Spirit

Chapter 2: Nightmare
It was late, so I reluctantly decided to go to bed. Sleeping was the worst time for me. I loathed it way too much. I didn’t hate getting rest, but I hated the fact that it wasn’t “rest” since I wake up in the middle of the night sweating and panting. The dreams were mortifying.
I slowly laid my head down on my pillow, folded my arms across my chest, and closed my eyelids. The position I was in made me feel like I was in a coffin.
I waited for sleep to wash over me. I felt brave, but deep inside I was frightened.
I waited and waited and waited. Then finally I knew I was asleep.
The first picture came. The picture my dream always started out with. It was a picture of me. No, her, the girl that just about takes over my whole life. She comes out when I’m being mean. The transformation doesn’t hurt me when all color drains from my hair and skin leaving it a snowy white and when the color of my clothes get affected by the transformation turning them into various shades of white. When the color of my eyes turn into an icy blue, like an iceberg under water. No. It was much, much lighter than that. My eyesight vanishes and the only thing I can see is blackness and something that looks like twinkling stars. It was like I was in outer space.
The worst part of it was the things I was able to do. I was able to hear things clearly. I could hear the footsteps of an ant. I could hear people whispering. I could hear anything. This might be considered as the coolest thing in the world but it isn’t. It’s like being in New York City; hearing the honking of horns, people talking, and much more. Actually the way I can hear stuff I much more nosier than New York City because I could hear every sound that’s being made when I turn into this thing.
Hearing isn’t the only thing. I could also smell things distinctively as long as I knew the scent. Some things smell like roses, some delicious, and some that are down right nasty!
I could sense my surroundings so instead of using my eyes I use this sense.
I theorize that I can carry things as heavy as an elephant without breaking a sweat.
Although I hate what I can do, there is one thing I can live with. It works when I’m myself and when I’m this thing. I can heal. I know I can because once I got a paper cut and it healed right before my eyes. As the blood rolled down my skin, my body absorbed that drop of blood back into me. I’ve always waned to experiment with this, but I was too scared to.
The next out millions of pictures was a picture of her going ballistic. Her mouth is wide open as if she’s screaming, her hands are clenched into fists and her eyes are shut tightly. It frightened me to think that that could ever be me.
The next picture, it seems that she is lying on the floor, cringed. She seems absolutely helpless and it looked like she was hurt.
All of these pictures are bright and white. I wasn’t able to see the setting at which these pictures took place.
I knew the order of all these pictures by heart and I knew when I was about to wake up because the most horrifying picture of them all was coming up.
As the penultimate picture faded away, the last picture popped up like one of those scary thriller movies when the victim is walking alone and all of a sudden, the killer jumps out. This last picture was the killer. It was a close up of the girl screaming. It looked like she was in excruciating agony.
Then I woke up. Bolting up right from my bed, sweating like crazy and gasping for air. I looked up to look in my mirror right across from me. My hair was drenched in sweat and I had purple bags under my eyes. I wiped my face with the cloth I kept on my bed stand.
I looked at my new clock and it read that it was only five twenty-two. I sighed and fell back on my pillow and stared at the ceiling.
No one knew about what I could do except for my family. It was a secret to be kept. No one could know about it. I knew no one else like me. No one in my family is like me. So I was alone with no answers, no one who knew what I was going through, and no one to understand.
Thinking about this made me started to cry. I turned over to my side to face my window to let the tears fall off my cheek. Sweat and tears. What a horrible match. It was May, so the sun was rising and a little bit of light was peaking through my curtains. Although it seemed like it was going to be a beautiful day, it’s always going to seem cloudy to me. To have to deal with this, I couldn’t bring myself to accept it.
“Why?” I whispered to myself. “Someone help me,” I pled.
I’ve searched on the Internet for any sign of what I was. I’ve read books but nothing explained anything.
The first time that I’ve transformed, the first day the dreams started coming, the first day I automatically knew I wasn’t normal, the first day I knew I was a freak was when I was four. I was playing with Jayant in the backyard, tossing his ball around back and forth. Jayant had the ball in his hands but I wanted it so I took it from him. Then… it happened right in front of Jayant who watched me, wide-eyed. When he was finally able to speak, he screamed. The sound was so loud and it hurt my intensified hearing so I attacked. Jayant kept screaming, I kept attacking. Luckily, my parents heard Jayant’s screams and when they came out to the backyard, I was back to normal, playing with the ball and Jayant was in the corner of the fence crying. His lips were bleeding, he’d lost a tooth, and his arm was broken.
I was surprised when Jayant told me he forgave me and my parents didn’t send me to an orphanage.
I had a lot of problems with this as a child. It wasn’t until I was ten did I realize the trigger of this and it was me being rude or mean so those were things I had to work on. At times I slipped, but I was able to manage. The last time I’ve transformed was when I was thirteen. I had a lot of close calls when I met Taylor Tank. She hated me as much as I hated her. She always picked on me and made fun of my naturally matted hair. I had to take five deep breaths and let it go. That’s what my mom told me to do and it seemed to work. But just taking deep breaths won’t cure anything. It won’t take it away. I just want to be normal, but normal isn’t in the cards.
“Are you having a bad dream?” Jonathon asked as he cracked open my door. His long brown hair covering his left eye at which he was rubbing with his fist.
I smiled at him and nodded my head. Jonathon was unaware of what I was able to do. My mom thought it best if he was to learn about it when he’s able to understand things better. Nicolette didn’t know about it as well.
“Me too,” he said and walked toward me and sat on my bed. His voice was almost down to a whisper.
“What’re you doing up so early?” I asked him.
“Bad dream,” he reminded me.
“What was it about?”
“You were gone,” he whispered.
“I was gone?” I asked, confused.
“Someone took you away. I missed you.”
I smiled at him and gave him a hug. “No one is going to take me away. I promise,” I assured him. “Why did they take me away?”
“They wanted to hurt you.”
“Well, you don’t have to worry about that because no one is going to hurt me. It was just a dream.”
“Do you promise?” he asked. “Do you promise you won’t leave?”
“Yes,” I said, confidently and leaned in to kiss him on the head. “You should go back to sleep.”
“I don’t want to,” he murmured.
“It will be fine,” I told him.
“Can I stay with you?” he asked.
“Sure. Why not?”
Jonathon crawled under my blanket and lay down. I sat next to him and decided to stay awake since my alarm clock would ring in a couple minutes telling me to get ready for school.
“They said you were an alien,” Jonathon said and looked up at me.
I froze. “Who said I was an alien?” I tried to make my voice sound as calm as possible.
“The people who took you away. They said you were different. An alien.”
“Does it look like I have green skin, one eye, an antenna, four legs, and two tongues?” I asked.
“You got that from Lilo and Stitch,” he accused me.
I laughed. The laugh was unsteady. “Get some rest,” I murmured and brushed his hair from his face. He looked up at me and his expression was still worried.
“No one is going to take me away,” I reminded him and smiled.
There has been times I wanted to tell the world what I was just so that maybe if there is possibly someone out there like me, they would hear me and come to me. But the thing is that I didn’t want to turn into some kind of freaky lab experiment. I didn’t want to be a lab rat. I didn’t want to be taken away from the people I love. I didn’t want people to see me differently.
I looked at my brother and he was already asleep. “And I also don’t want you to worry about me,” I whispered.