Hunted (3 page)

"I…well,
there was a girl in school who was lying and I knew she was lying so
I kind of made a disbelieving noise and then things kind of escalated
from there. She called me chubs, so I insulted her back and then I
told everyone in study hall that she'd cheated on her history test."

Dad
looked tired a lot of the time lately. He was working longer hours
than ever and it showed in the set of his shoulders and how bloodshot
his eyes always were. He rubbed his eyes and stared at the ceiling
for several seconds.

"I'm
not sure what to say to you, Adri. I always thought that only having
girls would mean that I wouldn't have to worry about having these
particular kinds of talks with any of my kids."

I
felt sorry, for the first time all day. The assistant principal, the
psychiatrist, Mom, they all mostly just yelled at me or at the very
least scolded me, but I'd known that their unhappiness came from how
I was impacting their lives. Dad was different, and I knew it without
him having to even open his mouth. He was worried about how my
actions were going to impact
me
.

"I'm
sorry, Dad. I don't know what I was thinking. It just kind of
happened."

Dad
looked back down from the ceiling and took my hand between both of
his. "I have some questions for you, but I don't want answers
right now. I want you to think about them and then come back to me
with the answers later."

My
headache was stronger than ever. Tears started pooling in my eyes,
but I managed a nod, which seemed to satisfy him.

"The
first question is who you think was the bully in this situation. The
second question I'd like you to think about is some of the ways that
the situation could have spiraled out of control and gone oh so much
worse than it did, and the last question is whether or not fighting
was justified and if so, why."

"You're
not going to tell me that fighting is never justified?"

Dad
shook his head. "Your teachers and mother are probably going to
tell you that there's no such thing as a justifiable fight, but I
don't agree with them. I'm not saying that your fight with this girl
at school was that kind of fight—maybe it was, maybe it
wasn't—but some fights are justified."

"Okay,
Daddy. I'll think about your questions."

I
stood up to go help Cindi finish up with the dishes, but he stopped
me with a gesture. "I'm sorry, Adri, but you need to have some
kind of consequence for what happened today. I'd take away your
phone, but you hardly use it, so it wouldn't be the same kind of
punishment for you that it is for Cindi. Instead I'm going to say
that you need to deep-clean the house. I want you to finish up a room
every other day between now and whenever you have a set of answers
for my questions."

I
opened my mouth to answer his questions right then and there, but he
held up a hand.

"If
you have good answers to my question then I may shorten your
punishment, but if I feel like you haven't really given them any
thought then I'll be adding to it."

I
didn't like it. The normal teenage response would have been to yell
and scream in an attempt to convince him that the pain of sticking to
his guns was much greater than he'd expected, but I couldn't bring
myself to explode into those kinds of theatrics. Dad already had
enough to worry about what with Cindi starting to really take an
interest in boys and Mom spending ninety percent of every day lost in
some other world where her art actually mattered.

"Okay,
Dad. I'll think about it and I'll start cleaning the kitchen
tonight."

"You
can wait to start until tomorrow, sweetie. How bad off is your arm?"

I'd
forgotten that Janessa had scratched me. The school nurse had patched
me up while I'd been waiting in the office.

"It's
okay. It probably won't even scar up or anything."

Dad
pulled me onto his lap and wrapped his arms around me in a fierce
hug. "I'm just very glad that you're okay and that things didn't
end up worse than a scratch on the arm. I love your mother, and I
love Cindi, but you feel things more deeply than either of the two of
them and that makes you special to me."

It
was hard to talk past the sudden lump in my throat, but I nodded. "I
love you too, Dad. I'm sorry if I was stupid about everything today."

"It's
okay. We're not going to talk about it anymore until you have had a
chance to think about those questions. The important thing will be
what you learn from today's events."

The
rest of the night passed by in a blur. Cindi was faster than normal,
so the dishes were already done by the time I left Dad's office.

Dad
fired up his work laptop and logged back into work for the rest of
the night. He paused for a few minutes when Mom came out from her
cave to eat, but she just wolfed down her food and then fidgeted like
a little kid until Dad gave her a hug and sent her back to her
darkroom.

Cindi
finished up her homework and then spent most of the rest of the
evening texting people on her iPod. I stared at my textbook for
another hour or so, but I didn't really make any progress on my
chemistry homework.

I
finally just put everything away and got ready for bed. Dad looked up
absently at me when I padded into his office to give him a hug good
night.

"You're
going to bed already?"

"Yeah,
I haven't been sleeping very well lately. I thought maybe I'd just
turn in early tonight and see if it helps."

"Your
headaches are still bothering you, aren't they?"

It
was like Dad had developed some kind of weird sixth sense to
compensate for the fact that Mom was so oblivious to everything going
on around her.

"They
seem to be getting a little better. They don't bother me as much as
they did."

It
was a lie, maybe even more than just a white lie. The headaches were
worse than before. I was just getting better at ignoring them lately.
Well, better most days at least.

"Well,
I'm glad to hear that they are a little better, but if they are still
bothering you next week I think you should ask your mother to take
you to the doctor. She can take me into work on Tuesday or Wednesday
so that she has the car to drive you to the clinic."

"I'll
be fine, Dad. It's just a little headache from time to time."

"I'm
serious, Adri. I want a promise out of you that you'll be responsible
enough to ask for help before things get worse."

Right.
I had to be the responsible one because Mom certainly wouldn't be. I
hated when Dad made me promise him something. It was pretty much the
one thing guaranteed to get Cindi or me either one to do what he
wanted. Unfortunately he knew it, so he wasn't averse to using
promises to get his way whenever he thought we weren't taking care of
ourselves or that we were going to get into trouble.

