When Rose Wakes (16 page)

“It’s ruined,” Rose said, holding up the shirt in both hands.

Aunt Suzette let out a small gasp at the sight of the deep red stains, but then straightened up, calming herself.

“That’s not blood.”

“Blood?” Rose echoed in surprise. “Of course not. It’s punch. This one girl—I told you about Courtney—she spilled it on me on purpose. But Kylie loaned me her jacket, so it was—”

Aunt Fay lifted the ruined shirt from Rose’s hand, put it to her nose, and smelled it. She blinked and her gaze became accusatory.

“Rose… ?” she began.

“Yes, people were drinking alcohol. There was rum in the punch. I didn’t drink any of it, and neither did Kylie.”

The aunts exchanged a glance loaded with worry and suspicion and anger, and Rose could see the chances
of her ever leaving the apartment unchaperoned again dwindling rapidly.

“Look, I’m sixteen years old,” she said, letting her irritation show. “This kind of thing is going to happen. It just is. My memories are gone, but I’ve been… I don’t know,
educating
myself, I guess. You don’t know what it’s like to not know how to behave, to not know how to be whatever everyone expects you’ll be when they look at you. It’s like an actor learning a part. I’ve had to rehearse being a sixteen-year-old girl!”

She flushed, embarrassed to have spoken such truths in front of Kylie.

“Rose,” Aunt Fay said gently.

But Rose waved her away. “The point is, if you want me to try to have a life, there are going to be parties. And some people are going to be drinking. But I didn’t. And if you don’t believe me, then the awful girl who splashed punch on me has gotten exactly what she wanted.”

A quiet descended on the apartment, cloaked in the heavy potpourri smell that surrounded them. Aunt Suzette and Aunt Fay both seemed at a loss as to how to proceed from there.

“Um,” Kylie said, raising her hand halfway. “I can vouch for all of that. Rose didn’t drink any alcohol. But actually, I did.”

Rose turned, raising her eyebrows. “What?”

Kylie shrugged. “Well, you just told them I didn’t, and I know that you didn’t know that I did, but still it wasn’t true, so I didn’t want you to be saying something that wasn’t true even if you didn’t know it wasn’t true, and I’m babbling, aren’t I?”

Aunt Suzette smiled tenderly. “Yes, you are,” she said and sipped her tea. “Do your parents know you drink, or are we complicit now in your delinquent behavior?”

“Oh, I don’t
drink,
” Kylie replied. “I had half a cup of that punch and it was seriously nasty, like I almost retched all over Chloe’s birthday cake. And I know what you’re thinking, why have more than a sip if it’s that disgusting, right? But the guy who gave me the cup rows crew at Harvard and he is ridiculously cute and so, y’know, I didn’t want to be impolite.”

“Impolite?” Aunt Fay said drily.

Mischief danced in Kylie’s eyes. “If you’d seen him, you wouldn’t have wanted to be impolite either.”

Aunt Fay astonished Rose by laughing. She held up Rose’s shirt and looked at it again.

“I’ll work on this, but it’s probably doomed. I doubt even I can get this stain out,” she said. “You two go up to bed. At breakfast, you can tell us more about this party.”

Rose kissed her aunts good night, the two women fussed over Kylie to make sure she had enough pillows and blankets, and then the girls started for the stairs.

Aunt Fay called to Rose, who paused on the bottom step and turned.

“You weren’t ‘polite’ to any boys tonight, I trust?”

Rose smiled, wondering if they could hear the way her heart jumped and sped up at the question.

“Auntie, I promised,” she replied.

Aunt Fay glanced at Aunt Suzette and then back at Rose. “That’s right, you did.”

Guilt burned through her like quick poison, and it made her angry. Why should she feel guilty? Why should she have to lie? And yet they were so crazy on this subject that she knew honesty would not have the same result as the truth she and Kylie had told about the rest of the party. It would be ugly and awkward and, with Kylie there, horribly embarrassing. Still, she didn’t want to lie.

“I promise you I was very impolite to the boys at the party,” she said, hoping the joke would float, hoping it would suffice.

Her aunts both smiled, amused and visibly relieved.

