Chapter One

The Barren Moon

The panicked scream that burst from my throat was a tribute to a long-remembered terror – one undimmed by the passage of time. The six year old within me cried out in desperation as I was ripped from the nightmare. The dream had been my nightly companion for fourteen years, a constant reminder of the day everything in my life changed.

As if I could have forgotten.

There was no doubt that the events would remain etched permanently into my memory, an unwanted tattoo I hadn’t requested and could never remove, even if the nightmares had stopped. Somehow, though, I knew they wouldn't. If anything, they were getting worse, becoming more vivid and frequent with each passing year.

I wiped the gathering beads of perspiration from my brow, pulled my damp hair up into a loose ponytail, and untangled the twisted sheets from my legs. The small glow from the nightlight beside my bed warded away shadows that otherwise threatened to consume me. Focusing on the warm mellow light, I tried to push the memories from my mind. Although I was well practiced in driving away the nightly terrors, it took more effort than I liked to admit for my mind to settle and my heart rate to stop thundering in my chest like a goddamned cavalry charge.

Dragging a shaky breath into my lungs, I swung my legs to the floor and padded out of my small room. The kitchen’s icy linoleum tiles were uncomfortable under my bare feet, and I hurried to pour myself some water from the tap before tiptoeing back to the warmth of my bed.

I sipped my water after slipping back beneath the covers, searching for the book I always kept within reach on my nightstand. Any hopes of more rest tonight were futile; after the nightmare inevitably hit I could never relax my mind enough to sleep. Sometimes I’d get lucky and the dream wouldn’t rear its ugly head until near dawn, allowing me a few solid hours of rest. Other nights, like tonight, I wasn’t so lucky.

A glance at my cellphone informed me that it was only 2:37 AM, leaving me with almost six hours until my first class of the semester began. Great way to start sophomore year, Brooklyn, I thought bitterly. Overtired and grumpy. Oh, and dark under-eye circles are so in this year.

The near constant bruise-like circles that lined my eyes were usually manageable with the help of some quality foundation. Most people would never notice them at all, and those who did would never discover their origin. Holding people at arm’s length was easier and, in the long run, saved everyone a lot of unnecessary hurt and heartache.

I’d never been one to reach out to others for companionship or comfort. Those who gravitated in my social orbit were either blissfully self-involved or simply uninterested in my past. Anyone who pushed me for more was dropped like a bad habit.

I wouldn’t really say that I had friends – acquaintances, maybe, but not friends. Friends usually wanted to know personal information; they liked to ask questions. And that made friends something I really couldn't afford to keep.

There was one exception to this rule, and that was Lexi. Then again, Lexi didn’t follow any of the rules she made for her own life, so I guess I shouldn't have been surprised when she broke all mine as well. She’d spun into my life like a tornado, uprooting everything in her path and creating chaos from the fragile illusion of normalcy I’d tried to reconstruct after my mother’s murder. In the second grade, on my first day at a new school, Lexi had declared she liked my blue sparkly backpack, and that we would be friends.

And so we were.

It’s rare that Lex doesn’t get her way. People are drawn to her as if she exudes some invisible magnetic force, pulling them in and making it impossible to deny her anything. She’s tall, with fiery red hair and light blue eyes that constantly glint with mischief. In many ways, she’s my opposite.

While she towers at 5’10,” I barely hit 5’5” in my tallest pair of stilettos. Her bright copper mane bobs around her shoulders like a halo of light; my dark brown-black loose waves tumble almost to my waist. Her freckled skin glows with pale luminescence; my natural olive tones leave me looking slightly tan even in the heart of winter.

The biggest difference between us, though, isn’t detectable if you look only skin deep. Because below the surface, where no one can see, something is broken inside me. Or maybe not broken, but definitely missing.

Hell, maybe I never possessed it at all.

