9

I screamed, closing my eyes, bringing my hands up to my face. Even in death, I did not want those bullets to graze my face.

“Alice!”

I fell backward, my head colliding with something sharp, jagged, and painful.

“Alice!”

I opened my eyes to find Brandon bent over my body, holding me by my shoulders. His face looked as pale as death. The dreadful vision had ended. I was back in the land of reality. For now.

“Alice, oh God, are you okay?” Brandon panted as he tried to lift me up off the floor. I felt like a ton of bricks, unable to move from the cold cove floor.

“Leave me alone!” I yelled. It was a reflex reaction. In my defense, I just had one of my visions. I wasn’t myself. I was still reeling from it. These visions had been the bane of my existence ever since I could remember. They would come, warning me of some danger or the other, and when they would end, I would feel hollow, as if my life force had been drawn out as a toll for the vision I had. These visions were always of the future. I would see the most horrible things and then be driven insane by the secret knowledge that these events would come to pass.

At first, these visions were rather juvenile. When my pet rabbit died, I knew where to find his ripped-up pieces. A rather transient fox had decided to dine on his gamy body at night while everyone slept. I, on the other hand, had a vision about Mr. Whiskers dying terribly, and was awake the entire night, knowing that as I clung to the sheets, a fox was out there, burrowing into Mr. Whisker’s cage, chewing him alive.

But as I grew up, these visions became graver. A week before grandma died in a house fire, I had an hourlong vision in which I saw her cooking eggs, bacon, and toast for breakfast, completely forgetting as a result of her creeping dementia that she had left the gas on. I saw as the flames leaped out of the kitchen and reached into the living room where grandma was on the verge of enjoying her post-breakfast cigarette. As she clicked the lighter, the entire house caught fire, burning grandma alive.

When my neighbor back in Chicago went missing, I did not confide in the police that I had seen a vision where he was walking drunk on the highway, trying to hail a ride by sticking out his thumb. I did not share the knowledge with his weeping widow that I had seen him get mauled by a speeding A****n truck. He was dead before he fell into lake Michigan, where his corpse lies rotting to this day.

And the cherry on top of this sundae made from horrors and dread was what happened back in Chicago.

“Alice, can you please tell me what’s wrong?” Brandon asked, his voice breaking with worry. I felt pity for him. I even envied him that he had not seen what I had seen. There was no way I was going to tell him what had just happened. Right now, the situation had not gone completely tits up as it had done back in the South Side. I was not going to repeat history.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, it’s…it’s nothing that you did. I have to go,” I cried. I hadn’t even noticed that I had been weeping unconsciously this entire time. My eyes stung and the back of my throat felt clogged up.

“Can I at least drive you home?”

“No! Just… Just stay away!” I yelled as I ran out of the cove. I was doing him a favor. I was being merciful. He did not know it just yet. The vision had me in it with him. I wouldn’t give that future a chance to come to pass. If I won’t be there, neither will he, and so no one will die. If protecting him from those men meant that I was not going to be with him, then so be it.

“I’m sorry, but can you freaking explain what just happened? Did I hurt you?” Brandon asked.

“I can’t do this. I can’t. Please don’t contact me again,” I said. The waterfall served as a barrier between us, me on one side of it, him standing behind it, looking at me with a forlorn expression.

I ran away from the cove, not caring for the twigs and branches that leaped out at me from the sides, stinging my arms and tearing my legs as I ran. I’d had enough of this pre-cog bullshit. I wasn’t going to have any more of it.

The night wove shadows in my path as I ran back to my home, my mind a wreck, my faculties unable to function. I couldn’t help but repeat that vision over and over again in my head. It was almost as bad as the one I had in Chicago.

I relented against the haunting night, ignoring the creeping shadows, pretending that the protruding branches from the forest were not stinging me as I crashed through the forest path toward my home. What must he think of me? He didn’t know my life. He didn’t understand what I had been through. He must be thinking that I’m completely batshit. Maybe there will come a time, long after all of this has passed, when I will meet him, old and fraying, and tell him why I rejected him, why I ran away. Maybe he will thank me then. Or maybe he will hate me all the more.

 

   

The sun was a concept alien to me ever since I had moved to Rapid Falls. Every day was a day shadowed by dark clouds. On the brief moments in the afternoon that the sun peeked from behind the drapes of cumulonimbus clouds, it looked like a tame white ball, incapable of heat, incapable of light.

As I lay in bed the following day, repeating the vision I had, I contemplated what to do now that I’d skipped school for two days now. Back in Chicago, rules were rules and if you skipped school for three days in a row, you got a warning call. Two warning calls later, you got suspended. After suspension, you got expelled. Would Rapid Falls High be as strict?

I didn’t care. At this point, I couldn’t give a shit about anything in the world. Not my missing father, not how my mom and my sister were adjusting to the new town, and most certainly not about Brandon. It was the goddamn vision that had made me this catatonic. Granted, I wasn’t a ball of sunshine before it, but given my track record with psychotic visions and their aftermath, it was understandable why I was as reserved as I was.