“So you can’t hear my thoughts?”
He shook his head.
“But you can feel them?”
“That’s right.” My character/dream whom we have yet to find a name for moved his fingers slightly as I traced the lines of his palm. It was fascinating how he actually had fingerprints and veins, bones, hairs, fingernails. I was still reeling from the contact that I felt when my fingers brushed over his skin. His skin! He had skin! It was unbelievably mind-boggling. What was even more bewildering was that he felt pain. And he was invisible to everyone except me. I had discovered this earlier in the evening when he touched my arm and I let out an enormous scream and almost like it was an automatic response my leg flung up and nailed him in the chest. He could hardly breathe and as I was in the middle of my hysteric apologies my dad came bursting through the door and asked what happen. At first I just sat there, waiting for him to go ballistic because there was a boy in my bedroom, but instead he came right for me and with a concerned look on his face asked me what happen. After a second or two the mind-numbing shock wore off enough for me to come up with a suitable lie, that there was a spider but I killed it. My dad seemed to half heartedly accept it and left without even a glance at—whatever his name was.
He chuckled softly. “You’re still hesitant,” he said, catching my passing glimpse at his face.
I shrugged. “You would know, since you can hear my emotions.”
“In a sense, yes.” He started to close his hand over mine and I immediately pulled away, still too afraid to completely recognize the fact that he was a real human being, or a representation of one, who could touch and be touched. He sighed impatiently.
“You’re so stubborn,” he said, lying down sideways on my bed. His legs were too long and hung off the side.
I didn’t allow it to actually manifest into a thought, but the reasons behind my actions were simply because I had convinced myself that this was another dream. And I would go to sleep, wake up, he’d be gone, and I move on with my life. So I was going to try and enjoy the rest of my life-like dream as much as I could before I fell asleep.
I shrugged again. It had become my best way of responding.
“But somehow I already knew that,” he mused, crossing his arms behind his head. “Maybe because I’ve been trapped in your memory for so long…” he peered over at me and smiled slightly.
“Is that where you’ve been?” I asked, my mind picking at the brief part of our five hour long conversation we had spent on that subject before moving on to other questions that I just couldn’t keep down. “I guess that makes you a memory then.”
“And it’s not enough for you is it?” he said pointedly, his lids slipping over his eyes.
I didn’t answer. I didn’t know how. He already knew that I didn’t regard him as a person. There was really no reason to say it out loud. For some reason I felt ashamed of myself for not feeling ashamed of myself. If he could walk, talk, think, then that should be enough to classify him as a person right? To be perfectly honest, I had no idea how I should feel about the situation. Not a single emotion was stirred when I reflected on the past several hours. Maybe not a single emotion, but several bleak and confusing feelings overwhelmed me from the inside, making it hard to distinguish just one. Or perhaps this was just my defense against him so he could hear what I was feeling.
“I’m sorry,” I said, not sure why I was saying that or what even possessed me to talk.
“Are you mad at me?” He asked. I looked over at him to see him staring at the ceiling, like he was concentrating real hard on a specific point.
“N-no,” I said, caught off guard by his question. At least not anymore. This was defiantly not the direction I was planning on the conversation to go.
He glanced over at me for a second before returning his gaze upward. “Sometimes you are so hard to figure out.”
“Were you listening to my emotions?” I asked, irritated. For some reason this really bothered me.
“It’s kind of hard not to when they’re bouncing of the walls like crazy,” he said. There was silence for a moment or two until he suddenly turned his head toward me and grinned mischievously. “Now you’re mad.”
“Stop it!” I nearly shouted, remembering that everyone else in the house was probably asleep by now.
“Stop what?”
“Listening!”
This is so unfair, I thought as I got up off the bed and grabbed my pajamas that were lying on the floor. He knows practically everything about me and I can’t do anything about it. You’d think since he was the one in my head I would be able to do the same to him but nooooo.
“Where are you going?” he asked, propping himself up on his elbows as I headed toward the door.