Rose nudged Kylie and they fled up the stairs. A fresh wave of guilt surged up inside of her, but Rose pushed it away, and when they had at last retreated to her bedroom and she closed the door behind her, she managed to shut it down, separating herself from it entirely.

The two girls looked at each other and sighed, and then laughed. Kylie dropped the armload of pillows and blankets on the floor and then let herself fall into them. She turned onto her back and looked up at Rose.

“That was frickin’ nuts!”

“Told you they were weird,” Rose whispered.

“Not them! Are you kidding me? I’m talking about the weirdo lady on the T.”

Rose perched on the edge of her bed. “So you do believe she was following us?”

“I don’t know. I mean, it’s not like we got that far ahead of her. No way did we lose her. She totally could have caught up, so she probably wasn’t actually our stalker or anything. But she was just so freaky!”

They talked a little longer about it, but soon the conversation returned to the party and to Kylie’s honesty with her aunts.

“I can’t believe you told them that,” Rose said.

“Well, I didn’t know if they could smell it on me or something, so I didn’t want them to figure out that I’d had alcohol and then think
you
were lying. You didn’t know. That wouldn’t have been fair or cool.”

Rose studied her, this pretty, wild girl sprawled in a pile of bedding on the floor, and felt suddenly very fortunate.

“You’re a good friend,” she said.

Kylie grinned. “So are you.”

“How?” Rose said, her smile slipping. “I mean, all I do is babble about crazy stuff and get you chased by subway stalkers.”

“And let me sleep in your weird-smelling apartment with the creepy mobiles hanging in the windows,” Kylie teased.

Rose buried her face in her hands. “Gahhh! I know!”

She dropped her hands and glanced over at the
window, where the spirit-wards her aunts had made dangled from gleaming thread like fishing line. She laughed to herself.

“Sorry about the stink,” Rose whispered. “It’s Aunt Suzette’s potpourri.”

Kylie smiled. “I love it. Entering the secret lair of aging French hippies.”

Laughing, Rose picked up her pillow and hurled it at her, prompting thirty seconds’ worth of giggling pillow fight that ended with the two of them flopped on Rose’s bed, red-faced and chuckling. They settled into a contented silence, just staring at the ceiling, each alone with her thoughts.

Rose broke the silence.

“This wasn’t the first time I’ve seen her.”

Kylie rolled her head to the side, staring at her. “The woman on the T?”

Rose took a shuddery breath. “Yeah. The other day I was shopping with my aunts on Newbury Street and I saw her standing across the street just staring at me. Cars were going by, people walking around her, but she was definitely staring at me.”

And I started to go to her,
Rose thought. But she didn’t say it. How to explain the weird compulsion she’d had to walk over to the woman? She had nearly walked right into traffic, could’ve been killed, and she had no explanation for that. It had been almost like she was in a trance or something. She was just glad that she hadn’t felt any
such temptation when she had seen the woman tonight. All she had wanted was to get away from her.

“Did your aunts see her?”

“I don’t think so.”

Kylie sat up, leaning against the headboard, and studied her. “So you think this lady really is stalking you?”

Embarrassed, Rose looked away. “I know what you’re going to say. It’s a coincidence. Or it wasn’t the same person. It’s crazy, right?”

Kylie shrugged. “What the hell do I know? I’m sixteen, not some shrink.”

They laughed again, but not with the same open abandon they’d felt only moments before. When the laugh subsided, Rose only looked at her, waiting for more. After a few seconds Kylie drew her legs up beneath her, propping her chin on her knees. Her eyes held a kind concern that verged on sorrow.

“All right, you want my two cents? I think maybe all of this is more than anyone should be expecting you to handle on your own. Recovering from a coma, and probably worse, the memory loss, you should totally be in counseling. You’re starting your life over from scratch. That’s, like, the most stressful thing I can possibly imagine. And yes, I know I always speak in superlatives, but I’m serious. It’s huge. And you’re going through it alone.”

Rose frowned. “Well, not
alone.
”

“You mean your aunts? They seem okay, but come on, Rose. You’re
freaking out and they’re not really taking it seriously. You need someone who will. I can’t believe the hospital didn’t hook you up with a therapist or whatever.”

