*Somewhere on Earth...*
BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!
"Uggh..." Sel moaned as she rolled over. She hit the button on the clock and sat up. "God, Mondays suck beyond suckiness," she muttered, looking at the rain pouring down the window. She didn't want to get up. She didn't want to face another day as the "school freak." She wanted to stay in bed, fall back asleep and dream. Her dreams were always so nice, except for the occasional nightmare. *Like last night,* she thought with a shudder. *Maybe if I went back to sleep, I could erase the bad dreams with good ones. It's what usually happens.*
Somehow she managed to haul herself into the bathroom. Glancing in the mirror, she was surprised it didn't crack. Her curly blonde hair was a frizzy mess, like always. Her eyes--green, with a tinge of gold near the middle--were bloodshot, with bags and shadows under them from lack of sleep. Her skin was white under its spring tan. Filling the cup by the sink and drinking from it, she noticed that the rim of the cup was stained red. She rolled her eyes and spit the water in her mouth into the sink. It, too, was tinged red. She drank again, and spit. *God,* she thought, *why does this always happen? Honestly, every nightmare....* She looked into the mirror again, and noticed her bottom lip had split, and the blood had dried on her chin, not to mention the fact that her mouth was full of blood from some unknown injury.
*I should tell someone,* she thought as she brushed her teeth. *I really should tell Mom. She always says I can tell her anything.* She grinned at her own stupidity, and winced when her lip split again. *Yeah, right. Mom, I've been having this nightmare since I was two, and it's happening more and more often, and there's this dead lady who I think is my birth mother telling me that I'm a Dreamspeaker and that I should go to Rainbowland to be trained. My ass she'd listen. Hell, I don't even know what half those things are. Dreamspeaker. What was I on when I went to sleep last night?*
She spat into the sink, more foam stained crimson washed away by the clear water. *And what was all that about that little furry guy? He had a kind of nice voice--in a grandfather type way. It made him sound really fatherly and sweet--* she smiled crookedly-- *despite the fact he was yelling something along the lines of "The daughter of Melayel will cause the destruction of the universe! We *cannot trust her!*" Greeeat. Add death and destruction to the list of subliminal messages being sent to me by The Voices of the Rice Crispies.*
Much as she joked about her nightmares, they scared her. She shuddered when she thought about the dark, shapeless shadow that had haunted her for as long as she remembered. Her last thought before sleep was always, "Please, no nightmares." And it didn't help; the nightmares came anyway, without want or permission.
*And this one.... this was worse than all the others. They're getting worse all the time.* Sel felt her heart speed up as she remembered last night's horror, the dark shape, the woman's screams of agony, the smell of death, the red light, and worst of all, the cruel, high laugh that cut through it all like a spear, ignoring all reason and all laws of the universe, sharper and grimmer than any sound Sel had ever heard.
As she tried to calm herself, Sel fingered her necklace for comfort. "Get a grip, girl," she told herself. "Come on. It's over, it's okay, it's all right," and her breathing slowed.
She looked at the necklace to keep her mind from going back to the nightmare. It was silver, with a Celtic knot charm on it. She had had it for as long as she could remember. She assumed it came from her birth mother, wherever she was now.
Sel had wanted to find her birth parents for years, since she was old enough to understand what "adopted" meant. Sel loved her adoptive parents; they had taken her in when they found her, a six-month-old baby on the doorstep, with no clue of who she was. But still...there was something missing. She wanted....no, *needed*--to know why her mother would have given her up. Was she not good enough? Had her parents even wanted a daughter? Did they even give her a name?
Sel's adoptive parents had named her after her mother's sister, Selene Iris Rennald. Yes, *Selene.* Yes, *Iris.* Yes, they had named her after a moon goddess and a heavenly messenger. Sel couldn't blame her parents, but come on. Selene? Had they any clue about the teasing she would get? It only hurt her more that her hair was light blonde and frizzy, and that she couldn't even think about dating a boy in her grade without gagging. She sighed. *Thirteen is way too young for dating. Maybe in three months.*
She turned the knob on the shower so the water could heat up. *I wish I knew what those dreams meant. I mean, it couldn't be prophetic, could it? Definitely not. I haven't had a prophetic dream in a year or so, and I used to get them all the time. Weekly, even.* As she pulled off the T-shirt she wore to bed, she caught a glance of herself in the mirror. The mark was still there. The only people that knew about it were her and her parents. She always made sure to hide it otherwise. Just above her left breast, there was a small brown mark, shaped like a circle with a five point star inside it. Her mother claimed it was a birth mark, but Sel knew better. She had never seen a birth mark that outright resembled anything aside from blobs. It had to be something different, God knows what. She had hoped that one day she would wake up, and it would be gone.
Sel hated that mark. She wasn't even sure why, but for some reason it reminded her of evil, of a bad memory someone was trying to forget, but kept surfacing again and again in their brain. Whenever she saw it, she couldn't shake the feeling that it was the by-product of a brush with a being that was so purely evil that it made her shudder. "Stop thinking like you're a character in Jekyll and Hyde, Selly-girl," she muttered, using her silent nickname for herself. "You can ask your birth mother. When you find her, you ask her. And when you find her, she'll take you to live with her and you'll never have to see THS again. Now get ready for another day of hell on earth."
