The Saving Angels Series: Books 1-3 (2 page)

After his sudden death, I wound up spending a few weeks in the hospital. At first the doctors thought I was suffering from depression, but it was more deeply rooted. My own grief compounded with my sensitivity to my mom’s sorrow was almost enough to kill me. The doctors were flabbergasted that even sleeping pills did not seem to give me the peace I needed. They observed that if I fell into a natural sleep, I seemed more peaceful.

My dreams had always been the soothing medicine that I needed for any pain that I experienced in life. We have never once, in all our years together spoken a single word, but we share a conscious bond that makes it unnecessary.

For obvious reasons, I had to keep this info to myself since the doctor’s already thought I was a basket case. I could just imagine what they would think if I told them I was comforted by some boy I had been dreaming about all my life, and even though he always stood in the shadows, and I had never seen his face clearly, I was in love with him. Not even my parents knew everything about the dreams. Sure, they knew that I occasionally dreamed about some boy I had never met, but I never let on that I dreamt of him every night, and that he is the reason I paid no attention to the boys in school.

My grief over my dad’s passing gradually lifted, and I started to function again. I knew a big part of this was because my mom realized that I could not handle her grief on top of my own. She learned to hide her own grief when I was around. I felt bad that she had to mask her own sorrow, but I could not help appreciating the loosening of the band of sadness that had encircled me.

I knew my mom still missed my dad even a year later, and often at night I could still sometimes hear her crying in her room.

That’s why we were in a new house, in a new town.

Two months ago after our first Christmas without my dad, my mom abruptly closed the book she had been reading at the breakfast table. At the slam of the book, I looked up startled from my own book.

“That’s it,” she had announced. “We’re moving.”

“What?” I asked, not sure I heard her right. “Moving?” We had lived in this house as long as I could remember.

“Were moving,” she repeated.

“Why?”

“Because we are never going to let go of him if we stay in this town, everywhere we go reminds us of him. The movies, our favorite restaurants, even the mall. I’m reminded of him wherever I go, and I know you are too. We need a new beginning.”

“Isn’t moving expensive?” I asked, not sure my mom had thought this through completely. We weren’t poor, but I knew that both my parents had to work to maintain their lifestyle. I had been worrying about how we were going to make ends meet since my dad had died.

“We have the money from your dad’s life insurance.”

“Dad had life insurance?” I asked surprised.

“Yes, we both had policies in our name. We took them out after we adopted you. We wanted to make sure if anything ever happened to us, you would be taken care of.”

I felt the familiar pang in my heart. I knew I should get over being abandoned, but for some reason I could not let it go that my “real” parents didn’t love me enough to keep me. I knew my adoptive parents loved me like I was their own flesh and blood, but I couldn’t help wondering why I had been left behind by my real parents.

“How much money is the policy?” I had asked, shaking off the bothersome thoughts.

“Enough that you never have to worry about college and you get to spend your last couple months of school in private school.”

I was thrilled. Attending a private school had been a lifelong dream of mine. Not because I was vain and wanted to surround myself with other smart kids, but because I felt if I attended a school where there were other kids with high IQ’s, I could get lost in the crowd. Don’t ask me why I had assumed everyone at private school were smart, I had just always perceived it that way.

In public school I always seemed to be the smartest in my class, and my teachers were always trying to get my parents to have my IQ tested, but I always fought it. I didn’t want to skip grades. I didn’t want to be tested for gifted classes. I just wanted to be like any other teenager. For years my goal was to fly under the radar. I always got straight A’s, but I never went beyond that. The less attention I got, the happier I was.

It was easier when I had teachers that didn’t care much about their jobs, and had only gone into teaching for the summers off. They appreciated kids like me who made their jobs easier. The teachers that actually liked their jobs were harder to fool. Usually, after a couple of months, they would catch on to just how smart I was and then the cycle would start over again. They would meet with my parents.

“Do you know Krista is gifted?” They would ask.

“Yes,” my parents would reply.

“Would you like us to test her?”

“No,” my parents would say. “We think Krista is comfortable where she is.”

I had seen this cycle many times and just wanted to put it all behind me. I felt a private school was the way to go, but they were expensive and I knew that it would be too costly for me to attend one, so I had never asked.

“Yes,” my mom replied.

“There’s more, I’ve been researching private schools and guess where one of the best in the nation is located?”

“Santa Cruz?” I asked, not daring to believe my good fortune.

“Yep!” she replied, using one of my favorite slang words.

Except for being overly sensitive and dreaming about some guy I had never met, the next craziest thing about me was my ridiculous, burning desire to visit Santa Cruz. My parents could never explain this strange desire of mine, but I couldn’t help wondering if I was born there or something like that.

The Department of Children and Family Services had no information to pass on about me, except the fact that some woman found me sitting on a park bench at a rest stop in Utah, when I was two. I was found clutching a bear and a small backpack. I couldn’t tell them my name, and all the social workers could get out of me was that “Franklin,” or what sounded like Franklin, had told me to sit until someone came to help me. The authorities searched the area high and low for anyone close to the name of Franklin, but their searches proved to be fruitless.

“Santa Cruz,” I had repeated. Saying the name out loud filled me with an unexplainable rightness.

Now, two months later, here we were. From the moment we drove through the town limits, I had felt it. I didn’t know why, but I knew I belonged here.

I studied my reflection in the mirror over the sink as I smoothed moisturizer on my face. The sea air was playing havoc on my complexion. I hated the constant gritty texture my face seemed to have and the dark black smudges under my eyes that made me resemble a NFL football player. I couldn’t help feeling a little frazzled about starting school the next day. It was one thing to feel like a freak on the inside, but a whole other thing to look like one.

