Uninvited: An Unloved Ones Prequel #2 (The Unloved Ones Prequels) (2 page)

I nod, and then back out of the kitchen.

The music from the stereo seems more hollow than before, and no one bothers to talk to me on my way out, or ask me why I’m crying.

I walk back home in the cold. The streets are dark. The sound of running water comes from the gutter as the snow melts, but the rest of the night is quiet. There are still patches of white on some lawns, and along the corners of the roofs, but otherwise winter is over.

I don’t understand how Todd could move on so quickly. I understand he had girlfriends before me, but I thought I was different. He was my first boyfriend. To be honest, by then he was my only friend. We did everything together, and for a brief period, it was like my entire world expanded. Now I have this emptiness to deal with. Even the sky feels farther away than it did before, and the darkness emptier.

It’s a mile back to my house. The driveway is empty, and I’m not surprised. My mother is a nurse. She works odd shifts, sometimes gone the entire day, sometimes the entire night. There are weeks when we don’t see each other face to face, and communicate solely by notes on the fridge.

I don’t mind, not really. I’m glad to be alone tonight.

I unlock the door and abruptly lock it behind me. This is a safe neighborhood, but it pays to be vigilant. I go from window to window, double-checking that they are locked, and then I wash my face in the bathroom. I go into my room and change out of the outfit I bought especially for my party. I fold it neatly into the second drawer of my dresser, slip on a nightgown, and then sit on the edge of my bed.

My room is spotless. Every pen and pencil is put away on my desk, and my carpet even has fresh vacuum lines. It smells like roses. I have straight A’s and perfect attendance. I’m cute. I’m smart. Why doesn’t he want me?

And why—
why
—did he chose Becka instead? What does he see in her? What does she have that I don’t?

I start to cry again as I pull out the pins from my hair and set them in a neat row on my bedside table.

It’s not fair. I did everything right. I’ve
always
done everything right. Why did he dump me? Why doesn’t he want me back?

I settle into bed and pull the covers up to my chin. My eyes remain open, and I find it difficult to fall asleep in the silence. I keep thinking about Becka.

And when I’m falling asleep, all I can see in my mind is her.

* * *

I wake to the sound of people in my home.

The voices I hear through the wall don’t sound threatening—a man’s low rumble and a woman’s answering laugh—but the thing is, there should be no voices. My mom leaves for work an hour before my alarm goes off, and there’s no one else living with us. I should be waking up in silence, like every other morning.

My heart beats as I wipe the sleep out of my eyes. My arms feel odd, like I’ve slept on them wrong, and when I swing my feet to the floor, I can barely feel them. I do feel, however, that I’ve stepped on something. I look down, and am confused when I see my toes sinking into a slice of pepperoni pizza on a paper plate. I only have time to register that my toenails have black paint chipping away on them before I look up, and see my room has been torn apart. The floor is covered with crumpled papers, dirty clothes, and in the corner, an electric guitar. Where did that come from? I don’t play guitar. Is this some sort of prank?

I stand and the blanket falls off of me. My clothes feel tight. I look down and see that instead of my pajamas, I’m wearing a low-cut black top with spaghetti straps and no pants, just a flimsy pair of red underwear. My legs look weird, and when I look up, I realize everything is sort of blurry.

But blurry or not, it’s clear that this isn’t my room. There’s a closet where my desk should be, and the light coming from the window is all wrong. I’m somewhere else. I’m not at home.

I start to shake. This is more than a prank. I’ve been
brought
here, and—judging from my blurred vision and wobbly limbs—I’ve also been drugged. There’s no other explanation. The voices I hear are my kidnappers, laughing amongst themselves, thinking they have time to spare before they come back and—and—

I am wide-awake now.

I squat down on the floor and rummage through the junk until I come to a pair of tight black jeans that I’ve never seen before. I sniff them and cringe. They smell. Then I lift up an arm and smell myself.
I
smell. How long have I been out?

I pull on the jeans and make my way to the door. Then, thinking better of it, I go back into the room and grab the electric guitar. It’s lighter than it looks, but it’s the best thing I’ve got for a weapon right now. I turn the doorknob, surprised that it is unlocked, and creep into the hallway with the guitar over my shoulder.

I hear laughter again from around the corner, except this time it’s not the woman’s voice, but the sound of two young children.

Oh God. They’ve taken children too.

I tiptoe around the corner, and come out to a small, brightly-lit kitchen. Four people are sitting around a round kitchen table—a middle-aged man and woman, and two young children, a girl and a boy. The boy is reaching across the table to steal a slice of bacon from the man’s plate, and the woman is brushing the girl’s hair. The man has his back to me. He’s sipping from a mug of coffee while browsing the internet on his phone. They all look relaxed and—
normal
. It throws me, and I just stand there with the guitar raised in the air, ready to strike.

Then the little girl, who must be about four or five, looks up at me from her chair. I raise a finger to my mouth for her to be quiet, but she giggles and points at me.

The woman looks up first, then the boy, and then the man turns around, the mug of coffee in his hand.

“Where am I?” I scream. My voice sounds off. It must be the drugs. “What have you done with me?”

The girl giggles, and the woman rolls her eyes.

“Becka,” she says calmly, “put that down and eat your breakfast. You’ll be late for school.”

I stumble. I try to say the word “Becka,” but can’t get past the B. I feel weak and lightheaded, but I still feel like I’m in danger. I need to get away from these people. I turn to go back toward the bedroom, and come face to face with a girl holding a guitar over her head.

It’s a mirror, my mind registers. I lower the guitar slightly, and the image in the mirror does the same. Then I drop the guitar and stumble backward, and so does my reflection.

Only the girl in the mirror is not me. She has messy black hair and mascara running down her cheeks.

