Chapter 27 -
06/17/2018
When I was lying in bed that night, I found Lectyn’s questions filled my mind like confetti blasted through a cannon. After spending four hours trying to make sense of them, I finally exhausted myself to sleep.
Again, I was back in the nightmare at the bottom of the drywell, or worse yet, with a grotesque bird standing over my head, asking me in Lectyn’s voice, over and over again if I was willing to stay here forever. When I backed away and refused to answer, I ended up falling in and out of the mirrors without being able to stop.
My sanity was hanging by a hair. Before self-destruction took me over, voices calling my name suddenly boomed over the bird’s incessant questions. I stopped dead in my tracks, as the chanting transformed to a hand planting a firm grip on my shoulder. It pulled me toward the sky, and I wanted to go with it to a far distance away from the crazy bird and the jailcell of the drywell. But my heart sank deeper into despair, when the ground swallowed my feet and I remained fixed like a stone amongst my own lifeless reflections.
My eyes snapped open, as I woke with my heart fluttering and my shoulders sore. I sat up on my bed and rubbed my temples with my palms, wanting to expel details of the nightmare from my memory.
The night was quiet still. I switched on the lamp on my nightstand to check where my body ached. When I leaned close to the mirror on the wall, I found marks like handprints all around my shoulder blades. It took me a moment to recognize a line of red scribbles along the side of my neck. It was the imprint of my initials that had once been embroidered on the back of my shirt. Someone had squeezed me so hard that they had pressed the scrawls into my flesh.
My eyes shifted to a large crack in the center of the mirror. It shaped like a handprint with the jagged shards merely intact. I hadn’t noticed it before and I didn’t know when the mirror had chipped. Through the crack, a deformed reflection of myself sitting in the distorted room stared back at me. That was when I came to notice everything bizarre about my life.
For the past a few months, I went through nothing but a set of carefully organized routines that built my life to perfection. It never seemed strange to me, until this very moment that Mother made cinnamon buns, my favorite dessert, every single afternoon, or that my closet was filled with nothing but outfits beautiful in various shades of turquoise, my favorite color, or that the leaves of the Tulip tree in our backyard remained vibrant even though fall, my favorite season, should have come to an end long ago.
My head was about to explode, when a sharp pain seared through me like I was dealt a blow by a wrecking ball. The force of it drilled blocks of memory into my brain. I recalled with agony how I ended up at the Pocket of Treehouses in AohhoA. I had sneaked out of the Koala’s house, entered the cave to meet the Warden and discussed with him my need to return to my family. The next thing I knew, the floodgate of doubts swung open.
How exactly did I get back home?
Did we end up going to Vermont at all?
What had happened to the entire summer?
Why couldn’t I remember my first day of high school?
Why couldn’t I remember anything about winning the gymnastics competition?
I leaned over and took out my Tablet from the nightstand. I turned in on and logged into my online journal. I swiped through the entries like my fingers were on fire. I scanned the familiar writings page after page, till the entries stopped at where summer was supposed to begin. There was no update after that.
The Tablet dropped to the floor, its screen blinked blue and green. I reached for my cellphone and tapped open the gallery icon. There was nothing there except for a few selfies I took with Vassie a few days ago. I moved over to the message icon and pressed it open. I started scrolling through all my texts with my thumb, while the exchanges with Vassie, Christy and Lectyn flashed through the screen. The earliest text was “I’m here. Same spot.” dated October 15th, the day I returned from AohhoA.
I flung the phone to the bed, as I felt a black hole grow in my chest. I spearheaded down the stairs into our family room, walking straight to the bookshelf. I began rummaging through photo albums, taking them out to the floor one by one, till I located a thick album with beige-colored covers. It kept photos of me in chronological order starting when I was around five years old. I leafed through the album quickly and found no photos of me on the night that I had supposedly took home the trophy for the junior Nastia Liukin Cup Series. It was impossible to believe that my parents wouldn’t memorialize the moment of such an accomplishment.
“What are you doing?” Mother’s voice shot from behind me. I span around, finding her wavering toward me over piles of albums. “Sasha. What are you doing here in the middle of the night?” She asked again, sounding as unfeeling as the lifeless expression on her face.