Because its indisputable that Lexi is warm, glowing and vivacious; her eyes dance with that indelible spark of life. Instead, I am cold; empty of that inner glow and utterly unable to make my emerald eyes appear anything but lifeless and guarded. Comparing Lexi to myself was like comparing the sun to the moon: her, a warm life-producing star around which everyone orbits, and me, a solitary, barren moon, brightened only by others’ reflected light and riddled with craters.

With a sigh of resignation, I pulled back from the spiral of depressive thoughts I swirled into whenever I compared myself to Lexi. She’d been best my friend – my only friend – from age eight on. We’d even applied to college together and, after a miserable freshman year of on-campus housing and randomly assigned roommates, we were about to be sophomores with our very own hole-in-the-wall apartment.

Our two bedroom, double bath suite took up the entire second floor of an ancient, dilapidated Victorian-style home, which had been roughly chopped up to accommodate student renters. Yes, it was a dump, and yes, the hot water rarely worked properly; but it was ours, and the rent was only $450 a month – far more affordable than some of the swankier new properties littering the student housing neighborhood.

The downstairs neighbors kept to themselves; we’d yet to meet them, and we’d moved in a month ago. Conveniently, we didn’t have to cut through their apartment to reach the stairs, as our landlord had constructed a rickety, steep outdoor stairway, leading up to our second floor balcony. Cobbled together with plywood, it probably wasn’t the safest entryway, but it served its purpose.

State universities generally draw in all types – jocks, preps, nerds, princesses. With nearly 20,000 undergrad on campus, I’m sure some people felt lost, overwhelmed by the crush of academia. Where others may have felt alone, I reveled in the anonymity. Here, I had no past. No one knew my story. If I felt the urge to vanish into the crowd, faceless and disconnected, no one would even glance up from their own lives long enough to notice. It was the exact opposite of my high school experience, and it was everything I had hoped for when I’d applied.

Crawling down to the foot of my bed, I pushed open the window to let some of the humid Virginia air creep in. The late August night was dark and quiet; the bars had let out hours ago and no one loitered on the street. Most people would be getting up early tomorrow, eager to start the new semester. After about a week of attending every class and taking copious notes, what I called the “good student syndrome” would quickly wear off most undergrads. The end of early-semester diligence generally marked the launch of party season and, consequently, the end of quiet nights on my bar-riddled street.

Taking advantage of the undisturbed night, I scooted slowly off the foot of my bed and out onto the slate roof stretching directly below my open window. The rooftop was nearly flat, wide enough for me to lie with my – albeit short –legs fully extended. Technically, it served to shelter the wraparound porch below from the unrelenting Virginia elements, but in my mind, the roof was created especially for me. It was my special spot, my private nook – the one place where I could block out the rest of the world and feel safe.

Safe.

I guess it shouldn't seem like such an unattainable state. I’m sure it isn’t for normal people. But I had accepted long ago that I was not, nor would I ever be, a normal girl. After the incident fourteen years ago, I’d been taken into state custody until my biological father could be notified. My mother had never wanted anything to do with him and, as he was long gone by the time she’d discovered she was carrying me, she’d never tracked him down. I spent the first six years of life believing that it would always be just the two of us – that we didn’t need a man to make us a family. And in the years after, I’d started to believe that I didn’t need a family at all.

Since she’d never informed him of his fatherly duties, after my mother’s death there was some confusion about what to do with me. It took Child Protective Services nearly six months to find the man whose name was listed on my birth certificate. The delay, apparently due to his extended business trip to Beijing, left me stranded for months without a guardian. So, as my mother had no living relatives, I was placed into a group foster home until my father could be bothered to collect me.

Most of my memories from that time are inaccessible to me. I’m not sure whether I forcibly blocked them out or involuntarily repressed them, but whatever the case, that time in my life remains a blur.

Some images are clearer than others; I can almost still hear the sympathetic voices of the social workers and doctors as they explained to me that life as I knew it was over. The all-consuming despair I’d felt at the loss of my mother had never really gone away.

