Incarnadine

Chapter 1

CHAPTER 1

Jamie jumped out of her Hello Kitty blanket when I slammed the bedroom door behind me.

“Um, Lena? You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”

“Maybe I have.” I struggled to catch my breath, my chest still heaving from running and dashing for the stairs after locking every door downstairs. I swiped a damp strand of hair away from my face and shivered. Pulling, my arms across myself, I held onto my soaked sleeves, thinking back. “Maybe I just did.”

Jamie went to the bathroom and brought a towel to drape over me. “What happened?” she asked.

“The alley. Dark. Rain. A guy. Hot guy—”

“How hot are we talking about? Sam Winchester or Dean Winchester? Or Castiel? Because—”

“—and I offered him an umbrella,” I continued, now frantically. “He said a word—Japanese, I think. He dropped our umbrellas. Touched my face. Said my name again. Kissed me. Best kiss ever. Disappeared, and—and— Poof! Just poof!”

I was out of breath when I finished. It felt like a dream. Unreal even to my ears now.

“Okay…So, what’s his hair color? And his eyes? Maybe I know him. One of the guys who have a crush on you.”

“How many are they—like, ten or eleven?” I half-laughed at the ridiculous notion. “And none of them can possibly look like him. He had these amazing eyes I could write hundred of poems about. Gray eyes. And his jaw, and the look on his face—I swear it’s all so unreal, like straight out of my dreams—”

I broke off and swallowed. Oh my. “Jamie, could you please get my sketchbook here?”

“But you’re all wet! What if—”

I was almost hyperventilating at this point. “You can hold it in front of me. I just need to see. Please.”

She went over the bedside and opened my sketchbook for me to see.

There. The guy in the alley. Or at least the semi-silhouette of his shadowed face. His face was never clear in my mind, and I didn’t even know if he truly existed. But that face had been lingering like a haunting presence in my mind since the dreams started.

The dreams. They were always there. Sometimes I would be running in a field of grass. Sometimes I was in the woods, listening to the gentle humming of the birds. In some rare ones I would be by a beautiful lake, letting a peaceful serenity come over me while I hummed a tune I always heard the birds do.

My therapist had told the Cadwells that any dreams I had might be real memories, the ones pre-amnesia. But Mr. Cadwell always said that if it hurt to think about them, I didn’t have to pursue them. I once heard him tell Jamie that my dreams of the woods might be because of how I was found in the woods, after the animal mauling. I had woken up in the hospital after Mr. Cadwell found me. I had no recollection of anything, including how I ended up in the woods, naked and heavily injured. No family came for me, no one from anywhere nearby our town claimed to have ever seen me at all.

That was until the Cadwells pitied me and took me in. They enrolled me in the same high school their daughter went to. Jamie became my closest friend, my guide through everything.

“Do you think,” I thought out loud, “that he might know me from, you know, before?”

The word 'before' sounded like a taboo word to us. We just rarely talked about it.

Jamie crouched down in front of me and took my hand in hers. “Elena, if he knew you from before, why would he only find you now? Why years after the day you showed up in our town?” She squeezed my hands. “If he’s someone who cared about you, he would have looked for you long before now. You know the news about you was practically nationwide.”