“What happened exactly when I won the gymnastics competition? Why couldn’t I find any record of activities after I had made it back?”
“Back from where?” Mother held her gaze on me, as she approached me.
“From AohhoA!” I shouted. “Mom, did you know that I had been gone the whole time? Did you know that I couldn’t remember what happened right after I got home? Did you realize that everything around me was perfect? Too perfect?” Questions fired out, as I was on the brink of tearing bursting out of my eyes. “Are you even my mother?”
I stepped back, when Father emerged soundlessly into view from behind the door. He appeared as if he was hollow inside. He stared at me like he was looking through me. The left side of his face glistened under moonlight, but through the window I couldn’t see the moon.
“She is just exhausted. Our daughter is exhausted,” Father muttered to Mother like Sam’s robot dog, mechanical and impassive.
He walked passed her to me and removed the album from my hand. Slowly he inserted it back into the row of albums on the shelf. “Now go to sleep. You will be fine in the morning,” he ordered me in such an unfeeling way like he was a guard talking to a disorderly tourist at a remote site of historical ruins.
It was so unlike him that I heard myself ask, “Who are you?” I searched his eyes that were as cloudy as wax blocks. I couldn’t recognize my Father anymore. Fear twisted up from my burning stomach and rocked my ribcage. I grew so afraid of my parents that I rushed out of the door not wanting to be either of them for another minute.
I pranced back upstairs and headed for my bedroom. It became crystal clear to me what was strange – since my alleged return home, I had not seen any mirror other than the one in my bedroom. Whenever I needed, I had simply relied on the selfie-mode of my phone camera.
Something was terribly strange about the situation and this mirror raised on the wall facing my bed. It was angled to capture a view exactly the same way, when I had inspected my bedroom with the Warden. We must have looked at the room from where the mirror hung. No, we must have looked at it from inside the mirror.
I swept the trophy off from my desk and walked up to the wall. But a yank to my arm caused me to lose balance.
“What are you doing, Sasha?” asked Father, as he wrenched the trophy out of my hand. My parents had come upstairs after me.
Frightened, I tried to take it back but he seized my arms and bent them at the elbow behind my back.
“Stop acting like a child,” Mother called out from behind us. She joined Father and the two of them began dragging me away from the mirror.
Despite the pain, I tussled against their firm grip and I trekked forward with great effort. When I caught my reflection in the chipped pieces of the mirror, I broke into a cold sweat.
The scene was just like the one in the nightmare where I was locked up facing the reflective wall of the drywell. I watched the mirror image of myself twist around with my arms tied up. But I was scuffling with no one, not even a shadow. I was all by myself with my supposed parents nowhere to be found.
“He is not my father. And you are not my mother,” I started screaming. Despite my outcry, the force behind me tightened around my arms and hauled me further away from the mirror.
I was frustrated and scared, unable to think of what my next move should be, till a command in my own voice rolled from the mirror, loud and clear. “Come out, Sasha. Use Imajigo Trade.”
A shift erupted in my chest with memories of AohhoA rushing back to me. I squeezed shut my eyes and drew up all my attention to envision my fingers forming a triangle in the direction of the mirror. I recalled the steps when Sye had done it as slowly I built a portal of Syoncept with the triangle in my head. I searched through the portal till I began to establish silhouettes of a circle of figures. Something told me that I had to make a lunge for them.
I refocused my mind to visualize a baton, like how I had done it, when Bulkee asked me for a boat at the popcorn river. I forced myself to concentrate till black dots amassed to a shape so solid that it made my head heavy.
My eyes split open, when a painful wrench torn me like something was springing through my body, spraining my guts, and boiling my flesh. The pain worsened with a sudden rise of heat from the bottom of my belly and it was pulling me inside out. I screamed, as I felt something literally firing off from my forehead, and snipping through the Syoncept portal into the silhouettes ahead of me.
An acute bang sounded in the room and the mirror shattered in response. Starting from the cleft, sharp and glinting pieces blasted everywhere. I broke my hands free just fast enough to twist around and dodge the explosion.
I gasped, when I caught glimpses of the figures of Father and Mother splintering like broken china dolls. Along with them, everything around me began to disband into a ribbon of debris, till a point directly over my head drew in all the wreckages. I felt a blistering sting to the back of my neck and I lapse into unconsciousness.