After the incident, I know I didn’t speak to anyone for several months. The foster mother I’d been placed with made sure that I ate and dressed each day. A psychologist stopped by several times each week to chart my progress in her small state-issued notebook, assuring me that everything would be okay. But really, what else could she say?

Nothing was okay. I was a six year old ward of the state who’d witnessed the violent murder of the only source of love I’d ever known. I would never be “okay” again, despite the shrink’s reassurances.

Throughout the years, I’d seen a never-ending parade of therapists, psychologists, and psychiatrists, all equally eager to get a glimpse inside my twisted adolescent mind. These consultations invariably proceeded the same way – with them prompting me to speak about my “childhood trauma,” and me sitting on a slightly uncomfortable leather chair, staring at the clock in brooding silence. After the first few sessions of unrelenting taciturnity, my shrink-of-the-week would inevitably become frustrated, accuse me of burying my feelings, and claim that I would remain “spiritually lost” or “damaged” until I battled some bullshit inner emotional war.

What I didn’t say, during all those weeks of silence, was that no amount of soul searching would fix my past. There was no magical Band-Aid I could stick on my heart, no special glue I could use to make myself whole again. I had shattered to pieces like a fragile vase on concrete; some fragments could be roughly cobbled back together, but many of my vital parts had simply turned to dust, pulverized and scattered by the first gust of wind.

Leaning back on my hands, I closed my eyes and pulled a deep breath in through my nose. The summer night air smelled of fresh-cut grass and a faint hint of the coming autumn. There was a slight chill in the breeze, rustling the leaves of the maple tree nearest the house and sending goosebumps skittering up my arms. I rubbed them absentmindedly, my eyes scanning from the maple’s graceful sloping branches down to the quiet street below.

Shit! What the hell is that? Correction - who the hell is that?

My pulse immediately began to pound in my veins as my eyes confirmed that there was, in fact, someone standing in the dimly lit street.

Watching me.

My muscles tensed up and I froze like a deer in headlights – a naive prey trapped neatly in a predator’s lair.

It was definitely a man. Though I could only make out a silhouette, as the nearest working street lamp was a half block away, the shoulders were too broad, the build too tall, to be anything but male.

Or, it was possibly one of the steroid-abusing female swimmers from China’s Olympic team, I thought to myself, nearly snorting aloud at the thought. Yeah, Brooklyn, that’s totally probable.

My brief moment of levity died and an irrational sense of dread commandeered my senses. I remained frozen, unsure whether I should move back inside. Could he see me? Was he watching me? Surely it was too dark for the stranger to notice a relatively small girl perched on a rooftop in the dark.

I could see the small glowing cherry of his cigarette flare brighter whenever he brought it up to take a drag. The rest of the street remained empty yet the man continued to lean against his motorcycle, a Harley from the looks of it, seemingly waiting for someone or something.

Clearly, he was not waiting for me or watching me, I reasoned. I’d never seen him before in my life. Though I couldn't see his face in the darkness, I knew simply by his build, his choice of transportation, and the smoke billowing in his lungs that we didn’t exactly run in the same social circles.

Still, I wasn’t about to sit outside alone in the middle of the night, dressed only in the skimpy tank top and cotton shorts I’d slept in, when there was a random man lurking in front of my house. It was time to go back inside, preferably without drawing any undue attention to myself.

Channeling my inner Sydney Bristow, I slid my hands back until my fingertips grazed the edge of the windowsill. Very slowly, I moved my body backwards, keeping my eyes trained on the shadowed man. When he had no reaction to my covert movements, I felt the sense of leaden panic ease from my chest. He hadn’t noticed me; he wasn’t even looking at me.

Bond, Brooklyn Bond.

More confidently, I pivoted my legs and slid them inside the window, my knees sinking into my plush down comforter. I glanced down once more at the man in the street as I began to shift my torso inside, my hands braced against the windowsill.

Through the darkness, I felt our eyes meet. It wasn’t as if I could physically see his eyes, but somehow I knew they were staring directly into mine.

