Chapter 1
Chapter One:
The first time I saw someone die, I was fifteen.
I was leaning in between the dusty seats of my father’s 97′ Bronco, close enough to see the chips in my mother’s neglected manicured nails. I reached a shaky hand out to touch her shoulder, and my hand passed through empty air. Not like I’d missed or something, like she wasn’t even physically there to be touched. And then the vision hit me, and the road began to tilt uncannily, the sound of screeching tires on wet pavement, my mother's screams piercing through the chaos. Then time restarts, and I was back in the car again, rain tapping gently on the windshield, my father’s hand relaxed on the wheel, my mother laughing at one of those horrendously corny jokes of his. I told myself it was just the storm making me anxious. I was good at that back then, talking myself out of things, filing the weird thoughts away. I had a whole system.
Three days later, I didn't have parents.
I played the vision over relentlessly in my mind, memorizing every little detail: The impact. The crunch of metal. The way my mother's body folded forward, neck snapping at an impossible angle. Dad's head smashed through the driver's side window. The blood...there was so much blood, mixing with the rain that poured in through the shattered windshield. It was exactly how it all happened. For a little while, I thought I was going crazy; I did have a minor skull fracture after all. But the vision came before the crash, before the head injury, so maybe I was just insane, so I kept it to myself and tucked it away.
The second time it happened was at the funeral. Someone put their hand on my arm, one of my mother’s coworkers, I think, I barely knew her. She was just trying to comfort me, and the vision came out of nowhere, so fast and clear it knocked the air right out of my lungs: old age, a quiet room, decades from that moment. I yanked away like I’d been burned. That was the moment I realized just how much my life had changed. I lost my whole world, but I gained something just as terrible. It was then that I began to pay close attention to where people’s hands were at all times.
For the longest time, I consumed myself with it, wondering why this was happening to me, where it came from, why it started, and whether there was a word for it somewhere out there that would make it more real and less like I was going insane. I’d stay up until the early morning hours following any lead I thought I had, but in the end, there was nothing. I stopped eating, I couldn’t sleep, my bones began to feel heavier, and my mind stayed in an endless fog, in endless grief. Because I hadn’t just lost my family, two people whom I loved the most in the world, I had lost my connection to everyone else, too. I lost the possibility of ever making another genuine connection in my life because there was no way that I could get close to someone, when I knew what it looked like when the light faded from their eyes. That thinking led me to believe that I was somehow being punished. For what, I had no idea. Maybe I was a complete bitch in my past life, or doomed to be one in my next. Was I the reincarnation of some foreign dictator? A murderous queen? A traitor? I had no idea, but none of it made carrying it any easier.
Before all of it, I had been the kind of person who ran towards things. Unsolved things, unexplained things, the kind of strange and slightly reckless situations that my best friend, Lana, had to be talked into and that I could never be talked out of. I kept a notebook full of half-formed theories. I had a genuinely embarrassing number of opinions about cold cases and conspiracy theories. I had been, by most reasonable definitions, kind of a lot.
But whatever this was, it took that version of me and tore her into tiny pieces, little bits at a time. Every time I pulled back from a crowd, every time I engineered some reason not to go somewhere, every time I let Lana make the excuses because I was too anxious or tired to make them myself, a small piece of me went with it. Until finally, the girl with the notebook and the outlandish theories and the tendency to drag her best friend through questionable situations was mostly just a whisper of a memory that Lana tried to keep alive by bringing her up every chance she got, not quite ready to let go. In the end, she really was my saving grace.
I eventually stopped blaming the ability. Mostly just myself. There had to be some reason this was happening to me, curse or not, I just wished, sometimes, that whatever had decided to give it to me had picked someone better suited for the task, someone stronger.
