Chapter 32 Mariella #2
I’m staring at our past selves sitting in the lecture hall on that second day. The vision is fleeting, like a flash of lightning across a dark night sky, but my echo lingers: my churning stomach and racing heart. The exhilarating prospect of becoming Anna’s friend.
Pain slices through my skull, and I’m thrown from my visions, my chest heaving. Temples damp with sweat, I release Anna’s hands.
Her eyes are wide, her mouth slightly agape. “What—what was that?” she whispers, staring at her hands as if she might see electrical sparks dancing along her skin.
“Did you see anything?” I ask between breaths.
“I saw… myself.” Her brows draw together, and she presses her hand to her chest. “But it felt like, I wasn’t—myself.”
“That’s because you were feeling an echo of how I felt in that memory.
Ever since I was a kid, I’ve had vivid dreams. And when I wake—” I glance up at Anna.
Her eyes are fixed on mine, her expression unreadable.
“—I have these strange symptoms, like there’s electricity running through me.
” I clutch my heart-shaped charm between my fingertips.
“Those pills you found? They’re sleeping pills, prescribed by my psychiatrist to make it stop.
I spent years thinking there was something wrong with me.
But this year, I met people like me. They told me I wasn’t dreaming; I was time traveling.
I can’t tell you much more than that.” I search her wide eyes and slack mouth.
“That’s where I’ve been every time I said I was with Sarah—since I moved in with you. I’m sorry I lied to you. And that I made you question yourself. You’re the best friend I’ve ever had, Anna, and I think the world of you. Please forgive me?”
Anna finally closes her gaping mouth, her vacant gaze looking outside. When her head swings back to me, her bottom lip is trembling. “Oh my God!” she screams, bursting into tears. She wraps her hands around my shoulders and yanks me toward her until we’re awkwardly hugging over her central console.
“So, you can, like—see into the past?” Anna asks, finally letting me go. I nod, and her green eyes light. “Oh my God,” she says again. “What else can you do?”
“Nothing. There’s a place that trains people to time travel, but I’m not going.”
“Why not?” she demands.
Emptiness spreads through my chest. “Because I’d have to drop psychology.”
Anna scrunches her button nose. “Okay? So, drop psychology.”
I shake my head. “I can’t.”
“Ella, you’ve been given a gift,” Anna says, grabbing my hands. “Don’t throw it away.”
I pull my hands from hers. “I’ve already decided.”
“Why?” she says.
My arms snake around my heaving chest. “Because I’m terrified of ending up like my mom. Studying psychology is the only way I—” Tears sting the back of my eyes. “If I can understand her illness, I can prevent it… Stop it from happening to me.”
“You’re not going to end up like her,” Anna says softly.
“I finally got her death certificate. It listed schizophrenia and psychosis as contributing causes. We’re products of our parents, and mental illnesses have genetic components.
Schizophrenia is highly inheritable. Last year I started getting paranoid that I was being followed, and it’s only getting worse.
That was how it started for my mother. She and I are so similar, even our mannerisms are the same.
” Both introverted homebodies who’d prefer to sketch the world around them than actively participate.
“You even said yourself how much I look like her.”
Anna’s face falls. “You’re not your mother, Ella. Just because she got sick doesn’t mean you will.”
“You don’t know that. She seemed fine. Then she deteriorated over the course of three months, and there was no trigger. She didn’t drink or take drugs. We were happy. It makes no sense.”
“Sometimes mental health disorders don’t. Sometimes there isn’t always an answer.”
“I need there to be an answer.” I’m giving up too much for there not to be.
“Ella, you just said your mother was well her entire life until she got sick. You said you were happy.”
“So?”
“So,” she mimics with wide eyes, “maybe you can’t control what’s going to happen to you.
But you can control your life now. If you’re going to inherit your mother’s illness, the disease obviously hits later in life and has a rapid onset.
And it sounds like you already know her medical diagnoses.
So, learn the warning signs and have regular sessions with your psych.
