Chapter 24 -
05/06/2018
I heard a gentle knock and my eyelids flickered open. I scanned the area, darting quick glances everywhere. I found myself lying in my bed, covered under my very own quilted throw blanket.
Swallow, my cat, spread atop my hair on the pillow. I reached up, wrapped one arm around her belly and brought her soft body into my chest. I pressed my face into the furs atop her head and breathed in the sweetness. How I missed the smell of her!
“Sasha. Are you up?” My mother’s voice came through the bedroom door.
I sat up and checked the alarm clock on my nightstand. It showed the time of two forty.
I half-wondered if I just woke from a coma, when the knock came again. “Are you alright? Had a good nap?”
“Yeah. Good. I guess,” I murmured, as Swallow broke free from my embrace and jumped off the bed. My eyes followed the petite creature, as she stomped the floor like a lieutenant.
“Come down for some cinnamon rolls. I’m just done baking them,” said Mother. I couldn’t tell from her voice if she was upset at me for having gone missing for so long. Before I could respond, her footsteps trailed off,
I stumbled out of bed, my head heavy. I crossed to my closet and quickly removed my tee shirt and denim shorts. I slid open the closet door to shirts and dresses in different shades of turquoise, my favorite color. Absent-mindedly I picked out a dress and slipped it on.
The excitement of seeing my family began to swell in my chest. I wondered where to start with my experience in AohhoA and decided to tell my parents everything. I was certain that Mom would forgive me once she learned what I had gone through.
I recalled a story she had once told me. She was a little girl living in Moscow, when one afternoon her parents pulled her and her younger sister from their games at the front yard, and ushered them to pack their things into a backpack. The very next day early in the morning, the whole family left the Soviet Union for the United States. Mother didn’t know anything about Boston until the day she had arrived. In the end she survived the hardship, proving that she was the kind of woman made strong by the curve balls of life.
In a way I was taken and thrown into a strange place just like Mother was. It was possible that those unexpected turns in life that had toughened her were now making me strong.
I slid shut the door and headed downstairs. It crossed my mind only briefly that my closet contained way more turquoise-colored clothes than I had ever owned. I was too preoccupied to notice anything unusual. I was just excited to be home again. I couldn’t wait to tell everyone about AohhoA.
“Your favorite, honey,” Mother looked up from the countertop when I entered the kitchen.
Father was transporting the cinnamon rolls from the oven to a wire rack. He glanced up at me quickly as he took off the mitten. He didn’t say a word but offered a quick nod of acknowledgment.
Sam dashed into the galley, slammed past me, dragging his little toy dog with him. He clasped onto the edge of the laminated countertop. “Wait for them to cool off,” Mother chided him lightly, as he broke off a small chip from one of the buns.
All of the activities made the afternoon seemed as typical as any Sunday afternoons should be. But the casualness was the least reaction I had expected from my family. It was too bizarre that no one seemed surprised to see me again or bothered to comment on my absence. I began to grow uneasy, my footsteps unsteady, when I walked up to the counter.
Father brought out a teapot and fill it with water, when he took notice of my jitter. “Your nap seemed a little longer than usual. You slept well?” he asked.
Did I really just wake up from a nap?
“Yes,” I responded and decided to hold my tongue about the storm brewing in my chest.
Mother placed all the cinnamon rolls onto a plate and carried them to the deck in the backyard. Sam leaped up from the floor and followed her.
Through the window I suddenly noticed the trees outside. The leaves created nature’s splendor with their shades of yellow, orange, red and brown. But something seemed odd about these colors. “What’s the date today?” I asked.
“The 15th, Sunday.” Father glanced over at the calendar hung above the sink.
“Which month?”
“October, of course!” Mother exclaimed from outside and waved for us to join her and Sam.
Fall was the season that I loved the most. But what happened to the entire summer? I was just one syllable way from letting the question roll off my tongue.
“You must be exhausted from yesterday,” Mother said with a look of concern, when I stepped onto the deck.
