pretty
as I'd thought originally. She wasn't exactly plain looking, but
her features weren't very remarkable. She did have incredibly
soft-looking wavy brown hair though.

It looked like debate boy had pretty much
finished answering her question. I looked back down at my book so I
wouldn't get caught staring. I was just about to dive back into my
text book when someone cleared their throat nearby.

The tutor was standing at my elbow looking
over my assignment. "Hi, I'm Albert, and you must be Adri."

I winced again, it was going to take a lot of
work to get people to use my full name. "Adriana, but I don't need
any help."

Albert smiled, "I know your card wasn't on
the red side, but Mrs. Campbell asked me to stop by and go over a
couple of steps you left out on your homework assignment from
today. Since I just finished with Rachel and was over here already,
I thought I’d show you the steps you're missing."

I nodded my assent as I mentally filed away
both his name, and the girl's. Surprisingly enough, Albert was a
good teacher, pointing out the steps I'd been skipping over, and
even explaining why they were important. It was rare enough to find
a school teacher who could really teach math these days, finding a
student who could teach was nearly a miracle.

Rachel packed up her things while I was being
instructed in the finer points of inequalities. As she slid the
last book into her backpack, Albert stepped away from my desk with
another smile.

I flipped over to the next chapter and
started in on functions as Rachel exited out a corner door I hadn't
noticed before. I saw a flash of the stunted, brown vegetation that
the locals called grass, before the door swung back closed.
Suppressing an urge to just surrender and go outside until Britney
finished up, I got started. The roar of some kind of
high-performance engine a few seconds later almost changed my mind,
but my native stubbornness kicked in before I let the thought get
out of hand.

The subject matter was harder than graphing,
but I persevered, and managed to make it through all fifteen
problems without resorting to the red side of the card. Of course
Albert did stop by to see if I was having any difficulties, but
since I didn't summon him, he couldn't read anything into it.

When Britney stomped over and asked if I was
done, I considered telling her I needed ten more minutes. Her being
an attention hog didn't justify me being petty though. I just
nodded instead and packed up my stuff.

The ride home was completely uneventful, and
mercifully brief. Britney was one of those people who drive fast
normally, and even faster when they are pissed off. Apparently
having to stay after school to study merited twenty-five over the
speed limit.

I normally would have complained-I'd become
much more sensitive about speeding in the last couple of months,
but I was anxious to get home, and very much not feeling like there
was anything particularly special to live for. Not that I was
suicidal, contrary to mom's unvoiced, but obvious fears. I just
didn't have much of anything to look forward to.

It wasn't until Britney's Saturn was nearly
out of sight that I realized our Jeep Cherokee was parked in the
driveway. I sometimes felt I should have outgrown the need to talk
to Mom when things were tough, but I couldn't deny that it felt
like a big weight had been lifted off me as I walked through the
door.

"I'm home, Mom. How did your latest shoot..."
Whatever I'd been about to say evaporated off of my tongue as I
entered the living room and saw mom curled up on the couch with
bloodshot eyes.

Mom had always been the strong one. I still
more or less belonged in some kind of padded room. Mom had simply
accepted events and done her best to hold our life together so
there'd be something for me to come back to.

"What happened?"

I wanted to comfort her like I used to do
with Cindi, but I suddenly realized I didn't know how. Parents
weren't supposed to need reassuring. If they did, they were
supposed to work it out between each other. Only now there was just
her.

"The bank's calling the loan on our house.
They called the Mayor's office and were told I didn't get the
contract to do the tourism brochure. They're claiming I committed
loan fraud. Only I don't understand, Mr. Peters told me I had the
job."

I'd pretty much forgotten about the tourism
brochure for the city. It'd sounded like the perfect job for mom,
albeit a short term one. Now it was sounding like it'd been too
good to be true. The move had been something I'd opposed and then
ignored when my opposition hadn't made any difference. I didn't
know anything about grown-up things like mortgages. I'd been too
self-absorbed to learn. For the first time I felt guilty about
making things harder for mom. Surely there was something I could
have done to help out, even considering the attacks.

"They can't do that can they? I mean if they
told you that you had the job they can't take it away can
they?"

Mom rooted around in a half empty box until
she found some tissues, it wasn't the first one she'd been through
this afternoon.

"I didn't think so, but Mr. Peters claims
there was never any contract signed and I can't find our copy in
any of the boxes."

"Mom, what are we going to do? Where will we
go if they kick us out?"

She smoothed my hair back from my face.
"Don't worry about that sweetie. I'm sure everything will be ok. I
was just over-reacting. It'll turn out to be nothing."

It was just like mom to misplace something
important like that. I opened my mouth to do exactly that, but
stopped before the words could fully form. I didn't know much, but
fraud wasn't the kind of thing you associated with a slap on the
wrist. If the worst happened and mom was going to serve jail time
then we had bigger problems than even what she was admitting
to.

**

It looked like the sun must have set hours
ago, but it wasn't really dark. The full moon seemed somehow
brighter than normal, edging the landscape with a silvery tracing.
The cool illumination was strangely complimented by the warm
tendrils of light trying to escape from the greenery surrounding
the area.

I let my gaze drop, and found an unearthly
pool of liquid light at my feet. The quiet murmur of falling water
to my right kindled a burning thirst I hadn't realized I'd been
feeling since I opened my eyes.

Looking towards the waterfall, I found a
shimmering ribbon of light working its way down the rock face. The
sight was so incredibly beautiful it took me several moments to
realize the tendril was the waterfall I'd been looking for.

