Watcher

Chapter 1

“When dealing with the insane, the best method is to pretend to be sane.”
~Hermann Hesse~

Wake up. Wake up! WAKE UP! NOW, CODA, WAKE UP! I sat up stick straight in my bed, waiting for my heart to drop below the 200 beats per minute mark. Not that I could move even had I wanted to do something different, but it was still an uncomfortable sensation. While waiting, I glanced at the calendar above my desk. April 24th. Three months, one week, two days since it had begun. By this point, it was routine to wake up after a couple hours of sleep.
Growing up, I was never one to remember my dreams. Not as in, they’re hazy and brief glimpses; I just never remembered anything at all. I went to bed and then woke up. Nothing in between. That all changed on January 15th. I have no idea why or what happened, but after that date I woke up every night with the same nightmare. Sometimes multiple times if I tried to go back to sleep. I don’t think it’s the type of nightmare that other people have had either. At least, it’s not similar to any book or movie I’ve read or seen or even heard about for that matter.
My nightmare went as such: I’m walking in pitch-blackness. This light-defying darkness is the type where I can’t see my hand a centimeter in front of my face. I trip over something, but when I look back to see the obstacle, all I see are these big green eyes in the darkness. It’s like they are warning me to keep going. “Never look back and never stop running,” they seem to say to me. Those eyes fill me with such a dread I can’t even explain. They cause my heart to clench and my lungs become unable to fill with air. It’s at that point that I would hoist myself out of unconsciousness – if that were what you can call a dream-state. Night after night the same succession occurs.
4:35 a.m.
Another thing that had changed in the previous three-plus months was my appearance. I had grown constant plum bruises under my eyes and had lost fifteen pounds, which I did not have to spare to begin with, due to the fact that I no longer slept. Were I to fall back asleep, the nightmare would skip through my brain, over and over, like the broken record it was. I no longer tried to get back to bed and was content with the couple hours of sleep that I got.
I lay back and was immediately encaged in fresh lilac-scented goodness. Knowing I loved it, my dad made sure to use it every time he washed my sheets. Against my beloved feather pillow, I fruitlessly wondered again what had changed. My doctors – yes, my father had brought in trained medical help – thought that it was part stress and part remnants left from “un-dealt-with childhood issues.” Come on, everyone has childhood issues, and very few have dealt with them by their sophomore year of high school!
Nothing else had changed in my daily living. I hadn’t all of a sudden gone through puberty, nor had I met my soul mate. I had not changed towns or schools or anything since I was five years old! Knowing I would not fall back asleep, I decided to saunter to the bathroom and begin my day. There is nothing that a nice bubble bath and scented candles cannot fix. Well, ok, there are a lot of things that they can’t fix, but at five in the morning, nothing else could be better.
Quietly I walked across the hallway to the bathroom. Turning on the light, I instantaneously shied away from my reflection. I already knew I looked like a walking corpse. Sunken cheeks, gawking black eyes returning my stare where once vibrant blue shone bright. Even my wonderful hair looked dull, as if the lack of sleep had somehow stripped the sunshine from its golden strands. It was my only redeeming quality and, because of the horrible nightmares, even that was being taken from me. I no longer recognized my reflection.
By 6 a.m. I was bathed, dressed, had triple checked all of my homework (a benefit of going to bed at two and waking up only a mere two and a half hours later) and was eating a nice bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch.
“TIM! If you are not up in three minutes, I will leave you to take the bus.” Technically, since my brother was older, our 15-year old, well-loved Honda Accord was still his until he left for college, but I could always threaten.
“Morning, Sunshine.”
“Morning, Dad.”
The smile that met mine melted my heart. My father. Even though he was left by his wife, our mother, when I was five, he never let a day pass without flashing his award-winning smile. My father is over six feet tall and looks like a Greek god. This isn’t in the weird, Freudian sense either. He just is good-looking. I should know; I did not inherit any of it besides the hair. Tim took all of the looks and I got the leftovers – pouty lips, normal blue eyes, blonde hair, and a nose too big for my face.
“Are you going to come in to work after school today?” He used to ask me how I slept and all the other common, routine morning questions found at any breakfast table. Not anymore. We try to stay away from the sleep (or lack thereof) topic as much as possible since it only added stress to our otherwise completely stress-free relationship. The three of us had always been close. Tim and I went at it every once in a while, but we never had a fight that lasted more than a day.
“Uhh, yeah. If that’s ok. I need the money.”