Arcadia's Gift Part 1

Arcadia's Gift.

by Jesi Lea Ryan.

Prologue.

"Our bodies have five senses: touch, smell, taste, sight, hearing. But not to be overlooked are the senses of our souls: intuition, peace, foresight, trust, empathy. The differences between people lie in their use of these senses; most people don't know anything about the inner senses while a few people rely on them just as they rely on their physical senses, and in fact probably even more." - C. JoyBell C.

It felt like ripping... ripping through me, ripping from me. A deafening roar reverberated all around as I lay flat on my back, drowning the shrieks and screams echoing on the river valley walls. My eyes were wide open, unblinking, but all I could see were abstract forms in shades of black, gray and red. A searing burn cut across both of my thighs as if I'd been struck by a flaming hot iron. My flesh melted and bubbled, absorbing the phantom burning metal and shattering my femur bones like gla.s.s. Although I was screaming as loud as I could, the sound was distant, like someone screaming under water.

A hub of activity swirled around me, but I had the distinct feeling of being alone... alone in h.e.l.l. I groped around on the cool soil at my sides, spa.r.s.e patches of long gra.s.s and loose gravel, trying to remember where I was and what had happened to me. The pain prevented any coherent thoughts.

Voices. Panic all around me. Yet I was alone in my h.e.l.l.

A flash of heat seared through my head, pounding rhythmically. Rust coated my tongue. The heat began to sink down my torso, leaking out of the stumps left under my hips. I sucked in jagged breaths as I realized that the heat was my blood, pumping through my arteries and spilling onto the cool ground.

No! I don't want to die! Again, the screams tore out of me. No one answered my cries.

My body grew colder. The pain faded to numbness. They say when you know that you are dying, your life flashes before your eyes. I knew I was dying, but curiously, it was my twin sister Lony's life that came to me in last minute mourning, not mine. I saw her love for me, even if we fought more than talked these days. I saw her fierce hope that our parents would reconcile their failed marriage and reunite, before nothing remained to salvage. I saw her boyfriend, Cane, and the lost promise of young love. A swell of love and pain filled my chest when I pictured Cane. It made no sense...I didn't even like him.

The forms in my vision began moving more slowly, becoming even darker. I struggled to reach out to them, but my arms were as heavy as iron weights. I opened my mouth to scream again, but only rust flavored foam escaped my throat and rolled down the corner of my mouth and into my hair. The skin on my face broke into a cold sweat as I steadily bled out.

It was almost over. I wanted my mom.

A shock of pain ripped through my chest as my heart raced, running out of blood.

Thump-thump. Thump-thump.

The faster my heart pumped, the less time I had left. My back reared up, head sc.r.a.ping the ground. My lungs heaved, panting. The forms in my vision swirled so dark they blended with the night. I reached out desperately with my hands, fingers not even finding a hand to hold. Breath rattled in my chest as it left my body for the final time and the whole world faded to black.

Chapter 1.

The day before...

Yellow morning light seeped through the pink curtains of my bedroom, intruding on my Ian Somerhalder dream and nudging me awake. I brushed the crust out of my eyes and rolled over to check the time. Ugh! Why did I always have to wake up ten minutes before my alarm was set to go off? I dropped my head back onto the pillow and pulled the covers over my head. It was no use and I knew it. Those extra ten minutes of sleep were gone forever. The wisps of my dream faded away like smoke.

The sounds of morning in my house seeped into my warm blanket cave. My sister, Lony, was getting ready for school down the hall in our shared bathroom, her little radio tuned in to the local morning show. Every so often, she'd giggle at something the host or his sidekick said. Lony got up a half hour earlier than me every day so she could claim the shower -and eighty percent of the hot water -first.

In the kitchen below me, my mother hollered threats down the bas.e.m.e.nt steps at my brother, Aaron, to coerce him into getting up for school. We only lived two blocks away from our high school, but Aaron still managed to be late at least twice a week.

Although I couldn't hear him, I knew my father must be sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee and checking the sports section for last night's baseball scores.

Moisture tickled the insides of my eye lids, threatening to spill my grief. This would be Dad's last morning here with the family. He was moving out this weekend into one of the rental properties they owned, the one where the hallways between the apartments smelled like stale Vietnamese cooking.

I turned onto my side and hugged my down pillow to my chest. It was best to get the crying done and over with now. It wouldn't do any good to break down in front of the kids at school.

Anyone with two eyeb.a.l.l.s in their head could see my parents hadn't been happy for a long time. They used to argue at night after we went to bed, usually about money, but a lot of times, just nit-picking at each other. We'd hear them down in the kitchen snapping and hissing, trying not to wake us. I should've known things were really bad when the arguing stopped. One or both of them must have given up the fight.

I had to get up if I was going to see my dad off to work. On a normal morning, I wouldn't have bothered, but today, it was important. I rubbed my face dry with the sleeves of my pajamas and crawled out from under the covers, turning off the alarm before it beeped. Time to boot Lony out of the bathroom. I crossed the hall and pushed open the door without knocking. My sister did her best to ignore me.

