Kids These Days

Chapter 15: Finn

I'm having the strangest dream. 

Ronan stands before me, his hands outstretched, like he's offering me a gift. In his palms lies a blood-red flower with dozens of slender, overlapping petals. I can't tear my eyes away from the coiling pattern. For some reason, I'm reminded of my ninth grade math class, and the day we spent learning about the Fibonacci Sequence. I count the numbers in my head, reminding myself that this is a dream, that none of this is real. The petals form a perfect mathematical spiral. 1, 2, 3, 5... 

Ronan clenches his fingers into a fist, and the flower dissolves into a shower of sparkling rubies. The gems rise to my knee level, and then to my hips. When I open my mouth to call for help, the rubies pour down my throat, and I see that Ronan is gone. He didn't even stick around to explain the meaning of the red flower. Typical. 

Moments before the rubies overwhelm me, the dream shifts, and I'm transported to the desert — and into the shade of a towering, bone-white Joshua tree. The tree stands in the middle of a circle of rocks, similar to the radial pattern of the red flower. I take a step closer to the rocks. The air is unnaturally viscous, like I'm walking through foam. It feels like hours pass before I reach the edge of the rock circle. 

There are no rocks. The circle is made of skulls. Antlers jut towards the sky like strange, skeletal stalagmites, the gaping eye sockets of the deer skulls watching as I dash around the circle, trying to find a break in the bones. When I try to jump over the circle, an invisible boundary shoves me back, the message clear: you're stuck here. 

(Great. I've always wanted to be a pagan sacrifice.)

The sun beats down on my shoulders, white-hot and unforgiving. I raise my hand to block out the blazing light. As I make my third — or is it the fifth? — revolution around the tree, a woman steps out from behind the flaking trunk, blocking my path. 

It's Leigh, the stranger I met in the desert. She gazes at me curiously. 

"What's happening to me?" I ask, because wandering around in a circle of bones doesn't strike me as a normal, daily activity. "Is this a dream?"

"It's temporary," she replies. "I don't know if I would call it a dream. This is more of an in-between place, if that makes any sense. Think of it as a metaphysical waiting room."

(It doesn't make any sense.) "How long am I going to be stuck here?"

"Not so long. I'm bound to this place too, you know." 

"My friends..."

"You're with them right now." Leigh smiles softly at me, and I see that she's right. I'm sitting in someone's beat-up Volvo — windows rolled down, radio blasting — and the wind is blowing through my hair, a refreshing break from the incessant sun. Becca sits next to me. (I chalk her presence down as a heat-induced hallucination.) She brushes my hair out of my face, her touch surprisingly gentle. Before I can react, I'm thrown back into the skull circle. 

"They're good friends," Leigh continues smoothly, as if I didn't just teleport out of a car. "I wish I had friends like them. When I was your age, I only had my sisters."

It occurs to me that I don't know Leigh's age. Her heart-shaped face gives nothing away — she could be sixteen or thirty, although the sadness in her deep brown eyes seems to span centuries.

"How old are you?" I ask. "How long have you been here?" 

"That's a funny question. I was your age when I... left. But I feel much older now."

I wipe a bead of sweat from my forehead. Is it getting hotter, or am I just being extra paranoid? "You said you had sisters. I do, too. Sarah, Margaret, and Maureen." Saying their names makes me feel stronger. More solid. The heat subsides, and I feel my pulse slow to a steady rhythm. "Who are your sisters?"