What had happened yesterday? I wondered. But I knew better than to toss out an offhanded question. I quietly grabbed a cinnamon roll and took a bite. The pungent and sweet taste sent a rush of familiarity that momentarily dispelled the noises in my head. “Yes, it must be from yesterday,” I nodded.
“We are just so proud of you, Sash,” Mother went on.
I took another bite and chewed it with intensity.
Father came out with the teapot, steam bubbling up from the sprout. He put down the kettle and picked a cinnamon bun. Raised it over his head, he beamed. “To our champion!”
“Of Nastia Liukin,” said Mother with a grin.
Me? I had won the junior Nastia Liukin Cup Series? I couldn’t believe it. Winning the Cup meant that I would be an invitational to compete for the senior’s event, which was more than just an honor. It was a validation of all the hard work that I had put into the past school year. A tingle of excitement raced from my head to my toes, as I gazed down at the white streak of butter on my finger.
“You look like you just heard the news for the first time,” Mother took a sip of her tea and exchanged a glance with Father.
“Well, your trophy is not going anywhere,” He teased with a wink.
My trophy?
“It’s in your room, isn’t it?”
“I will be right back,” I licked off the butter and chomped down the last bits of the roll, before I strolled over to the stairs.
Around the corner, once I was out of sight from everyone in the kitchen, I dashed up to my room. When I swung open the door, it was right there, shaped like a flower bud standing tall on my desk by the lamp.
I picked up the trophy and studied the design of a female figure with her arms elegantly raised over an arched back. On the chic metal base, I spotted the rank, noting “first place” along with my name engraved right below it. The attestation of my merits. I traced the inscriptions with the tip of my finger and I thought, Unbelievable.
It wasn’t my victory that I found hard to believe. I had been very close to it the year before, taking home the bronze. It was the fact that I had no recollection of the whole experience that puzzled me. How could I not remember something so extraordinary?
I shut my eyes and pressed the heel of my palms into my eye sockets. I decided to think things through, to sort the information that had rained down on me like hailstones. But my cell phone rang, the familiar ring tone snatched my attention. I quickly pressed the button to accept the FaceTime request.
“Sasha, Congrats again!” The grin of Vassie Ja took half of the screen.
“Vassie!” I said, noticing the long faux eyelashes of the self-made makeup artist, also my best friend.
“Whatcha up to?” Her eyes squinted, showing the silver glitters on the ends of the eyelashes. “You got a new dress. Let me see it!”
Her ability to sight the slightest change in anyone’s appearance never fail to amaze me. Once again, she had assessed the condition of the dress based purely on the spaghetti straps in the video.
I held the phone to an angle so that the camera offered her a better view of the dress. On the front, two shades of teal blended together like two rivulets merging into one and then reaching for separation.
The dress wasn’t brand-new, although it was only my second time wearing it. I bought it on my fifteenth birthday and went to school in it the day after. But when I discovered another girl sporting the same dress, I immediately walked off to the locker room and switched out to a tank top. There was no doubt in my mind that the dress fitted much better on the other girl. Besides, I had zero interest in inadvertently pairing with her to parade around the school like a shaved chicken next to a beautiful peacock. I left the dress in my closet and hadn’t touched it once until this afternoon.
“It’s gorgeous and the color is amazing on you,” exclaimed Vassie.
“Thanks,” I replied, my shoulders rolling up. I debated only for a brief moment if I should bring up the topic about AohhoA, before I made up my mind. I had to get it off my chest. “Vas. I need to tell you something,” I said. “I just had this craziest experience. Like I somehow wandered into a different world.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, as she flung her hair to the other side, giving it a tousled texture.
“Vassie. I had been kidnapped,” I blurted out, not sure how else to say it.
“Are you kidding?” Her head snapped back to the camera.
“Well. Sort of like being kidnapped.”
“You are okay though, right?” she asked, her brows moved up to her forehead as her eyes grew very wide.
