Wake Unto Me (3 page)

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Authors: Lisa Cach

Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Historical, #Europe, #Love & Romance, #Girls & Women

BOOK: Wake Unto Me
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She spent all her free time either drawing the strange things she saw in her dreams, or with her nose inside historical novels. The world held in the pages of history felt like the real world, and the present day an illusion she had to suffer through until she could escape back into the pages of a book.
Or escape into the rich dreams of sleep. She always woke with reluctance, feeling that she was being torn from a more vivid world. She rarely remembered more than snippets of her dreams, but when she did, the images and sensations were so lifelike that they were indistinguishable from reality, and sometimes she couldn’t remember whether she’d dreamed something, or lived it.
Other times, though, sleep brought her nightmares that carried her far beyond terror, waking her and the entire house with her screams. Those were the Screecher dreams. In the midst of sleep, she was sometimes attacked by howling, ghostlike apparitions. She didn’t know what they were or where they came from, whether they were real or figments of her imagination, spirits or delusions, and for lack of any better name she called the apparitions the Screechers.
Both the extremely vivid good dreams and the distressing Screecher nightmares had started at puberty. She didn’t know if it was a blessing or a curse, to have both types. Her father and stepmother, she knew, feared that the Screecher nightmares might hint at mental instability; that she might be a little crazy, like her long-dead mother, who had thought she could predict the future.
Overall, books and art were a safer escape from reality than sleep.
The weird dreams couldn’t entirely explain her sense of alienation from her classmates, though. It was something deeper than that, something that made her think that she didn’t belong there.
She needed to escape her life entirely. College had always been her light at the end of the long, dark adolescent tunnel. Lately, though, college felt a thousand years away. Three years might as well be three decades. Her inability to change her present life had left her teetering on the edge of a vast pit of despair. She needed something to change soon, or she’d fall in.
Right now, she had one small hope for how she might escape the pit.
In July, she’d received a random e-mail from the Fortune School, in France. She’d never heard of it, but assumed they’d gotten her e-mail address from a pen-pal service she’d signed up for the year before, through her French class (unhappily, her French pen pal had given up the effort of friendship after a single illiterate e-mail from Caitlyn; French, alas, did not come naturally to her).
The girls’ boarding school invited her to visit their Web site and apply for both admission and a scholarship. She’d snorted in disbelief at the scholarship part; these people obviously hadn’t seen her grades.
Still, it seemed harmless enough to look at the Web site.
The moment the school’s home page came up, and she saw the photo of the castle that housed the school, Château de la Fortune, she felt her soul being called to the Fortune School. She hadn’t known that what she yearned for was to go to a French girls’ boarding school, but the photo of Château de la Fortune, perched on a cliff overlooking the Dordogne River in southwestern France, convinced her that attending that school was the only thing that could possibly make her happy.
Of course, there was almost no chance she’d be admitted. There was even less chance that she’d get a scholarship, and it would be impossible for her father, a log truck driver, to pay the annual tuition listed on the Web site: it was twice what he earned in one year.
And yet … It was as if her very soul cried out that she at least had to try.
So she’d applied, in secret. Some hopes were better nurtured in private, where the words of others could not harm them, and where disappointment could be borne free of the pitying gaze of friends.
From the day she’d sent in her application, she’d been both dreading and eagerly anticipating an envelope in the mail, telling her whether or not they wanted her. It had been over two months now, making sorting through the mail every afternoon torture. No letter meant hope could live another day, but it also meant another night of dreading the inevitable disappointment to come.
“You quiet because you’re thinking about Pete?” Jacqui asked, jarring Caitlyn out of her thoughts.
“Huh?” They’d come to Caitlyn’s street. She hadn’t heard a word either of her friends had said for the past fifteen minutes.
“Someone’s lost in romantic daydreams,” Jacqui said.
“Yeah, right.”
Sarah and Jacqui laughed and waved good-bye. “See ya,” Sarah said.
“Yeah. See you tomorrow.” Caitlyn walked the last half mile alone, her thoughts all on the letter that might, or might not, be waiting for her at home.
Ruin, salvation, or limbo: they were the three possibilities that the U.S. Postal Service could deliver to the mailbox any day but Sunday.
Which would it be today?
Caitlyn let herself into her house, stepping over the perpetual pile of her younger brothers’ out-of-season coats, athletic gear, and shoes clogging the entryway. No one was home, but she knew the day’s mail would be piled at the end of the kitchen island, like it always was.
Several white business envelopes were stacked on top of a pile of catalogs. Caitlyn chewed her upper lip and picked them up, forcing herself to go through them.
Cable bill.
Something from the grade school her three young half brothers attended.
Electric bill.
Credit card offer.
And one last envelope. She turned it over, her heart racing.
Mortgage statement.
Her shoulders sank in relief. Her hopes had been saved from execution, for one more day at least. With light steps she went to her room to drop off her backpack.
Tyler, Wade, and Ethan, her half brothers, were at their various sport practices and scouting activities. Her dad and stepmom were driving them in separate vehicles, engaged in the complicated ballet of boy pickup and delivery, pausing only to toss fast-food burgers and chicken parts to the boys as if feeding hungry lions. She had the house to herself for the moment.
She opened her door and was about to toss her backpack onto her bed when she saw it: a white envelope, already opened, set upon the corner of her bed. Her heart sank.
Caitlyn set her backpack down on the bed and picked up the letter, her dreams collapsing around her. A yellow sticky note was attached to the envelope.
What’s all this about? We need to talk.—Mom
Great. Not only did she get rejected, but she got to look forward to the added pleasure of discussing with her stepmother, Joy, why she’d applied to a French boarding school. Joy probably took it personally, as if Caitlyn were fleeing from her in particular. She seemed to take every one of Caitlyn’s moods personally.
Caitlyn’s birth mother had been killed in a car crash when Caitlyn was only four. She had only the faintest memories of her, more imagined than real, and knew her face only from photos. She’d given Caitlyn her long dark hair, and—inexplicably—the tarot card of the Wheel of Fortune. She had tucked the tarot card under Caitlyn’s pillow on the day she died. There was a family rumor that she had foreseen her own death, and that the tarot card had been her way of saying good-bye. Caitlyn’s father refused to discuss it.
Joy had married Caitlyn’s father by the time Caitlyn was five, and had embraced Caitlyn as her own child; Caitlyn had grown up calling her Mom. Joy was a simple, kindhearted woman, but the loving woman who had understood a lonely little girl was at a loss when dealing with a confused teenager who couldn’t, even to herself, explain why she was so miserable. The less Caitlyn felt understood by Joy, the greater the gap between them grew.
Her dad, meanwhile, was grateful to have three uncomplicated, athletic young sons to deal with. Caitlyn became Joy’s problem, not his. The few times Caitlyn had tried to talk to him about anything personal, he told her to go talk to her mom.
Caitlyn sank onto the end of her bed with the envelope in her hand, hopeless tears of disappointment filling her eyes. She couldn’t face three more years of high school, she just couldn’t. Something else had to be possible: a GED through the community college? Homeschooling? School online? Something. Anything.
She slid the single sheet from the envelope and unfolded it, snuffling back tears.
Dear Caitlyn,
Thank you for your application. I am pleased to inform you that we can offer you both admission to the Fortune School in late January, and a full scholarship. Registration materials will follow under separate cover.
 
