The Messenger: Mortal Beloved Time Travel Romance, #1 (2 page)

M
r. Preston closed
the door between our classroom, the hallway, and probably my sanity. I stood next to his desk filled with comic books, real books, and magazines. A grayish rock veined with white-quartz crystal that was bigger than my fist rested on a bunch of papers, and functioned as a paperweight.

“Madeline.” He ambled to his desk. “Just because your family has influential friends and you retain a partial scholarship here, does not mean you can afford to slack off or slide. At any moment you can be dismissed from Preston Academy for bad grades and/or attitude issues.” He picked up a stack of magazines and tapped them on his desk to align them.

A weathered copy of
Maxim
poked out from the stack. Ew.

“Frankly, I believe you are pushing the boundaries with both of these concerns.” He pushed that magazine back into the paper pile.

“You wanted to know if we had any ideas or thoughts about land grabs. Right now, I don’t have a great answer. But, Mr. Preston, I will research and report back.”

His smile turned to a frown. “Do that by this Monday, please.”

Great. There went my weekend. When my cell phone vibrated, I glanced and jumped when I saw Brett’s number. My heart pounded and my foot tapped on the floor almost all on its own. “Mr. Preston, can I answer this? It’s important.”

“Preston Academy has a strict policy that all phones are turned off during class,” he said. “Surely, you know that.”

My phone hummed—Brett was on the line; my love life was on the line—but not for much longer. “Technically we’re between classes,” I pleaded.

“May I?” He smiled and held out his hand toward my phone.

I handed it to him and he examined it. “Oh, dear. Your phone seems to be an older model.” He frowned. “One that loses signals easily.” He pushed a button and Brett’s call disappeared.

I closed my eyes and bit my lip, trying to hold my temper.

“Lip biting, like nail chewing, is another unattractive habit.” He leaned closer to me.

The smell of his cheap cologne drifted up my nose. It took everything in my being not to move away from him. Good thing I didn’t eat breakfast, as that would be coming up right about now.

“Phone calls might seem important. But honestly, it’s up to you,” he said. “When you’re in the middle of a teacher-student conference regarding your lackluster academic performance, you need to determine whether a phone call from a young man might be worth dropping a grade, detentions, or even stepping
off
the fast-track to a reputable college.”

“I know that, Mr. Preston.” I looked up at the large clock on the wall behind his desk. “Can we please continue this later, sir?” I spotted Chaka pointing at her watch through the small window in the classroom’s door. “I’ve got about five minutes to get to gym class, change clothes, and be on time.”

“Well that’s a class you certainly don’t want to flunk.” He handed my phone back to me.

I bolted out the door into the hallway.

“
W
hy is
Piranha Preston so pissed at you?” Chaka asked, her signature bangles jangling as we raced down the hall.

“I don’t have a flippin’ clue. I just want to get in the water and swim,” I said. “I love the water. It clears my head.”

“I hate swimming,” Chaka said. “Unless it’s on Dad’s island in the Caribbean; the water’s crystal clear and bathwater warm. Not to mention the pool boys fight over who’s going to teach me how to snorkel.”

“You have your diving certificate, Chaka.” I slammed open the door to the girls’ locker room.

She giggled. “Who cares? They’re really hot, and don’t know that.”

A
fter gym class
Chaka had a date with study hall, and I had to find Brett. I returned to the foyer with Aaron at my side. If Brett was actually in Preston Academy today, this was probably the best place to find him.

People from all over the world traveled to see and experience Preston Academy’s famous foyer. They came to make etchings from the signatures of their loved ones, or the grads that became celebrities. Recently, a young, über successful, popstar received permission to film parts of her music video for her newest platinum hit in the famous foyer—following a hefty donation to our school’s scholarship fund, of course—and spotlighted her mom’s autographed brick. A couple of Preston students were in the video. I wasn’t one of them.

I had seen these foyer walls so often that my eyes skipped over the famous people: the politicians (local and national), the actors, and the wealthy entrepreneurs. Instead, my eyes came to rest, like they did every time I walked through these doors, on one autograph.