“Of course. It was nothing serious,” I shrugged. “But somehow, I ended up traveling with a red pear and a crystal bear. They were like werewolves with human features, except that they weren’t.”
“Sasha,” Vassie chuckled with a slight roll of her eyes. “What are you talking about?”
“I know I’m not making any sense,” I said. “But I was with them and we went through those incredible places, where eggs were flying and popcorns were coming out of a river. And I met a really cute falcon.”
“Did I just hear you say ‘a really cute falcon’?” She paused to stare at me. “Please tell me that someone just woke up from a wicked dream. I will take it, even if it’s a daydream.”
“Maybe,” I said doubtfully. “Vassie, the crazy part is that the whole thing is real. It did actually happen.”
“Sash,” she said, her face pressed up against the camera, “I can see the bags under your eyes like my baby niece’s half-drunk breastmilk. You are just too exhausted from yesterday. Or maybe too excited that you’ve started hallucinating.”
“You are probably right,” I managed a nod.
“We should celebrate your championship,” she switched to a jolly tone. “Say dinner tonight at BeBo’s?”
I hesitated, because I really wanted to stay in and be with my family. I wanted to kick back, like watching a movie with Mom and Dad and Sam on the couch with Swallow on my lap. But then again, I had to talk to Vassie about AohhoA. She would get it if we chatted in person. “Sure. I will come,” I told her.
“Does six o’clock work for you?”
“That will be perfect,” I flashed a grin, attempting to match her cheerfulness before we ended the call.
I should be happy to have finally made it home. But the intimacy seemed hitched on a faint sense of fictitiousness. In comparison, what I encountered in AohhoA was far more substantial, with everything I had gone through with Bulkee and Sye still vivid in my memory like the intense heat of a bonfire on a wintry night.
But how credible is one’s memory? It’s probably nothing more than a snowflake fallen from the sky. Crispy clear until it joined a puddle of water on the ground, when its delicate edges melted away into a tiny droplet. Maybe like the snowdrop, my memory of AohhoA would someday dissolve and be lost to a vast sea of other exciting experiences that I was sure to come into my life.
Swallow, my cat, spread atop my hair on the pillow. I reached up, wrapped one arm around her belly and brought her soft body into my chest. I pressed my face into the furs atop her head and breathed in the sweetness. How I missed the smell of her!
“Sasha. Are you up?” My mother’s voice came through the bedroom door.
I sat up and checked the alarm clock on my nightstand. It showed the time of two forty.
I half-wondered if I just woke from a coma, when the knock came again. “Are you alright? Had a good nap?”
“Yeah. Good. I guess,” I murmured, as Swallow broke free from my embrace and jumped off the bed. My eyes followed the petite creature, as she stomped the floor like a lieutenant.
“Come down for some cinnamon rolls. I’m just done baking them,” said Mother. I couldn’t tell from her voice if she was upset at me for having gone missing for so long. Before I could respond, her footsteps trailed off,
I stumbled out of bed, my head heavy. I crossed to my closet and quickly removed my tee shirt and denim shorts. I slid open the closet door to shirts and dresses in different shades of turquoise, my favorite color. Absent-mindedly I picked out a dress and slipped it on.
The excitement of seeing my family began to swell in my chest. I wondered where to start with my experience in AohhoA and decided to tell my parents everything. I was certain that Mom would forgive me once she learned what I had gone through.
I recalled a story she had once told me. She was a little girl living in Moscow, when one afternoon her parents pulled her and her younger sister from their games at the front yard, and ushered them to pack their things into a backpack. The very next day early in the morning, the whole family left the Soviet Union for the United States. Mother didn’t know anything about Boston until the day she had arrived. In the end she survived the hardship, proving that she was the kind of woman made strong by the curve balls of life.
In a way I was taken and thrown into a strange place just like Mother was. It was possible that those unexpected turns in life that had toughened her were now making me strong.