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Monday at school started normally. Being shunned by the jocks and ditzes as Sel carefully made her way towards her locker. Book-checked in the hallway. Homeroom teacher droning on about the Industrial Revolution (they were eight chapters behind where they should be, considering it was April). Lila sick again.
*Of course she's sick. The one day I really need to talk to her, she's sick. Great,* Sel thought, thinking about her best--and only--friend. *Just to spite me, of course!*
"Watch it, bitch!" someone said as he knocked into her. For the second time, Sel's books spilled to the floor as she went down on her knees. She looked up, straight into the face of Kyle Falklaris. *Crap. Crap, crap, crap. I just had to run into him of all people!*
"Scuze me for being alive!" Sel spat at him. He growled and walked on. Sel sighed and went to the process of picking up her books. She was surprised when her hand bumped into someone else's. She looked up from the floor to see the face of a boy she had seen around, but didn't know.
"Sorry," she said, hurridly pulling her hand away from his.
He just smiled. "It's okay," he said. "You look like your day isn't going too well." He grinned, handed Sel her math book, stood up, and reached down to give Sel a hand. "I'm Brian."
"Sel," she said, shaking his hand. "I haven't seen you around much, Brian."
He shrugged. "I guess our schedules aren't very alike. Like right now, I should be at..." he looked at the clock, "...English."
*English, while I'm at algebra. In an entirely different wing of the school. Ah.*
"Why aren't you there today?"
"Doctor's appointment. I just got here." The bell rang, signaling the start of second period. Sel slammed her hand on her forehead.
"CRAP!" Sel yelled. "I'm late!"
"Whoooaa," Brian said. "You know, if you're gonna be late, you might as well take your time about it."
Sel grinned. "Good point."
"So, you're in eighth grade?" Brian asked. Sel nodded. "Thirteen?" She nodded again.
"And you're a ninth-grader, right?" She asked.
He answered, "Yep, and fourteen."
*He's a grade above me,* Sel thought. *So why the heck is he being nice to me? I mean, everyone in this whole dang school knows about me. Not to mention the junior high is the scape goat of the school.*
They continued to talk about various subjects during their walk to their separate classes. Eventually Sel came to the math wing. "Well, um, thanks for the help, Brian," she said awkwardly.
Brian smiled. "No problem. Sel turned around, preparing to walk to her class. Then--
"Hey, Sel?"
"Yeah?" She turned around to face Brian again.
"Do you have anything to do tonight?"
"Uhh.....no," she replied as she, bewildered, wracked her mind for activities. "I'm not doing anything."
"Could I walk you home tonight?" Sel was so taken aback by the question that she stared blankly at him for a few seconds, then stuttered, "Uh, yeah, sure. Whatever."
He smiled again. "Great. I'll meet you at your locker after school. It's in the eighth grade hall, right?" She nodded, and he turned and walked away.
*What the hell?* Sel thought as she walked into math. *First a nightmare, then a boy I never even met asks if he can walk me home. How much weirder will today get?*
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Sel sat beside her locker after school, after managing to avoid most of her classmates for the day. After the strange talk with Brian, her day had been relatively normal. Boring, yes, but blessedly normal.
*Somehow, I get the feeling that I'm not going to have much more normal,* she thought as she waited. *But how many friggin times today have I had a 'feeling'?*
Just at then moment, someone said, "Hey, Sel, you ready?" and knocked Sel out of her thoughts.
She looked up to see Brian. "Yeah, I'm ready."
"You live anywhere around here?" Brian asked.
"About a mile away," Sel answered.
"That's about where I live," Brian commented.
"Really?" Sel asked, interested. "I thought I was the only one in the neighborhood who went to THS."
They got into a conversation about the school baseball team, then into homework, their families, and their friends before they fell silent.
*Why is he being so quiet? I asked him what group he hangs with at school, and he says he doesn't. He can't be a loner like me. I thought Lila and I were the single loners at THS. And when I ask him about his other friends, he says he doesn't have any. Why wouldn't anyone want to be friends with him? He's nice and funny and smart. I'd kill to be friends with a person like this, especially since we have a lot in common.*
*Maybe it has something to do with the grayness. Maybe he notices it too. But why would he? Even Lila doesn't and she's the one who believes in all that voodoo stuff.* She glanced at Brian, who was kicking a stone along the sidewalk. *And yet... I think there's something that this boy knows that makes him more that he seems. So, maybe if I ask, he won't think I'm crazy. It's worth a shot.*
Sel took a deep breath, and, hoping he wouldn't think her insane, said, "You know, it's funny, but have you noticed everyone's been seeming melacholy lately? I know I sound nuts, but it just seems like everything is a little less....colorful,"
Brian's eyes flickered. "Yeah, I noticed that too. And I haven't seen a rainbow for a really, really long time."
Rainbows. Sel had nearly forgotten about them. She barely thought about her childhood obsession anymore. When she was a little girl she had been convinced that there was a little kid like her making rainbows. She swore that she had seen her once. But, of course, it couldn't be true. Especially now.