Everything about Lony's face was glittery and pink, from eye shadow to blush to lip gloss. She stood in front of the vanity methodically sectioning and flat-ironing her natural waves into a perfectly disciplined curtain that would hang down the middle of her back. Seeing her was like looking at myself in a funhouse mirror. Technically, we're identical right down to the DNA, but these days no one ever mixed us up. I'm more the "wash and wear" type.

"What's wrong with your eyes? Auditioning for The Walking Dead?"

I ignored her, stepping past to flip on the shower. I dropped my pajama bottoms and tugged my t-s.h.i.+rt over my head. Lony was the one person that I could change in front of without being self-conscious.

"Cady! Why do you have to fog up the mirror while I'm still getting ready?" Lony complained.

"Get ready in your room," I snapped back, stepping into the hot water and drawing the curtain closed. I heard her yank the electrical cord out of the wall and stomp off toward her bedroom in a huff. She came back a minute later to get her radio.

I took the fastest shower of my life, not even bothering to blow dry my hair. I threw on my clothes and hurried down the stairs. But when I got to the kitchen, the table was empty. Dad's coffee cup sat abandoned in the sink. He was already gone.

Chapter 2.

"Girl, your sister is a piece of work," Shawn declared as he slid into the bench seat across from me at the lunch table and set his tray down hard. Shawn Cole has been my friend since kindergarten, but as much as he liked me, he could never hide his aversion to my sister.

"What did she do now?" I asked, jamming a fork full of pasta salad into my mouth.

He rolled his eyes and complained, "Mr. McDonnell paired me up with Lony for our semester long chemistry project. We both know I get better grades than she does, but I just spent the last half hour having her dictate to me her ideas and how she insists we're gonna do things. I refuse to be bossed around for the next sixteen weeks by the Cheerleader from h.e.l.l. Any advice for me on how to handle her?"

"Yes," I replied, swallowing. "Pick your battles."

"Thanks," he muttered. Shawn set to work dissecting his cafeteria pizza until it was free of all veggie matter.

"Hi, guys," Bronwyn said cheerfully, taking her usual seat by my side. Bronwyn Perkins was my other best friend. We met in the first day of junior high when we showed up wearing identical outfits. In many ways, Bronwyn was more like me than my own twin. We're both quiet until you get to know us. We both love animals and work part-time at a local shelter. We listen to the same music, like the same books and think the same movie stars are cute. My high school career would royally suck without her.

"Shawn just found out that Lony is his partner for the chem term project," I explained.

"Oh, I'm sorry," Bronwyn replied, patting his arm. There was no love lost between her and my sister either. Lony thought Bronwyn was a nerd of the highest caliber, and Bronwyn thought Lony was a spoiled brat. Both were right to a certain extent, but that didn't mean I didn't love them both.

My gaze trailed over to where Lony and her friends sat at the center table, clearly the loudest group in the room. If a bomb fell out of the sky and took only Lony's table out, Dubuque Senior High would lose all of its varsity cheerleaders and most of the football team, leaving the marching band miraculously intact. At the moment, I could barely see my sister, because, Cane, had his muscular arms draped over her shoulders. They started dating almost a year ago, at the beginning of our soph.o.m.ore year. Since then, Cane had become a regular fixture on our living room couch.

"Do you work tomorrow, Cady?" Bronwyn asked. She yanked the band out of her copper hair and began re-fixing her ponytail which had worked itself loose throughout the morning.

"Um, no. Dad's moving, remember? Thought I'd give him a hand." I bent my head down over my plate, blinking like crazy to keep the tears back. Actually, my father said he didn't want my help. He planned to pay some guys from his construction crew overtime to load and unload boxes, but I didn't think I'd be able to keep myself from pitching in. Maybe he'd let me do the unpacking at his new place. If left to his own devices, I could picture him living out of cardboard boxes for the next year.

Shawn shot Bronwyn a warning look and responded, "We're sorry, Cady. We forgot. Are you okay? Wanna talk about it?"

"Not really," I sighed. I set my fork down, having lost my appet.i.te. My friends stared at me with concern. I know they just wanted to be there for me, but I really needed to get through this day on my own. "I think I'm going to take off. I want to stop by the library before literature."

I stood up and carried my tray to the was.h.i.+ng counter. As I pa.s.sed by, I heard Lony's trilling soprano erupt into a fit of giggles. How could she behave so normally today? Didn't she care at all about our family falling apart? I took a deep breath. Of course she cares about our family, I reminded myself. She just deals differently, that's all.

I trudged up one flight of stairs and turned into the library, bustling with students avoiding the humiliation of where to sit in the cafeteria. The library was always busy the first couple weeks of school.

I wanted to check out some books on the Russian royal family for my European History cla.s.s. I had a vague idea of doing a Romanov family tree for my cla.s.s project later in the semester. I jotted down the call numbers of two promising books from the computer catalog and set off for the stacks. After locating a large volume on Nicholas II, I stood in the aisle reviewing the table of contents.

