Immortal Light: Wide Awake (30 page)

“
Last night on that beach, Lucy,
when I saw you running toward me, I was yelling your name because I
wanted you to acknowledge me; I wanted you to remember me. But, no
matter how hard I ran, I just couldn’t reach you.” Kat wiped tears
and mascara from her face.

Lucy squeezed Kat’s free hand, feeling every
ounce of what she had done to her friend.

“
I’m so sorry, Kat. I’m sorry that
I did this to you. I was being so stupid and selfish.”

“
Lucy, I’m here for you. I would
give up anything to be your friend. Please don’t forget about me,
no matter what happens to you, okay?” She made sure to have Lucy’s
attention.

The two girls walked out of the
store and hugged, both wiping the remaining tears from their eyes.
It didn’t take long for Kat to return to her usual bouncy self as
they walked back to the bus stop.

“
So, you think all of that stuff
is real, the city and all that? I mean, how cool would that be if
there really are other dimensions and universes? I’ve read about
that stuff, you know.”

A great sense of relief flooded
Lucy because of Kat’s enthusiastic support. She was suddenly
excited to talk about the prospects of everything she had seen in
the last two weeks.

“
I think it would be really cool,
but I don’t know if it’s real at all, I don’t really understand
some of it. But what if it is just a bunch of crazy dreams?” Lucy
asked, wanting a truly honest perspective.

“
If those are all dreams, then you
have the most vivid imagination I’ve ever seen. Not to mention, we
have some weird bond like twins or something.” Kat laughed about
the prospect of them being sisters, but all Lucy could do was force
a chuckle.

Getting back to school before the end of the
day didn’t prove to be any serious task. The two girls were
actually on time to their last period classes and no one really
seemed to notice that they were gone.

Walking to the car at the back of the lot, Kat
and Lucy laughed about how much fun it was to play hooky. The two
girls felt their bond completely renewed and made plans to spend
the rest of the day together.

As they walked, Kat reached out
and squeezed Lucy’s arm gesturing with a nod over her shoulder.
Lucy looked and saw Benjamin standing near his motorcycle, Samantha
draped on his arm. All of Samantha’s friends were standing around
them talking and laughing. Lucy just looked down at the
ground.

“
C’mon, let’s go,” she all but
growled, walking with a more determined air toward her
car.

“
Why don’t you tell him,
Luce?”

Lucy didn’t stop, she just kept
walking. “Because I can’t,” she replied heatedly. “He’ll just deny
it. He told me he would, remember?”

“
But you’re in love with him, and
there’s obviously something special going on there.”

“
Well, when he’s ready to address
that out here, then I’ll go with it.”

Kat wasn’t satisfied, as she
usually wasn’t. “You have to be proactive, Lucy. Remember what you
did with Mark? I mean, that was the boldest thing I’ve ever seen
anyone do. Why do you think I was so upset when I heard you broke
up with him?”

Lucy stopped at her driver’s side door. She
looked back toward Benjamin, who was still enjoying his
friends.

“
Well, this is different. He knows
how I feel, so now it’s up to him.” Unlocking the doors, the two
girls got in and Lucy pulled out of her space.

As rubber burned onto Ingersoll Street, no one
noticed that in the midst of the popular crowd, staring after the
beige Cavalier was a pair of nearly luminous green eyes.

***

Time slipped away from Lucy
as life seemed to get back to normal. Her days were spent in school
and working at the library, and at night she worked on getting
her
haven
stable
enough to use. Peter had been amazed at how little time it actually
took. After just two nights of working on it, the
haven
was so stable that
she could get there any time she wanted to. It was so stable, in
fact, that almost a month had gone by since she last worked with
Peter.

Sometimes in class she would
rest her eyes and jump to it for a few minutes. The first time she
did that she discovered that time slowed down in the
haven
. It wasn’t much,
but for every ten minutes she spent inside, she lost only about one
minute in the real world. She had fun playing around with one
minute naps, as they would have been perceived by the rest of the
world, and being able to take a vacation to the beach in the middle
of school.

While she was simply having
fun with it, it was made abundantly clear why Benjamin and Peter
would ever choose to use them. It was more than a place of focus
and concentration, it was truly a catharsis, as Kat had talked
about. She often thought about how it was a shame she couldn’t
bring her homework with her—she
’
d be valedictorian for
sure.

It was already cold in Coos
Bay in mid-October. Walking across campus, Lucy thought about how
strange it was that things began to feel normal with the passage of
time, no matter how strange they may have seemed before. She was
living her life on two different planes, and while there were only
slivers of evidence that could confirm there was carryover between
the
haven
state
and reality, she would be content living in two different worlds
simultaneously.

Though Kat was more than
understanding, they didn’t talk about it much. In the first few
days after telling Kat everything, they even tried to get her back
to the
haven
on
the beach, but it had never worked. After, the subject rarely came
up, and Kat’s biggest goal had become to break up Benjamin and
Samantha and get him together with Lucy. It killed Kat that Lucy
harbored such strong feelings for a guy that she had no intentions
of going after.

The wind was biting cold so Lucy wrapped
herself in a pea coat and hid as much of her face as possible in
the lapels as she climbed the stairs from the parking area. Looking
down she watched each step pass beneath her feet until at the top
she saw a familiar pair of brown leather shoes. Following them up
to their owner’s face, she found Benjamin.

