Some Faraway Place Read online

  Or maybe that was just because I told this hot girl that I was journaling. Like a thirteen-year-old. But she just smiled and gave a little nod and said, “Cool, cool. That’s cool.”

  I don’t know that I believed her that it’s cool, but I found myself smiling in return.

  “What about you?” I asked. “Are you a writer?”

  “Trying to be,” she said, grinning. “Poet, more specifically.”

  A poet. This cute girl with the longboard and the warm brown eyes is a poet. Kill me.

  “Oh wow,” I said, the blush on my cheeks getting to a truly lava-like degree. “That’s amazing.”

  “I don’t know about that.” She laughed. “It’s not exactly the most lucrative career, but there are worse ways to spend your time in college than reading Márquez and going to spoken-word nights.”

  She smiled at me like we were in on a private joke, like I would immediately understand what she was getting at. My stomach dropped—this always happens. Anytime I meet someone new my age, they just assume I’m in college. That’s all anyone can talk about. College college college. But I’m not in college because a) who can afford that level of debt and b) why would a chef need a liberal arts degree?

  “Oh, I’m not—” I started, before promptly falling unconscious.

  THE GODDAMNED TIMING OF THIS THING I SWEAR.

  So, on the plus side, I guess, passing out in an urgent care usually leads to someone, you know, checking on you and wondering why the hell a girl with a broken wrist went off to dreamland. I’m wondering that still. I can barely remember the dream—it was fuzzy even while it was happening, blurred and cracked around the edges, like I was watching a broken TV—but there were two men in snowy woods, blood … a helmet. I swear I’d seen the men before, somewhere, but it slips away if I think about it too hard.

  Anyway, after a long chat with the doctor, she was pretty certain that I have narcolepsy. Which, okay, yeah, I should have seen coming, given how much I’m randomly falling asleep, but I don’t know that I believed that it was a thing people really had. I live in a family full of superhumans and somehow the medical condition I have is a totally normal, but still really rare one. What are the odds?

  She wants to run a bunch of tests, so I guess I now have to do some weird sleep study things. Guess I’ll keep writing in here. Seems like something that should be documented.

  Anyway, all of that hardly matters when I didn’t even get the girl’s name! That’s right. I passed out, she, I guess, went in to get her cast put on or something, and we totally missed each other. My mom might have been right about skating to work today but I wish her vision had been a little more specific. Meeting the girl of my dreams doesn’t count if I never see her again.

  08-29-2016, morningwafffles, text post

  Oh, Mumblr, do I have a story for you. Today went from bad to worse to … maybe really great?

  I was boarding to class—suuuuuuper late—when a stupid Ultimate Frisbee team ran into the middle of the street. Cut to: me, in the emergency room, cradling my broken and useless wrist. I think I can probably still skate, but my balance is going to be way off. And I missed my seminar, and it was my turn to read my work today, so that sucks. Not that I love reading my own poetry out loud in front of a bunch of strangers, but I was pretty proud of what I came up with this week and no, dear readers, I will not be sharing it, so don’t even ask. You are very sweet to want to read my original work, but I would literally rather die. Fanfic is one thing, my embarrassing poetry is another. Besides, if I read something aloud in class and then someone read this blog and realized who I was I WOULD DIE. I have actual nightmares about the anonymity being destroyed. It’s not that writing fanfic is shameful or anything, it’s that I know some people in my life who are not Stucky shippers and I have too many ship wars in my internet life to want to tempt them IRL too.

  (Ooh, speaking of Stucky, I’m thinking of maybe finally writing a post-fall fic, but one where Steve actually finds Bucky after he falls from the train and takes care of him, so please send me all of your Hurt/Comfort fics plssssss. And before you all start piling into my asks, don’t worry: I’m committed to finishing somewhere a place for us first.)

  “Get to the good stuff, Waffles!” you say as I ramble on about nothing. Okay, okay, disclaimer over, anyway, yeah, my day started terribly!! I have to wear a cast for eight weeks, but whatever, I can live with that. Put in the replies what stickers I should put on this thing.