It doesn’t mean you need to throw away your chance at something great. ”
“But what if I’m making a mistake?” I say, my voice small.
“Let the current carry you,” Anna says, and my eyes lift to meet hers.
“I don’t know what that means,” I say.
“Isn’t it obvious?” Anna stares at me earnestly. “It means trust yourself, Ella. Follow your heart.” She shifts in her seat, turning so her legs are angled toward mine. “Close your eyes.” I give her a look. “Just do it, ho,” she orders. “Close your eyes.”
Exhaling, I do as she asks.
“What do you see?” she says, her gentle tone coaxing me to search the darkness behind my lids. “What do you want?”
Parker’s beautiful golden gaze flashes before my eyes.
“These powers don’t make us different, Ella. They make us special. Being a time traveler lets you relive any memory you want. It’s a gift.”
I want to believe him. I want to make memories I’m desperate to relive. And I want him to be in them.
I open my eyes. Anna’s brows are raised, a knowing smile on her dark red lips.
She’s right. I can’t control my genetic predispositions.
If my mind’s going to fail me, like my mother’s did, I need to enjoy my life now.
And I won’t be alone at the end, because I’ll have created memories worth being lost in.
Exciting memories as a time traveler, at Neurovida. With Parker. And Rose. As an Alpha.
“What do you want?” Anna asks again, shrugging her shoulders as if she’s asking the simplest question in the world. Perhaps she is.
“I want to be a time traveler,” I say, my mouth splitting into an open grin.
“Duh,” she says with wide eyes, and angles her head toward my house. “Now go get your shit.”
“What?”
Anna starts her car, and a pop song blares through the speakers. “You can’t stay here, babe.” She slips on a pair of oversized black sunglasses and angles the rearview mirror to study her own reflection. “You’re coming home.”
Rays of white light bounce around me, shimmering in my periphery like the midday sun on the surface of the ocean. I’m standing in the mental health ward, my mother and younger self crouched before me.
The hospital staff move toward my mother.
“Get off me,” she screams. “No. They’re trying to kill me.”
The wall of bright light edges toward me, readying to carry me into another time, another memory, but I push against it, demanding it wait until I’m ready. It’s time I stop running.
I follow the hospital staff dragging my mother back toward her room. The tunnel of white is closing in, a sphere of light and pressure pushing against me. Gritting my teeth, I try to hold it back, but only my mother and her bed are now visible within the dazzling light.
She’s injected with some sort of sedative and left prone over the crisp white bedsheets. The bolt on the door clicks after they leave. Unable to move, my mother’s gaze drags to the far corner of the room, focused somewhere past the wall of white.
“I’m sorry this happened to you, Mom,” I say aloud, even though she can’t hear me.
I step closer to the bed and reach for her, my hand moving through hers like a lost ship drifting through mist-coated water.
What I’d give just to hold her. To let her know she wasn’t alone.
To thank her for the wonderful memories she left me with.
I want to tell her that reliving them in my dreams is the greatest gift a mother could give their child.
My vision blurs, and I blink away tears.
“I’m sorry for forgetting what it was like before you got sick.
For blaming you for sending me away. For spending my life wishing I wasn’t like you.
You told me all along I was special. I believe it now.
And I know I am who I am today because of you.
Because of how much you loved and cared for me when you could.
” I sink to my knees beside her bed, head bowed, tears blotting my light blue dress.
“I know you’re there,” my mother mumbles, and my head snaps up.
“Mom,” I cry, my heart lurching into my throat. “Can you hear me?”
My mother’s head turns, and my heart stops as her haunted gaze drifts into the shimmering light behind me.
Hairs rise on the back of my neck, and I get to my feet, slowly turning to face the wall of light.
Then I sprint directly into it.
I’m saturated in white, the only sound my quickened breath. The light bounces backward, and it feels like my stomach is being crushed from the inside out.
I must be losing it. Because what I’m seeing can’t be real.
It can’t be Silas standing in the corner of the room.