“Hey, Sean. What brings you down here?”
I stumbled to the side, still straddling the line between the real world and the hallucinatory realm of the giants. Light and dark fought for supremacy in my head, with light ending up victorious as Melissa’s radiant beauty swam into focus, backlit by the healthy yellow of the sun, framed by the deep azure of the sky and sea behind her.
The bright sunshine caused me to blink rapidly, and for a brief moment the darkness returned and a part of me went away, leaving someone—something—in control of me.
“Uga ye durresh amu enki tiamet!”
My vision cleared and Melissa still stood there, her face speaking volumes in its impassiveness. I knew I had spoken aloud, but she acted as if I’d merely said hello.
“Damn it!” I ground my fists against my eyes and blindly kicked at the wooden bench. So far gone was I in my fury that I felt no pain from the impact.
“What’s wrong?” Melissa’s question carried no more emotion, no more concern, than if I’d just expressed trouble over my math homework.
Not that I’d ever had that particular problem.
“What’s wrong? Either I’m going fucking crazy or this whole town is. I should ask you what’s wrong. I spout words in a strange language and you don’t even react. A freakin’ squid crawls out of my mouth and everyone in the diner acts like they don’t see it.”
I grabbed her arms, relishing the familiar, normal feel of her flesh. “Look at my hands! I’m turning into some kind of sea creature and no one says a word. You tell me what’s wrong!”
“Ow! You’re hurting me.” Melissa drew back and I let her go, reluctant to relinquish the one thing I knew was real. “No one’s crazy, Sean. Maybe you just need to put that brain of yours to use. There’s more to life than science or math.”
“Huh?” I didn’t know what else to say. Her reply was an enormous non sequitur; I couldn’t comprehend where her line of thinking was moving. “What are you talking about?”
“There’s history, for one thing. New Hope is full of it. You’ve lived here for years, but you’ve never bothered to learn about your town. Maybe you should rectify that.”
She flashed a quick wink at me, then turned and started down the path toward the park. I could see some of her friends from the track team already there, standing around in shorts and T-shirts. One of them waved in our direction, although I doubted the girl meant to include me in her greeting.
“Wait,” I said. “What does history have to do with anything?”
Melissa tossed an impish grin over her shoulder at me. “History is everything, Sean.”
I called out to her again, but she kept walking, flicking one hand up in a goodbye gesture. The sun ignited her hair into a shining ball of golden fire, a comet on a trajectory that left me alone once more, only now my thoughts were more confused than ever. With a sigh, I turned my back to the park. And found myself staring across the town square directly at the library.
My legs were moving before I made the conscious decision to follow Melissa’s advice.