Rami's Return

Rami felt herself lurch, as if riding a roller coaster that had just slammed into an abrupt stop. Her stomach felt as if it was going to crawl out of her body. This hadn't exactly been one of her best days--you'd think that you'd actually get to rest on weekends at some point, but apparently her teachers thought that you learned best when you had to work on busy- work worksheets every minute of your life. Rami herself learned best when she was reading outside of class, especially when she was doing research for one of her stories. The heavy weight of high school's rigid structure killed her imagination. Her parents had now lectured at her several times for not doing as well in school as her sister had. (Her parents seemed to constantly be on the lookout for something to lecture her about. It was a good thing they'd never found out about her smoking.) Rami didn't blame Amy for it, though, or at least tried not to. They were different people and were good at different things, and it wasn't fair that her parents thought that what Amy could do was worth more than what she could do.

Since she'd managed to beat down a fairly large number of her pointless assignments and decided that the rest were so pointless that it didn't matter in the long term if she put them off, she'd decided to try to write one of her stories. So naturally, she found that she'd gotten clogged up with writer's block. When she was on top of things, writing was a joyful, beautiful thing. Her imagination was on fire as her fingers danced across the keyboard. Naturally, the only thing she loved as much as writing was reading. But whens he had writer's block, it was frustrating and made her feel like a corpse. It was always bad during heavy homework days and had gotten worse once she'd quit smoking. She felt tired, drained, irritable... It didn't feel like just a physical thing, either. It felt like her spirit was hungry for something.

Reluctantly, she decided that it would be pointless to try to write any more. She closed TextEdit (Rami was as much of a die-hard Mac user as her parents and sister were die-hard Windows users). Her desktop wallpaper was an image of a blood-red dragon flying over the mountains in the sunset. As she saw it, she felt stirred on a level she didn't understand, feeling for a moment almost a filling of her hunger, making her hunger all the more, and grew dizzy, feeling as if she was about to fall into an abyss. She stood up and shook her head clear. "Eurgh," she said. "I have been staring at the computer screen for far too long." She probably couldn't do any homework, though, since that would only make her feel more sick. She could walk outside, which on a fall day like this would normally help clear her head, because when New Caanan had a proper fall rather than just leaping from summer to winter the days were incredibly clear and beautiful. Drinking in the clear air also reminded her why she'd stopped smoking. But tonight New Caanan was coated with fog and the setting sun was a blood red circle. She might want to go out on an evening like this to get herself in the mood for writing a certain kind of story, but she didn't want to be in that mood now. The best thing to do would be to plop down on the couch and get lost in a good book. And she did so.

A major interstate passed through the town of New Caanan, Indiana, flanked by the usual army of grimy gas stations and cheap chain restaurants. In fact, New Caanan happened to have the largest number of restaurants per capita of any city in America, not something an university town that straddled the boundary between large town and small city would want to take pride in. A black motorcycle had just driven in from the exact border of the town. Those who were driving by felt for a moment as if they'd just heard an unearthly whinny echo through the road. But they shrugged their shoulders and drove on.

The motorcycle stopped in for a moment at a gas station. From it dismounted a tall, lean, weathered man with dark hair and blue eyes. He looked around him, smiling as his eyes settled on a van full of teenagers from one of the local high schools. For a moment, it seemed as if his eyes had a tinge of grey. He nodded his head and entered the gas station to pay. When he paid the attendant, he spoke few words and dropped some money on the counter. As he shuffled out, the attendant stored the cash in the register nervously, as if she were holding a spider, and slammed it shut quickly, like a door after a bogeyman.

The man rode on, steering the motorcycle fluidly and perfectly even though he had his eyes closed. He stopped into a McDonald's where a bunch of teenagers were hanging out. His eyes settled on each of them, turning slightly grey each time. His face had been blank and expressionless, but he almost smiled, seeming like a hunter about to move in for his prey.

He put on the motorcycle and drove off. He'd looked into the souls of many of the students at New Caanan High School, and all of them had known Rami, many of them without really noticing her. He had some vague idea of her--smart but rebellious girl who didn't fit easily into any social group and had friends and enemies in just about all of them, loved to read and write fantasy fiction, used to smoke, a few people knew that her father was a math professor at Griffin University. Just about every boy who knew her found her attractive, but wouldn't let themselves be attracted to her because they couldn't figure out what box to put her in. There were exceptions, though--she'd had several boyfriends, and her romances had all been interesting and passionate and lasted about three minutes. Her best friends were Kelli Rice, who was one of her teammates on the school swim team, and Michael Abbott, another would- be fantasy writer and all-around geek. She had been secretly smoking until recently, then bravely and reluctantly given it up.

The man left the McDonalds. No one had noticed him, but once he had left everyone felt relieved without quite knowing why. He mounted his motorcycle once more and rode off into the street. He was not far from the red brick campus of Griffin University, which looked especially strange and eerie in the night considering how banaly it looked in the light of day. The fog seemed to writhe and congeal around the motorcycle. When it let up, where the motorcycle had been was now a small Saab. Once more, a strange whinnying was heard.

1. In the present...
2. In the past...

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