Be in the Real (12 page)

She was frustrated by the vagueness of it all. It didn’t seem fair that the user gave her very little for her to discover their identity and what it all meant. Determined to figure it out, she scrolled to the beginning of her blog, scanning all the comments from this particular user. At first it was relatively quick to get through all the notations left by other users, but soon the remarks increased and she felt like she was plodding through it all much too slowly. She was using all her resources to move forward, but was only capable of moving as fast as her reading capabilities would permit.
 

Time seemed to travel painfully slow, it felt as if every page she turned ahead brought her back to the beginning. She hadn’t realized how proliferous Trillian had truly been, until she was forced to revisit every piece that had ever been written on the blog.
 

With every moment that passed in Kaila’s endeavors to learn the truth, Trillian grew exceedingly impatient, attempting to force her way in and take control. Kaila didn’t blame Trillian’s eagerness to begin; she had been starved while Kaila had been in the White Room. The concept that she was sitting there in Trillian’s writing space with a computer at the ready, was like giving a child a rainbow swirled lollipop and asking them not to lick it. Kaila understood, but wasn’t quite ready to hand over control yet.

She clicked and scrolled, browsing over every comment, searching in earnest for something written by ∞, but there seemed to be nothing other than the most recent comment written just a few weeks before. By the time she had gone through it all her writing time had dwindled to nil. Her stomach growled, begging to be fed its next meal. Kaila knew that denying Trillian her moment would probably prove disastrous, but she couldn’t ignore the signals that said that Trillian’s part of the day had been eaten away by Kaila’s baseless curiosity.
 

She closed the laptop, tucked it beneath her arm and went directly to her room, depositing the computer in its customary place. All the while Trillian voiced her protest at the inhumanness of it all. To Kaila, this line of thought was humorous since Trillian wasn’t in fact human, and only borrowed a body to serve her own purposes. Despite Trillian having written thousands and thousands of words through Kaila’s very fingertips, Kaila knew little to nothing about Trillian or why she had come, only that she had been with Kaila forever, maybe even before her parents.

And just the thought of her parents dragged Kaila unwillingly back to the moment she had discovered their bodies, inert and motionless in their shared bed, the ties that they had been strangled with still wrapped around their necks. She had remembered staring at those very ties, both of which had belonged to her father. One was a blue and yellow paisley print with hints of red and purple. To Kaila’s mind the tie had always reminded her of a peacocks tail, brilliant and showy; it had been her favorite of her father’s collection. Kaila’s second favorite tie, a Christmas themed one with an image of Frosty the Snowman, with a black hat and eyes and a red scarf around his neck, was the very one that had been used to snuff out her mother’s life.

Kaila snapped out of her reverie to find that she was already sitting at a table in the cafeteria with a filled tray of food resting in front of her. The plates had been laden with all her despised foods, lima beans, broccoli and what she was certain was cow liver, heaped with mounds of caramelized onions; the disgusting fare had Trillian’s name written all over it. Kaila was surprised that Trillian was already retaliating for having been shoved to the side, it was much sooner than she might have predicted.
 

The food debacle had perturbed her enough that she almost threatened Trillian with another stint in the White Room if she didn’t cease and desist. A molecule of understanding at Trillian’s frustration made Kaila reconsider the threat, not to mention that she was loath to returning to the space that felt like a soul-sucking vortex. In truth, it took Kaila a week at minimum to fully recover from the experience.
 

Kaila glanced down at her tray again. She tried to determine if there was anything that was edible. After a quick perusal she came to the conclusion that there was nothing on the plates that would ever pass through her lips without her heaving and retching shortly after.

“What the hell do you have there?” Pauline said, letting her tray, that held a single chocolate pudding cup and an apple, fall with a bang next to Kaila. Kaila shook her head as if the movement would explain it all. But gauging by the questioning expression etched on Pauline’s face, it had not.

“Trillian,” Kaila said with a shrug.