"I guess it's the after effects of the long winter," she commented dully. "I mean, my mom said that was the hardest one in ten years, including the one four years ago, and that's saying something."
"That was a bad year," Brian agreed. "It was really tough not to give up."
Sel nodded, knowing the feeling well. "I've been feeling like that a lot lately, too."
"Like you just want to crawl into bed and stay there--"
"Because you know that today's not going to be any better than yesterday and there's no point in trying?"
Brian nodded. "Yeah. Exactly."
*So that means that he knows how hard it is to keep yourself from feeling that way, and how much a fight it takes to believe that it's going to get better. I guess there *is* more to him than meets the eye.*
"You know what I wish?" he asked suddenly, startling Sel out of her thoughts.
"What?" She moved to the curb and checked for cars before she crossed the street, Brian beside her.
"I wish--"
"Brian, watch out!" she yelled as a bright red car came out of nowhere. She pushed him to dodge, but knew that neither of them were going to get away in time.
She heard a horn, and yelling and the sound of metal grating against bone, and felt a horrible, paralyzing pain in her head, and before the darkness gathered her into its merciful arms, her last thought was, "Please, no nightmares."
She didn't realize she was stepping into a living one.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
When Sel woke up, the first thought in her head was that she felt considerably worse than she had ever had before. For once in her life, she could understand why Zeus was willing to let Hephaestus split his head open to stop his headache. Her arm felt broken, and her whole side was so tender it hurt to move.
It felt like her brain was dead. She couldn't remember what had happened. She couldn't think of anything at all, except that she wished her side would stop hurting. She moved her arm, and gasped when she realized how much it hurt to move it. She picked up the other and touched her head. It was sticky. *Did I get pop on my head somehow?* she wondered, not realizing how absurd her thoughts were; she didn't even realize that she was in a grassy field speckled with star-shaped trees. When she looked at her hand, she figured out that the stickiness was blood.
*Great. *More* blood. Just what I need.*
Then it hit her. The car. The darkness. The plea.
Brian.
"Oh, shit..." she muttered aloud. "God, *please* let him be okay.... Brian?" she croaked, wondering if he heard her. After waiting a few minutes, she realized that either he was still out or he was nowhere near here. She hoped beyond everything that it was the former.
Slowly, painfully, she sat up. And gasped.
She noticed the trees. And the flowers, and the rainbow waterfall, and how beautiful everything was. It was so *colorful.* Even in her anxiety, she couldn't help but stop and marvel at this lovely Utopia.
After catching her breath, and her thoughts, she started crawling in a circle, trying to find him. She had no luck.
"This is impossible," she muttered as she crawled painfully, pausing every few seconds to overcome her vertigo. "I haven't found anything, not a backpack, not a hat, not even some blood, and I know that car couldn't have missed him entirely." She started up gently sloping hill. To her, it seemed like trying to climb Everest. "Even if I got him partly out of the way, he still would have been clipped by it, at least. And where *is* he? In all those vanishing stories all the people end up in the same place. And-- Oh my freakin God...."
The top of the hill had a perfect view of the entire valley she was in, from the moutains to the beautiful castle to the caves to the small village of tiny huts.
"Oh," she breathed, trying to control her amazement. The land around her created such an aura of serentity and happiness that she could feel its smooth warmth against her skin. Suddenly nothing seemed to be as bad as she thought it had.
The fears and worries gone, she felt overwhelmed by fatigue. Sel lay down on the grass, careful not to jar stiff muscles and bones more than she had to. With the nightmares refusing to leave her alone, sleep had become a long neglected friend.
*Rest....it sounds so nice.....and I doubt any night-demon would dare trouble me here....* She felt like she was floating, borne on a breeze of calm.
Suddenly she heard, in chittering and changes in tone, someone say, "Get Rainbow! Now! She needs help! She's hurt!"
Sel cracked open one eye sleepily. A small, furry green creature stood above her, chattering to a blue being of the same size. In her fatigue, the realization that they were the same kind as the creature in her nightmares escaped her. "Are you going to give me something to make it hurt less? That'd be really nice...." She saw the red-haired boy with worried eyes kneel beside her, and the last thing she did before she slipped into blessed darkness was whisper, "You're all right. "You'll keep the nightmares away. I know you will."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
She heard the voices before she saw their owners. "She's slept so *long.* I'm starting to worry that she might not wake up at all."
"You'll do something, Canary. I know you will. She'll be fine."
"I don't know....if the Sprites hadn't found her and Krys hadn't brought her here when they did, I don't doubt that she would have died."
"I know. It was lucky."
"How did Brian take it?"
At the mention of Brian, Sel opened her eyes to see who the speakers were. One looked like a girl of about twelve, with strawberry blonde hair in a high ponytail and a blue dress. The other looked a little younger than her, with the lightest hair Sel had seen on anyone under fifty and a yellow shirt and pants.
"I'm not sure. Usually I can tell, but in the last year, he's changed so much. I can't tell you how relieved I am that he's not hurt."
"We all are, Rainbow. This year has been bad. We can only hope that the next will be better."
"Maybe."
