Take Me Away
Chapter 5
I walked into the Mills house slowly, trying to avoid my imminent doom.
"I know you're there, Marisol."
Ah shit.
I walked into Regina's study without a word, closing the door and coming to stand in front of her desk. She gave me a smile that screamed this was all business before motioning me to sit. I did so slowly, watching her watch my every move.
"So," I began carefully. "I'm fired, yeah?"
She waited a moment before uttering one word. "No."
"No?" I asked dubiously. After the hellish night I'd had, something working in my favor seemed like even more of a long shot than Regina having a heart. Yet here were examples of both in one go.
"While you did act so carelessly that my son was able to slip off on his own and leave town, you are the most capable person for the job and the only one Henry is fully at ease around. However, should something like this ever happen again I shall see to it that you are punished accordingly. Furthermore, you'll be giving me a report on the day's events everyday after you drop off Henry until I see that you've got everything back under control. Are we clear?" Regina asked solidly.
"Crystal," I muttered. I glanced at my watch, noting that it was time to go unless I wanted to be late. "I have to take Henry to school now. May I?"
She nodded and I got out of her study as quickly as I could, popping into the kitchen and finding Henry grabbing himself some food.
"I'll take a cream cheese bagel, sesame seeds on top, yeah?" I asked with a tired grin. Henry jumped, choking on his toast before forcing some orange juice down his throat.
"You're here!" Henry grinned at me just as a sesame seed bagel popped out of the toaster.
"Looks like you knew I was coming," I smirked. He slathered cream cheese all over both halves of the bagel, putting them together and hanging them to me in a napkin.
"What did she do to you?" Henry asked nervously. I sighed, wrapping an arm around the kid and guiding him out of the house.
"See, thanks to your little stunt I'm supposed to keep you on a leash. Which pretty much means only taking you from home to school, school to work, and work to home. Then I'm supposed to give your mother a very detailed report of the day's events until she decides she doesn't need them anymore. So, for today you are under a very tight leash. Then tomorrow I'm not gonna give a shit and the Ice Queen over there will probably have my head," I grumbled.
"Evil Queen," Henry corrected. I laughed.
"Your fairy tales are really getting to my head, Shorty."
"What do you mean?" Henry asked with an arch of his brow. There was a look in his eyes that told me I was about to feed a fire I shouldn't, but I told him anyway.
"You know I've been having crazy dreams," I muttered. "That stupid island and all."
"Yeah?"
"Well, according to my dreams, the island is Neverland and creepy kidnapper guy is Peter Pan – which, by the way, isn't the cute little redhead from the Disney movies," I said with a sigh. It really wasn't fair, he didn't even sound like Jesse McCartney.
"They're not dreams, Mari." I rolled my eyes.
"They're not memories, either, Henry. I'm not a character in your book, I'm a person. We can argue this a million times over but facts are facts. These dreams are just that, and this is reality." He shook his head at me, walking along with a look on his face that told me this conversation wasn't over.
"You'll see what I'm talking about. Eventually, you'll remember." The conviction in his voice was too strong, making me glad I left out the details of what happened after my dream.
I sighed, walking along a cut off section of the beach as Henry paced around an old wooden kid's structure that we called his castle. The kid had had a pretty rough day from what I'd heard. When he was in his only outdoor class his mother (the adoptive one) had shown up, given my sister attitude, and told Henry that his mother (the biological one) had been thrown in the slammer for something or other. The kid had a fit of defiance, telling Regina that she had somehow framed Henry's birth mom, Emma. Regina eventually stormed out of the school and let him go back to class, and when I got out of school the kid practically begged me to skip work and take him to the castle. I'd been ignoring Regina's calls on our whereabouts all afternoon, taking time now to reflect on my royally screwed up day.
My thoughts wandered back to last night, to what happened after I'd escaped my dream of Peter Pan playing in my head.
I woke up in a sweat, struggling to breathe as I tried to untangle myself from a mess of sheets. I stumbled out of bed, taking note of how dark it was in my bedroom, as if someone had gone and blotted out the moon and all of its stars. Pan's words echoed through my mind, the thought of his shadow coming to take me away sending my heart into overdrive. I made for the window, ripping back the silky curtains. Moonlight streamed in, making it just a touch easier to breathe. The light cast shadows around my room, making it suddenly very clear that I couldn't win here. If there was light, there was shadows and if there was darkness there was fear.
Whoa Mari, you're going a bit nuts don't you think? I asked myself. Get some air, kid.
Following my own orders, I unlatched the window and pushed it open to welcome the night air. A cool breeze rushed in, fanning my face and drying my sticky skin. Clouds had begun to roll in across the sky, blotting out half of the stars and making the night gray. But one annoying and ever-present star twinkled at me mischievously, reminding me again of the one and only Peter Pan. "God," I grumbled. "If you're the one who runs Neverland you can bet your Lost Boys that I am never going back." With one last breath of fresh air, i turned away from my window to go back to bed.
Of course, I wasn't expecting the floating thing with the golden eyes. I let out a shriek, stumbling back into my desk and hearing something shatter as the thing reached for me. It was black and long, like a man, and it moved so fast I could barely keep track of it. I reached behind me and grabbed the first thing I could get my hands on, which happened to be a stapler, before swinging at the thing. My hand made contact and i felt a shock of cold, but the thing reared back and gave me a quick once over.
"I'm not going back," I cried. "I don't want to." As if I'd spoken the word of God, the thing rushed forward and out the window. I shrieked once more as it passed, but once it was gone I slammed the window shut and locked it as tight as I could. Praying that I was still in a nightmare, I stumbled back to bed and crawled under the covers, yanking them over my head and trying to force myself back to sleep. Despite the lack of oxygen under the blanket, I managed to convince myself that I would wake and in the morning and find out none of this was real.
Except when I woke up in the morning, shivering and curled in a ball, I got out of bed to find a shattered flower vase near my desk. Swallowing hard, I got the sweeping pan and the broom, collecting the bits of the once beautiful vase and throwing them in the trash before getting ready for school. It hadn't been a dream. Unless the wind had gotten passed my closed window and knocked over my three pound glass vase, the only explanation was that I had knocked over the vase in my struggle with Peter Pan's shadow.
I shook my head. It had been too long a day and I couldn't keep playing the scene in my head, but I did it anyway. I wasn't going crazy, but I couldn't exactly tell anyone what was going on either. I'd have to go see Doctor Hopper for the rest of my life if I did that, so the only person I really had to look this over with was the same person I would see in a mirror. Myself.
"Some sort of thing was in my room last night and it wasn't human. I'm either going crazy or some creepy magic thing is going on where some boy breaks into my mind and sends shadows out to get me." I felt like I was going to be sick. "God, first this, then Regina and Henry. What's next, am I going to get hit by a bus?"
Don't jinx it, I thought to myself.
"That would be the least of my problems today. I can't even go home and sleep because, chances are, I'm going to have another dream. This is even worse than having to deal with Freddy Kruger." I seat in the sand, wishing I could forget today even happened.
Maybe I should go see Dr. Hopper.
I'm not crazy.
You're not okay, either.
"Have I ever really been okay?" I asked quietly. Before I could think it over, I looked up to see none other than Henry's birth mom approaching the castle. Clearly, today just wasn't going to work out for me.