"Okay,
Dad. If things don't start getting better soon then I'll go see a
doctor."

I
kissed Dad on the cheek and then went into the small room I shared
with Cindi. We actually had bunk beds—black metal
monstrosities—of all things, so I climbed up to the top bunk
and closed my eyes.

"You're
really going to sleep already, Adri?"

"Yeah.
It's been kind of a long day."

"Okay,
I'll just put my iPod on silent then. Good night."

"Good
night, Cindi."

I
fell asleep instantly. It didn't make any sense, but once I was
dreaming it was actually easier to remember some of the other dreams
that I'd been having recently. Remembering didn't particularly help
because they were still so odd.

Mostly
it was just a collage of images involving people I knew—Richard
Parsons, Janessa, even a couple of my teachers, which luckily wasn't
as gross as it otherwise could have been. Tonight was different
though. I wasn't at school or anywhere else I knew, and I wasn't
dreaming about anyone familiar.

I
was standing in the top of a partially-constructed skyscraper. The
steel skeleton had been assembled and most of the floor and exterior
wall had been finished for the floor I was on, but if I looked up I
could see open sky above me in some parts.

There
was movement a little ways ahead of me. Part of me said that I should
just steer clear, that dreams in abandoned buildings never end well,
but I crept forward anyway. There was a small man sitting on the very
edge of the floor I was on. His legs dangled out into thin air, but
he didn't seem worried that he might fall.

He
was obviously intent on watching something below us, so I took a
couple of steps forward until I could see over the edge of the
building too. What I saw was odd, even for a dream. We were somehow
both really high up and only a few feet from the ground all at once.
When I looked straight ahead at the buildings around us, we were even
with the very tops of most of them, and they were all dozens if not
hundreds of stories tall, but when I looked down at the ground it
seemed like it was close enough that I could just hop down from the
building without any risk of injury.

I
shook my head and closed my eyes, but when I opened them back up
everything was still the same. Down below, on the street, someone
walked into view and I suddenly realized what else was wrong about
the scene. There was only one person visible down there. We weren't
in some kind of ghost town—the buildings all looked
well-maintained, the streets were still in working order—but
there wasn't anyone else down there. I'd never been to New York or
Tokyo, but it just didn't look right to have a city as big as this be
completely deserted.

The
man looked up at us and my heart skipped a beat. He looked familiar
somehow, not like I knew him, but like he was related to someone
important to me. Only he didn't actually look like anyone I knew.

It
would have just been one of those things that you dismiss as a weird
coincidence, but my heart was still going a mile a minute. It was
like it was trying to tell me that whoever this guy looked like was
the reason that I'd never been particularly interested in any of the
guys my own age. It wasn't that I was gay or asexual, I'd just been
saving my emotions and attention for this one person whom I still
didn't know, but whom I finally had the tiniest of links to.

I
came within a second of throwing myself off of the building so that I
could stop the man below us and ask him where I knew him from, but
something stopped me at the last moment. I'd heard people say that if
you hit the ground in a dream that you'd die without waking up. I'd
never believed it before now, but there was something about this
dream, weird though it was, that made it feel as real as anything I'd
ever experienced with my eyes open.

Instead
of jumping, I turned to the man a few feet away from me and asked
what I thought was a non-threatening question.

"Who
is that and is there a way for me to get down there in time to talk
to him before he disappears?"

The
man practically jumped out of his own skin. It was like he'd been on
a hair trigger, but he'd been expecting the threat to arrive from a
different quarter.

He
went from sitting to standing without ever actually having seemed to
move, but that was the least alarming of the changes. Between one
second and the next his face changed. He went from looking like a
non-threatening, elderly Native American to something out of a
nightmare. His teeth lengthened and got sharper at the same time that
his face got broader and sprouted fur.

The
change happened so fast that I blinked and missed most of it, but
before my words had even died in the air I was standing only a few
feet away from some kind of wolf-man monster who looked like he was
about to rip my head off.

"How
did you get here? How did you find me?"

I
opened my mouth to respond, but he grabbed me by the throat and
slammed me into a steel girder so hard that I saw stars.

The
sheer terror I was feeling was messing with my senses. I was trying
to talk around the panic surging up from my gut, but all I could
think about was the way that it felt like a prickly wind was pushing
me back against the structural member at the same time that his hand
pinned me against it.

We
stood there staring at each other for what felt like an eternity and
then suddenly the entire building rang like a gong. Still holding me
several feet off of the ground, the monster walked back over to the
edge of the building and looked down. I was just able to see the man
we'd been watching—at least I assumed it was the man we'd been
watching.

He'd
transformed into a beast that was almost a mirror image of the one
that had me by the throat and seemed to be climbing up the outside of
the building. It was hard to be sure, he still seemed to only be a
few feet below us, but now the ground looked to be quite a ways below
him.

"You
can't be him, not if he's coming after us, but you're inarguably here
so I guess I'm not as unique as I always thought." My captor
looked back down at the beast that was climbing towards us and shook
his head. "I don't know who you are, but this is the only
warning I'll provide. You need to stay away from me. I'll let you go
this time. Go ahead and jump out. I'm not holding you here now."

It
was like he was a raving lunatic. Nothing he was saying made any
sense. How could I possibly jump anywhere when he was still holding
me by the throat? The sheer ludicrous nature of what I was
experiencing finally got to me. I opened my mouth as he relaxed his
grip slightly and instead of a scream of terror, laughter bubbled out
of me.

Seriously,
a talking wolf-man was holding me by the throat and telling me to
jump. My subconscious had gone ape-crap crazy this time.

"I
will not be mocked."