Once

Seventeen

Jax quietly pushed the teacup a little nearer to Elle's hand and said, kindly but firmly, "Drink."

Elle dutifully lifted the cup to her lips and sipped. The warm tea hitting her stomach made her realise how cold she was. Her jaw was chattering and her hands were practically shaking.

"Sorry," she said quietly.

"Elle," said Russell, "you need to stop saying sorry."

They were all crowded round a tiny table in the back of the Ginger Cat Cafe. Elle was purposely avoiding eye contact with them. It was bad enough to faint in the middle of a secondhand clothes shop, but worse to then be half-carried into a cafe by Russell, Sellan and some boy she only met yesterday.

Jax laid a gentle hand over Elle's. Elle stared down at it, then up at Jax's face.

"Elle," she said, in that same kind, insistent voice, "what's going on? And don't say 'nothing'. It's not like you to suddenly collapse out of nowhere. And we can all see there's something going on with you."

The others were looking away, but Russell glimpsed at her and gave a little nod.

"It started yesterday, didn't it?" Jax said. "Maybe something to do with Mr Luzlic's talk?"

Elle nodded slowly. It started earlier than that, of course, but they didn't need to know that. Not with David sat there staring at her.

"OK," she said. Her voice sounded far away and raspy - not her own voice at all. Her head still felt full of cotton wool and there was a dull ache in her left temple where she'd hit the floor. "I... I think there is something wrong with me."

"But what?" Jax said, springing forward eagerly in her seat. "Are you sick or something? Is it -"

"Please," Elle said. She could feel herself flushing, and she hated it. "I'm going to try and explain it to you. But I need you all to just listen, and not interrupt or ask any questions. I probably wouldn't be able to answer them anyway."

They all gave her a short nod. There was a mixture of worry and fascination in all of their eyes which Elle could frankly have done without. This was hard enough to put into words without feeling like she was some gruesome artefact on display in a museum.

"Alright. It started yesterday - with Mr Luzlic's talk. I don't know what it was, but somehow it felt... significant."

"What do you mean?" Jax asked gently.

Elle shot a look at her.

"I told you not to ask me any questions. Sorry Jax, but if I'm going to do this I'm going to have to try and explain this my own way." She regathered her thoughts and began again. "So, like I said, something about what Mr Luzlic was saying seemed important to me. I know it was just some stupid talk about fairy stories - I doubt many of you were even listening to it all that much. But for some reason, to me it felt like a sort of... warning. As if he were hinting at something for me to pay attention to. As if he knew something secret, something majorly important, and he was giving that talk just as a way to hint about it to to me."

She saw Russell steal a glimpse at Jax and tried to ignore it.

"So that's why I was in such a weird mood yesterday afternoon. I just had this sort of feeling that something was going to happen. Like... I mean, you know I don't believe in this sort of crap, but it's how people describe having a premonition. Just a sort of vague, eerie feeling that something was coming - something big, and something bad."

She was surprised to notice that David, much as he had been with Mr Luzlic, was staring at her with rapt attention, hanging on every word.

"And then last night..." She froze, trying desperately to suppress another vicious shudder that surged through her. She sipped her tea, but it didn't help. "Last night I nodded off at my desk while I was revising. And I had this... dream."

Her cheeks were burning. Saying all this out loud sounded crazy. And that's because it was crazy. If it wasn't happening to her she'd never believe a word of it.

When she didn't speak for a few seconds Russell said gently:

"What was the dream about, Elle?"

"It was about that girl. Marigold. I saw her - out playing with her friends on Meadow Lane. I saw all of it. The trees, the houses, the streetlights coming on. They were playing hide and seek, her and two boys. She went off to hide down some alleyway that runs behind the houses, right at the edge of the woods. She snuck into the garden of this abandoned house, and the door was open so she went inside. And she was attacked."

"You saw someone attack her?" Maggie barely whispered.

"Not someone. It was a something. It was..." Here it was. The craziest part of the whole thing. "It was a bear that I saw. There was this huge, ferocious grizzly bear waiting for her in that house, and it attacked her."

She gave a deep sigh that rattled all the way through her. There it was. She'd said it all out loud. Why didn't she feel any better?

Maybe because of the circle of faces staring back at her. The excruciating silence surging like an electric current between every pair of eyes. The unspoken words so obvious they could all practically see them hanging in the air: Elle's gone crazy.

Russell leaned forward, laying a hand on Elle's wrist.

"Look, Elle. Everyone has weird dreams sometimes. Hell, I was dreaming the other night that I was being chased round school by this huge gorilla -"

"You don't understand." She yanked her hand away and Russell looked shocked, but she didn't care. She didn't need sympathy. She needed them to believe her. "It wasn't like a dream, Russell. Not really. It was like I was really there, actually seeing it. And it wasn't just that I saw something horrible happen to a little girl and now I've heard about this girl who disappeared and I've tried to make it all fit together. I saw this little girl. A little girl called Marigold, who was attacked by a bear in a house on Meadow Lane. How do you explain that?"

The moment she'd asked the question she saw the answer staring back at her in all of their eyes, and she was stunned at both how obvious and how horrible it was. It's because you're making it all up, Elle. That's how you explain that.

None of them said it, of course, but that's what they were all thinking. She thought she was inventing it to - to what? Get their attention? Make herself important? Impress their cool new friend? It didn't matter what reason they were supposing. The fact that they thought she could do that in the first place was a painful enough thing to realise on its own.

She rose suddenly to her feet, so quickly that she sent her chair clattering to the floor behind her. Russell jumped up too; so did Jax.

"Elle, stop a minute," Russell said. "You've fallen - you've hurt yourself -"

"I am not crazy," Elle said. Her voice came out as a thin, hard growl, which she suspected did not exactly help her argument.

"Elle, nobody said you were," Jax said. Her voice was gentle. Like a nurse, Elle thought, trying to calm down a patient who is threatening to do something stupid.

"You didn't need to. I can see it on all of your faces." Elle felt tears stinging her eyes and she tried desperately to blink them away, but her breath was catching in her throat and her hands were shaking with emotion. "I'm not saying this for any other reason than that it's the truth. I saw it all. I saw that little girl. And none of you can convince me I didn't."

She turned to leave, but at the last second swung back and threw a defiant, angry face at them all. There were tears coursing down her cheeks now but she didn't care. They all thought she was losing her mind anyway.

When she spoke her voice was full of more venom that she'd have even thought possible in herself.

"I'll tell you this, too. It's not over. It's going to happen again. And you'll all be fucking sorry when it does."

And she was gone before any of them could stop her.