Suddenly, someone rounded the corner of the shelves and ran right in to me. I let out a little shriek and dropped the heavy volume on my foot, sending a white flash of pain up from my toes.

"d.a.m.n! I'm so sorry!" the guy said, before muttering under his breath, "I'm such an idiot..."

I bent down to rub my toe and retrieve the book splayed open on the floor. I wanted to be annoyed with him, but I didn't have the energy for it.

"Don't worry about it," I sighed. I carefully straightened the bent pages.

I didn't recognize him, but with over two thousand students, and this being the first week of school, there were lots of new faces roaming the halls. He wore a black b.u.t.ton down over a white Flobots t-s.h.i.+rt and black, faded jeans. Over his eyes were thick brows and a disheveled patch of black hair. He carried a worn backpack covered in sewed-on patches of indie rock bands. Realizing I was staring, my face flushed.

His shoulders were slumped, but I couldn't tell if it was because I was so much shorter than him or if he just had poor posture.

"Are you okay?" he asked.

I wasn't okay, but my problems had nothing to do with my throbbing toe. "No, but I'll live," I replied dismissively. "What are you so into there that you couldn't watch where you were going?" I gestured to his hand where he had a finger stuck in a book to hold his page.

He held up The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy with a guilty expression. "It's stupid *cause I've read it like five times already...." His voice trailed off and he s.h.i.+fted his weight from foot to foot.

"Don't panic," I said.

His brows knitted together in question. "I'm not?"

I gestured to the book in his hand.

He grinned. "Oh, right! Don't panic." The boy was obviously pleased that I had read the book enough to quote from it, proving we were both card carrying members of the same nerd club.

His grin faded and his feet began doing the shuffling thing again. "Anyway... sorry to disturb you." He pivoted and began walking away.

"Wait!" I called after him.

He stopped and looked over his shoulder at me. Light purple shadows lingered beneath his eyes and his mouth was tight.

"Are you okay?" I asked. "You seem..."

The corner of his mouth twitched into a half grin, "No, but I'll live."

As a sucker for all creatures in need, human, animal or insect, I decided to introduce myself. "I'm Arcadia Day. You can call me Cady...everyone does."

"I know. You're in my literature cla.s.s. And your sister, Avalon, has chemistry with me. Pretty names."

"Uh, thanks. I'm sorry, I never noticed you in lit, but don't feel bad, I'm not very observant." Duh! Why did I say that?

"No problem. I sit a few rows behind you. I recognized you a moment ago by the back of your head."

I couldn't help grinning. "So, considering I'm not so observant, and I obviously didn't pick it up in cla.s.s, are you going to tell me your name?"

"Oh, yeah, sorry. I'm Bryan Sullivan. I'm new. We moved to Dubuque this summer from Portland...the one in Oregon. Not Maine."

"Well, I guess we're both heading to lit, so if you'll wait for me to check this out, I'll walk to cla.s.s with you."

A spark of enthusiasm flashed in his eyes briefly before he stifled it in an effort to remain cool. He gave a quick nod. In a school as large as ours, it could be difficult to make friends.

The first bell rang as I finished at the checkout counter. Bryan waited by the door, staring at his sneakers.

"I have to stop by my locker, but it's on the way," I said. "Do you have your stuff for cla.s.s?"

Bryan nodded and patted his backpack. "They gave me a locker way up on the fourth floor, so it's easier if I carry most of my books with me."

We pushed through the busy halls. The noise of the crowd around us didn't make conversation very easy.

"So how are you fitting in?" I shouted. "Making friends?"

He shrugged. "My mom signed me up to play piano in the school jazz band. She thought it would help me to get to know some people. A few of the guys are cool, but we are in that talk-to-each-other-in-cla.s.s-but-don't-a.s.sociate-outside-of-school phase."

"Ah, I suppose it takes time," I replied. "So you play the piano?"

"Started with lessons when I was four years old. I prefer the guitar, but the school already had plenty of guitar players, so piano it is."

"That's so cool! I always wished I could play an instrument."

Lockers at our school are a.s.signed by cla.s.s and in alphabetical order, which means Lony's locker is right next to mine. She and Cane were leaning against the doors of both, staring googley-eyed at each other and blocking my access when I approached.

"Do you think you can go scrog somewhere else? I need to get into my locker."

Cane gave a Neanderthal-like grunt and Lony stuck her tongue out at me, but they did scoot over. Bryan waited by my side as I swapped my books out. Lony's eyes did a double take when she noticed the boy was actually with me, but Cane steered her off toward their next cla.s.s before she could say anything. Thank you, Jock Boy.

I swung the metal door closed and spun the lock. "Ready?" I asked with a nervous smile.

"So, you and your sister...you're twins, right?" Bryan asked as we walked.

"Yeah."

"I almost didn't notice. You don't seem much alike."