Again, I was back in the nightmare at the bottom of the drywell, or worse yet, with a grotesque bird standing over my head, asking me in Lectyn’s voice, over and over again if I was willing to stay here forever. When I backed away and refused to answer, I ended up falling in and out of the mirrors without being able to stop.
My sanity was hanging by a hair. Before self-destruction took me over, voices calling my name suddenly boomed over the bird’s incessant questions. I stopped dead in my tracks, as the chanting transformed to a hand planting a firm grip on my shoulder. It pulled me toward the sky, and I wanted to go with it to a far distance away from the crazy bird and the jailcell of the drywell. But my heart sank deeper into despair, when the ground swallowed my feet and I remained fixed like a stone amongst my own lifeless reflections.
My eyes snapped open, as I woke with my heart fluttering and my shoulders sore. I sat up on my bed and rubbed my temples with my palms, wanting to expel details of the nightmare from my memory.
The night was quiet still. I switched on the lamp on my nightstand to check where my body ached. When I leaned close to the mirror on the wall, I found marks like handprints all around my shoulder blades. It took me a moment to recognize a line of red scribbles along the side of my neck. It was the imprint of my initials that had once been embroidered on the back of my shirt. Someone had squeezed me so hard that they had pressed the scrawls into my flesh.
My eyes shifted to a large crack in the center of the mirror. It shaped like a handprint with the jagged shards merely intact. I hadn’t noticed it before and I didn’t know when the mirror had chipped. Through the crack, a deformed reflection of myself sitting in the distorted room stared back at me. That was when I came to notice everything bizarre about my life.
For the past a few months, I went through nothing but a set of carefully organized routines that built my life to perfection. It never seemed strange to me, until this very moment that Mother made cinnamon buns, my favorite dessert, every single afternoon, or that my closet was filled with nothing but outfits beautiful in various shades of turquoise, my favorite color, or that the leaves of the Tulip tree in our backyard remained vibrant even though fall, my favorite season, should have come to an end long ago.
My head was about to explode, when a sharp pain seared through me like I was dealt a blow by a wrecking ball. The force of it drilled blocks of memory into my brain. I recalled with agony how I ended up at the Pocket of Treehouses in AohhoA. I had sneaked out of the Koala’s house, entered the cave to meet the Warden and discussed with him my need to return to my family. The next thing I knew, the floodgate of doubts swung open.
How exactly did I get back home?
Did we end up going to Vermont at all?
What had happened to the entire summer?
Why couldn’t I remember my first day of high school?
Why couldn’t I remember anything about winning the gymnastics competition?
I leaned over and took out my Tablet from the nightstand. I turned in on and logged into my online journal. I swiped through the entries like my fingers were on fire. I scanned the familiar writings page after page, till the entries stopped at where summer was supposed to begin. There was no update after that.
The Tablet dropped to the floor, its screen blinked blue and green. I reached for my cellphone and tapped open the gallery icon. There was nothing there except for a few selfies I took with Vassie a few days ago. I moved over to the message icon and pressed it open. I started scrolling through all my texts with my thumb, while the exchanges with Vassie, Christy and Lectyn flashed through the screen. The earliest text was “I’m here. Same spot.” dated October 15th, the day I returned from AohhoA.
I flung the phone to the bed, as I felt a black hole grow in my chest. I spearheaded down the stairs into our family room, walking straight to the bookshelf. I began rummaging through photo albums, taking them out to the floor one by one, till I located a thick album with beige-colored covers. It kept photos of me in chronological order starting when I was around five years old. I leafed through the album quickly and found no photos of me on the night that I had supposedly took home the trophy for the junior Nastia Liukin Cup Series. It was impossible to believe that my parents wouldn’t memorialize the moment of such an accomplishment.
“What are you doing?” Mother’s voice shot from behind me. I span around, finding her wavering toward me over piles of albums. “Sasha. What are you doing here in the middle of the night?” She asked again, sounding as unfeeling as the lifeless expression on her face.
“What happened exactly when I won the gymnastics competition? Why couldn’t I find any record of activities after I had made it back?”