The girl in the mirror is Becka.

I
am Becka.

My shoulders—
her
shoulders—are heaving up and down as I gaze at the reflection. I still have that feeling of detachment, and it occurs to me that I must be dreaming.

“Becka, are you feeling all right?” the man at the table—Becka’s father—asks me. When I don’t respond, he pushes back his chair from the table. But dream or not, I don’t want any of them near me. It’s too creepy. Before he can get up, I rush back into the hallway.

But now I find myself with a new problem: there are doors on either side of this hallway, and I can’t remember which one I had been in before. They all look the same. I hear footsteps behind me. “Becka?” her father calls.

I open the first door to the right. It’s a small bathroom. I slip inside and lock the door. It’s dark, so I flip on the light. A moment later I can hear Becka’s father outside.

“You’d better be getting ready for school in there,” he says. His voice is authoritative but not cruel. The doorknob doesn’t move. Even if the door wasn’t locked, he would have respected my desire to be alone. When he speaks again, his voice is at a lower volume, as if he doesn’t want anyone but me to hear. “Come on, Becka,” he says. “Your mom and I let you go out last night with the understanding that you’d get back in time for school.” He sighs. “But I guess that was our mistake. Parenting doesn’t come with a manual, you know. I’ll tell you what, if you’re tired, why don’t you go back to bed and take a half day? Your mom can drop you off after lunch.”

“No!” I yell. The idea of being trapped here with them is horrid. “I’ll go to school. I
want
to go.”

“Okay, sweetie.”

I wait until I hear his footsteps walk away, and then I turn toward the mirror and see myself—see Becka—leaning against the door.

“This is a dream,” I whisper to myself. “All you have to do is wake up.”

The first thing I can think of is to pinch myself. I squeeze a bit of flesh on my upper arm between two fingers, but it doesn’t hurt. I can feel it, in a detached sort of way, but I can’t feel the pain. I swallow.

I don’t remember ever swallowing in a dream.

I try to quiet my panic, telling myself that if I can’t wake myself up, I’ll just have to go through the motions of the dream until I wake up naturally. If you’re going to be in a dream, you might as well do it right. Just because it’s a dream is no excuse for laziness.

I look back at Becka in the mirror. She’s a real mess in the mornings, and I feel embarrassed for her. Her black hair is matted down on one side, and sticking up on the other, and her face looks dirty from her smeared makeup. I don’t want to be seen like this, even if it isn’t really me, and even if this isn’t real. She looks that bad.

There’s a comb on the countertop. It’s covered with stray hairs, and I clump them out and toss them into an overflowing garbage can. The whole counter is dirty. There are toothpaste clumps in the sink, with bits of hair stuck in them, and the mirror is streaked with water droplets. I struggle to drag the brush through her split ends, doing little more than hiding the worst of her bed head, and end up using one of the hair clips left out on the counter to keep her bangs out of my (our) eyes.

I squint down to look at what else she has laying around, and find a pile of disposable, daily-wear contacts in individually-wrapped containers. I pick one up at random, and peel back the foil cover. I’ve never worn contacts; my vision is perfect. But apparently Becka’s isn’t. I poke my finger into the liquid of the container, and scoop out the contact disc onto my fingertip. It’s softer than I would imagine, and it takes me a few tries, but I get it onto her eye. The vision in that eye is crystal clear now, and I open another package and put in a contact into the other eye. The difference in clairty is staggering, like going from VHS to High Definition.

It’s then that I catch sight of her toothbrush laying on the counter, but the thought of putting that in my mouth after she’s used it makes me gag. Even if I am her now, it just doesn’t seem sanitary.

Taking a shower is beyond my comfort level as well, so I settle for some deodorant and a spritz of cheap perfume. Then I wash off her make-up—which I remember from last night—and reapply. Her brands are all cheap and glittery, but when I put on her signature eyeliner and dark lipstick, it looks right. I look like Becka.

That is, I look like cheap trash.

I stand looking at myself in the mirror.
I
would never dress like this. A skimpy black top and tight black jeans—yuck. Where’s the color? But the idea of going through her clothes is distasteful. Besides, this
is
how she dresses, and even though she looks like a mess to me, that’s how she’s supposed to look. I wash my hands in the sink, and then dry them on a towel which makes me want to wash them all over again, and then flick off the light.

I freeze. I flick back on the light. Then I flick it off and on a second time.

You’re not supposed to be able to control light in a dream. That’s one of the rules.

 I open the door slowly, not bothering to turn off the light as I walk down the hallway. I hear the voices of Becka’s family again from the kitchen. Her mother looks up at me when I round the corner.

She smiles. “Aww, you look nice, sweetheart. Come give me a hug before you head out.”

I step forward reluctantly. They are all watching me, but only the little girl is frowning. She must be able to tell something’s off.

I stand with my arms at my side as Becka’s mother wraps me in a hug. “I am
so
proud of you,” she says.

“Why?” I blurt out.

She laughs and looks up at me. “For being you, silly.”

I stare at her in confusion. The little girl knocks over her plastic bowl of cereal, and Becka’s mother is distracted.

Proud? I repeat in my head. What has Becka ever done that anyone should be proud about?
My
mother has never said she was proud, and I’ve gotten straight A’s since Kindergarten. Is this what it is like in other families?

And if Becka’s family is so supportive, how come Becka turned out so lazy and stupid?

“Here,” her father says, and I turn to him. He puts something into my hand, and I look down to see a twenty-dollar bill. “For lunch. I didn’t have time to pack you anything.”

Our school lunches are $3.25.

“Can’t have our girl going hungry,” Becka’s mother says.

I blink. “Um, I’d better get to school.”

Becka’s mother turns to her father and they laugh, as if I’ve made a joke. I start to back away, and her father stops me.