Vitality (Vitality Series #1)

Chapter 9 Dreams

Aching. Everything was aching: her body, her mind, the presence of day as she slipped away from a deep dream... The sun was too bright and her bones too heavy, heavy like a sedative. Ava wanted to fall back asleep to her dreams. She had felt at peace, wherever it was.

She opened her eyes to the ceiling, the sound of paper crinkling under her as she moved, her memory blurry. She must have just fallen unconscious last night. Had the lights even gone out?

Ava turned over, splaying the papers with her hand. Her fingers were black and chalky; she must have been drawing. She went to shuffle through the papers with her left hand too and noticed it blotchy with red, red all over the papers, red on her flannel. The smell was potent; it was blood.

Peeling off her flannel, she found dried blood running down her arm. She felt up to the top of her shoulder where the aching was the strongest and tensed from pain as she laid her hand on some kind of wound. It was sticky.

What the hell did she cut herself with?

Ava stood up, looking around the room, trying to find some evidence of what she did. She switched the lights on and off easily.

She huffed and looked back at the mess on the bed, her head disarrayed. But then a drawing lay there that caught her where she stood — her dark stranger — a sight which to her was sharp metal knives and soft, sweet lilacs across her chest. Had she sketched him in her sleep? An intimate close-up. His long dark eyelashes lay contrasted against his cheeks as he looked down and away. The drawing was unnerving to her, almost taunting.

And it was beautiful.

She reached out her fingers over it, shaking slightly. It was blotted with blood as well.

"Who are you?"

Frustrated and tired of the whole thing, she wrapped her fingers around it and ripped it up, throwing it over her shoulder as she went to get ready for class.

***

"Hey, buddy." Shane's head bobbed around Ava's open locker, one headphone dangling from his ear. She was trying to organize things to clear her head and beat her fatigue. It hadn't even been a week and her fingers were falling off the steering wheel. "This is becoming a normal thing." He looked into her locker, giving an odd look. "I think you're getting attached."

"Ignorance is bliss, is it?" she asked, still in her locker, wondering if this whole move was actually a nightmare.

"Well that depends. Do you mean ignorance as in an attitude sense, or a not-knowing kind of thing?"

"More like living in an oblivious state of mind kind of thing." She leaned on her locker to look at him better. Pieces of his hair escaped from under a winter cap that sat crookedly on his head.

"Oh yes, then, that is bliss."

"I envy you." She let her brows fall, and his eyes slanted down. It looked like he wanted to say something. But he didn't. Instead, he just looked... happily stuck...

Ava shook her head at him; he was beginning to grow on her.

Dahlila and Danny turned into the hallway. "There's the gang," Ava said with sarcastic enthusiasm. It was a bizarre feeling, seeing the all-American boy and the all-American girl walking up to her to chit-chat like buddies.

"We were at an awesome car show," Dahlila said, fixing her hair with a glowing smile.

"Fuck yeah." Shane flicked the drawing Ava had hung on her locker door. She swatted his hand away and shook her head at him again.