Touch: Saving Ai | ✓

11

I sat on the train, eyes unfocused as I stared at the shadows on the floor. How I'd gotten there was something of a blur – where I was headed even more so. All I knew was that if I didn't keep my head bowed down between my knees, I was going to be sick. My head ached and the buzzing in my ears was growing stronger by the minute. The occasional spasm of pain flared from my ribs and my jaw whenever the abrupt movements of the train threw me off balance. My breath felt short and refused to stick to a rhythm, and no matter how hard I pulled at the roots of my hair, my trembling fingers would not steady.

What was happening to me?

Voices. Possession. Imposters.

After seventeen years of visions and countdowns, had I finally lost it and gone crazy? Could the Gwen I'd been seeing have been a hallucination – some kind of twisted delusion of grandeur that my hero complex had sparked?

No, it couldn't have been. Ryo had been there when she – it had been at the house and he hadn't noticed the difference either. Unless...

No. Impossible. I knew Ryo too well to be fooled.

But was that really true?

The thought made me retch.

The PA system announced the next station, and the shadows moved as the person sitting opposite me leaned forward. 'Hey, kid? You don't look so good. Do you need me to call – '

Shadowy fingers reached out across the floor.

Hysteria overcame me. 'Don't touch me!' I flung myself out of my seat and into the aisle. Air – I needed air.

'Now arriving at – '

I didn't bother to listen to the rest. The train doors slid open with a ding and I threw myself out onto the platform. It didn't matter where I was as long as I was out of there.

God, why wouldn't my head stop hurting?

Gwen's voice kept echoing in my skull. 'I haven't been at school since Monday.'

I didn't want to think about it. I didn't want to think about any of it. The thoughts in my head – the emotions in my chest, it was like the Incident all over again. I didn't want to think. I didn't want to feel. How had I dealt with it back then?

Oh, right. By locking myself away.

I'd sat in the dark, leaning against the wall – shielded from anyone who tried to check up on me by my bed. The darkness had felt empty, safe. Ha, who am I kidding? It had felt like an abyss and I'd fully believed that an abyss was what I deserved. I wanted to sink into it – disappear. I very well might have if Ryo hadn't invaded my room after three days of self-imposed solitude and thrust a packet of glow-in-the-dark stars into my face.

'You're going to get whiter than your name, sitting you in the dark,' he'd said.

Like most of his strings of semi-broken English, the sentence made no sense. I told him so, and the bickering commenced. He insisted that I was getting whiter and I told him that he made no sense. The argument ended with him stacking a bunch of stuff on my bed so that he could reach the ceiling, me yelling at him to be careful as he struggled to stick on the stars, and him toppling over and concussing himself because only an idiot would stack a chair on top of a bunch of soft toys on a bed and think it would remain balanced. Just thinking about it now makes me want to smash my palm into my forehead.

Regardless, the real idiot is and was me. However much I wanted to deny it, he'd saved me back then, and now he'd saved me again. The first time I'd known he'd be fine – the second, I hadn't.