So much for my theory that he couldn’t see me.

I watched as he took a final drag on his cigarette, moved his hand to his forehead, and sent me a mocking salute, as if to acknowledge my departure from the roof. My eyes tracked the movement of his hand, unmistakably identified by the dim glow of his cigarette, and I hastily moved the rest of my body inside, locking the window shut behind me.

What a creep.

Back in the safety of my bedroom, my fear quickly faded. Whoever he was, he was clearly pleased with the fact that he’d managed to make me so uncomfortable simply by loitering. It was probably just some stupid fraternity brother, waiting for his sorority counterpart to stumble outside for a late-night hookup. It didn’t have anything to do with me.

At least, that’s what I told myself when I glanced out the window a minute later and saw that the motorcycle had vanished completely.

***

A few hours later, I perched on one of our kitchen island barstools and sipped my coffee greedily. Ah, caffeine. Sweet nectar of the gods. The weak morning sunshine trickled in through an overhead skylight, illuminating our paint-chipped cabinets and mismatched furniture. My fingers absently moved across the marred countertop, tracing a collection of scratches gouged out by the last decade of tenants.

Lexi shuffled into the kitchen, her red hair still mussed from sleep and her feet stuffed into a pair of hideous green frog slippers.

“Coffee,” she muttered.

Lexi was not exactly what you’d call a morning person.

“Already brewed,” I reported, hiding a smile behind my coffee mug as I took in the sight of her disheveled bed-head and rumpled pajamas.

“You’re a saint,” she said, pouring herself a steaming cup and inhaling deeply as the aroma reached her nose.

“I thought we decided to burn those slippers after seventh grade along with your collection of Beanie Babies and N’ Sync posters,” I observed sarcastically. Lexi simply glared over at me, unwilling to be baited into a response.

“How are you already dressed and perfect? I still have to shower before class at eight. What time is it anyway?” she asked.

“To answer your first question – I’ve been up all night and had plenty of time to get dressed. And as for the second,” I glanced at the digital microwave clock, “It’s 6:57.”

Lexi grimaced in sympathy at the thought of my sleepless night. Then again, that girl could sleep fifteen hours a day and it probably still wouldn’t be enough for her. Her bed was quite possibly her favorite place in the world.

“Wait! Shit! It’s already seven?” Lexi exclaimed, jumping up from her barstool and nearly upending her coffee in the process. “I’ll never be ready in time! Perfection doesn’t just happen, it takes time, Brooklyn. I guess I’ll be late for my first class. Shit!” she cursed again, racing out of the kitchen.

“The professor will probably just go over the syllabus anyway! Nothing crucial,” I called down the hall after her.

Not that it mattered; whether she had five minutes or forty, Lexi could pull together a polished look most of us could only achieve with the help of trained makeover specialists. Somehow, she even made bed-head look attractive. Hell, if Lexi went to class wearing those damn frog slippers, half of the female student body would be rocking them within the week.

It seemed ironic that, thanks to my sleepless nights, I had hours to get ready when I rarely needed more than ten minutes to do my hair and makeup. As for picking clothes, I’d never been one to meticulously plan or accessorize my outfits. I usually just threw on my standard combo of jeans, a tank top, and flip flops. As for the rest, after concealing my dark under-eye shadows, dabbing on a touch of mascara and lip-gloss, and letting my dark waves tumble freely, I was ready to go.

I didn’t understand what could possibly take Lexi so long. Throughout the years, she’d frequently been frustrated by my utter lack of interest in clothes, makeup, and shopping. As per my best friend duties, I’d served as her dressing-room sounding board for many years as she tirelessly weighed the pros and cons of a particular dress or pair of heels. I drew the line, however, at letting her pick out clothes for me. As a fashion-merchandising major, she was constantly trying to get me to deviate from my boring girl-next-door look, but I didn’t see the point. My clothes were just fine, even if they lacked designer labels or avant-garde flair.