Sel tried to roll over, and gasped. Any pain she had felt before now seemed like a blessing. Her mind hadn't been working properly, and she couldn't comprehend what she had felt. Before, a dull ache and numbness had covered everything, a glass wall had separated her from the worst of the pain. Now, everything was poignant and sharp.
The girl with the light hair yelped happily and came over. "Good! I guess I hadn't any need to worry then! You're better now, I guess, since you're up."
Sel gaped at the girl's absurd comment. How could she be fine when there was lightning in her body, burning her from the inside out?
"Canary, give her something for the pain. I think it's killing her." The girl with the darker hair--Rainbow, she remembered-- smiled at her. "But from what Brian told us, you got off easy. Getting hit by a car sounds really painful."
Sel could only nod.
"I guess you're wondering where you are. You're in Rainbowland, and I'm Rainbow Brite. This is Canary Yellow, the Color Kid of Yellow. Together with the Sprites and the other Color Kids, we put all the color in the world. When you got hit by that car, you were brought here for some reason that we can't figure out. Brian ended up closer to the castle, and we found him almost immediately. You we didn't know about, since Brian was unconscious, but the Sprites found you, and Krys brought you here. If it weren't for him, you'd probably be dead."
Sel stared.
So it was true. When she was little, she had thought someone-- a girl like her-- had made the rainbows and put them in the world and made all the colors. She hadn't known how she had known, and all her friends, even at that age, had thought her crazy for it. And she had eventually dropped the idea to make them stop teasing her. But she had been right. And when she asked herself, "how?", she didn't know the answer.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
She slept, on and off, for the next three days. The light-haired girl-- Canary-- took care of her most of the time, chattering cheerfully to fill the dark silence Sel kept between them. In a day she learned not to look Sel in the eye; her eyes were filled with spiteful questions and anger. She had been ripped out of her home, away from the only parents she knew, and they couldn't-- or wouldn't-- tell her why.
When Canary wasn't there, a sprite usually was. Once a girl in an orange dress, Lala Orange, had taken care of her, talking nonstop about how she would show Sel how to use makeup when she was better. Sel pretended to sleep to get her to be quiet. All she wanted was rest and an explaination as to why she was here.
*And I'll probably never get one.*
On the third day, Canary said cheerfully that she had a visitor. Wondering who would be insane enough to come to see her and hoping it was Brian, Sel sat up, trying to see who her visitor was before he came in.
It wasn't Brian. It was a young man Sel thought looked vaguely familiar, but couldn't say from where. He was, she thought slowly, not bad looking, with red-brown hair and determined gray eyes.
"Sel, this is Krys. He was the one who brought you here after the sprites found you. Krys, Sel." Canary said cheerfully.
He nodded at her, and Sel stared at him harshly, though she didn't know why she was angry.
"I guess I'll just leave you two alone to talk, since there's probably so much you want to ask each other," Canary remarked, and left them into the hands of a cold silence.
Well," Krys said after a few minutes, awkwardly attempting to fill up the unnatural quiet, "you look a lot better than the last time I saw you."
"I guess I should say thank you," Sel said quietly. "For saving my life and all."
"No problem," he responded loftily. "I'm used to getting girls out of messes."
Sel stared at him, hoping she hadn't heard what she thought she heard in his tone. "Are you saying girls aren't capable of looking after themselves?"
He shrugged. "Females just don't have the sense and strength of men."
"Wait just a durned second! I didn't ask to get hit by that car, and I barely saw it coming! And it seems you've forgotten, a *boy* was also hit by the same car!"
"Brian wasn't hurt as badly as you were," he remarked absently, as if her protest was futile and of no importance.
"That's only because I shoved him out of the way!"
"And now you're trying to compensate for your mistake." A slight smirk that Sel wouldn't have seen if she wasn't an expert at reading people to find out if they were making fun of her or not tugged at Krys's lips, suggesting her ignorance and stupidity at fighting truth.
"Stop that! I'm not an idiot! D'ya want me to prove it? Just let me get out of this dratted bed--" She started to stand up, her body screaming at every movement.
He put up his hands, visibly shocked. "Don't! You'll hurt yourself!"
"You're hurting me and every other woman in existance more! Take all that back or I'll kick your ass!"
"Will you calm down?! What is wrong with you?"
"I've been hit by a car, yanked out of my home, chatted at by garrulous idiots who don't realize how boring and meaningless their lives are, and now insulted by a male chauvinist pig for being female! That's what's wrong with me! I want to know why I'm not in my room with my cat and my mother now, and I want to know how I can get back, *now!* I have a life there, and I want to go back to it! Leave me alone!" Sel sat down and, without knowing why, began to sob.
He put his hands down, and quietly said, "If that's the way you want it, then I'll tell them to let you be."
Sel nodded, not looking up. She was so lost in misery that she didn't hear the door shut. She cried until she fell asleep, forgetting even her plea for the nightmares to leave her alone. And they came in a rush of fever, more intense then ever, and she tried to fight them off, kicking and screaming silently, begging them too late to leave.
She didn't wake when someone walked in and pulled the blanket back over her shoulders, and ran a hand over her too-hot skin, whispering, "I'm sorry."