“Rebecca Wilde” was inscribed on a brick high on the wall, well over my head and out of reach. I squinted up at her name on the wall.

“Your mother and I were in the same class,” Mr. Preston said. “Rebecca was a risk-taker. Very different from you, Madeline.”

I swiveled and saw him standing just a few yards behind me.

“What’s his problem?” Aaron hissed.

“In fact,” Mr. Preston said, “I heard Rebecca climbed rickety scaffolding on a dare to cement that brick up there, herself. She got in a bit of trouble for that, though. Someone turned her in.”

“Probably him,” Aaron whispered. “I’ll pull the ladder over. Climb it and touch her signature.”

I hesitated. Aaron walked toward that stupid ladder, kneeled next to its base and flipped down the floor locks. He leaned one shoulder against it, and wheeled it around the foyer’s walls until he parked it under mama’s brick. He beckoned, “Come on.”

I froze, surrounded, bombarded, by teens hurrying in multiple directions. Everyone was moving except for me. It dawned on me that I was completely caught in time;
I was the girl who couldn’t move.

The top of the ladder appeared like it stretched to the sky. I hated heights, and this whole scene was too tall, too stress-inducing, too much. Which made me wonder if I had my stash of anti-anxiety pills in my purse. I usually didn’t need them. But every once in a while, I’d have a full-blown panic attack, which would leave me paralyzed.

Aaron patted the ladder. “It’s not that high up. If you were a rock-climber or enjoyed mountains and cliffs, this ladder would be like a stepstool. It would be nothing.”

When I was twelve, my family and I celebrated my stepmom, Sophie, getting hired as a legal assistant at O’Ryan and Sons. We nibbled on tapas in the middle of a trendy restaurant called Barcelona, which was on the first floor, no heights involved—whatsoever. I heard the screech of tires braking, and a loud ‘BANG,’ from a nearby car crash. The next thing I knew, I lay on the floor in Child’s Pose, my head between my knees.

I was drenched in sweat and struggled to breathe for fifteen minutes. I clasped my hands over my ears while my dad and Sophie knelt on the floor with me. They hugged me and whispered that everything would be okay; it all would be fine, really. But out of the corners of my eyes I caught the stares of pity from fellow diners, as well as the embarrassed glances from the waiters. We haven’t been back to that restaurant since.

“Your mama’s brick is about eighteen feet up. You can do eighteen feet.” Aaron said.

Mr. Preston smiled and shook his head. “She’s too busy waiting for a phone call.”

Aaron glared at me and snapped his fingers.

“Fine!” I clasped my hands behind my back, stretched my shoulders wide-open, and stomped my feet on the floor, twice. I climbed a few steps up the ladder and looked down at Aaron. “You need to hold onto the bottom of this thing in case someone bumps into us.”

He grabbed onto the ladder’s railings and planted his feet. “I’m here. Call me Elmer. Climb.”

So I did. I climbed two more steps. Five steps. About ten feet up I began to hyperventilate a little. I managed a few more rungs. About thirteen feet up I clutched my chest with one hand, and my breath turned raspy. “You’re holding that ladder tight? You’re not going to let it slip?” Sweat dripped off my palms as I squeezed the railings.

“We’re good,” Aaron encouraged.

It felt like I was climbing through mud, but I made it up three more steps. I was about fifteen feet up. If I climbed just three more feet, I could stretch my arm high over my head and touch mama’s brick. I never in my wildest dreams planned on doing this, and until now, never even thought it possible.

Sudden warmth enveloped me and my skin tingled. The logical part of my brain kicked in and explained that since I was so high up, close to the foyer’s ceiling, heat rises to the top. There were only floor heaters in this room, but they hadn’t yet been fired up and weren’t usually turned on until around Halloween.

I always thought if I ever found myself this high off the earth again, that I’d feel light-headed. But instead, I felt grounded. Didn’t make any sense. I was about a yard away from touching the actual brick that mama helped create. Once I placed my hand on her signature, maybe I could feel in my own body what Rebecca felt in hers, while she was a student here. Perhaps I could feel what darkness filled her heart and made her so callous about abandoning me.

