The Girl In Between #1 Read online

  The Girl In Between

  The Girl In Between Series Book 1

  Laekan Zea Kemp

  Copyright © 2014 by Laekan Zea Kemp

  All rights reserved.

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the above author of this book. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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  Contents

  BookBub Giveaway

  Newsletter

  Introduction

  1. Bryn

  2. .

  3. Bryn

  4. Bryn

  5. .

  6. Bryn

  7. .

  8. Bryn

  9. .

  10. Bryn

  11. Bryn

  12. .

  13. Bryn

  14. .

  15. Bryn

  16. Bryn

  17. .

  18. Bryn

  19. Bryn

  20. Roman

  21. Bryn

  22. Bryn

  23. Roman

  24. Bryn

  25. Roman

  26. Bryn

  27. Bryn

  28. Bryn

  29. Roman

  30. Bryn

  31. Roman

  32. Bryn

  33. Bryn

  34. Roman

  35. Bryn

  The End

  Newsletter

  Also by Laekan Zea Kemp

  Pen & Xander

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Order Pen & Xander Today!

  The Boy In Her Dreams

  About the Author

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  1

  Bryn

  The tide surged, carving a crescent in the sand. Water collapsed against my knees, tearing the beach out from under my legs. But when the wave receded, the foam clung to something dark. Something long and still.

  I saw his face, lashes tangled over blue lids, his lips parted against the sand. The breeze rippled off his clothes, ocean peeling from his face and dripping onto my hands. I was steeled there, not sure if he was real, until I saw his eyes, a flash of his dark pupils.

  My hands trembled, afraid to move him, to wake him. Afraid he wouldn’t. Another wave spilled over him, the sand giving way, rocking him. I reached for his shoulder, pushing until he was on his back. He was the color of a hydrangea before it blooms, wilting like one too, every inch of him sunken and bruised.

  I bent down, listening for a heartbeat. Nothing. My fingers trembled against his face and then I took a deep breath. His lips were cold and I pressed down hard, burying his mouth with my own. The water trickled down his jaw, foam sticking to his skin. I drew in another breath and then I forced it down to his lungs.

  He was still and I sunk against his chest, pushing, pushing. Breathe. Please. The tide curled underneath him and then his muscles tensed. His back arched, air driving down to his lungs.

  And then he opened his eyes and so did I.

  “Bryn.”

  I blinked.

  “Are you okay?”

  I heard my mom’s voice, her hands freeing me from the blankets.

  “Awake?” she said.

  I nodded, the dull shade of my room coming into view. I saw my David Mach Spaceman poster, my LP collage above my desk, my welding gloves on top of my hamper, and my mom’s face, shadows spilling down the bridge of her nose. This time I was awake.

  “How long?” I said, my voice shallow and hoarse.

  She brushed the hair from my face and I felt it stiff and sticking to her fingers.

  “Four weeks,” she said.

  Four. I sunk against the mattress. “That’s not…” Better. I’m not getting better.

  “At least you didn’t miss Christmas,” she reminded me.

  My pulse was in my ears as she gripped my hands.

  “We’ll try again,” she said.

  “We’ve…”

  “We’ll try again.”

  I let go of her.

  “I’ll get you some water. Are you hungry?” she asked.

  I shook my head, tears sliding down the back of my throat. But she didn’t see them.

  “I’ll make you something just in case. Do you want me to grab you some clothes? I’ll run a bath—”

  “Mom. Stop.”

  She liked to fill the emptiness, especially when she was nervous, which was all the time. But words were just a side effect, not a remedy.

  “I can do it,” I said.

  “Are you sure?”

  I rolled to the edge of the bed and planted my feet on the cold wooden floor. I let the chill rise through the soles, waking the rest of me. Those first few steps were always shaky, muscles remembering to contract, blood trailing down to places that felt numb enough to cut off. But this time I’d been asleep for four weeks.

  The last time I’d slept that long was two years ago when Dr. Sabine set me up in a hospital room for observation during some experimental therapy. I’d woken up five weeks later thinking I’d been cured. A month passed. Then another. Then six. Six whole months without an episode. But then one day I slumped to the floor in the middle of art class, out cold for two weeks, and I knew I hadn’t been cured. I still had Klein-Levin Syndrome and it still had me.

  I shuffled to the bathroom, each step like needles pricking the balls of my feet. I sat on the edge of the tub, catching my breath while steam climbed the vanity mirror, but not before I caught a glimpse of my reflection. That was always the worst part because I always looked like shit.

