Goodnight, Ginny

                                    Goodnight, Ginny
  For the third night in a row I woke up screaming. I never asked for this to happen. None of it. In fact, I should’ve been the last person you’d expect to be involved in anything like that.  I guess if you’d known me before, you might understand why what happened was such a big deal. For those who didn’t know me, though, this is just another story; and it begins with a dream.
         A strong wind blew the last few leaves off a giant oak, but there was something else in the wind, too – smoke. The tree stood beside a rock, engraved with the name “Campbell”. The street behind me was deserted, and the only streetlight flickered and died. I walked slowly toward the house and knocked on the door, but pulled my hand back when I realized how hot it was. Fire, was the first thought that jumped into my head. I didn’t even know these people, but I knew I had to help them.
  The back door was also locked- big surprise, so I looked for a spare key Instead, I found a garden lined with rocks. There was a light on in a second story window, and I threw rocks at it as hard as I could.  Unfortunately, there was a reason that I wasn’t in softball, and I remembered that I couldn’t hit the broadside of a barn with a boulder after the 11th rock missed its mark. I ran to the backdoor and started pounding on it. A window shattered on the first story, but it wasn’t my fault. Smoke and fire poured out, followed by a high pitched scream. The last thing I remembered was beating on the door with the single thought that if only I could get in there, I could help them.
  And then I wake up, but by them the scream is always mine.  I was a woman possessed. During the day it was the only thing on my mind, and I kept going over it in my head; replaying the events in my head to try and catch what I missed. Nothing. It was like trying to solve a puzzle that was missing a piece. No matter how hard you tried, it couldn’t be put together; until something Leah said caught my attention.
         I wasn’t really listening to her. Even though she is my best friend, she can rattle on about nothing for as long as someone is around to hear it. So I was surprised to hear the one word that was constantly on my mind come from her.
“What?” I said, turning around to face her and got hit by another sophomore trying to get to her locker. “Sorry. Leah, what did you say about a fire?”
         Leah looked dumbstruck. Usually I am an innocent bystander while she gossips, and don’t interject with any comments to disrupt her. “Fire? Oh, yeah, that.”
         “Well?” I said.
         She sighed, “Hold on, jeez. I was saying that my cousin, Gabby, - you remember her, right?”
         I nodded.
         “Well, Gabby lives over in Blue Vale, and she told me that a family on her block was killed. Both parents and their little boy, it was terrible.”
         I couldn’t breathe. The scream from the fire came back to me all over again, and I could almost smell the smoke. It couldn’t be real, it wasn’t real, there’s no way; and yet…
         “Leah,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady. “Do you remember who it was? The family’s name, I mean?”
         She looked up at the ceiling and twisted her hair, something that she thinks makes her look especially cute - it doesn’t. “Umm… I’m not sure. It was something like Sandbell, or Caldwell, -“
         “Campbell.”
         “What?” she said, dropping her hair and looking at me.
         “Their name is Campbell,” I had no way of knowing it or proving it, but something told me that it was the same house I’d saw go up every night that week.
         “That’s it!” Leah yelled. “Now I remember. How’d you know?”
         I looked at her. I couldn’t tell her the truth; that I’d dreamt about something before it actually happened. She’d think I was crazy. Even I was beginning to wonder about that. No, it must have been an accident, or just a coincidence.
         “Ginny-“
         “Lucky guess,” I said quickly. “It was just a lucky guess.”
         “Oh,” Leah laughed. “That reminds me of the boy who sits in front of me in French…” she started, but I didn’t hear anything else she said. My mind was trying to rationalize.
  I should explain that I am a sensible person. I don’t drink, I don’t party, but most importantly, I don’t dream. It’s been that way since about the time my older brother, Jeremy, left home. He was the dreamer in our family. He had huge ambitions, and did whatever it took to accomplish them, even if that meant leaving home at 17 and never returning. Our father had wanted him to be in the army, just like he was, and Jeremy had wanted to help people. It didn’t work out too well. So, one night Jeremy left, and the next time anybody heard anything about him, we knew that he wasn’t ever coming home again. There’d been an accident involving him and a drunk driver, and even though I was nine, I knew what it meant.
         Our mother had been a work-a-holic, and after the accident she became more of a stay-at-home mom. She acted like she was about Jeremy’s age, and did the most irrational things. Dad had never been the gung-ho working type, but it turned him into the kind of person you never see at dinner, and is always in his office on the weekends. He never said so, but I always thought that he blamed himself for my brother’s rebellion, and his death. As for me, I went from idolizing Jeremy and his careless, easy-going spirit, to wanting nothing to do with it. I did what I thought other people wanted me to do, and I was the person I thought they wanted me to be. Dreams were dangerous, things happened, bad things, when you dreamed. I didn’t dream anymore, whether intentional or not. That is, until this past week, almost five years later.
  When I got home after school, my mother was in the kitchen painting. She smiled when I came in, but it was only to ask me a question. “Hey, Ginny, could you take that paper into the living room for me? Thanks. It’s today’s paper, and your father would kill me if I got paint all over it.” She said, and held up her paint-covered hands.
         I sighed and took it off the table and into the next room, but stopped before I got all the way there. On the front page was a smoldering house with the caption:
  “Firefighters were unable to rescue a family of three when a late – night fire erupted in this residential neighborhood. Investigators are still uncertain as to the cause of the blaze. The victim’s names will be released when the relatives have notified other family members of the tragedy.”