“You’re doing great.” Aaron’s voice broke. “Don’t look down. You’re close, like that guy who climbed Everest or something. Or that guy who had his hand trapped… but they made a movie about him. James Franco, the actor, was totally hot and…”

Aaron was talking gibberish, and I was an idiot, so of course I looked down. I saw Brett O’Ryan, my kind-of boyfriend, walking on the foyer far below me. His arm was wrapped tight around the shoulders of a petite girl with porcelain skin and long, curly, red hair. WTH? My hands started shaking.

Aaron’s eyes flitted between Brett and me. He smacked one of his palms onto his forehead and frowned. “I said don’t look… Aw, Maddie. Could you take directions from anyone, just once?”

I gripped the ladder’s railings ’til my fingers turned white and shook my head. “No.” I glared at Brett. No need for any more texts; I’d figured out his news. “Hey, Brett!”

They looked up at me. Brett’s face blanched. The girl he was with? Her perfect face was smooth, porcelain, and stone blank. Not blank, like she was dumb. Just empty, like something I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. And right now, my heart was too crushed to even try to figure it out.

Brett shifted from one foot to another. He smoothed his white-blonde hair back from his forehead with his free hand. “Hey, uh, Maddie. I’ve been trying to get a hold of you about that, um, project.” He looked down, and coughed into his free hand—the hand that wasn’t wrapped around that girl’s shoulder.

He peered back up at me: huddled and hanging for dear life fifteen feet up in the air, on a stupid ladder. “Can we talk later, buddy?”

“Buddy?” I asked. With the exception of Aaron and Chaka, I’d shared more secrets with Brett than anyone else. We knew each other for years. Had confided in each other for hours in his house, grungy coffee shops, in city parks, on Lake Michigan’s beaches, on the dunes in Indiana as we huddled beneath some pine trees high in the hills, while the winds whipped past us creating mini-sandstorms.

We went to some Junior High dances and Preston Academy events. We also shared some kissing action. Now he was practically breathing down the neck of a girl who happened to be a dead ringer for Miss Teen Ireland, and I was “Buddy?”

“Absolutely. Later.” I looked Brett in his eyes. He couldn’t hold my gaze for longer than a second, and my heart sunk as I realized I was
never
in Brett’s heart the way I wanted to be. And frankly—that sucked—’cause I had liked him for a very long time.

“Uh, great. Thanks,” Brett said and walked away with that gorgeous girl glancing up at me while she whispered into his ear.

I felt my heart twist and sink into my stomach. I stared at the ground below me. It looked about a hundred feet down—not fifteen. The room spun. I clung to the ladder’s railing, plunked my butt down onto a ladder stair, and tucked my head under my arm.

“Hold onto this thing!” Aaron said to someone, way off in a fog somewhere. “Hang on, Madeline. I’m coming to get you.”

I
don’t know how
, exactly, but Aaron got me down off that ladder and somehow dragged me to the school cafeteria.

Chaka had rolled out her yoga mat, and I lay in Child’s Pose on it for I-have-no-idea how long, before I was able to lift my head off the ground.

“Take this.” Aaron shoved a tiny, white pill at me.

I swallowed it.

“Drink this.” Chaka thrust a water bottle at me.

My hands shook as I struggled to unscrew the top.

Aaron grabbed the bottle, yanked the top off and handed it back. “You’ll feel better in no time.”

I chugged the water and dropped the bottle. “I’ll feel better when I talk to my mama.”

I
was
six-years-old and strapped into a booster seat in the back of Mama’s dinged hatchback while she drove to an important appointment after my horseback-riding lesson. I didn’t know what the important appointment was about—didn’t care—’cause I was hanging with Mama, which was always a good thing.

We were driving in one of those tall parking garages, the kind that was round like a soup can, where the ramp spiraled up—which felt like we were going in circles. The last thing I remembered was our car accelerating like crazy, me getting dizzy and asking Mama to slow down. Then there was a loud BANG! That’s it.