  It was ALL worth it because, at urgent care, there was another girl there who had a broken wrist. And, reader, SHE WAS CUTE AS HELL. She rollerblades, which is completely adorable, and she was just sitting in the waiting room, journaling!! Like, old-school, in a notebook, with a pen, journaling. Le swoon.

  So, like, great start, right? Total meet-cute. I started telling her about how I write poetry, which is something I never do but her perfect dimpled smile made me feel like I could tell her anything and everything. And I was going to but then … she passed out!! I’m not even kidding, she was totally fine, talking completely normally and then: bam, unconscious. I’ll be honest, it was terrifying. I immediately went to the nurse’s station of course, to try and get help and they checked her out and it turns out she was just sleeping? They asked me if I knew if she had a history of sleeping disorders and I had to be like, “uh, I have no idea, I just met this girl and was trying to get my flirt on when she went all slack in these super uncomfortable plastic chairs.” They said they’d check her out for a concussion, but then the doctor called me in to put my cast on and by the time I came back out, she was gone.

  Now, this is the moment in a fic where’d I’d bite my nails and stay up until two in the morning reading to see how the writer is going to get the two characters together again. Except, that’s not how life works! Other than the fact she journals and her passing out gave me some good inspo for aforementioned Hurt/Comfort, I know nothing about her. I don’t even know her name. I don’t know how I would even begin to find her again.

  My life is a t r a g e d y.

  AUGUST 30TH, 2016

  I woke up in my house. The same house I’ve lived in for my whole life. And I knew I was dreaming. I was at the front door, facing it like I was about to go out. Except the door was shut and I knew—somehow I knew—that I shouldn’t open it. So I turned around and I walked past the small mirror in our front hall, expecting to see my own face. But nothing was there.

  There was something wrong—really wrong—with that. It wasn’t just that I wasn’t seeing myself in the mirror, it’s that I knew, deep in my bones, that I wasn’t looking at a mirror at all. But a window. I was peering into something, through glass, into the other side, where unknown things lurk.

  I looked down at my hands and they were unrecognizable, shrivelled and veiny, a heavy flannel shirt that I don’t own creeping its way down my arms. I looked back up at the mirror and saw a thick, black fog deep in the distance, moving closer, closer, closer. I took a step toward it, now just a foot from the glass, wanting to reach out and touch, wanting to walk through and sink into the fog, understand it, except I couldn’t, I knew it would swallow me whole. I didn’t even know what the fog is, but I knew it was coming for me.

  As I stepped closer to the mirror, the fog did too and then I saw my own face. My own face but not mine at all—my cheeks were sunken, my eyes all whites, my hair short, my jaw sharp—I was me in the dream, but not me, not Rose, someone else, some other me. The other me brought his hands up in front of him, palms facing me, and then pushed, reaching through the glass of the mirror and outward, stretching his long fingers toward the fog.

  Just as my fingers touched the smooth surface of the mirror, the glass shattered into a million pieces, a loud blaring noise rattling my teeth, the fractured mirror bits pushing out toward me, slicing my face, the fog rushing forward, overwhelming me and then—

  I woke up.

  AUGUST 31ST, 2016

  Every morning, I wake up more and more exhausted. It feel
s like the fog from my dream followed me out and is weighing me down, clouding everything around me. I feel completely off-kilter, my frustration over sleeping so much and not feeling rested the only emotion I can access.

  I passed my dad in the hallway this morning, thinking that I needed to talk to him. But I don’t know what about. That fog was still gathered around me like a heavy coat, my frustration mounting when I couldn’t figure out why I wanted to talk to him. I still haven’t told my family anything about the dreams or the falling asleep or what really happened at urgent care. Which brings me to …

  Yesterday, when I was writing in the kitchen and Aaron was lurking around, he eventually started looking over my shoulder, nosing his way into my business like usual.