And the nightmares left.
BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!
"Uggh..." Sel moaned as she rolled over. She hit the button on the clock and sat up. "God, Mondays suck beyond suckiness," she muttered, looking at the rain pouring down the window. She didn't want to get up. She didn't want to face another day as the "school freak." She wanted to stay in bed, fall back asleep and dream. Her dreams were always so nice, except for the occasional nightmare. *Like last night,* she thought with a shudder. *Maybe if I went back to sleep, I could erase the bad dreams with good ones. It's what usually happens.*
Somehow she managed to haul herself into the bathroom. Glancing in the mirror, she was surprised it didn't crack. Her curly blonde hair was a frizzy mess, like always. Her eyes--green, with a tinge of gold near the middle--were bloodshot, with bags and shadows under them from lack of sleep. Her skin was white under its spring tan. Filling the cup by the sink and drinking from it, she noticed that the rim of the cup was stained red. She rolled her eyes and spit the water in her mouth into the sink. It, too, was tinged red. She drank again, and spit. *God,* she thought, *why does this always happen? Honestly, every nightmare....* She looked into the mirror again, and noticed her bottom lip had split, and the blood had dried on her chin, not to mention the fact that her mouth was full of blood from some unknown injury.
*I should tell someone,* she thought as she brushed her teeth. *I really should tell Mom. She always says I can tell her anything.* She grinned at her own stupidity, and winced when her lip split again. *Yeah, right. Mom, I've been having this nightmare since I was two, and it's happening more and more often, and there's this dead lady who I think is my birth mother telling me that I'm a Dreamspeaker and that I should go to Rainbowland to be trained. My ass she'd listen. Hell, I don't even know what half those things are. Dreamspeaker. What was I on when I went to sleep last night?*
She spat into the sink, more foam stained crimson washed away by the clear water. *And what was all that about that little furry guy? He had a kind of nice voice--in a grandfather type way. It made him sound really fatherly and sweet--* she smiled crookedly-- *despite the fact he was yelling something along the lines of "The daughter of Melayel will cause the destruction of the universe! We *cannot trust her!*" Greeeat. Add death and destruction to the list of subliminal messages being sent to me by The Voices of the Rice Crispies.*
Much as she joked about her nightmares, they scared her. She shuddered when she thought about the dark, shapeless shadow that had haunted her for as long as she remembered. Her last thought before sleep was always, "Please, no nightmares." And it didn't help; the nightmares came anyway, without want or permission.
*And this one.... this was worse than all the others. They're getting worse all the time.* Sel felt her heart speed up as she remembered last night's horror, the dark shape, the woman's screams of agony, the smell of death, the red light, and worst of all, the cruel, high laugh that cut through it all like a spear, ignoring all reason and all laws of the universe, sharper and grimmer than any sound Sel had ever heard.
As she tried to calm herself, Sel fingered her necklace for comfort. "Get a grip, girl," she told herself. "Come on. It's over, it's okay, it's all right," and her breathing slowed.
She looked at the necklace to keep her mind from going back to the nightmare. It was silver, with a Celtic knot charm on it. She had had it for as long as she could remember. She assumed it came from her birth mother, wherever she was now.
Sel had wanted to find her birth parents for years, since she was old enough to understand what "adopted" meant. Sel loved her adoptive parents; they had taken her in when they found her, a six-month-old baby on the doorstep, with no clue of who she was. But still...there was something missing. She wanted....no, *needed*--to know why her mother would have given her up. Was she not good enough? Had her parents even wanted a daughter? Did they even give her a name?
Sel's adoptive parents had named her after her mother's sister, Selene Iris Rennald. Yes, *Selene.* Yes, *Iris.* Yes, they had named her after a moon goddess and a heavenly messenger. Sel couldn't blame her parents, but come on. Selene? Had they any clue about the teasing she would get? It only hurt her more that her hair was light blonde and frizzy, and that she couldn't even think about dating a boy in her grade without gagging. She sighed. *Thirteen is way too young for dating. Maybe in three months.*
She turned the knob on the shower so the water could heat up. *I wish I knew what those dreams meant. I mean, it couldn't be prophetic, could it? Definitely not. I haven't had a prophetic dream in a year or so, and I used to get them all the time. Weekly, even.* As she pulled off the T-shirt she wore to bed, she caught a glance of herself in the mirror. The mark was still there. The only people that knew about it were her and her parents. She always made sure to hide it otherwise. Just above her left breast, there was a small brown mark, shaped like a circle with a five point star inside it. Her mother claimed it was a birth mark, but Sel knew better. She had never seen a birth mark that outright resembled anything aside from blobs. It had to be something different, God knows what. She had hoped that one day she would wake up, and it would be gone.
Sel hated that mark. She wasn't even sure why, but for some reason it reminded her of evil, of a bad memory someone was trying to forget, but kept surfacing again and again in their brain. Whenever she saw it, she couldn't shake the feeling that it was the by-product of a brush with a being that was so purely evil that it made her shudder. "Stop thinking like you're a character in Jekyll and Hyde, Selly-girl," she muttered, using her silent nickname for herself. "You can ask your birth mother. When you find her, you ask her. And when you find her, she'll take you to live with her and you'll never have to see THS again. Now get ready for another day of hell on earth."
