Sleep No More

But things didn’t happen like I thought.

Sierra’s alive. And Daddy’s not.

A lady came in to talk to her. They’ve been outside in the hall for a long time. I look at Mommy and then slide down from the couch and sneak to the door. They’re quiet, but if I put my ear right where the door isn’t quite closed, I can hear them.

“It was supposed to be me,” my aunt says in an angry whisper, and my stomach starts to hurt. I didn’t want her to know. Now she’ll figure out I changed things.

“You?”

“Yes, it was supposed to be me and I did nothing. Give me some credit.”

“Then who?” the other lady asks.

I cross my fingers, but Sierra still tells on me. “It must have been Charlotte. It would’ve terrified her.”

“You know how severe of an infraction this is,” the lady says, and I don’t know what infraction means, but her voice doesn’t sound like it’s something good.

“She’s six!”

“She broke the rules,” the woman says. “You’re one of us, Sierra. And hopefully someday that girl will be as well. But only if you get her under control.”

“I’ve been working with her since she was three!” Sierra argues.

“Then you’re going to have to work harder, aren’t you?”

Sierra says something but it’s so quiet I can’t understand her. Then I hear the loud click of high heels. The lady’s going away. Sierra’s coming back.

I run across the slippery floor and jump onto the couch again just as Sierra pushes the door open and pokes her head in. “Hey, sweetheart,” she says. “Are you hungry?”

I’m not, but when I said no all day yesterday, Sierra got mad. So I nod.

“Let’s go get a snack,” she says, holding her hand out to me.

But she doesn’t take me to the cafeteria. She stops at a vending machine and buys a package of M&M’s and we go to a dim, quiet room with a big cross at the front. It looks like a church, but it seems weird to have a church in the hospital. I guess everyone else thinks it’s weird too, because the room is empty.

Maybe that’s why Sierra brought me here.

“Charlotte,” Sierra says, “you had a vision about this, didn’t you?”

My bottom lip quivers, and tears overflow when I nod.

“And you tried to stop it.”

I nod again, even though the way she said it wasn’t really a question. It’s bad to see the visions at all. Sierra’s been teaching me how to fight them off since I was three.

But it’s hard.

And sometimes it hurts. This one hurt a lot.

“I tried to save you,” I whisper, but I can barely get the words out through my tears. My chin drops to my chest and I feel her pull me onto her lap, where the curled ends of her pretty, blondish-red hair tickle my face.

“I’m going to come live with you,” she says, and I’m so surprised my tears stop with a loud sniff. “Your mom will need a lot of help, and … I’m going to keep an eye on you for a while,” she says, and it sounds like a bad thing.

She lifts my face and rubs my wet cheeks with her thumbs. “Your mom is going to wake up,” she says, her voice very serious. “And when she does, you cannot tell her what happened. You can’t tell her anything.”

“But you said—”

“I know. I hoped that someday we could. But this accident has changed things. We can’t ever tell her now.”

“Why not?” I ask.

“Because … because she might be angry. With both of us,” Sierra says after a long silence, and my chest hurts at the thought of Mommy being mad at me.

“Charlotte, I’m afraid the time has come for you to act much more grown up than you are. It’s going to be difficult, but you have to work very, very hard at following the rules from now on. Do you understand?”

I nod, even though I really don’t.

Sierra glances at the door that leads into the little church place. “Tell me the rules,” she says.

“You know the rules,” I say, rubbing my eyes with my fists.

“Tell me again,” she says, and her voice is very soft and gentle now.

I stare at her, not sure why I have to do this here, but I start to recite anyway. “Never reveal that you are an Oracle to anyone except another Oracle.”

“Good. Two?”

“Fight your visions with all your strength. Never surrender. Never give up. Don’t close your eyes.”

“Three?”

“Never, under any circumstances, change the future.” Sierra nods and a single tear shines on her cheek.

Then I understand.

I did this. Daddy is dead because I didn’t follow the rules. I bury my face in my aunt’s shirt and start to sob.

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What I wouldn’t give to live somewhere without snow. Not that there’s any snow actually sticking on the ground yet. Just dead grass and bitterly cold winds. Ugly cold.

Until I open the front door to the high school and am blasted with a mixture of heat, moisture, and noise. The hall is swarming with bodies and music and cell phones chirping, but I put my head down and wander through it like a winding maze.

The space in front of my locker is crowded with people and for a moment I indulge the fantasy that they’re waiting to talk to me. But I know better. Robert Jones is one of the most popular guys in school and his locker is on my right—thus the majority of the crowd.

On my left is Michelle.

We used to be friends. Now we have this wary sort of acquaintanceship. Michelle glances in my direction and even though I see her catch sight of me—that slight widening of her eyes—she gestures to the two girls with her and they walk off together toward the cafeteria.