Free Brave New Love by Paula Guran

“If you don’t want to stay up with her, I will. I’m taking her to Doc Sara’s.”
    •  •  •
    I dreamed of blue. Blue-green. Like the grass and the sky melted into one. I swam in it, as if it were thick water, and worked every muscle to be able to move. The effort felt
good, and the color was so vibrant I feared it wasn’t real.
    As my eyes started to crack open and I realized my fears had come true, my heart sank. I just wanted something to be real. I looked around the room and discovered I wasn’t in my bunk with
the other girls, but on a cot in another room. I shifted and saw that Dylan was there, looking out the window.
    “I thought you were gone,” I mumbled. My voice was raspy from sleeping. I felt so stiff.
    Dylan moved quickly to my side. “I’m back. How do you feel?” he asked as he tore off the cover from a tray of food. “Why don’t you have something to eat?”
    “What time is it?” I asked. It looked sort of pearly-blue outside. Must be close to dinner.
    “About five in the morning. You must be hungry.”
    “Five in the morning? How did that happen? I remember feeling tired . . .” I searched my thoughts, trying to find something more, but that was it. I had been really tired, so I
crawled into bed.
    “Why don’t you just eat?”
    “I don’t want to. I’m not hungry,” I protested.
    “Sure you are.”
    “Just stop for a minute, okay?” There was a small edge to my voice that seemed to make him nervous. “Could I just walk around a little? I feel so achy.”
    Dylan checked his watch. “Fine, but I’m coming, too. And so is the food.”
    I rolled my eyes, threw off the blankets, and stood. I didn’t bother with shoes, I just pushed open the door. I was a little disoriented. I’d never seen the grounds from this
viewpoint. I looked around and saw what would either be considered a small lake or a large pond and walked on to a little floating dock. I went to the edge, not waiting for Dylan, and sat down,
sticking my feet in the water.
    It wasn’t the blue-green water in my dreams. It was the shadow-covered gray of early morning.
    “Did you leave a ransom note for my dad?” I asked, aching to know how soon this would all end.
    “Ransom? No,” he replied, appalled.
    “He has money, connections. He’d give you whatever you want,” I offered.
    “I doubt that,” Dylan said quietly. There was a sadness to him just then that didn’t fit in with the confident, dangerous, wild person I thought he was. It confused me.
    “I don’t understand what’s going on,” I said. My breath hitched, and I realized that I might cry. It was the first time in years that I’d felt so . . .
hopeless.
    Dylan shook his head, trying to decide something. He looked at his watch again, then the food, and then me.
    “Mackenzie, you’ve felt strange since you’ve been here, right? Not just because you’re in some new place but because you keep feeling normal, and then it starts to slip
away and then, suddenly, you get it back, yes?”
    I nodded. He’d summed it up better than I could.
    “Did you notice that you usually start feeling better after you eat?” he asked.
    I tried to remember. I didn’t seem to relate it to the food, but I remembered that earlier I’d been bothered that he was gone and then not so much, if at all, once I’d started
eating.
    “There are opiates in the food,” he said slowly. “Drugs.”
    “What?” I shook my head. “That’s ridiculous.”
    “It sure as hell is ridiculous. It’s also true. Thing is, it’s getting worse, and I suspect in about half an hour you’re going to start screaming again if you don’t
eat.”
    I eyed the plate. “I don’t believe you. You’re just trying to scare me.”
    “Are you scared? Think about how you felt yesterday when you woke up. How often do you feel that way?”
    I almost shouted out the answer: Never.
    “Think about the world you’ve been used to, Mackenzie. There’s no crime because everyone’s