Short Story Chapter 22

“Are you sure? Have you ever considered the possibility that you might have lived before?”

“Leave that up to my dad,” Vinyl said. She sounded confident that we would, in fact, be in another place at the end of the day. “Trust me, Octy. We’ll be okay. You do trust me, right?”

“Come here.” She motioned for him to move closer. Once he stood before her, she dipped her finger under the elastic of his boxer’s waistband and gave a tug. “Let’s see how sexy you are when you come.”

Mikey looked at him with another sad stare, and he suddenly realized where he recognized the stare. It was the same stare his mom gave him before he went to the streets with any gang that seemed appealing to him that day. He shook his head. I will go to my mother’s grave and apologize, he thought. “

I sit at the kitchen table going over the eviction papers. But we have done nothing wrong I think in my head. My husband John paces beside me furrowing his brow. “I just don't understand. Why us? Why would they come after us?!” exclaims John.

“This is it,” Theron said, leaning against the holotable. Everything had been powered down and packed up. All that was left was to pile onto their ships and go their separate ways. Theron had a shuttle standing by, a simple, one-manned vessel to deliver him to his mother’s command ship.

“That was a long time ago, but it’s wrong what they say about the past, I’ve learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out. Looking back now, I realize I have been peeking into that deserted alley for the last twenty-six years.”

"I can't," said Gwen sadly. "He doesn't want to see me; he made that perfectly clear. I don't blame him, either," she said.

From the moment George rolled up in the car next to him, John knew that this night wasn’t going to end well for him.

They turned the castle corner to a giant lawn two kilometers long. Flowers of every color lined where the yard and forest met, a decorated border everyone seemed to fear. A wooden fence marked the beginning of the lawn’s plateau, and flattened stones created a biotic footpath into a green valley of nothingness.

He opens his eyes to an unfamiliar view—there is a blue-toned light hitting against the shadowed ebony metal siding. He hits his head from the van driving over a bump, "Ow..." he gently rubs the affected area.

Maggie had grabbed a quick lunch from the cafeteria before hauling ass back to her room. At the moment, she wasn’t interested in spending time making idle conversation with her teammates. She had already been awake longer than she normally would’ve been for one day and her irritation was growing from the forced social interaction. She craved some quiet, alone time to allow herself a break and to prepare herself for whatever Shannon had planned for them next.

“Maybe you’re right, but now I have no choice, I have to do something and I don’t want to.”

Jarrod felt her father’s eyes on him, causing the nerves he’d built up to shake apart, but he got them under control and cleared his throat. “I didn’t know you were leaving.”

“Oh. Well, in this world, your reality is completely opposite of who you were in the other world.”