  “Writing about how cool and accomplished I am and how you’ve always felt inferior to your older brother?” he said, crunching on a carrot loudly next to my ear.

  “Oh yeah, that’s exactly what I’m writing about.” I rolled my eyes but snapped the journal shut all the same.

  “What do you care anyway?” I asked, swiveling in my seat to look up into his dumb, smug face. “You know everything I’m thinking and feeling—you don’t need to read my diary for that.”

  “Diary?” He took a step back, leaning against the counter. “What are you, twelve?”

  I stuck my tongue out at him for lack of a witty retort.

  “Besides,” he continued, “I don’t know what you’re feeling. I’m not an empath, I’m a mind reader.”

  “Thank god for that,” I muttered.

  “I don’t know, I wouldn’t mind trading one for the other,” he said, taking another large chunk out of the carrot, like he was freaking Bugs Bunny or something.

  “Really?” I asked, genuinely surprised. Aaron and I never talk about his ability in depth. Mostly because I’m too afraid and nervous to ask and he seems to have people to talk to about it, between our parents, his psychologist, his doctors, his group therapy. I don’t really know what little old me, non-Atypical Atkinson, could really contribute to the conversation. Even thinking stuff like that puts me on edge because I know that Aaron could hear it and maybe feel weird or pressured to say something or pity me for being the one person in the family without abilities but he’s not here now, so I’m going to think whatever I want to think.

  It’s like this: two years ago, Aaron started acting really weird. Like, really weird. He was getting really distracted all the time, kept having these random outbursts, these really intense headaches … it caused a lot of family drama. I really don’t like thinking about it, honestly, whether he’s in the room or not. It was a really awful time. I was a rising senior, and I was already stressed enough as it was. We were all pretty on-edge at first, not really understanding what was going on with him. We couldn’t tell if it was some kind of mental break or the appearance of his ability. Both my parents first showed signs of being Atypical when they were around fourteen, so when Aaron and I skated by that deadline, they kind of just assumed we were normies. All that said, my mom started to suspect that Aaron was a precognate like her—that he was getting visions of the future and didn’t know what they were yet so it was totally bugging him out. Long story short (too late) and a few trips to the good old Atypical Monitors later, and the truth came out: Aaron is Atypical. He’s a mind reader.

  Can you imagine? I have no powers—ZERO—and on top of that, I get stuck with an older brother who can HEAR MY THOUGHTS.

  My life is one big cosmic joke.

  Which is what I was thinking when Aaron, unprompted, slid into the chair across from me. He took another big crunch of the carrot and leaned his arms across the table, stretching out like a floppy dog, his bangs falling in front of his face and giving him that effortlessly cool look that I can literally never achieve.

  GOD, I hate him sometimes.

  “Listen to me, Rosie,” he said with a world-weary sigh.

  He does this constantly. Despite the fact that he is exactly sixteen months older than me, he always acts like he’s the wise old brother who knows absolutely everything about the world and I’m his silly little sister “Rosie” (which NO ONE else calls me, by the way).

  “I get that it’s weird to be in this family and not have an ability—”

  “Aaron, stop listening to my thoughts—” I said, knowing he didn’t actually want to invade my privacy (or at least, so he CONSTANTLY TALKS ABOUT, always so smug about his ethical code).

  “You know I can’t help it, sometimes,” he said, eyes big and puppy-doggish. “Stuff just jumps out.”

  I wanted to jump out of that conversation. But he kept going.

  “I’m just saying, I understand.”

  “No, you don’t,” I mumbled. “You have one.”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t,” he said.

  I wanted to say that it wasn’t the same. That when he thought he was a normal human, he also had me, Rosie, normal human number two. He didn’t have to do this alone. But Aaron and I have never really talked like that before. We’ve always gotten along decently—I complain about him being a know-it-all and he complains about my Switzerland-like neutrality when he gets into arguments with Mom and Dad, but we’ve never been, like, genuinely mad at each other for a long period of time. It’s just sibling fighting. Normal brother-sister stuff.