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Monday at school started normally. Being shunned by the jocks and ditzes as Sel carefully made her way towards her locker. Book-checked in the hallway. Homeroom teacher droning on about the Industrial Revolution (they were eight chapters behind where they should be, considering it was April). Lila sick again.
*Of course she's sick. The one day I really need to talk to her, she's sick. Great,* Sel thought, thinking about her best--and only--friend. *Just to spite me, of course!*
"Watch it, bitch!" someone said as he knocked into her. For the second time, Sel's books spilled to the floor as she went down on her knees. She looked up, straight into the face of Kyle Falklaris. *Crap. Crap, crap, crap. I just had to run into him of all people!*
"Scuze me for being alive!" Sel spat at him. He growled and walked on. Sel sighed and went to the process of picking up her books. She was surprised when her hand bumped into someone else's. She looked up from the floor to see the face of a boy she had seen around, but didn't know.
"Sorry," she said, hurridly pulling her hand away from his.
He just smiled. "It's okay," he said. "You look like your day isn't going too well." He grinned, handed Sel her math book, stood up, and reached down to give Sel a hand. "I'm Brian."
"Sel," she said, shaking his hand. "I haven't seen you around much, Brian."
He shrugged. "I guess our schedules aren't very alike. Like right now, I should be at..." he looked at the clock, "...English."
*English, while I'm at algebra. In an entirely different wing of the school. Ah.*
"Why aren't you there today?"
"Doctor's appointment. I just got here." The bell rang, signaling the start of second period. Sel slammed her hand on her forehead.
"CRAP!" Sel yelled. "I'm late!"
"Whoooaa," Brian said. "You know, if you're gonna be late, you might as well take your time about it."
Sel grinned. "Good point."
"So, you're in eighth grade?" Brian asked. Sel nodded. "Thirteen?" She nodded again.
"And you're a ninth-grader, right?" She asked.
He answered, "Yep, and fourteen."
*He's a grade above me,* Sel thought. *So why the heck is he being nice to me? I mean, everyone in this whole dang school knows about me. Not to mention the junior high is the scape goat of the school.*
They continued to talk about various subjects during their walk to their separate classes. Eventually Sel came to the math wing. "Well, um, thanks for the help, Brian," she said awkwardly.
Brian smiled. "No problem. Sel turned around, preparing to walk to her class. Then--
"Hey, Sel?"
"Yeah?" She turned around to face Brian again.
"Do you have anything to do tonight?"
"Uhh.....no," she replied as she, bewildered, wracked her mind for activities. "I'm not doing anything."
"Could I walk you home tonight?" Sel was so taken aback by the question that she stared blankly at him for a few seconds, then stuttered, "Uh, yeah, sure. Whatever."
He smiled again. "Great. I'll meet you at your locker after school. It's in the eighth grade hall, right?" She nodded, and he turned and walked away.
*What the hell?* Sel thought as she walked into math. *First a nightmare, then a boy I never even met asks if he can walk me home. How much weirder will today get?*
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Sel sat beside her locker after school, after managing to avoid most of her classmates for the day. After the strange talk with Brian, her day had been relatively normal. Boring, yes, but blessedly normal.
*Somehow, I get the feeling that I'm not going to have much more normal,* she thought as she waited. *But how many friggin times today have I had a 'feeling'?*
Just at then moment, someone said, "Hey, Sel, you ready?" and knocked Sel out of her thoughts.
She looked up to see Brian. "Yeah, I'm ready."
"You live anywhere around here?" Brian asked.
"About a mile away," Sel answered.
"That's about where I live," Brian commented.
"Really?" Sel asked, interested. "I thought I was the only one in the neighborhood who went to THS."
They got into a conversation about the school baseball team, then into homework, their families, and their friends before they fell silent.
*Why is he being so quiet? I asked him what group he hangs with at school, and he says he doesn't. He can't be a loner like me. I thought Lila and I were the single loners at THS. And when I ask him about his other friends, he says he doesn't have any. Why wouldn't anyone want to be friends with him? He's nice and funny and smart. I'd kill to be friends with a person like this, especially since we have a lot in common.*
*Maybe it has something to do with the grayness. Maybe he notices it too. But why would he? Even Lila doesn't and she's the one who believes in all that voodoo stuff.* She glanced at Brian, who was kicking a stone along the sidewalk. *And yet... I think there's something that this boy knows that makes him more that he seems. So, maybe if I ask, he won't think I'm crazy. It's worth a shot.*
Sel took a deep breath, and, hoping he wouldn't think her insane, said, "You know, it's funny, but have you noticed everyone's been seeming melacholy lately? I know I sound nuts, but it just seems like everything is a little less....colorful,"
Brian's eyes flickered. "Yeah, I noticed that too. And I haven't seen a rainbow for a really, really long time."
Rainbows. Sel had nearly forgotten about them. She barely thought about her childhood obsession anymore. When she was a little girl she had been convinced that there was a little kid like her making rainbows. She swore that she had seen her once. But, of course, it couldn't be true. Especially now.