  This time was particularly nasty. My hair was in a tangled mess on top of my head, curls matted into knots I knew I’d spend the next hour desperately trying to untangle. I could see my collarbones sharp beneath my grey skin. My fingernails were long and cracked—the ones on the left shaved down from where my mom had most likely tried to clip them.

  I thought about her wrestling with my 130 pounds of symptomatic defiance; with my disease. I hoped I hadn’t made it too hard for her even though I knew I always did, because when I was sleeping, I wasn’t always out completely.

  It was a strange thing knowing that my body was able to function without consciousness. During an episode I could still eat and drink and do all of the necessary things it takes to live. I just couldn’t remember doing them. And yet those strange symptoms were really the only things doctors knew for sure when it came to KLS: the sleeping for long periods of time, the aggressi
on, the binge eating, the delirium.

  But the symptoms were subjective and inconsistent and, for me, sometimes non-existent. I didn’t have a normal strand of the disease. I had something else. Something worse.

  I stared down at my hips, at my thighs. They looked foreign but not sharp enough to cut straight through. Not like last time. Sometimes I’d wake up ten pounds heavier and sometimes I’d wake up looking like a bag of bones. I didn’t even remember what my body was actually supposed to look like anymore. I didn’t remember normal.

  I slipped down into the tub, the water pouring over me in a rush. I just simmered there, wanting to melt. But then I remembered the boy, the sallow color of his skin, lips peeling and blue.

  I never dreamed when I was sleeping. Not like that. I went somewhere, tucked between moving photographs—the past and the present—every memory I’d ever had stitched into some fluid breathing patchwork. And the water. It was everywhere.

  I spent most of my episodes sitting on some illusory beach waiting to wake up—the conscious’ coping mechanism, my doctors had always said, though no other KLS patients had experienced anything like it.

  But this time when I felt myself drifting, just on the verge of waking, I’d looked down the shoreline and there he was. Spat out by the waves. A floating corpse.

  Until I filled his lungs with air and he woke up.

  I heard a knock and the knob springing loose. I pulled the curtain, hiding my face.

  “Bryn?”

  I felt the steam pour out, cold air rushing in. Then my cousin Dani shut the door.

  “Thank God. That was a long one.” I heard her lean against the bathroom counter. “How are you feeling?”

  “Fine.”

  No doubt my mom had already filled her in. Four weeks. She’s still sick.

  “What day is it?” I asked.

  “December 21st.”

  I exhaled, feeling the water rise. I’d missed semester exams and my mom’s birthday. I’d missed the deadline for the scholarship contest at Emory.

  “At least you woke up in time for Christmas,” Dani offered.

  I imagined the parts of the house I hadn’t seen in four weeks covered in tinsel and ceramic ornaments; fake flower arrangements on every side table, my mom’s favorite Native American wind instrument Christmas CD on repeat.

  In the past six years I’d missed three Christmases. I tried not to think about my mom and grandmother wrapping presents they weren’t sure when exactly I’d open, hoping that I’d be lying with them on the couch on Christmas morning watching old home movies and eating cinnamon rolls, when really I’d still be in bed, neither of them able to gather enough resolve to even switch on the Christmas tree.

  That was one of the worst things about being sick. Someone was always waiting on you, which meant disappointing people was inevitable.

  “How was…?” My voice cracked and I swallowed. “How was I?”

  I knew Dani would have been here most days, checking on my mom, she and my aunt bringing by groceries when my mom was too afraid to leave me and run to the store. She and I had grown up more like twins, though she had our mom’s signature dark skin and straight black hair while I inherited cork screw curls and a strange egg shell coloring from some long lost relative on my dad’s side.

  “Not bad,” Dani finally said. “You pretty much stayed in bed the whole time. Got a little annoyed when your mom tried to turn you but that’s it.”

  I remembered the first time I got bedsores. They looked like bruises at first, swirling up from the waist of my yoga pants and near the collar of my shirt. I’d been asleep for six weeks. Luckily, that’s as bad as they’d gotten and once my mom started turning me every day I hadn’t gotten them since.

  “And how was she?” I asked.

  I heard Dani sigh. “Fine. Like always.”

  Fine. That’s not what I’d heard in her voice that morning. My mom’s face was always the first thing I saw once I finally opened my eyes and every time she looked older. This time it had looked like I’d been gone for years, her laugh lines deeper and crawling to the translucent skin under her eyes. She looked tired.