Pauline dragged out a plastic and metal chair then sat without comment. She cast her eyes across Kaila’s tray, studying the contents. After a few beats, she plucked up the plate of liver and onions, added a few scoops of lima beans to it then laid it on her own tray.

“Gotta love me some liver,” she said with a half-smile.
 

Kaila literally shuddered at the comment. A few years back, in her quest to give all foreign foods a try she had decided to partake of the fried liver. The smell that had wafted out of the cafeteria kitchen had been divinely beefy and quite appealing when mingled with the aroma of fried onions. Up until that day onions cooked any way at all had been amongst her favorite delicacies. Onions were prized not only for their succulent flavor, but also their versatility, being the basis of many savory dishes.
 

In retrospect, Kaila had to deem beef liver a chameleon of the culinary, making the diner believe by smell and visual alone that it was in fact like all other beef. Based on the aroma it should have tasted like the finest steak, yet in reality the meat was not only disgusting to the palate but the texture of it was chalky. With a few chews it had quickly dissolved into a thick paste that bore no similarity to beef of any kind.
 

Without a word to Pauline, Kaila extricated her body from her seat. She dumped her tray and its uneaten contents on the tray racks where used dinner trays went. Kaila lined up for what would be her second trip down the food line, though she hadn’t remembered her first.

This time she loaded her plate with Shepherds pie that boasted tender chunks of beef, green peas, corn and coins of carrots, all drenched in a thick gravy that was topped by creamy mashed potatoes. For dessert, she picked a double chocolate chip cookie, counting herself lucky for having managed to swipe one before the cache was depleted. Before she could make her way back to Pauline, Derrick had stepped into Kaila’s path. Her eyes bore a straight path to the purplish and yellow, near perfect impressions of her hands around his throat.

“Can we talk?” he asked.
 

Kaila noticed the new huskiness in his voice, a direct result of her actions. She also noticed something else too, his usual bravado seemed to have vacated the premises, he almost sounded humble. His muted ego wasn’t near enough for Kaila to forgive him for his most recent slight. To her mind there was nothing he could say that would ever be cause for her to talk to him ever again.

“No.”
 

She bumped past him, intentionally driving her shoulder against his. She had used enough force that it should have knocked him over. To her utter disbelief he actually managed to stay erect. She heard, rather than saw, his cast bumping the floor beneath him as he hurried to catch up with her. Kaila was already sitting in her seat, fork ready to dive into her lunch, when Derrick arrived at her table a little out of breath from his efforts.

“What do you want?” Pauline asked, puffing up like a robin fighting for its territory.

“I want to talk to Kaila.”
 

Derrick slipped into the chair across from the two girls. He kept his focus on Kaila. Kaila was more than adept at ignoring people and was soon too entrenched in her meal to care or even notice what Derrick was rambling on about. It was only when he had grabbed her free hand, holding on for a fraction of a second before releasing her, that she was brought back to the present moment.

“Haven’t you got it through your thick skull yet Derrick, she’s not into you, so fuck off and leave her alone,” Pauline said. She glared at Derrick with unfiltered venom.

Kaila sat silently, witnessing the stare down between someone she despised and someone that was part of her. Pauline was like the hair on Kaila’s head that was ignored most of the time until it needed to be washed, or combed or whatever, but it was something that you would feel naked without. Pauline was the only person besides Norm who had that particular distinction.

“I’m not messing with her, I just want to talk about all that stuff she said when…”
 

His voice trailed off. He cast his eyes around the cafeteria as if searching for the right words to convey his feelings.

“Before she had her seizure that day,” he added, after an extended pause.
 

Kaila continued to spoon Shepherds pie into her mouth as though he hadn’t spoken at all. Even if she had wanted to talk to him about what she had said, she couldn’t have, because when Trillian was in control, Kaila went away somewhere else. And even if she wasn’t completely away, she usually didn’t remember what had transpired. Or at least that was normally the case; oddly this time she had actually recalled most of what Trillian had spewed out, though she wasn’t ready to rehash it with Derrick of all people. He had had his opportunity and had made a mockery of her; there would be no second chance.

