a stiff breeze, her shirt and jeans pressed to her skin from its force, her gaze focused across churning waves toward a small island, blurred with rain. Becca followed the girl’s gaze, staring past her to the island as well, a forlorn, rocky tor that looked as inhospitable as an alien planet. The girl shivered and so did Becca. The cold burrowed beneath her skin and gooseflesh rose on her arms.
The girl was familiar. So familiar…
Becca stared at her hard, putting a physical effort into it.
Is she someone I know?
Becca struggled to remember. Who was she? Where was she? Why was she pulling Becca into her world?
Distantly, she felt the light-headedness, the clammy warning that she was about to pass out. No, no, no! Caught between the two worlds, her body failing in one, her mind desperately searching for answers in the other, Becca focused on the girl.
“Who are you?” she called, but the rising wind threw the words back into her throat.
The phantom girl took a step forward, the tips of her boots balanced over the edge of the cliff. Becca reached out an arm. Her mouth opened in protest.
“Stop! Stop!”
Was she going to throw herself to her death?
Becca lunged forward just as the girl turned to face her. Instead of a profile, Becca caught a full-on view of her face. “Jessie?” she whispered in shock, her head reeling.
Jessie just stared at Becca and Becca, powerless, stared back. The wind danced through Jessie’s hair and around her small, serious face. Becca’s heart pounded painfully.
Jessie Brentwood? Her missing classmate? Gone for twenty years…
Except now, in Becca’s vision.
“You’re too close to the edge!” Becca warned.
The phantom girl lifted a finger to her lips, then mouthed something at Becca.
“What?” Becca tried to clear her mind. “What?”
In the gathering mist the girl’s image began to fade. Becca pushed forward but it felt as if her feet were mired to the ground.
“Jessie!” she cried.
The girl melded with the rain and the watery world dimmed into endless gray.
Becca sensed tears on her lashes and a dull throb in her head. Somewhere, a male voice was saying, “Hey, lady. You okay?”
With difficulty, Becca opened her eyes. She was in the mall. Sprawled on the tiled floor. Packages tossed asunder. No more ocean. No more wind. No more Jessie.
Oh, God, she looked like a fool!
Tucking her legs beneath her, Becca tried to pull herself together. It was difficult to come back to reality. It always was after one of her visions. The damn things. She’d thought they were behind her. A symptom of her childhood. She hadn’t had one since high school, and she was now thirty-four years old.
But she never forgot. Not completely.
“I’m fine,” she said in a voice she didn’t recognize as her own. Clearing her throat, she fought the blinding stabs of pain that flashed through her head. Another unwelcome part of the visions. “I tripped.”
“Yeah?”
The young man bending over her wasn’t buying it. A small crowd of “tweenagers” had gathered, small enough that Becca figured she hadn’t been out that long, maybe mere seconds. One of the girls was looking at her with huge, round eyes and Becca could still hear the reverberations of the girl’s scream as she’d watched Becca go down. She was holding a soda from the nearby food court. Vaguely Becca remembered glancing their way just before she was overtaken by her vision.
“You were, like, having an attack,” a different girl said. This one wore a hat that smashed her bangs to her forehead and she peeked out between the strands of blond hair. They all looked ready to jump and run. Briefly, Becca thought about yelling “Boo!” and sending them stumbling over themselves, away from the crazy lady.
Click. Click. Click.
Becca heard the snap of a cell phone being shut. One of the guys had taken a series of pictures of her fainting spell. That did it! Stupid punk kid. Becca climbed unsteadily to her feet and gave the boy the evil eye. He looked torn between bravado and fear. Becca was about to give him a piece of her mind but was saved the effort when a heavyset woman in a dusty blue uniform steamed toward them.
“Back off,” she bit out at the boy who attempted to swagger toward his friends, even though he was boiling to escape. They all half ran, half loped toward the food court and an exit door.
“You all right, ma’am?” the security woman asked.
Flushing with embarrassment, Becca nodded, collecting her packages. She was definitely not all right.
“You look kinda pale. Maybe you should sit down.”
“This happens to me. Not enough air getting in. Vagus nerve, you know. Shuts down the whole system sometimes.”
It was clearly mumbo jumbo to the security guard, and it was a flat-out lie to boot. Doctors had once rubbed their jaws, speculating what caused Becca to faint and have visions. They ignored the visions, concentrating on the cause of her fainting, and had postulated and supposed and theorized to Becca’s parents, Barbara and Jim Ryan, but there had never been any satisfactory explanations.
“I’m fine,” she reassured the guard one more time, hanging on to the shreds of her dignity with an effort. Before she could be questioned further, Becca headed out the mall exit and ducked through a drizzling rain to her car, a blue Volkswagen Jetta wedged into a spot between two oversized SUVs. Feeling a twinge in one shoulder from her fall, Becca squeezed through the driver’s side door and tossed her bags into the passenger seat, then climbed in. Her body was still tingling, too, as if her muscles had been asleep. She dropped her forehead to the steering wheel and took several deep breaths. This vision had been different. Almost touchable. She’d actually reached for the girl. That had never happened before.
Was it Jessie? Was it?
Becca shoved her rain-damped hair from her eyes, silently told herself to get over it, then lifted her head only to gaze blankly through the windshield at the mall’s cream-colored stucco walls. A twentysomething woman was standing under the portico near the doorway while smoking a cigarette and talking on a cell phone, but Becca, lost in her own thoughts, barely saw her.
Becca hadn’t had a vision since that last year of high school. Not once. She’d managed to convince herself over the years that she wasn’t odd. Some kind of freak. That she wasn’t losing her mind.
But this vision of Jessie had been stronger than anything she’d experienced before. And a helluva lot more frightening.
What did it mean?
“Nothing! Face it, you’re just a freak,” she muttered under her breath. What she did not need now in her life, absolutely did not, was any kind of eerie visions or attacks or whatever you wanted to call them. She’d hoped they had died a quick