I reached into the dancing pool of light at
my feet and smiled as my cupped hands came away filled with water
that lit up my palms. I couldn't imagine anything more surreal. I
might have stayed there for hours if the barest whisper of sound
hadn't distracted me.

Alec was staring at me, an expression of
disapproval marring otherwise perfect features.

"Of all the places for you to intrude, why
did it have to be here?"

For a second, surrounded as I was by such
beauty, I did feel like an intruder. He was gorgeous, and his dark
skin seemed to have the slightest hint of light playing beneath its
surface. I was as plain and ugly as always.

"Only you could see such beauty and think
only of keeping it to yourself. Trust me, even with surroundings
like this I'd much rather be elsewhere if you're part of the
bargain."

The thought of being elsewhere brought our
newest crisis to mind, and I realized that it was very likely I
wouldn't have to worry about Britney, Alec, or Brandon for very
much longer.

"At least you won't have to suffer my
presence for much longer; we'll be gone all too quickly."

The fact I was arguing with Alec when I knew
this all had to be a dream, was ludicrous, but it wasn't as
ludicrous as the way he flinched at my words.

"No, you're right, all too soon you'll go the
way of so many others. If I can depend on nothing else, I can rely
on that."

A little eddy of wind found its way into our
grotto, and for the first time my newly-acute sense of smell
registered Alec's presence. His scent was divine, full of subtle
themes I wasn't experienced enough to pick out, all of which seemed
to scream of warm power and rock-like masculinity. For half a
second the torrent of sensation was too strong to leave room for
conscious thought.

I realized I'd closed my eyes to better savor
the experience. When I opened them Alec's expression had moved from
annoyance to sadness. I had a pair of heartbeats to wonder at the
strange tricks my subconscious was playing on me, and then the
dream started fading away.

The heavenly surroundings were predictably
the first thing to disappear, leaving afterimages of light burned
into the corners of my vision. Alec was the next thing to go, but
the memory of his features clung to my mind long after I found
myself in a featureless void. Stranger still, his scent stayed with
me even longer. I was just self-aware enough to hope I'd remember
it all when I awoke in the morning.

Chapter 5

It was a good thing I'd started school in the
middle of the week. If I'd gone to school the next day after all
the drama of learning about our mortgage problems I probably would
have had a nervous breakdown. As it was, I was essentially
worthless all weekend.

I tried to warn mom about the animals that'd
mauled the kids from school, but she told me she was already aware
of the incident and left before I could draw her into a discussion
of what we should do about the bank.

I saw her for maybe a total of three hours
during the entire two days. Even I knew it was wasted effort. If
mom somehow beat the odds, it still wasn't going to result in the
kind of money we'd need to save our house. Not in the next two or
three weeks at least.

It felt like my whole world had just
disappeared down a drain. I didn't suffer any real panic attacks,
but more or less spent both days in a kind of despondency that
wasn't much better than a full-blown attack.

By the time Monday morning arrived I had
vague memories of doing homework and not much else. The only
positive from the whole weekend was the way my dream from Friday
stayed with me. As I got ready for school I idly wondered if it
would be possible to recreate the grotto in real life. Obviously
not with the impossible, glowing water, but with the incredible,
lush vegetation and the secluded pool. Then again, I'd seen mom
pull off some pretty crazy tricks with her camera, maybe there
would be some way to simulate glowing water, some kind of
photography trick I'd never heard of.

I walked downstairs as the eastern sky was
just starting to change colors.

Mom was already gone. The message board was
conspicuously empty, so she was either still frustrated with me,
angry at our hopeless situation, or wrapped back up in her quest to
become a renowned photographer.

Britney picked me up on schedule and I
somehow made it through my first two classes. Mrs. Sorenson was
still out to prove to everyone I was an idiot, and Heathcliff was
still a psychopath despite Mr. Whethers' best efforts to explain
the character's motivation.

Math was actually the high point of the
morning. Mrs. Campbell was smart enough to put Britney off in a
corner surrounded by the kind of kids she'd never even consider
talking to under normal circumstances.

Not having Britney distract me all hour would
have been a blessing by itself, but things got even better when
Mrs. Campbell complimented me on the homework I handed in.

"Most excellently done Ms. Paige. Albert said
you seemed to pick up the concepts quite quickly. I've noticed
you've been working on the older material during class, which I
very much approve of, but you may want to listen today. We're
starting a new section, and it should be fairly straightforward for
you to pick up."

I shouldn't have been surprised when she
turned out to be right. The new chapter was on probability, which
had absolutely nothing to do with the stuff they'd been working on
the week before. I quickly decided I didn't like the new stuff as
much as what I'd been studying on my own, but it was relatively
easy, and almost before I knew it class had ended and it was time
to go to lunch.

My doubts about whether or not everyone would
be back in school today after three nights of partying, were
quickly resolved as Britney and I tried to fight through the
ridiculous foot traffic on our way to our lockers.

By the time we made it to the lunch room, I
was heartily sick of dodging jocks with shoulders the size of an
ox. Why on earth did every single one of them think it was
necessary to mock fight, throw balls back and forth to each other,
or otherwise make a spectacle of themselves?

My mood was further soured as we arrived to
find an unmistakable circle of bystanders signaling an impending
fight. My first instinct was to go find a teacher before the two
idiots hurt each other, but while I was still looking around to see
if there was an adult in the room, Britney grabbed my arm and
pulled me towards the circle.