Chapter 7
Sami looked in the bathroom mirror at the rest stop and cringed. She looked awful, she thought to herself. Her hair was a mess and her clothing bedraggled. She looked in her purse for a comb and miraculously found one, although getting it through the tangles was a bigger challenge. Finally she finished getting through the mass of tangles and washed her face. She tried to smooth over her clothing, but without much luck. She took a final look in the mirror and decided that she'd done the best she could with her appearance and left the ladies room. Outside in the moonlight she made her way to the diner and went inside. She sat down at the counter and ordered a burger, fries and a coke. She sat in silence and her mind wandered back to the dream she'd had on the bus. She couldn't shake the feeling that it had been a warped version of real events, events from her past. But how could that be? She'd been at a boarding school yes, but she didn't remember it looking like the one in her dream and she couldn't remember it ever being under attack. Her memories of school were not the most pleasant, but that was normal considering that she'd never liked school, mainly because she'd never been good at it. An image suddenly burst inside her mind. She sat in a classroom, all her attention focused on the man in the front of the room, the man in the wheelchair. He was addressing the class but what he said made no sense to her. He talked about the necessity of secrecy and about not using what they had against others, except as a defense. She turned her head and noticed the good-looking boy beside her. He turned and smiled, winking at her. "Genie, pay attention!" he whispered to her. She blushed and turned away but as she turned her head to steal another glance at the boy the image vanished as quickly as it had come. Sami shook her head to clear it as the horn on the bus gave two short blasts, signaling that the bus was ready to move on again. She asked the waitress for a doggie bag and gathering her things made her way back onto the bus, taking her troubled memories with her.
The next morning, after a troubled night's sleep, Sami finally arrived at her destination, Breckenridge, Colorado. She went to the desk and asked directions to the boarding school she had attended there, only to be told that the school had closed down several years earlier. "Closed down?" Sami asked the clerk at the desk. "But how could that be? Why would it close?" "There was a fire there a long time ago. The building's condemned now." The clerk answered and looked back down at her papers. "Oh." Sami said in disappointment. "Well is there any way of getting up there?" "Well I suppose you could take a taxi up, though I can't imagine why anybody would want to do that. Say what do you want up at the school…?" The clerk looked up, but Sami was already gone.