The silence lengthened between the three of them, Pauline continued tossing dirty looks at Derrick and Kaila enjoyed her meal, her hunger was slowly satisfied.

“I
do
have predictive skills, I was just being an asshole before,” Derrick said suddenly.
 

He splayed his fingers out onto the table in front of him, leaning in a little closer as though imparting a deep secret. Kaila chewed on her most recent bite of food, mashing the sinewy meat between her teeth. She tilted her head to the side intrigued, still, she wasn’t sure if his words were authentic or a ploy to once again make a fool of her.

“How do you mean?” she asked, curiosity made quick work of her determination to ignore Derrick for the rest of her living days. At this he almost seemed bashful, like he wasn’t certain if he should continue. Real or contrived, the shift in his behavior drew her in.

“A few times, I knew things were going to happen before they did…”

“What things?” Kaila said. Her filled fork was frozen midway to her mouth.

“Don’t feed her your bullshit Derrick, this matters to her. So help me, if you fuck with her again…”
 

Pauline shook her hand-model fist in Derrick’s direction. He ignored her, rubbing at the fine stubble on his chin.

“Like when a friend of mine died.”
 

He paused as if he wasn’t sure if he wanted to go on. Even Pauline grew silent. Her hand relaxed as she stared at him with rapt interest.

Derrick’s stiff shouldered attempt at a shrug revealed that he was indeed shaken by what he was about to divulge.

“I had a dream about this guy that I’d known since grade school, his name was Scott… the night before he died I had this weird dream where he was drowning and…” He shook his head, all the color had drained from his face, leaving him looking sheet white. His dark stubble seemed the only color on his face.

“I wasn’t there when he got drunk and decided to go for a ride in a canoe with a couple of other guys, otherwise I might have stopped him you know. Not like I actually believed that the dream was real. I would have stopped him because going out in deep water in the middle of the night was just plain dangerous and a lot dumb.”

“So he died like you dreamt?”

 
Pauline spoke this time; clearly Derrick had broken down her defenses.

Derrick nodded. “And if it had been only the one time I might have blown it off, but it happened again, a few years later to another guy I knew. This time I dreamed that he was suffocating. It was so real that I remember waking up and struggling to breathe. But more than that was how cold I felt. It was so bad that I had to get up and take a hot shower. I couldn’t seem to get warm. A week later he got drunk at a party and fell asleep in a snow bank on the way to his house. A snow plow operator found him frozen to death the next morning.”

“That’s seriously fucked up,” Pauline said, releasing a long exhale.
 

The force of it made a stray piece of her hair fly up for a second before it came to rest on her forehead.

Derrick clasped his trembling hands together and nodded.

 
“Tell me about it. What’s worse is that over the years the dreams have increased. Now it’s not just people I know, it’s people who are virtual strangers…before all this happened I was all about science and everything that happened could be explained you know, but this…”
 

He shook his head. If it was even possible he went even more ashen.

Though Kaila had been thoroughly engrossed in his words, his last statement had her mind aflutter with possibilities and questions.

“Are you saying that you believe that not everything can be explained with science?” she said, her gaze locked on Derrick with an intensity unparalleled.

“That’s exactly what I’m saying, and I feel crazy just saying it but I think it’s true.”

Kaila shook her head. “If you’re in here then you are crazy, but that’s not the point now is it? There is a definite line between being crazy and reading the clues, and it sounds like you read the clues that you were given. If that’s the case why would it be crazy and moreover what is wrong with crazy? Those that call us crazy are the ones who live a life attached to a piece of paper called money. Now that in my opinion, is the true definition of crazy. What you are describing is not.”

Derrick leaned against the plastic back of the chair. A little of the tension that had tightened his jaw a few minutes before had released. He looked vulnerable.