“Back from where?” Mother held her gaze on me, as she approached me.
“From AohhoA!” I shouted. “Mom, did you know that I had been gone the whole time? Did you know that I couldn’t remember what happened right after I got home? Did you realize that everything around me was perfect? Too perfect?” Questions fired out, as I was on the brink of tearing bursting out of my eyes. “Are you even my mother?”
I stepped back, when Father emerged soundlessly into view from behind the door. He appeared as if he was hollow inside. He stared at me like he was looking through me. The left side of his face glistened under moonlight, but through the window I couldn’t see the moon.
“She is just exhausted. Our daughter is exhausted,” Father muttered to Mother like Sam’s robot dog, mechanical and impassive.
He walked passed her to me and removed the album from my hand. Slowly he inserted it back into the row of albums on the shelf. “Now go to sleep. You will be fine in the morning,” he ordered me in such an unfeeling way like he was a guard talking to a disorderly tourist at a remote site of historical ruins.
It was so unlike him that I heard myself ask, “Who are you?” I searched his eyes that were as cloudy as wax blocks. I couldn’t recognize my Father anymore. Fear twisted up from my burning stomach and rocked my ribcage. I grew so afraid of my parents that I rushed out of the door not wanting to be either of them for another minute.
I pranced back upstairs and headed for my bedroom. It became crystal clear to me what was strange – since my alleged return home, I had not seen any mirror other than the one in my bedroom. Whenever I needed, I had simply relied on the selfie-mode of my phone camera.
Something was terribly strange about the situation and this mirror raised on the wall facing my bed. It was angled to capture a view exactly the same way, when I had inspected my bedroom with the Warden. We must have looked at the room from where the mirror hung. No, we must have looked at it from inside the mirror.
I swept the trophy off from my desk and walked up to the wall. But a yank to my arm caused me to lose balance.
“What are you doing, Sasha?” asked Father, as he wrenched the trophy out of my hand. My parents had come upstairs after me.
Frightened, I tried to take it back but he seized my arms and bent them at the elbow behind my back.
“Stop acting like a child,” Mother called out from behind us. She joined Father and the two of them began dragging me away from the mirror.
Despite the pain, I tussled against their firm grip and I trekked forward with great effort. When I caught my reflection in the chipped pieces of the mirror, I broke into a cold sweat.
The scene was just like the one in the nightmare where I was locked up facing the reflective wall of the drywell. I watched the mirror image of myself twist around with my arms tied up. But I was scuffling with no one, not even a shadow. I was all by myself with my supposed parents nowhere to be found.
“He is not my father. And you are not my mother,” I started screaming. Despite my outcry, the force behind me tightened around my arms and hauled me further away from the mirror.
I was frustrated and scared, unable to think of what my next move should be, till a command in my own voice rolled from the mirror, loud and clear. “Come out, Sasha. Use Imajigo Trade.”
A shift erupted in my chest with memories of AohhoA rushing back to me. I squeezed shut my eyes and drew up all my attention to envision my fingers forming a triangle in the direction of the mirror. I recalled the steps when Sye had done it as slowly I built a portal of Syoncept with the triangle in my head. I searched through the portal till I began to establish silhouettes of a circle of figures. Something told me that I had to make a lunge for them.
I refocused my mind to visualize a baton, like how I had done it, when Bulkee asked me for a boat at the popcorn river. I forced myself to concentrate till black dots amassed to a shape so solid that it made my head heavy.
My eyes split open, when a painful wrench torn me like something was springing through my body, spraining my guts, and boiling my flesh. The pain worsened with a sudden rise of heat from the bottom of my belly and it was pulling me inside out. I screamed, as I felt something literally firing off from my forehead, and snipping through the Syoncept portal into the silhouettes ahead of me.
An acute bang sounded in the room and the mirror shattered in response. Starting from the cleft, sharp and glinting pieces blasted everywhere. I broke my hands free just fast enough to twist around and dodge the explosion.
I gasped, when I caught glimpses of the figures of Father and Mother splintering like broken china dolls. Along with them, everything around me began to disband into a ribbon of debris, till a point directly over my head drew in all the wreckages. I felt a blistering sting to the back of my neck and I lapse into unconsciousness.