"I guess it's the after effects of the long winter," she commented dully. "I mean, my mom said that was the hardest one in ten years, including the one four years ago, and that's saying something."
"That was a bad year," Brian agreed. "It was really tough not to give up."
Sel nodded, knowing the feeling well. "I've been feeling like that a lot lately, too."
"Like you just want to crawl into bed and stay there--"
"Because you know that today's not going to be any better than yesterday and there's no point in trying?"
Brian nodded. "Yeah. Exactly."
*So that means that he knows how hard it is to keep yourself from feeling that way, and how much a fight it takes to believe that it's going to get better. I guess there *is* more to him than meets the eye.*
"You know what I wish?" he asked suddenly, startling Sel out of her thoughts.
"What?" She moved to the curb and checked for cars before she crossed the street, Brian beside her.
"I wish--"
"Brian, watch out!" she yelled as a bright red car came out of nowhere. She pushed him to dodge, but knew that neither of them were going to get away in time.
She heard a horn, and yelling and the sound of metal grating against bone, and felt a horrible, paralyzing pain in her head, and before the darkness gathered her into its merciful arms, her last thought was, "Please, no nightmares."
She didn't realize she was stepping into a living one.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
When Sel woke up, the first thought in her head was that she felt considerably worse than she had ever had before. For once in her life, she could understand why Zeus was willing to let Hephaestus split his head open to stop his headache. Her arm felt broken, and her whole side was so tender it hurt to move.
It felt like her brain was dead. She couldn't remember what had happened. She couldn't think of anything at all, except that she wished her side would stop hurting. She moved her arm, and gasped when she realized how much it hurt to move it. She picked up the other and touched her head. It was sticky. *Did I get pop on my head somehow?* she wondered, not realizing how absurd her thoughts were; she didn't even realize that she was in a grassy field speckled with star-shaped trees. When she looked at her hand, she figured out that the stickiness was blood.
*Great. *More* blood. Just what I need.*
Then it hit her. The car. The darkness. The plea.
Brian.
"Oh, shit..." she muttered aloud. "God, *please* let him be okay.... Brian?" she croaked, wondering if he heard her. After waiting a few minutes, she realized that either he was still out or he was nowhere near here. She hoped beyond everything that it was the former.
Slowly, painfully, she sat up. And gasped.
She noticed the trees. And the flowers, and the rainbow waterfall, and how beautiful everything was. It was so *colorful.* Even in her anxiety, she couldn't help but stop and marvel at this lovely Utopia.
After catching her breath, and her thoughts, she started crawling in a circle, trying to find him. She had no luck.
"This is impossible," she muttered as she crawled painfully, pausing every few seconds to overcome her vertigo. "I haven't found anything, not a backpack, not a hat, not even some blood, and I know that car couldn't have missed him entirely." She started up gently sloping hill. To her, it seemed like trying to climb Everest. "Even if I got him partly out of the way, he still would have been clipped by it, at least. And where *is* he? In all those vanishing stories all the people end up in the same place. And-- Oh my freakin God...."
The top of the hill had a perfect view of the entire valley she was in, from the moutains to the beautiful castle to the caves to the small village of tiny huts.
"Oh," she breathed, trying to control her amazement. The land around her created such an aura of serentity and happiness that she could feel its smooth warmth against her skin. Suddenly nothing seemed to be as bad as she thought it had.
The fears and worries gone, she felt overwhelmed by fatigue. Sel lay down on the grass, careful not to jar stiff muscles and bones more than she had to. With the nightmares refusing to leave her alone, sleep had become a long neglected friend.
*Rest....it sounds so nice.....and I doubt any night-demon would dare trouble me here....* She felt like she was floating, borne on a breeze of calm.
Suddenly she heard, in chittering and changes in tone, someone say, "Get Rainbow! Now! She needs help! She's hurt!"
Sel cracked open one eye sleepily. A small, furry green creature stood above her, chattering to a blue being of the same size. In her fatigue, the realization that they were the same kind as the creature in her nightmares escaped her. "Are you going to give me something to make it hurt less? That'd be really nice...." She saw the red-haired boy with worried eyes kneel beside her, and the last thing she did before she slipped into blessed darkness was whisper, "You're all right. "You'll keep the nightmares away. I know you will."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
She heard the voices before she saw their owners. "She's slept so *long.* I'm starting to worry that she might not wake up at all."
"You'll do something, Canary. I know you will. She'll be fine."
"I don't know....if the Sprites hadn't found her and Krys hadn't brought her here when they did, I don't doubt that she would have died."
"I know. It was lucky."
"How did Brian take it?"
At the mention of Brian, Sel opened her eyes to see who the speakers were. One looked like a girl of about twelve, with strawberry blonde hair in a high ponytail and a blue dress. The other looked a little younger than her, with the lightest hair Sel had seen on anyone under fifty and a yellow shirt and pants.
"I'm not sure. Usually I can tell, but in the last year, he's changed so much. I can't tell you how relieved I am that he's not hurt."
"We all are, Rainbow. This year has been bad. We can only hope that the next will be better."
"Maybe."