It looked like any other front page worthy fire, but when I looked closer there was a yellow rock in the front yard, engraved hazily with the name, “Campbell”
         “No way.” I breathed. It really happened.
  Slowly, I walked back into the kitchen and sat down at the table. “Mom,” I said. “Do you, do you ever have weird dreams?”
         She looked up from her canvas and gave me a look. “What kind of dreams?”
  “Like real ones, things that actually happen. Or…will, happen.” I said quietly, not daring to meet her stare.
  “Prophetic dreams? You mean like dreaming what hasn’t happened yet, but could?” she asked.
  “Yeah, sort of like that. Have you?”
  She looked off into space and touched her paintbrush to her cheek, leaving a green slash across her face. “I don’t think that I have, but your brother used to talk about something like that. I’m not for sure, but I think he used to tell me things like he knew that something was going to happen when we watched the news in the evenings. Well, that is when I could make it home for the news, he’d say that he knew about some big story they were announcing before it happened.”
“What did he do about them?” I whispered.
  “Nothing. Well, nothing that I know of. He stopped talking about it after a while; I think he got bored with the game, since I wasn’t buying into it.”
  “Oh,” I said. “So, you don’t think that he could have been telling the truth? That he actually had dreams like that?”
My mother looked at me, “Honey, that was a long time ago. Jeremy wasn’t that much younger than you are, maybe twelve or thirteen, maybe a little older. I think all kids go through a stage like that at some point or another. Eventually, you just grow out of it.”
  It was just a dream. Of course. Why had I ever let myself think any different was beyond me.
  My brother was seventeen when he left, and I never saw him again. I guess in order to block out what happened in my little kid mind, I just stopped believing in everything that I connected with Jeremy. I didn’t even notice when I stopped dreaming, and after a while it just seemed it had always been that way. Now, lying awake in bed it all came rushing back to me, and what happened to my brother made me realize why I’d blocked all that stuff out. I was afraid. Afraid to end up like him, to follow in his footsteps, and afraid of what he’d seen. So I can’t be entirely honest by saying that I wasn’t prepared in at least some way for what happened next.
  I know that most people who read this will say that there is no way on earth that this really happened, and to some extent that might be right, but this wasn’t on earth. This was in dreamland. They might ask me, “How did you know you were dreaming,” or “I don’t believe you.” Whatever. I didn’t ask for this, I didn’t even want to believe that it happened, but it did. That night I had another dream. It wasn’t the same one as before, I think because that one had already come true. If it happened at all; there was still a part of me that was refusing to accept everything I’d learned. This one was different in the fact that I felt what happened instead of witnessing it from afar.
  The world outside was a green blur. It tool me a second to realize that I was the one moving, not the world. I’m from the city, and driving through the country isn’t exactly something I do a lot of, especially in a car. Usually I’m in a bus, or walking, or even the occasional taxi. The person driving was Hispanic, and a little younger than my mother.
  “Excuse me,” I said. “Where are we going?”
  No response. I tried to pinpoint where I was, but everything looked the same to me, and besides, I’d hardly ever been out of the city. I was getting more than a little nervous, (afraid of car accidents) when all of a sudden I saw a car swerve into our lane up ahead. I looked to the woman, but she was talking on a cell phone and rummaging in her purse. The car got closer and I started screaming. Just when it seemed like she would never look up, she did – though a little too late. She swerved, though it didn’t matter, by then the other car was too close. Close enough that I noticed a frantic blonde in front shaking an old woman slouched in her seat, and a picture of a young girl smiling  from the rear-view mirror. Just before the moment of impact I closed my eyes, and opened them in my room.
  This time I did not scream; I knew what was going to happen. No more second guessing, no more questioning - I believed. I suddenly knew why my brother had to leave; it was because he’d had dreams, too. Jeremy couldn’t just sit around watching everything happen without doing anything to prevent it, though, he’d known what he had to do, and wasn’t afraid to accept his Destiny. I was afraid to believe, but this was too important to shrug off as a coincidence. That was because I knew the girl in the car, the blonde hair and the picture she was in on the rear-view mirror. It was Leah.
  The next day at lunch I was afraid to say anything to Leah. I wanted to tell her about the dream, but what if she thought I was acting crazy? But then again, what if it actually happened, and I never got a chance to warn her? Disaster. Before I could decide, however she started telling me about her Grandma coming to town, and asking her to bring a friend for the weekend.
         “So how about it? Want to spend a few days in the country, Ginny?” She asked.
  I was about to say “No thank you, I hate fresh air,” when I suddenly remembered the other woman in the car with Leah. “Oh, my ….”
  “What?”  She said.
  “Leah, I have something to tell you.” I said, and told her everything. She didn’t react how I thought she would; she believed me.
  We hatched a plan. It turned out that her grandmother actually did have a picture on her rear-view mirror of Leah, and everything was exactly as I’d described it. Leah called her grandmother and told her she wasn’t feeling well, so she would come see her next weekend, but not to worry, it was nothing serious.
I spent all weekend at her house, and I didn’t have anymore dreams.
  “We must have figured it out! I’ll bet that means it won’t come true now. We beat Fate!” She exclaimed. But I wasn’t so sure and still feared every night.
  On Monday Leah came to lunch with a newspaper. “Look at that,” she said, pointing to the front page. “Is that what it looked like?
There, on the front page, was the very same car that ran Leah and her grandmother off the road. The very same. The caption said that the driver had a heart attack and ran off the road. We’d won. For now.