Veiled (Ada Palomino 1)

With my mom dying and Perry moving out, it’s been really fucking hard not to feel alone. The last two years have been a special kind of hell.

I let my head sink back into the cool of the pillow and close my eyes, finding that current of peace and contentment that will hopefully pull me under, when I hear a faint scratching sound.

Oh god, I think, just wanting to drift away, just wanting the world to go black so I can wake up with the sun and have the world light again.

But it goes on. Not louder, just more . . . deliberate.

I slowly sit up and hold my breath, listening. The scratches sound like nails against a door. The closet door, to be more specific.

I swallow hard and my heart begins to thud. It’s not my imagination. I’m not asleep.

The sound continues, the strokes longer, the sound succinct, almost echoing throughout the bedroom.

It could be a mouse. A really large mouse. Okay, it could be a rat. A really large rat. God, I hope it’s a rat. If it’s a rat it can just stay in there until I get my dad to deal with it in the morning. Anything other than some type of animal is completely unacceptable.

I ease out of bed carefully, not making a sound, and stare at the closet, feeling frozen in place. There’s no way in hell I’m opening that door, but there’s no way in hell I’m going to spend the night in here either. I wonder if I should wake up my dad, but the man needs his sleep more than ever and knowing my luck, the scratching would stop when he gets here and there’d be nothing in the closet after all.

I’ll sleep in the other room.

I can’t help but pause by the closet on the way to the bedroom door.

The sound changes. A flurry of wings now, flapping against the closet door, the scratching louder.

My breath is caught in my throat. It sounds more like I have a chicken in the closet than a mutant rat, but even though I know there’s something funny about that scenario, this doesn’t seem funny at all.

Because a giant rat is plausible and a chicken is not.

And the wings don’t exactly sound like feathers either.

The flapping is thick, like someone throwing slabs of raw meat against a wall.

I am zero seconds away from either vomiting from fear or literally losing my shit, but if I keep standing where I am I feel like I’ll be stuck in the room forever.

And then I hear it.

A rough yet somehow familiar voice comes from the closet.

“Let me out,” it croaks and the sound is a fist in my lungs.

The closet door rattles as someone on the other side knocks.

Three times.

I wake up.

***

“New purse?” Amy asks me as I get in the passenger seat of Smartie, her Ford Focus she bought second-hand a few months ago after saving for every pretty penny.

I look down at the micro YSL bubble-gum pink purse that’s slung over my shoulder, which I chose to save up for instead of a car.

“Kind of,” I tell her. I bought the purse on an online sale a couple of months ago, I just hadn’t found the opportunity to wear it until now. I buy new things all the time—I mean, I’m a fashion blogger, it’s kind of my job—but more often than not I get stuck in the habit of using the same bag over and over again.

Today though, today I needed some cheesy bubble-gum brightness in my life. I’d been having the worst sleep for the last few nights, ever since that dream upon a dream and the knocking and the chicken thing in the closet. Thankfully I hadn’t experienced that again, even though I was giving my closet a wide berth now. The irony, that I’d be afraid of it when I’m about to start art school for fashion design next month and would probably be spending more time in my closet than ever before, wasn’t lost on me.

But I had been dreaming about a guy I met once, and in some ways those dreams were worse. I’d wake up in this happy, warm state, like my heart was glowing and I was just floating through life. The opposite of waking up from a nightmare. Because even though I couldn’t remember the specifics of the dreams, I knew I was with this guy and I was safe and I loved him. I couldn’t even tell if he loved me back, it was just this feeling of being on top of the world, something I’d never really experienced.

And that’s what made it worse. When you wake up from a nightmare, the reality comforts you. When you wake up from the best dream ever, reality is a burden, a slap-in-the-face reminder that you could feel this, you could have this, but you don’t and you won’t.