“I’ll be right back I have to change,” I answered curtly. I turned the knob, began to open the door, when something dawned on me and I just about shut it again. “Don’t go anywhere,” I said. “Seriously. Stay here.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” He lowered himself on his back again.
I sighed and silently crept out into the hall. It was the dead of night, probably somewhere between twelve and one in the morning. Thankfully my room was isolated from the rest of the house by a long stretch of hallway or someone might have heard me apparently talking to myself through the paper thin walls. I practically had my ear glued to those paper thin walls as I changed, listening for the quiet rattle of my bed or the tiny squeak of my door or light footsteps treading the stiff carpet. As quickly as I could I brushed my teeth and washed my face and with the same haste rushed back to my room.
My…boy, was fortunately still there. He was laying length wise now, with his head in the center of the bed and his long legs yet again hanging over the foot of the bed. I shut the door and as I approached him I saw he was fiddling with a book.
“My journal!” I shouted, not bothering to keep my voice down as lunged at him. Anger flooded through my veins, making my blood sing as I jumped on the bed and sent a locked and loaded fist heading towards his face. He blocked it with his free hand, and as he blocked, his hand slid up my arm and grabbed my shoulder at the base of my neck, his thumb pushing into the notch of my collarbone. Then, as an extra precaution, he placed his knee at my sternum to I couldn’t move forward.
“Who’s this Payne guy?” he asked as he continued reading. A smile appeared on his face the more he read. I felt a hollow desperation clench my stomach. I could only hope he wasn’t reading that story.
“Give it back!” I snarled, shaking off his grip on my shoulder and pushing his knee out of the way. I had only a brief opening to get my journal and when I reached for it he suddenly swapped it over to his other hand and the struggle started all over again from the other side.
“I reached for his hand…” he said dreamily as his eyes skewered the lines.
“No!” It was more of a shout of dismay than telling him to stop.
“My lips trembled as I said his name…”
“Please,” I begged, about ready to forfeit all my dignity and get on my knees and plead for mercy. “Stop!”
I heard the page flip. “Ooo, this is a nice description,” he continued. I felt hot tears threatening to fill my eyes. “The silver light of the moon broke through the foliage, dulling the red of his crimson hair and casting shadows upon his angular face. Hey, that sounds like me!”
“It is you, you idiot!” I spat, snatching the journal out of his hand and bound away so he couldn’t get it again. “Only two-dimensional!” My eyes were so bloodshot from fighting those tears I could feel the little red veins straining as they branched and soaked my eyes dry of almost all moisture.
He was far more than amused at this point. I could practically hear the laughter and glee blaring at me from inside him like a megaphone. My heart was pounding with a fierce intensity as I clenched my beat up and tattered journal close to my chest. It would be a miracle if my parents slept through this.
The Payne impersonator grinned impishly as I open my dresser and stashed my journal in one of my drawers. He was being arrogant again. I could feel his egotistical smile burning my senses. I shot him an icy glare as I closed the doors and latched them. As if that was going to do anything to stop him from doing it again.
“So I’m Payne?” he asked, still smiling smugly.
“You look like Payne,” I corrected. “But the similarities end there.”
“How am I different than him besides the fact that I’m alive?” he said, the agitation clear in his voice. “You based him off me didn’t you?”
I open my mouth, my tongue preparing to unleash its argumentative fury, but I found that I didn’t have anything to say to refute him. I sat there for awhile, the realization finally occurring to me that Payne, or Hal, or whatever his name was in my other story lines, wasn’t my memory; they were modified versions of the person from my past, who happened to be sitting right in front of me. He wasn’t my character, my characters were him. I blinked, feeling like I was just seeing him for the first time.
“Ashe?” he said.
The sound of my name on his voice gave me a surreal feeling. My head started to spin.
“Ashe, are you okay?”
It’s been you all along.
I heard his feet hit the floor as the ceiling above me grew distant and faded into a black hole of unconsciousness.
Then was it even a dream?