“They did,” Rose admitted. “I went a few times, but then I just figured if they couldn’t help me get my memory back, what was the point?”

Kylie stared at her. “Oh my God. Coping? Coping is totally the point.”

“I’m coping.”

“You’re having nightmares you think have secret messages in them, birds freak you out, and you think mental patients on the T are stalking you. Okay, granted, she definitely gave me the creeps, but I think she was just a nut. Plus, seriously, the Sleeping Beauty connection is there. Coma Girl equals Sleeping Beauty. In your dreams you’re, like, putting yourself into the story, or your version of it.”

“I barely remember the story,” Rose said.

“Trust me. It’s gotta be there in the back of your mind somewhere,” Kylie said. She seemed as though she would go on, but then her eyes lit up and she hopped up from the bed, crossing the room to Rose’s desk.

Slipping into the desk chair, she tapped the space bar on the keyboard and Rose’s laptop screen flickered to brilliant life. She went online and typed “Sleeping Beauty” into Google. The first hit was about the Disney film version, but Kylie chose the second, the Wikipedia entry for the fairy tale.

“Sit,” she said, getting up from the chair and gesturing for Rose to take her place. “Read.”

Rose obeyed, discovering the history of
La belle au bois dormant
and its author, Charles Perrault. The original fairy tale told the story of the christening of a princess and the ugly fallout that occurs when a wicked fairy was not included on the guest list. Those fairies who were invited became the princess’s godmothers and gifted her with wit and beauty, grace and song, but the wicked fairy cursed her, declaring that she would one day prick her finger on a spindle and die.

“Wait,” Rose said, looking up from the screen. “The good fairies couldn’t break the curse, but they could change it? How does that make sense?”

“How do I know?” Kylie said. “It’s a freakin’ fairy tale.”

Rose shook her head. It really did not make sense to her, but in Perrault’s story, one of the good fairies twisted the original curse so Sleeping Beauty wouldn’t die, just fall asleep for a hundred years, until she received a kiss from the son of a prince.

“That is just so random,” Rose said.

Kylie laughed. “Nah. Most fairy tales have princes and princesses kissing somewhere.”

Rose read on, remembering enough that she was not surprised to learn that despite the king banning spindles from the kingdom, the princess eventually pricked her finger on one and the spell kicked in. She rolled her eyes
at the discovery that the good fairies came back and put the entire kingdom to sleep with her, making them share in her curse.

“Where’s the logic?” she muttered.

But joke as she might, she could not avoid making the same conclusions that Kylie had. Her aunts had made a cameo in her dreams as fairies in the woods. There were a lot of things in her dreams that she could not connect to the story, but some parts of it did resonate. The thing about all the people in the kingdom falling asleep had been in there. The sleeping curse on the princess was an obvious parallel, but instead of pricking her finger, in her dreams the threat seemed to be sex itself. Instead of a kiss waking her up, sex would be the end of her.

And no wonder, with Aunt Suzette and Aunt Fay so frantic about her getting anywhere near a guy.

Rose glanced up at Kylie again. “You really think this could all be in my head?”

“Honestly, yeah. How could it not be? It makes sense. Who knows what’s stirring around behind whatever walls have been put up in your brain?”

Rose stared at the screen, smiling as she clicked back to the search window and then selected the link to the Disney
Sleeping Beauty.
The images did not look familiar at all, but the bright colors made her smile.

“Does that help?” Kylie asked.

“It shouldn’t,” Rose said, standing up and spinning
once before landing on her bed. She looked at Kylie. “I mean, really I’m trading one brand of crazy for another. But it does make me feel a little better.”

Her cell phone beeped. With a grin, she pulled it out of her pocket and saw she had a text from Jared.

Good night, beautiful. Sleep tight.

“And
that
makes you feel
much
better,” Kylie said.

Rose nodded eagerly. “It certainly does.”

She couldn’t wait for Monday, when she could see Jared again. As for her aunts’ paranoia about guys and sex, well, Rose was sixteen years old—definitely old enough to make up her own mind about such things.

And what they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them.