It had been almost a month
since she had talked to him last, mostly because she had gone out
of her way to avoid him. It took all of her self-control to do so,
but keeping her mind on her
haven
made it a simple task. The most difficult part
was keeping him out of her thoughts while in the
haven
. If he had somehow
shown up there, she feared she wouldn’t have been able to handle it
and either lash out at him or latch onto him.

Benjamin wore his usual black
jacket with a button-down shirt tucked into jeans. He stood with
his hands hanging onto his backpack straps and greeted her with a
charming, “Hi.”

Naturally and ridiculously, Lucy’s
heart raced and the uncontrollable urge to be near him once again
overcame her. It was the same emotion she fought every time she saw
him.

“
Hi,” she managed to squeak
out.

While she was rarely face to
face with him, the routine was getting a little absurd. How was it
that no matter what had passed, she was still completely hypnotized
by him and there was nothing she could ever do about it? But then
there was the prospect that perhaps she was finally facing the
moment she had hoped and prayed for: the moment when he would
dissolve the barrier that stood between the
haven
and the rest of life. So, she
decided to nudge the conversation along.

“
Waiting for Samantha?” Lucy’s
question was only laced with disdain rather than soaked, but she
had an ulterior motive; she would find out if there was a chance at
all that he was who she hoped he was.

Benjamin raised the corners of his
mouth. “No, I’m just enjoying the cold. It never got this way where
I came from.”

“
And where is that, where did you
come from?” He provided a new opening, so Lucy exploited
it.

“
I guess it is my turn, isn’t it?”
he asked, and Lucy froze for a moment.

She knew full well what he was referring to;
she was just taken by surprise that he was playing so well into her
plan.

“
Remember our deal? I would give
you a bit of information about me?”

Lucy laughed a breath of warm air as she
feigned recognition of their agreement from weeks before. The fact
that he remembered was actually very relieving to her.

“
Right, that. I sort of forgot
about it for a minute,” she lied.

The truth was that she pondered
daily about every interaction she had ever had with Benjamin Raven,
but she had to keep up a certain pretense.

“
I came from Southern California,
but that’s not where I was born.” He grinned at her, knowing it
would drive her crazy that he answered her question, yet planted
another.

“
Now that’s not fair,” Lucy pouted
disappointedly.

“
I know. I just like to see you
get irritated with me.”

“
What’s that supposed to mean?”
Lucy said indignantly.

“
Nothing, it’s just that I like
your company, but you are a little boring so I have to make it
interesting.”

She knew he was teasing her so she didn’t get
offended. Instead, she decided to play back.

“
Well, I guess compared to the
company of the physical human embodiment of Tigger, I would be
boring.”

She didn’t laugh, though she
prided herself on her quick-draw wit. After saying it, she felt
that, as clever as it was, it might have been a little below the
belt. You don’t just go after someone’s girlfriend to their face,
but Benjamin’s response surprised her. He was actually suppressing
a guffaw.

“
Touché, Lucy
Higgins, touché.
”
He laughed, and Lucy started to laugh, too.

“
Shall we go to
class?” Benjamin reached out his elbow and Lucy froze again. She
couldn’t believe his invitation. She looked around, but she didn’t
know what she was looking for, perhaps Samantha, but she
thought,
what the hell
,
and took his
arm.

Walking arm and arm with him she
felt like she was both walking on a cloud and swimming in a fish
bowl. She couldn’t fight the feeling that everyone was watching
them. In a bold attempt to relax the moment, and figuring she
really had nothing to lose, she brought up the subject of
Samantha.

“
So, how is Samantha,
anyway?”

“
She’s doing well, I
suppose.”

“
Where is she?” Lucy hoped she
wasn’t crossing any lines.

“
I don’t know. She usually shows
up just before school starts.”

She was getting nowhere with her line of
questioning, so she ratcheted it up a notch.

“
Well, you’re her boyfriend;
shouldn’t you know where she is at all times?”

Benjamin waited a moment before responding. “I
wouldn’t say I’m her boyfriend.”

Lucy was perplexed. “Of course you are. You’re
always together; what would you call it?”

“
I don’t know. I just figured she
needed a friend.”

“
What?” Lucy coughed, choking on
her own saliva. “She doesn’t need any friends.”

“
Yeah, I gathered that
much.”

“
Then why are you with
her?”

“
She just wanted to show me around
the school that first day, so I didn’t say no.”

“
But you hang out with them all
the time.”

“
I don’t want to hurt anyone’s
feelings, so I just sort of do what they do.”

Lucy was getting really
confused by the entire conversation. According to him, he wasn’t
dating or even “with” Samantha. So, that meant something Lucy
didn’t dare consider. Not only had Samantha not had the upper-hand
the whole time, but Benjamin actually considered himself available.
And, trying not to hope for too much, Lucy believed that all that
was going on in the
havens
, if they were real, gave her
the true upper-hand.

They ascended the stairs to class and Lucy
decided to make one more bold move. “So, do you want to sit by me
in class today?”

It sounded so junior high coming out of her
mouth, like asking a boy out when you knew “going out” was going to
be holding hands between classes because there was no way your
mother was going drive the two of you to the mall and leave you
there.

Benjamin looked down at Lucy, “Sure. I’d love
to.”

Lucy’s heart fluttered and, for the first
time, everything felt right.

At lunch Lucy didn’t have time to stop and
tell Kat, but she passed her a note that hinted at what had
transpired that morning between her and Benjamin. When Lucy met Kat
after school to walk to the car, Kat was already demanding
details.