ELEVEN
I couldn’t move, and everything hurt—my skin felt stretched too tight, muscles burned like they’d been lit on fire, and my bones ached deep into the marrow.
Confusion swamped me. My brain felt like it was full of cobwebs and fog. I tried to lift my arms, but they were weighed down, full of lead.
I thought I heard a steady beeping sound and voices, but all of it seemed far away, as if I was on one end of the tunnel and everything else was on the other.
I couldn’t speak. There...there was something in my throat, in the back of my throat. My arm twitched without warning, and there was a tug at the top of my hand.
Why wouldn’t my eyes open?
Panic started to dig in. Why couldn’t I move?
Something was wrong. Something was really wrong. I just wanted to open my eyes. I wanted—
I love you, Lena.
I love you, too.
The voices echoed in my head, one of them mine. Definitely mine, and the other...
“She’s starting to wake up.” A female voice interrupted my thoughts from somewhere on the other side of the tunnel.
Footsteps neared and a male said, “Getting the propofol in now.”
“This is the second time she’s woken up,” the woman replied. “Hell of a fighter. Her mother is going to be happy to hear that.”
Fighter? I didn’t understand what they were talking about, why they thought my mom would be happy to hear this—
Maybe I should drive?
Warmth hit my veins, starting at the base of my skull and then washing over me, cascading through my body, and then there were no dreams, no thoughts and no voices.
Thursday, August 10
“All I have to say is that you almost had sex with that.”
Scrunching my nose, I stared down at the phone Darynda Jones—Dary for short—had shoved in my face five seconds after walking into Joanna’s.
Joanna’s had been a staple in downtown Clearbrook since I was knee-high to a grasshopper. The restaurant was kind of stuck in the past, weirdly existing somewhere between big-hair bands and the rise of Britney Spears, but it was clean and cozy, and practically everything that came out of the kitchen was fried. Plus it had the best sweet tea in the entire state of Virginia.
“Oh man,” I murmured. “What in the world is he doing?”
“What does it look like?” Dary’s eyes widened behind her white plastic-framed glasses. “He’s basically humping a blow-up dolphin.”
I pressed my lips together, because yep, that was what it looked like.