Sel tried to roll over, and gasped. Any pain she had felt before now seemed like a blessing. Her mind hadn't been working properly, and she couldn't comprehend what she had felt. Before, a dull ache and numbness had covered everything, a glass wall had separated her from the worst of the pain. Now, everything was poignant and sharp.
The girl with the light hair yelped happily and came over. "Good! I guess I hadn't any need to worry then! You're better now, I guess, since you're up."
Sel gaped at the girl's absurd comment. How could she be fine when there was lightning in her body, burning her from the inside out?
"Canary, give her something for the pain. I think it's killing her." The girl with the darker hair--Rainbow, she remembered-- smiled at her. "But from what Brian told us, you got off easy. Getting hit by a car sounds really painful."
Sel could only nod.
"I guess you're wondering where you are. You're in Rainbowland, and I'm Rainbow Brite. This is Canary Yellow, the Color Kid of Yellow. Together with the Sprites and the other Color Kids, we put all the color in the world. When you got hit by that car, you were brought here for some reason that we can't figure out. Brian ended up closer to the castle, and we found him almost immediately. You we didn't know about, since Brian was unconscious, but the Sprites found you, and Krys brought you here. If it weren't for him, you'd probably be dead."
Sel stared.
So it was true. When she was little, she had thought someone-- a girl like her-- had made the rainbows and put them in the world and made all the colors. She hadn't known how she had known, and all her friends, even at that age, had thought her crazy for it. And she had eventually dropped the idea to make them stop teasing her. But she had been right. And when she asked herself, "how?", she didn't know the answer.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
She slept, on and off, for the next three days. The light-haired girl-- Canary-- took care of her most of the time, chattering cheerfully to fill the dark silence Sel kept between them. In a day she learned not to look Sel in the eye; her eyes were filled with spiteful questions and anger. She had been ripped out of her home, away from the only parents she knew, and they couldn't-- or wouldn't-- tell her why.
When Canary wasn't there, a sprite usually was. Once a girl in an orange dress, Lala Orange, had taken care of her, talking nonstop about how she would show Sel how to use makeup when she was better. Sel pretended to sleep to get her to be quiet. All she wanted was rest and an explaination as to why she was here.
*And I'll probably never get one.*
On the third day, Canary said cheerfully that she had a visitor. Wondering who would be insane enough to come to see her and hoping it was Brian, Sel sat up, trying to see who her visitor was before he came in.
It wasn't Brian. It was a young man Sel thought looked vaguely familiar, but couldn't say from where. He was, she thought slowly, not bad looking, with red-brown hair and determined gray eyes.
"Sel, this is Krys. He was the one who brought you here after the sprites found you. Krys, Sel." Canary said cheerfully.
He nodded at her, and Sel stared at him harshly, though she didn't know why she was angry.
"I guess I'll just leave you two alone to talk, since there's probably so much you want to ask each other," Canary remarked, and left them into the hands of a cold silence.
Well," Krys said after a few minutes, awkwardly attempting to fill up the unnatural quiet, "you look a lot better than the last time I saw you."
"I guess I should say thank you," Sel said quietly. "For saving my life and all."
"No problem," he responded loftily. "I'm used to getting girls out of messes."
Sel stared at him, hoping she hadn't heard what she thought she heard in his tone. "Are you saying girls aren't capable of looking after themselves?"
He shrugged. "Females just don't have the sense and strength of men."
"Wait just a durned second! I didn't ask to get hit by that car, and I barely saw it coming! And it seems you've forgotten, a *boy* was also hit by the same car!"
"Brian wasn't hurt as badly as you were," he remarked absently, as if her protest was futile and of no importance.
"That's only because I shoved him out of the way!"
"And now you're trying to compensate for your mistake." A slight smirk that Sel wouldn't have seen if she wasn't an expert at reading people to find out if they were making fun of her or not tugged at Krys's lips, suggesting her ignorance and stupidity at fighting truth.
"Stop that! I'm not an idiot! D'ya want me to prove it? Just let me get out of this dratted bed--" She started to stand up, her body screaming at every movement.
He put up his hands, visibly shocked. "Don't! You'll hurt yourself!"
"You're hurting me and every other woman in existance more! Take all that back or I'll kick your ass!"
"Will you calm down?! What is wrong with you?"
"I've been hit by a car, yanked out of my home, chatted at by garrulous idiots who don't realize how boring and meaningless their lives are, and now insulted by a male chauvinist pig for being female! That's what's wrong with me! I want to know why I'm not in my room with my cat and my mother now, and I want to know how I can get back, *now!* I have a life there, and I want to go back to it! Leave me alone!" Sel sat down and, without knowing why, began to sob.
He put his hands down, and quietly said, "If that's the way you want it, then I'll tell them to let you be."
Sel nodded, not looking up. She was so lost in misery that she didn't hear the door shut. She cried until she fell asleep, forgetting even her plea for the nightmares to leave her alone. And they came in a rush of fever, more intense then ever, and she tried to fight them off, kicking and screaming silently, begging them too late to leave.
She didn't wake when someone walked in and pulled the blanket back over her shoulders, and ran a hand over her too-hot skin, whispering, "I'm sorry."
And the nightmares left.