  “Are you sure nothing happened?” I asked.

  “Nothing out of the ordinary.”

  “What’s ordinary?”

  I heard the air cut through Dani’s nose. “You know.”

  “Did I miss anything at school?” I asked.

  She grew quiet. Something Dani never did.

  “Hello? Did something bad happen?”

  “Well, I don’t know if it’s bad, necessarily. Actually, in your case it might be good news. Unless—”

  “Spit it out, Dani.”

  I hated when people tried to act like the world didn’t exist while I was sleeping, erasing the past however many days from their own memories for my sake. I wished they’d just hand me some kind of running list, Things Bryn Missed, and be done with it. No awkward skirting around whatever emotions they thought I’d still attached to things like time. I was way past that.

  “Are you sure?” she said. “I mean you just woke up and—”

  “I’ve been sleeping, not off to war or something. Stop tip-toeing.”

  “Drew’s dating someone.”

  “Someone…”

  “Else.”

  “Yeah. Got that. Who?”

  “I don’t know. She doesn’t go to Imperial.”

  My throat tightened.

  “Are you okay?” Dani asked.

  I bent my knees, letting the water rise to my chin. It was cold.

  “Fine,” I said.

  “Are you sure? You remember last time when he—”

  “I’m fine.”

  I thought about that stupid red box sitting on my nightstand. The anniversary present I couldn’t open. The one he’d thrown against my headboard because I wasn’t ready. Because he was tired of waiting and I still wasn’t ready.

  Four weeks. It had felt like a long time when I’d first woken up but just then it felt like a flash, like it took him no time at all to find someone else. Someone normal. But as angry as I was, as much as I hated him, I hated myself a little too. Why can’t I just be normal?

  “Can you wait out there?” I said. “I want to finish up in here.”

  “Sure.”

  I heard the door slide closed and then I was underwater, watching the soft ripple of the vanity lights as they swirled with tears.

  2

  .

  My throat burned, those first few breaths setting my lungs on fire. I rolled onto my side, staring at those footsteps in the sand, at the deep impression of her knees. She was just here. I saw her. But then she wasn’t.

  I blinked, sunlight searing. Sulfur tears peeled down my sunburned skin, my fingers padding them dry. I finally opened my eyes and stared down at my hands, examining the unfamiliar scars and callouses. I looked down at my clothes, dark jeans and some t-shirt with weird shapes on it sticking to my skin.

  I stumbled to my feet but my legs were still liquid and I sank back down, crawling to the first sand dune. The tide licked at me, still reaching, and I kept crawling, getting as far away from the water as possible.

  I looked down the beach to where the water seemed to disappear behind the tree line, and then just past the next sand dune, the beach giving way to tall grass and a narrow dirt road that spilled into a bright blue sky. None of it looked familiar. Not the dark trees. Not the road veering around the bend. Not the beach. Not even my own shadow trembling next to me. I stared at my hands, throat tightening, trying to remember.

  Remember. Jesus, anything. Just remember something.

  But there was nothing. There was no one. No echo of a past I might have lived, of a place I might have come from. There was nothing and I was empty.

  3

  Bryn

  My hair was still dripping down my back when I walked into the kitchen. My mom, my grandmother, and my uncle were circled around an open box of blueberry muffins and ignoring how my clothes hung like they
weren’t my own. They were good at that, at not treating me like a ghost, even though waking up always made me feel like one.

  “Hey kiddo, hungry?” My uncle Brian grabbed a clean glass from the dishwasher and poured me some orange juice.

  Waking up from a long episode always felt a little like my birthday, everyone waiting around to see me, doting on me like I was some kind of pet. But seeing my uncle after a long sleep was even more jarring. Not because I didn’t see him almost every day—he was always coming by the house fixing something for my mom; helping her with some new project—but because he was my dad’s twin. The dad I hadn’t seen in eight months. The dad who’d left us, all of us, when I was seven.

  I looked at my uncle, his face expectant. I’d just started Dr. Sabine’s latest drug trial before my episode and it was supposed to be the miracle we’d all been waiting for.

  I shook my head. “Shit didn’t work.”

  He shrugged. “Hey, everyone’s a little fucked up.”

  “Language,” my mom cut in. “Jesus, you weren’t raised by wolves.” Then she laughed. “Nice to see you’re in a good mood.”