Now, I sat on the concrete ground on the tenth floor of the same circular, open-aired parking garage that featured moderately priced apartments above it. They were moderate, because while the building overlooked water, it wasn’t a postcard view of Lake Michigan but a grimy, skinny branch of the Chicago River that trickled past in the near distance.

I leaned back against a cold, concrete, support pillar about twelve feet from the sturdy, coiled, metallic rope that connected more columns in front of me. A chilly wind sliced through my hair, and I shivered. The rope separated this solid structure from the open air surrounding it. The thickness and metal design of the rope were intended to keep vehicles from catapulting off the edges of the garage. That worked most of the time.

My butt was numb from the cold concrete, and I hoped my jeans and T-shirt didn’t absorb the garage floor’s oil stains, discarded cigarettes, or the spray-painted, gang graffiti tags on the pillar that I leaned against. I shivered again, and hugged myself.

I’d bolted from Preston Academy without
my coat and was wearing only a paper-thin, long-sleeved T-shirt in fifty-degree weather. My cheeks were undoubtedly stained with mascara rings, and I probably looked awful. But really, who cared?

I craned my neck forward, and checked out the vacant lot below the parking structure. It was a sad sight: a large patch of weeds littered with trash and junk that had been dumped in the river had found their home here—most likely after a storm got wild enough to toss them onto the riverbanks.

Aside from the newer makes and models of the neatly parked cars, ten years after the accident, this whole scene still looked pretty much the same. Except this time I wasn’t strapped into the back seat of a car, hanging by its rear tires caught on the safety wire, ten stories off this ledge, suspended between sky and ground, life and death. And, according to the police report and descriptions from several witnesses who raced to the scene, screaming my lungs out.

I guess it’s good I had no memories of the actual accident. Amnesia, post-traumatic stress, whatever—I’d blacked it all out. I woke up on a skinny mattress in a tiny, antiseptic-smelling hospital bay in the emergency room, with wires hanging off me, while Dad peered completely panic-stricken into my face.

At that point, Mama was only missing two hours. Dad probably thought she escaped the wreck, and wandered off, dazed. Too bad we’d never seen or heard from her again. Where had she gone? Why had she left?

Over the years I learned enough about our accident by overhearing what people slipped in conversations, as well as what I googled. The police investigated, but never found the car, or the driver who rammed us. They never found my mama; suspected she used the accident as a ‘Get Out of Jail Free,’ card. Escaped her life as a mom and wife to start someplace new.

Dad never bought that. But after she’d been gone two years, he gave into mama’s family’s request and had her declared dead, so she could be officially mourned. Eventually, people pretty much forgot I was that poor girl whose mom disappeared. I was able to introduce myself without getting socked with questions, or the all-too-familiar looks loaded with pity.

So, sitting here now back at the scene, I didn’t know whether to feel surprised, shocked, or nothing. Between getting dumped by Brett, the possibility of losing my scholarship to Preston Academy, and having a panic attack—today was awful.

I thought that if I had the courage to return to the scene of our accident and sit for a while, perhaps even tried to meditate or pray, I would remember what happened. Then I could have less fear, and feel more peaceful—and be able to climb a stupid ladder. But the only things I felt right now were confusion, and a heavy ache in my chest.

I looked around the parking structure and noticed a bunch of gang tags painted onto the concrete, next to newer model cars. Apparently people weren’t scared to park here. They’d probably never even heard of the accident that happened ten years ago, in this very spot.

What was I thinking? That she’d show up and explain why she left ten years ago? That she’d drop off a box of chocolates with an,
‘I’m sorry I abandoned you
,’ note? I’d been here for a couple of hours, and other than the obvious outcome—my lips were probably blue and my fingernails definitely white—I hadn’t gained anything by coming back.

I rubbed my hands together, held them to my mouth and blew on them. I wondered what my life would have looked like, felt like, if Mama had never disappeared. Frankly, the only person I would have missed, would be my stepmom, Sophie.

I heard a jangle of keys and an older guy said, “Hey, kid. You look cold. Need a ride?”