  Except it isn’t really normal, is it? Not when we were inseparable as kids, before coming out on the other side of middle school as complete strangers. We never really talk to each other about the big stuff, like how we were both unmoored when our grandmother died or how we can both hear when our parents argue about my mom’s visions and we pretend it doesn’t bother us. Maybe ignoring all that stuff is normal, I don’t know, but what’s definitely, completely not normal is that now it doesn’t matter if I want to talk to Aaron about that stuff or not, because he knows. All his insistence that he has it under control, that he feels strongly about respecting our privacy doesn’t change the fact that he could be listening, at any time.

  “Rosie,” he started, and I tensed, wondering what he’d heard. He was squinting, like something was hurting his eyes—I didn’t know what that meant, but I really did not want his pity or a placating speech about how it’s okay to be normal, so I pulled the emergency switch.

  I started to think about kissing mysterious urgent care girl.

  “Aw, come on, Rosie!” He flinched back, shaking his head like he could shake the thoughts out. “Blech.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, did you hear something?” I asked innocently.

  “No, I didn’t,” he insisted. “You know I’m actually pretty good at the whole ‘controlling my ability’ thing. All I know is that you were thinking thoughts I don’t want to hear or see.”

  “Aha! So you were listening,” I said.

  “It’s hard to avoid seeing the beginnings of the tracks,” he explained and I rolled my eyes, having heard this lecture before. “But that’s all they are—the start of a train of thought. I don’t actually know the contents of the thought. Just the … brand.”

  “So, when I’m thinking about making out with a cute girl…”

  Aaron made a throwing-up noise.

  “It’s just a big neon sign saying ‘Sexy Thoughts, Stay Out’?”

  “Kind of,” he said, wincing. “And then the whole system automatically shuts down.”

  “Like how you cover your eyes and scream like a little kid whenever a snake shows up in a movie?” I teased. Aaron glared.

  It worked every time. And thank god I figured out a method of getting Aaron out of my head. Things had been okay for the past year, but in those early days, when he couldn’t help it, I always worried he would say all the brutally honest things I think about myself, about our family, out loud and destroy the peaceful balance I had created.

  “For the record,” he went on, “I wasn’t listening to you before. I don’t know what you thought I was going to say, but I was just gonna point out that it’s weird. Seeing you do something day after day that isn�
��t cooking.”

  “What?” I asked, trying to catch up.

  “Come on, Rosie,” he said, gesturing at my journal. “You’re not exactly the ‘commit to a hobby’ type.”

  Another wince, except this time it was me. He pulled his arms back, leaning back in the chair and gazing down his nose at me. As if putting some degree of physical distance between us could fix the fact that he knew he was hurting me.

  “I commit to things,” I said, fiddling with the edge of my notebook.

  “Like what?”

  “Cooking.” I barely resisted the urge to stick out my tongue at him.

  “Besides cooking.”

  He had me there. I became obsessed with cooking at age eight and never really looked back. I was never very good at focusing in school or extracurriculars that weren’t food based and I’ve never had an enormous bevy of friends. I’ve never really had a serious girlfriend either. I came out sophomore year and then endured about nine months of nonstop questions from my family about my love life. I think they worried that I’d been bottling up my sexuality and now that I was finally out, I was going to peel back the curtain on my exciting life of romance.

  The reality is much less thrilling. It’s more that I didn’t think about anyone that way for a long time. While every girl in my class was going boy crazy in middle school, I was finding everyone my age completely ridiculous. That’s still mostly true, but I did just wake up one day when I was fourteen and realize that I thought girls were very, very cute. I still think that but: thinking girls my age are cute + thinking most people my age are ridiculous = my mother calling me “too picky” and saying “let me just introduce you to the Lowenthal girl, she’s an LGBT too” and me turning up the food processor as fast as it goes until I drown her out and ruin the pesto.

  So, yeah. Commitment. Not so much.

  “Rollerblading!” I blurted, finally. Aaron rolled his eyes but I could see a tiny smile on his face.