 
Yours sincerely,
Eugenia Snowe, PhD
Headmistress, The Fortune School
Caitlyn’s breath froze in her chest. The letter seemed to float before her, held in hands that belonged to someone else.
She’d been accepted?
Full
scholarship? For
her
?
She read the letter again to be sure she’d not misunderstood. “Oh. My. God,” she said to the empty room. “Oh my God.
Oh my God!
Ohmigod, ohmigod, ohmigod, I’m going to France!
I’m
going to
France
!”
She leaped up onto her bed and jumped up and down, her backpack sliding off the mattress to the floor, the bed frame squeaking. “I’m going to France! France! France!” she shouted. “I’m going to live in a castle! Castle! Castle! What do you think of that, huh?” she asked the portrait of Bia. “
What
do you think of
that
?”
Caitlyn dropped onto the mattress, rolled onto her back, and kicked her feet in the air like a manic puppy. She read the letter yet again, then lay it over her face and closed her eyes, savoring the moment of pure happiness.
She was leaving Spring Creek. Against all odds, she’d received her Get Out of Jail Free card. She sent an enormous
thank-you
out into the universe, to whatever force had guided the Fortune School to send her that initial e-mail.
Then a moment of fear hit her, and her eyes sprang open: What if her parents wouldn’t let her go?
She shook the thought off. No, they’d be relieved to have her gone. Life would be easier and happier for them. They could focus on the boys and their sports, which is all they wanted to do, anyway.
In the meantime, Caitlyn would go out into the world, where the people would be new, where there was culture and history and varied ways of thinking. Where she’d live in a castle on a cliff. And where maybe, just maybe, she would find people like herself.
And if she was really lucky, maybe she’d find that guy of her dreams: the one who wasn’t perfect, but who was, somehow, perfect for
her
.
The possibilities stretched before her, and she imagined in France a world full of sunlight and castles, art and laughter, and a boy who would see into her soul.
She was leaving Spring Creek, and life was never going to be the same.
CHAPTER
Two
 
JANUARY 20
 
What was she forgetting? Caitlyn’s tired gaze skipped over the shambles of her bedroom, trying to decide what else to cram into her makeshift luggage. Weariness and tension made decision making almost impossible.
Stuffed animal?
No. She’d look childish.
Favorite books?
Too heavy.
Her eye fixed on her bulletin board, and her heart skipped a beat. How could she have almost forgotten that? She plucked the tarot card of the Wheel of Fortune from the lattice of ribbons on the board. It showed a wheel floating in the sky, covered in esoteric symbols. Fantastical creatures surrounded it: a sphinx, a snake, Anubis, and four winged creatures in the corners of the card. In ballpoint pen, her mother had written a few cryptic words along the edge of the card: “the heart in darkness.”
Caitlyn had always taken the words as a warning against bouts of melancholy. An uncle had once told her that her mother had been moody, given to dark thoughts and sometimes completely withdrawing into herself. Even though Caitlyn had been only four years old at the time, she wondered if her mother had seen hints of a similar personality in her, and had tried—however ineffectually—to warn Caitlyn to struggle against her nature.
Caitlyn had researched the card online, had even asked a fortune teller about it once, but she had never found an answer to why her mother had given it to her. The Wheel of Fortune’s main meanings were “fate” and “change,” which seemed about as ambiguous—or obvious—a message as you could leave a person on the day you died. Had her mother simply meant, “This is my fate,” and then written the words about the heart in darkness to ask Caitlyn not to grieve?
But what kind of person left that type of message for a four-year-old? Only a madwoman.
Holding the card, Caitlyn sank onto the end of her bed, exhausted by packing and by her own nerves. It was almost one in the morning, and in a couple of hours she and her dad would start the two-hour drive to the airport. The rest of the house was quiet, her parents and brothers sleeping. She should be sleeping, too, but she knew she’d just lie staring at the clock if she undressed and crawled into bed.

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