I looked up at the man who belonged to the voice. He was late forties, handsome, full head of dark hair, thin, and tall. He walked up the ramp toward me wearing crisp khakis, and a fine, dark brown, weathered, leather, bomber jacket. I heard the low, throaty hum of a finely tuned car engine in the distance—probably his ride.

“No, thanks.” I waved him on.

“I’d believe you except that your fingers are purple.” He held out his right hand in front of me. “Look at mine. Wow. They’re a normal fleshy color.”

“Kudos on your great circulation,” I said.

“Look. Whatever your beef is, you need to get out of the cold, call your folks, and talk it out.” The guy reached in his pocket and held his cell phone out toward me.

I shook my head. “I’m fine.”

“Right. If you don’t want to talk to them yet, at least find someplace safe to stay tonight. I can recommend a couple of shelters.”

“It’s not what you think.” I heard a high-pitched, grating sound, and some lame car backfired a couple of times. Busted. Dad drove his beater ride, and huffed up the garage incline toward me.

He screeched to a stop in the middle of the ramp, yanked the parking brake, flung open the driver’s door and catapulted out. The keys were in the ignition, engine still running, as he raced toward me with his longish, salt and pepper hair flying all over the place.

“Daddy?”

“You stay away from her!” Dad thrust one arm out at the guy in the bomber jacket and shook his fist at him.

The guy stared at my dad like he was crazy, but took the hint. “Just trying to help.” He walked back down the ramp. The smooth engine revved below us—the guy must have had a friend behind the wheel of his ride.

“We don’t need help from strangers.” Dad strode after the guy determined, almost manic.

“Dad, no!” I pushed myself off the ground, and ran after him. “I’m fine.” I grabbed his arm. His eyes met mine and they were a little crazy, reminding me of the old days after the accident. Guess I wasn’t the only one having a hard time today. “This man did nothing wrong.” I shook his arm.

But his eyes were dilated, and he was breathing quickly. Dad was in his crazy zone, and I had to break through to him before he did something he’d get in trouble for. I could not lose him again. “He was just trying to help,” I said. Dad’s nostrils flared. “Leave him alone. You cannot fight everyone.” I tugged on the sleeve of his jean jacket.

He sighed and closed his eyes for a moment. When he re-opened them, he appeared sane.

“Okay,” he said. “If you recall, I had a rotator cuff injury on that arm you’re yanking on. I’d really appreciate it if you stopped doing that.”

“Sorry.” I patted his shoulder.

“Much better.”

The man regarded us. “I didn’t come here for a fight, sir. I spotted your daughter and, well, I have a teenager. Stuff happens. I just wanted to make sure she was okay.”

“I’m sorry, man,” Dad replied. “I apologize.”

“No worries.” The man turned and continued down the ramp.

Dad wrapped his arms around me and squeezed so hard I coughed. “You’re catching a cold! You shouldn’t have come here.” He wiped a tear from his eye. “Darn, now I’m catching that cold.”

I hugged him back. Was this the first time we really connected since Mama disappeared? Dad smoothed my hair, over and over. It felt strange coming from him. But it also felt really good. “What were you thinking?” he asked.

“I thought if I came back here, talked to Mama... Maybe I could find a way to remember?”

“You don’t need to remember,” he said. “I’m glad you don’t remember. I can’t lose anyone else right now.” He pulled off his jean jacket and handed it to me. “Put this on before you catch pneumonia.”

“You will never lose me,” I said. “As long as we can order Joey’s Pizza Super Combo Deluxe for dinner. Extra large, so Sophie and Jane can have some.”

He frowned. “Ack, Joey’s! White flour carbohydrates topped with decrepit vegetables with zero nutritional value, and do you even remember what I told you about how they kill cows?” We walked the few feet to his car, and opened the passenger door. “Jane has a sleepover, and Sophie’s leaving on a business trip.”

“Again?” I asked.

“Yes, but we decided you’re getting your big present tonight.” Dad pulled his cell out of his pocket and made a call. “Pick-up. I want the insecticide pizza deluxe. Yes, I meant the super deluxe combo.” He pointed to me. “Happy? Get in.”