Rise of Ember Quin

12

She wakes like she’s been thrown from a car: airborne for a split second, then full-body collision with the mattress, all joints rattled and muscles braced. Ember’s eyes snap open to total darkness, her lungs refusing to work, her heart an angry fist inside her chest. It takes a full breath—two, maybe three—before she registers that she is not still at the party, not in the bathroom or the hallway or marooned by the roadside. She is here, in her own room, back in her own skin. The sheets are a noose around her calves, hot and damp from sweat, pinning her down. Her mouth is open, but no sound comes out.

She scrambles, kicks free, nearly throws herself to the floor. Her knees hit the carpet with a dull thud, skinning themselves raw, but she barely feels it. Her hands are in motion before her mind catches up—palming her thighs, then her hips, checking for the punch stain, for blood, for any trace of the disaster. All she finds is the damp press of her own nightgown and the frantic thumping of her pulse. For a second, she can still taste the cold sweetness of party punch in her mouth, metallic and sticky. She gags, just once.

Her room is silent. So silent that it rings. The only sound is her own uneven breath, echoing inside the little box she calls a life. She clutches at her chest, willing her heart to slow, counting the seconds the way she used to when she was a kid and thought monsters would lose interest if you could just hold your breath long enough. She’s too old for that now, but the logic is the same. Survive the moment. Outwait the fear.

She pushes herself upright, knees complaining, and sits on the edge of the bed. Her hands are still shaking—badly—and she digs her nails into her palms, focusing on the pain. One thing at a time: ground yourself. She forces her eyes open, searches the dark for landmarks. The window, still cracked open from the day before, letting in a draft that smells like grass and late-summer rot. The chair by the desk, draped in hoodies and unfolded laundry, her life’s camouflage. The cheap full-length mirror, askew from where she kicked it last week, now reflecting nothing but void.

She looks for the clock. She knows it’s stupid, but she needs to see it. The digital readout is a red eye on the bedside table: 3:17 AM. The numbers are so bright in the dark that they burn afterimages into her retinas. She stares at them, lets the glow hammer her back into the present. 3:17 AM means it was just a dream, that she is not bleeding on the side of the road, not trapped in a party rerun.

She wipes her face, only now realizing that her cheeks are wet. Not with tears, not really—just that thin, salty sweat that comes after a nightmare so bad you have to check for injuries. Her hair is plastered to her forehead, matted down at the crown. She rakes her fingers through it, tries to remember if she has to be somewhere in the morning. School. She has school.

She stands, wobbling. Her legs are still half-numb. She looks down and sees that her knees are scabbed from when she hit the floor, tiny beads of blood bright against her skin. She almost laughs. The brain is a sick little thing, always ready to turn memory into pain.

She turns to the nightstand and gropes for the lamp, the one her mom bought on clearance, shaped like a cartoon moon with a painted-on smile. The switch is stiff and sticky; it takes three tries to get it to click. The bulb flares on, and the world is reduced to a harsh yellow circle, pushing back the shadows.

Everything in her room looks different under the lamp. The posters—one of an indie band Rae said she’d love, one of a cartoon fox that embarrassed her now—are faded and curling at the corners. The carpet is trampled flat from years of pacing. The wall above her bed is bare, except for a single thumbtack where a photo used to be. Her phone, facedown on the floor from where she must have thrown it during the night, is dark and silent.

She stands there for a minute, breathing. The panic is gone, mostly, but her skin is still crawling, her scalp prickling like she’s wearing a helmet made of static. She checks her hands again, flexes them, amazed at how small and fragile they look in the lamplight.

She paces the perimeter of her room—four steps by two, back and forth—trying to walk off the feeling. Each time she passes the mirror, she catches a flash of herself: wild-eyed, hunched, hair frizzed to hell. For a second, she wonders what Jackson would think if he saw her like this. She pushes the thought away so hard it almost knocks her over.

The silence is overwhelming. She wants to scream just to fill it, to keep her own thoughts at bay. Instead, she sits back down on the bed and rocks forward, elbows on knees. She listens to the house—the faint creak of the water heater, the buzz of the fridge in the kitchen. No one else is up. Her parents’ room is on the other side of the house, walled off by a hallway and a shut door. She is totally alone.

She looks at the clock again: 3:19 now. Two minutes since she woke. It feels like an hour. She thinks about turning on her phone, about texting Rae, but the shame is still too close to the surface. She imagines the message: Had a nightmare, can’t sleep, need you. She can’t bring herself to do it. Instead, she curls up in a ball on the bed, lamp still blazing, and lets her breathing slow to something almost normal.

She wonders if Jackson ever dreams about her. She doubts it.

She stays like that, knees to chest, face buried in her arms, until the edges of the dream finally dissolve and all that’s left is the feeling of being awake at 3:19 in the morning, wanting to be anyone else.