I traced the dark smudges with my fingertip. The gritty texture of my skin could be fixed, but the smudges would be harder to cover up. The dream had shaken me more than I was willing to admit. I was terrified at what they meant. Was he going to leave me after
all these years? How would I function without him? Who would I turn to in my times of need?

All of these thoughts filled me with despair, and sleep was now a double edge sword. I longed to see him, but I feared for the day he would no longer be there.

I stepped into the shower after laying down an extra towel under the bathmat. The shower door was older, and no matter how hard we closed it, it still leaked around the edges.

Hoping the water would wash away the last lingering side effects from the dream, I deliberately twisted the knob to the hottest setting. Of course it took a while, since the hot water heater in the house must have been installed when the house was built twenty years ago. My mom told me that it couldn’t be that old, since typically hot water heaters only lasted about ten years. It may not be twenty years old, but it had definitely seen better days, and was another item on the endless “to do” list hanging on the refrigerator. My mom and I aren’t the handiest with tools, so the list keeps growing while nothing ever gets crossed off. My mom promised to call a handyman last night after the pantry door fell off its hinges. I could only laugh; the new house may be in a great location being only a block from the beach, but it definitely needed some work done, my mom called it T.L.C (Tender Loving Care). I felt it needed a lot more than that, like maybe a bulldozer.

I rushed through washing and conditioning my hair to conserve some of the limited hot water for shaving my legs. The sunny California weather was nice, and I definitely liked wearing shorts, but shaving my legs every day was getting old fast. At least it was better than wearing my regular attire of jeans and long johns like I would have to if we were still in Montana.

I was forced to switch off the shower when the hot water turned lukewarm. I toweled off with one of the plush rose colored towels my mom and I had special ordered when we still lived up north. We both hated stepping out of a hot shower and at least the plush towels helped ward off any chills. Of course, the mild temperatures in California were a lot different than the frigid temperatures we were used to.

I pulled on a pair of blue and green plaid board shorts and a Roxy t-shirt. I let out a sigh of contentment; I loved being able to wear such light weight clothes in March. Though before the move, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you the difference between a Roxy shirt and the standard Target t-shirts I usually wore during the summers back in Montana. I have never been a name brand junkie, but there was no denying that the Roxy shirts were super comfortable, not to mention they were very flattering, even for someone as flat chested as me.

Of course starting tomorrow, I would be wearing a uniform everyday and my new Roxy shirts would have to wait until the weekends. This thought didn’t make me cringe like most teenagers would have. I liked the idea of not having to decide what to wear each morning and never having to second guess my outfit choice. Even in the small town I had moved from, I had always been one step behind all the fashionistas.

I spent the hours waiting for my mom to wake up by getting my school supplies ready for the next day. I’d been out of school for two weeks for the move and had enjoyed my time off. I almost wished I had opted for early graduation. School had always been easy for me, but this past year it was ridiculously easy since I had finished all my core classes the year before. I had enough credits to graduate early, but I decided to do the whole
graduation thing for my mom’s sake. Being an only child, I didn’t want to deprive her of my last few high school memories.

I was a little apprehensive about starting a new school, and hoped that I could remain unnoticed until I graduated. I just wanted to finish high school and move on to a big university where it would be easier to blend in.

I had organized my backpack about a million times and had stuffed it with plenty of notebooks, pens and pencils. I had also packed an extra book on the off chance that I forgot my current novel I was reading.

Finally, I set my backpack aside realizing it was as ready as it could be. I moved to my desk, but I was a perpetually neat person, so there really wasn’t much to organize there. After a few minutes of just reshuffling things around, I sat on my bed.

Settling against my mountain of throw pillows, I picked up my favorite teddy bear that I had made at Build-a-Bear Workshop when I was ten. We bought it when we went to Las Vegas on vacation. It had become a ritual for my dad to buy me a new stuffed animal from B.A.B.W. every time we went on vacation, and I had a whole shelf of different animals we had purchased over the years. My favorites held court on my bed; like the cute orange tabby cat that we had bought in Orlando and the monkey from our trip to Colorado. Each one was special to me since my dad had helped me pick all of them out. I had fourteen in all, to remember every trip we had taken together.

I held my bear loosely in my hands as I studied the ceiling trying to keep my mind off the topic that was lurking in the back of my mind. At first I was successful as I studied the fine cracks that boarded the crease where the wall met the ceiling. The cracks had alarmed me at first, but mom explained that they were common in houses that were built on softer soil.

“We can hire somebody to caulk over them and then repaint the walls,” she had said.

After a few minutes, I could no longer ward off the thoughts from the twist my dreams had taken. I had a nagging feeling that something was going to happen.

From the moment we entered Santa Cruz, I knew this was where I was supposed to be. If asked why, I would not be able to give you a straight answer, it was just a feeling I carried around in my heart.

I had done plenty of research on the city over the years and knew probably more about it than the locals. I knew before we moved here that there were approximately 58,000 people who lived within the city limits and that the city itself was 12 square miles. I knew that it was 74 miles south of San Francisco and 30 miles away from San Jose. I even knew that Santa Cruz meant “Holy Cross.” I knew all of these things, but I didn’t know the most important thing, which was why I felt I had to be here.

I planned on finding out some of the answers today. My mom and I were going to visit the Boardwalk that had made Santa Cruz popular. When I found out that Santa Cruz had an amusement park on the beach, I wasn’t surprised, it all seemed to fit. In the background of every one of my dreams, I could make out an amusement park in the distance. I had researched the Boardwalk enough that I was pretty confident it would be the one from my dreams. If I was right, at least I would be moving in the right direction.