I considered pouring myself another cup of coffee, but decided against it. Two cups was my limit – any more and I’d be shaky and on-edge for the rest of the day. Wandering back into my bedroom, I double-checked that I had some empty notebooks and a copy of my class schedule tucked neatly into my backpack.

I’d have three classes today: Criminal Justice, Sociology, and Public Speaking. Joy. The university’s Pre-Law degree track encompassed a widely varied array of courses, most of which were supremely boring and full of brown-nosing, argumentative lawyers-to-be.

Can’t wait. I rolled my eyes. Sophomore year, here I come.

***

Lexi offered a running fashion commentary as we walked the three blocks from our apartment to campus. Mostly I just listened and tried to keep a straight face.

“What is that girl wearing? That’s a plaid skirt!” Lexi whispered, clearly outraged as she unsubtly pointed at the girl walking a few steps in front of us. “It’s like Rory stepped right off the set of Gilmore Girls!” She shook her head in disbelief.

“You’ve been watching reruns on ABC Family again, haven’t you?” I accused.

“Psh, Brooke. Who are you kidding? I own the box set.”

“You have so many issues.”

“I know, but that’s why you looove me!” she sang, throwing one arm around my shoulders and propelling me faster down the sidewalk.

“Um, Lex, your legs are each at least six inches longer than mine,” I complained, struggling to match her increased pace.

“I know, but I think I see Finn up ahead,” she said, peering over Rory’s shoulder to catch a glimpse of whatever boy had caught her eye.

Evidently unsatisfied with the view, she tugged me around the plaid-wearing Gilmore and nearly headfirst into a stop sign, refusing to slow down even when I squealed in protest and tried to wrench myself from her grip. She didn’t even bother to acknowledge my struggles and, after several more unsuccessful escape attempts, I stopped fighting. Allowing myself to be dragged along, I heaved a martyred sigh and resigned myself to my fate.

“And who, may I ask, is Finn?”

That caught her attention. Her head whipped around so fast I was instantly reminded of The Exorcist head-spinning scene.

“What do you mean who is he? Do you ever listen when I talk? Wait, no, don’t answer that,” she glared down at me, still walking at a breakneck pace. “He’s only the most attractive specimen of manhood on this campus! The star of every sorostitute’s fantasies!”

“Sorostitute?”

“Think sorority plus prostitute. Kinda catchy right?” Lexi smiled for a brief second before slipping back on her sternest, most disapproving frown. “Jeeze, Brookie. I know you have zero interest in gossip, but at the very least you need to recognize the drool-inducing men on this campus! They’re few and far between.”

“Sorry. Please, continue describing said specimen of manhood,” I requested with considerable sarcasm.

“Well, he’s beautiful. And completely unattainable, of course. I mean, he sleeps around, don’t get me wrong. But he doesn’t stick around. It’s a hit-it-and-quit-it deal, from what I hear,” she gushed. “He’s a senior, he transferred here last year.”

Lexi continued to scan the sidewalk ahead of us, hoping to keep her elusive target within sight. Apparently, we were stalkers now. No wonder this boy didn’t stick around; if Lexi was any indication, the girls at this school really did not understand boundaries.

“That’s definitely him, straight ahead,” she squealed, her voice at least three octaves higher than normal.

I couldn't see over the heads of the three girls walking directly ahead of us, and thus was denied a glimpse at Lexi’s new obsession.

“What are you going to do if you even catch up to him, genius?” I panted, slightly out of breath.

In lieu of answering, Lexi yanked me sideways, successfully passing the cluster of girls and whipping me into the direct path of an unseen fire hydrant. I pulled back, digging in my heels and trying desperately to slow my pace, but Lexi’s momentum made it impossible to avoid the oncoming collision.

Crashing into the hydrant at full speed, the wind was knocked from my lungs and I sailed into the air. I only had enough time to throw my hands in front of my face and squeeze my eyes shut before the pavement rushed up to meet me.

Date: 2015-02-16; view: 533