I slid shut the door and headed downstairs. It crossed my mind only briefly that my closet contained way more turquoise-colored clothes than I had ever owned. I was too preoccupied to notice anything unusual. I was just excited to be home again. I couldn’t wait to tell everyone about AohhoA.
“Your favorite, honey,” Mother looked up from the countertop when I entered the kitchen.
Father was transporting the cinnamon rolls from the oven to a wire rack. He glanced up at me quickly as he took off the mitten. He didn’t say a word but offered a quick nod of acknowledgment.
Sam dashed into the galley, slammed past me, dragging his little toy dog with him. He clasped onto the edge of the laminated countertop. “Wait for them to cool off,” Mother chided him lightly, as he broke off a small chip from one of the buns.
All of the activities made the afternoon seemed as typical as any Sunday afternoons should be. But the casualness was the least reaction I had expected from my family. It was too bizarre that no one seemed surprised to see me again or bothered to comment on my absence. I began to grow uneasy, my footsteps unsteady, when I walked up to the counter.
Father brought out a teapot and fill it with water, when he took notice of my jitter. “Your nap seemed a little longer than usual. You slept well?” he asked.
Did I really just wake up from a nap?
“Yes,” I responded and decided to hold my tongue about the storm brewing in my chest.
Mother placed all the cinnamon rolls onto a plate and carried them to the deck in the backyard. Sam leaped up from the floor and followed her.
Through the window I suddenly noticed the trees outside. The leaves created nature’s splendor with their shades of yellow, orange, red and brown. But something seemed odd about these colors. “What’s the date today?” I asked.
“The 15th, Sunday.” Father glanced over at the calendar hung above the sink.
“Which month?”
“October, of course!” Mother exclaimed from outside and waved for us to join her and Sam.
Fall was the season that I loved the most. But what happened to the entire summer? I was just one syllable way from letting the question roll off my tongue.
“You must be exhausted from yesterday,” Mother said with a look of concern, when I stepped onto the deck.
What had happened yesterday? I wondered. But I knew better than to toss out an offhanded question. I quietly grabbed a cinnamon roll and took a bite. The pungent and sweet taste sent a rush of familiarity that momentarily dispelled the noises in my head. “Yes, it must be from yesterday,” I nodded.
“We are just so proud of you, Sash,” Mother went on.
I took another bite and chewed it with intensity.
Father came out with the teapot, steam bubbling up from the sprout. He put down the kettle and picked a cinnamon bun. Raised it over his head, he beamed. “To our champion!”
“Of Nastia Liukin,” said Mother with a grin.
Me? I had won the junior Nastia Liukin Cup Series? I couldn’t believe it. Winning the Cup meant that I would be an invitational to compete for the senior’s event, which was more than just an honor. It was a validation of all the hard work that I had put into the past school year. A tingle of excitement raced from my head to my toes, as I gazed down at the white streak of butter on my finger.
“You look like you just heard the news for the first time,” Mother took a sip of her tea and exchanged a glance with Father.
“Well, your trophy is not going anywhere,” He teased with a wink.
My trophy?
“It’s in your room, isn’t it?”
“I will be right back,” I licked off the butter and chomped down the last bits of the roll, before I strolled over to the stairs.
Around the corner, once I was out of sight from everyone in the kitchen, I dashed up to my room. When I swung open the door, it was right there, shaped like a flower bud standing tall on my desk by the lamp.
I picked up the trophy and studied the design of a female figure with her arms elegantly raised over an arched back. On the chic metal base, I spotted the rank, noting “first place” along with my name engraved right below it. The attestation of my merits. I traced the inscriptions with the tip of my finger and I thought, Unbelievable.
It wasn’t my victory that I found hard to believe. I had been very close to it the year before, taking home the bronze. It was the fact that I had no recollection of the whole experience that puzzled me. How could I not remember something so extraordinary?
I shut my eyes and pressed the heel of my palms into my eye sockets. I decided to think things through, to sort the information that had rained down on me like hailstones. But my cell phone rang, the familiar ring tone snatched my attention. I quickly pressed the button to accept the FaceTime request.
