Crash (Visions (Simon Pulse)) by Lisa McMann Page B

me know if it gets worse.”
    I close my eyes and let out a breath of relief. “Yeah.”

Twenty-One
    All night I dream about it—the crash, the explosion, the nine body bags in the snow, the fire. Sawyer’s dead face. But in my dreams the events happen in random order. At the end, the body bags stand up and dance around in the snowy, fiery night, as if they are ghosts trying to get out of their containments. Sawyer’s eyes fly open and he cries out to me for help, but I just walk away, going into a hospital that magically appears next door. Doctors take me by the hands and I begin to shrink. As I get smaller they swing me like a little kid down the hallway, and then they let go and I soar into a jail-like cell with bars on the doors. The doors clank shut. I hear someone muttering and cackling, and when I look up, a toothless, red-faced scary guy is locked in my cell with me.
    I wake up kicking and sweating. Rowan is standing next to my bed saying my name.
    I stare at her. It takes me a second to remember where I am. “Oh,” I say, breathing hard. “Hey.”
    “Are you okay?”
    I swallow, my throat totally dry, and then nod. “Yeah. Bad dream.”
    “Oh,” she says. “Well, you were kind of moaning, or crying or something.” She goes back to her bed and sits on the edge of it, facing me.
    “I was?” My brain is a cotton ball.
    She nods in the dark. “You kept saying, ‘ Listen to me!’”
    I unwind my leg from the bedsheet. “Huh.” The nightmare is already starting to fade and the jagged pieces of it aren’t fitting together anymore. “Did I say anything else?”
    “Nothing that I could figure out. Are you still sick?”
    I continue to untangle myself from my blankets and ponder the question. When I think about going to school, about seeing Sawyer, about the vision everywhere, my stomach churns and I feel like throwing up. “Yeah,” I decide. “I’m still sick.”
    •       •       •
    It’s light in the room when I wake again, and I feel refreshed, like I’ve slept a hundred years. Rowan is gone, the house is quiet, and the first doughy smells of the dayare wafting up from below. I sit up and check the clock. It’s almost eleven, and I’m starving. My head feels . . . I don’t know. Less heavy or something. I can’t really identify the feeling, but it’s a kind of restlessness. Like my feet are tired of being in this bed. My legs won’t stay still.
    I get up and stretch, testing my muscles, and tentatively think about the vision, bracing myself for that overwhelming fear to take over, but it doesn’t. The fear is still there, all right, but it’s . . . I don’t know. More manageable. Softer, maybe. The vision appears on the window, as it has been doing lately, but today it is less in-your-face. It stays in the background, and I can actually think around it. I don’t even know if that makes sense, but that’s how it feels.
    I pad softly to the kitchen and toast a bagel in the quiet. It’s so strange to be the only one up here. So nice. I take my breakfast to the chair in the living room and tuck my toes up under my nightgown. I sit there and soak in the sounds of the street below—a garbage truck, an occasional honk of a horn, an exuberant Italian greeting a friend now and then.
    I think about the snowplow again and close my eyes to ward off the panic, but the panic doesn’t come, only a controllable fear, one that I can handle. I marvel at myself, wondering where the calm came from. Maybe it was the twelve hours of sleep, or crying it out with Trey last night, or the nightmare working something out for me in mysubconscious, like Mr. Polselli talked about once in a section on dreams. But as I sit here, I think maybe it’s something else. Maybe it’s coming from the same source that brought me this vision in the first place. Maybe it’s telling me that it’s not quite as futile as it seems, and it’s trying to give me directions now and then if I would only