“Omigod, stop. Stop!” A girl hisses. “What if she wakes up?”
“I told you,” Josh says as he raises my arm by the limp wrist. “Dexid patients are total zombies.” He releases my limb, and the girl gasps. I note a distant, throbbing heaviness beside me as my arm lands on the bed. Though my hearing and sight seem intact, my body’s totally frozen.
“No. Way!” the girl says, then she cackles. I hadn’t recognized the whisper, but I’d know that evilly delighted laugh anywhere. Gigi.
“So I can do anything to her, and she’ll have no idea?” Gigi asks. A metaphorical shiver runs down my paralyzed spine.
“So long as we don’t leave any marks,” Josh advises. He presses a calloused finger beneath my chin and follows the curve of my jaw down my throat to the hollow of my collarbone, where he pauses and gently circles the exposed skin just above my chest.
I scream and thrash and punch and kick. But not a muscle moves. And not a single sound comes out.
“Ew, no! Perv,” Gigi says. She slaps his hand away from me. “I’ve seen that Tarantino movie, and it doesn’t end well for you.” For a stupid, blind moment, I thank the gods for Gigi’s presence. No matter what’s transpired between us, it’s somewhat comforting to know that she draws the line at sexual assault.
“We are not going to do anything to her,” she continues. “I, on the other hand…”
A cool sweat sweeps across my body. Without another word, Gigi goes to work. I feel the occasional draft as my blankets are rearranged or my nightgown billows. I hear the faux click of a cell phone camera more times than I can count, accompanied by the occasional flash. At first, Josh offers supportive commentary, “Nice one!” or “Aw yeah!” but Gigi never replies. She has a job to do, and he soon quiets.
After some time—two minutes, twenty, a billion?—Josh becomes antsy. “Hurry up, Gigi. My uncle’ll be back from his break soon. You’ve done enough.” Apparently, her revenge is even gratuitous for the would-be rapist.
“Have I done enough?” She sighs theatrically. “Maybe just one more thing. A keepsake.”
I sense her step away from my body. A moment later, metal clangs across the room.
“Hey, wait a second,” Josh says. “You never said anything about this.”
The panic may start as his, but it instantly becomes mine as an unseen hand shoves my head to the side and grabs a section of my hair at the nape of my neck.
Internally, I cry out. Externally, I lay there, dumb and defenseless, my jugular served up on a platter. Gigi twists the hair around her fist, pulling it taught from the roots, and in one swift motion—
Slice.
My head releases as her hold on me disappears, along with a chunk of my hair.
“Okay,” she says with all the perkiness of a bubblegum cheerleader. “We can go now.”
Josh scrambles to my side and covers the shorter section underneath with the hair that remains on top. He turns my head forward and props it slightly with a pillow. My half sight fixes on the cracked grout again as the smell of clove blows over me. Then the door opens, and Josh and Gigi walk out.
I don’t know how long I spend locked in my body, unable to move, unable to scream. I’m suspended between utter panic that I’ll never again feel my limbs or that Gigi will return for another (possibly literal) pound of flesh and yoga-breathing calm, chanting Dream Wes’s last words to me like a mantra—You will wake up in the morning. Even if my frozen body would allow it, I’m not sure if I should laugh or cry that my only comfort comes from a figment of my imagination. The Dexid’s frying my brain like those eggs on drugs, creating such real unrealities that some slightly insane part of me is beginning to wish the stuff with Wes and Grady was real and that this was the dream. Anything other than Gigi and Josh in my room. Anything not to be so terrified and alone.
Eventually, I start to feel tiny sensations in my fingers and toes. Then tingling in my thighs and across my shoulders. By the time Ralphie enters in the morning, I’m able to blink my eyes, and I’ve regained feeling in most of my body.
“Morning, Sleeping Beauty,” he says as he holds out a cup of water. “How’d you sleep?”
I’m up on my feet and out of bed. I grab the water and gulp it down too fast. I double over as my body convulses in a coughing fit. My still sleepy legs cramp beneath the weight of what feels like a thousand needle pricks. I collapse back onto my cot.
To say that Ralphie looks distressed is an understatement. But I honestly don’t care. What is his empathetic discomfort compared to my tale of spontaneous paralysis, middle-of-the-night assault, and body-snatching dreams so real that I wonder if they’ve actually occurred?
My coughing fit dies down, and I open my mouth so that all the words can just tumble out, when the door to my room flies open, and a familiar, green-eyed boy dressed in plaid pajamas bursts in.
“This is my bed!” Wes Nolan hollers as he stumbles across the room and collapses onto me.
Before I can even twitch, his lips are at my ear. “Don’t tell them anything. Not the paralysis, not the dreams,” he whispers so only I can hear. “Meet me at the West Gate.”
Even if I had the mental capacity to react, Ralphie’s on top of Wes and pulling him away from me in a flash. “What the hell, Josh?” he bellows at his nephew standing in the doorway.
“He was already up when I opened the door, totally took me by surprise,” Josh pleads. “He’s delirious.”
Ralphie shoves Wes into Josh. “Get him back to his room, and don’t you dare let this happen again.”
Josh shoots me a totally BS apologetic look that I would have spat back in his face less than thirty seconds ago, but now I just ignore. After Wes’s whispered confession, I can do nothing but sit and watch, dumbfounded, as Josh ushers my literal dream guy into the hallway.
Ralphie kneels beside my bed.
“Sarah, I am so sorry,” he says, his voice sounding far away. “I promise everything will be under control by the time you come in tonight.”
I blink twice, then shift my gaze to my tech who, despite his sincerity, will most surely have nothing under control. Not by tonight. Not ever. How can he repair a world that’s just fallen off its axis?
“I need to go,” I say, my wits returning, my mind swimming.
“I don’t know if—”
I give him a look that must say I mean business, because he falls uncharacteristically silent. I stand, and he watches as I head to the bathroom to shower and dress. When I look back at him, he smiles and says, “Okay, we’ll debrief tonight. And I promise: no more patients barging in on your beauty rest!”
While Ralphie’s attempt at joviality is a testament to his kindness, it only highlights how utterly insufficient he is. It’s not that I’m just no longer in Kansas. The Emerald City has declared Technicolor war on my black-and-white life. And there’s only one person to see—the wizard, who’s waiting for me at the West Gate.