“Sasha, Congrats again!” The grin of Vassie Ja took half of the screen.
“Vassie!” I said, noticing the long faux eyelashes of the self-made makeup artist, also my best friend.
“Whatcha up to?” Her eyes squinted, showing the silver glitters on the ends of the eyelashes. “You got a new dress. Let me see it!”
Her ability to sight the slightest change in anyone’s appearance never fail to amaze me. Once again, she had assessed the condition of the dress based purely on the spaghetti straps in the video.
I held the phone to an angle so that the camera offered her a better view of the dress. On the front, two shades of teal blended together like two rivulets merging into one and then reaching for separation.
The dress wasn’t brand-new, although it was only my second time wearing it. I bought it on my fifteenth birthday and went to school in it the day after. But when I discovered another girl sporting the same dress, I immediately walked off to the locker room and switched out to a tank top. There was no doubt in my mind that the dress fitted much better on the other girl. Besides, I had zero interest in inadvertently pairing with her to parade around the school like a shaved chicken next to a beautiful peacock. I left the dress in my closet and hadn’t touched it once until this afternoon.
“It’s gorgeous and the color is amazing on you,” exclaimed Vassie.
“Thanks,” I replied, my shoulders rolling up. I debated only for a brief moment if I should bring up the topic about AohhoA, before I made up my mind. I had to get it off my chest. “Vas. I need to tell you something,” I said. “I just had this craziest experience. Like I somehow wandered into a different world.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, as she flung her hair to the other side, giving it a tousled texture.
“Vassie. I had been kidnapped,” I blurted out, not sure how else to say it.
“Are you kidding?” Her head snapped back to the camera.
“Well. Sort of like being kidnapped.”
“You are okay though, right?” she asked, her brows moved up to her forehead as her eyes grew very wide.
“Of course. It was nothing serious,” I shrugged. “But somehow, I ended up traveling with a red pear and a crystal bear. They were like werewolves with human features, except that they weren’t.”
“Sasha,” Vassie chuckled with a slight roll of her eyes. “What are you talking about?”
“I know I’m not making any sense,” I said. “But I was with them and we went through those incredible places, where eggs were flying and popcorns were coming out of a river. And I met a really cute falcon.”
“Did I just hear you say ‘a really cute falcon’?” She paused to stare at me. “Please tell me that someone just woke up from a wicked dream. I will take it, even if it’s a daydream.”
“Maybe,” I said doubtfully. “Vassie, the crazy part is that the whole thing is real. It did actually happen.”
“Sash,” she said, her face pressed up against the camera, “I can see the bags under your eyes like my baby niece’s half-drunk breastmilk. You are just too exhausted from yesterday. Or maybe too excited that you’ve started hallucinating.”
“You are probably right,” I managed a nod.
“We should celebrate your championship,” she switched to a jolly tone. “Say dinner tonight at BeBo’s?”
I hesitated, because I really wanted to stay in and be with my family. I wanted to kick back, like watching a movie with Mom and Dad and Sam on the couch with Swallow on my lap. But then again, I had to talk to Vassie about AohhoA. She would get it if we chatted in person. “Sure. I will come,” I told her.
“Does six o’clock work for you?”
“That will be perfect,” I flashed a grin, attempting to match her cheerfulness before we ended the call.
I should be happy to have finally made it home. But the intimacy seemed hitched on a faint sense of fictitiousness. In comparison, what I encountered in AohhoA was far more substantial, with everything I had gone through with Bulkee and Sye still vivid in my memory like the intense heat of a bonfire on a wintry night.
But how credible is one’s memory? It’s probably nothing more than a snowflake fallen from the sky. Crispy clear until it joined a puddle of water on the ground, when its delicate edges melted away into a tiny droplet. Maybe like the snowdrop, my memory of AohhoA would someday dissolve and be lost to a vast sea of other exciting experiences that I was sure to come into my life.
