“Does she know it’s me?” we asked. “That I’m the one setting the trap?”
“No—not at all. She just knows someone is. But it doesn’t matter what she knows or how she can adapt. You are better. Stronger. More able. Find the door. Open every one of them, if you must.”
And we did. We raced down the hall, throwing doors open wide—doors to Wanda’s memories: her first kiss, her prom, her entrance exam for the academy …
“Stop, stop!” Mommy shouted. “Too much too fast … She’s struggling. Look at the doors. Focus on your goal. You’ll see a sign. There’s always a sign.”
We stood stock-still, spread our feet shoulder-width apart, and balled our hands into fists. Down the hall about halfway to forever the wall had distorted into a door that wobbled and glowed.
“Got it!” we shouted as we rushed toward it and flung it open.
We paused inside a tidy office space. Only as wide as we were with our arms stretched straight out at our sides, it was still a happy place with potted plants on the desk and a huge assortment of colorful books and pictures filling a few tall bookshelves.
“Do you see her life’s desire?”
We examined the area, running our fingers across the spines of books and watching their titles rearrange themselves, letters rippling and falling into unreadable jumbles at our touch and then straightening again, shaking themselves and climbing back into their proper order and place.
“Is it temporary? What I’m doing?” Derek asked.
“Only if you let it be,” Mommy answered. “But you can change a life forever if you just try.”
“Forever,” we whispered, making our way beyond the bookshelf.
On a wall hung a whiteboard.
Words were carefully written in a dozen different colors of marker, each in friendly, bubbly handwriting. Kindness, Sharing, Love, Gentleness, Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, Friendship, Self-Esteem, Good Manners, Self-Worth, Science, Art, Social Studies, and Phys Ed were each in a circle with a line extending from it back to the largest bubble of them all, with two words written in neat, large script in the board’s center.
TEACH KINDERGARTEN
Our heart raced. “We’ve found it. There’s a whiteboard with her goal,” Derek said. “She wants to be a teacher.”
Mommy laughed, and deep inside Derek, who was deep inside me, I shivered at the sound. “Well, that will never do,” she said. “Pick up the eraser and let’s make up her mind for her.”
I fought him. I begged him. Don’t do it, my mind screamed. Don’t erase her dream and replace it.…
But he grabbed the eraser and went to work, his arm sweeping the height and width of the board to wipe it clean. To wipe out any trace of her dreams and desires.
“It’s not coming off.…”
“Put your back into it,” Mommy commanded. “Push your will onto hers.”
I was going to be sick, but there was no way I could. I was without form. He was without form.…
I was watching the memories of a ghost.
The queasiness passed as he worked with a fierce passion and the words began to disappear.
Mommy wasn’t just erasing Wanda’s future, she was changing Derek’s by letting him tamper with another person’s soul.
Inside his head, I cried. For both of them.
“Now what?”
The floor beneath our feet shifted, the boards buckling.
“Mommy?”
“What is it?”
“The room is … tilting.…”
“Oh. Very good. She knows something’s wrong. She’s strong enough to rebel. Be quick, baby. You need to write the new goal and get out.”
Back the way we’d come the door swung open and closed like a chewing mouth as the entire office slanted.
“What do I write?”
“In the center, write: ‘Work for the CIA.’ Then surround it with these words: ‘Shoot, Train, Fight, Work, Battle, Justice, Blood, Compete, Rise.’”
We scrawled the words on the whiteboard, connecting them back to her goal with a trembling hand.
The walls shuddered, pictures dancing off hooks and nails to crash on the floor and throw splinters of glass at us. “Finished!” we screamed.
“Not yet,” Mommy said as we grabbed hold of the whiteboard’s tray to keep our footing. “Grab all the markers so she can’t rewrite her destiny.”
I heard the smile in her voice and I shivered again.
We grabbed the sliding markers and shoved them into every pocket as things fell off the bookshelves and rolled under the desk. “Done!”
“Good boy! Now get out of there!”
We let go of the whiteboard and slid toward the door, kicking it open and bursting out into the hallway.
The ceiling undulated, tiles popping loose and flying in our direction, and Derek screamed, “Ouuut!”
We were back in the room with Mommy, her face so close to ours we pulled back in surprise. She patted our hand.
“How did I do?” we asked, panting from our efforts.
“Beautifully. You didn’t give up, and you adapted to new circumstances. You’re a survivor,” she said proudly. “Now let’s get things ready for Auntie’s arrival.”
I plummeted back into my own head—or he seemed to be vomited out of mine—but his mother’s words stuck.
“You didn’t give up, and you adapted to new circumstances. You’re a survivor.”
It was like Derek was sharing a lesson with me. With a groan, I kicked my feet out in front of me and rolled up onto my butt. The blanket fell off my shoulders, but it didn’t matter. Energy from Derek’s memory still washed through me beside the roaring headache. If I was going to survive this, I had to adapt.
And I was determined to survive.
Marlaena
My brain spilled out of my ears as my lips parted for Gareth’s kiss. His mouth was all cloves and cinnamon drenched in honey, his lips somehow both soft and firm, his tongue delicately probing along the edge of my mouth, precise as a cautious finger.
I sucked him down, filled my head with his smell, his taste, and wrapped my arms around him, letting my hands glide over the powerful muscles of his back and come to rest on his hips, just above that magnificent ass of his. He pressed me so close against his chest that my boobs ached, squashed against him the way I was, but I didn’t care. Because this was me and Gareth. Together. The way I’d wanted things to be for so long.