Free As I Wake by Elizabeth Scott

do, and I know what his breathing in bed this morning meant, I wrote “56-412 masturbates,” and then sat, fingers shaking before I gave in and touched myself, thinking of him and wondering—hoping—he was thinking of me.
    “I can have you taken in,” I say and he draws back a little. The sun, filtered in through the small, dirty windows, catches his eyes. They are brown, ordinary, but the way he looks at me—no one has ever looked at me like he does. He looks at me like he sees something. Someone.
    Me.
    “All right,” he says, and puts his hands behind his head. “Go ahead.”

24.
     
    WAKE UP.
    I don’t want to, I want what’s next, I want to be there, with him, and I—
    “Wake up,” I hear, and sit up, disoriented, my English book falling out of my Chemistry book and hitting the desk.
    I was here. I was in class, I am in class. I wasn’t in an attic, I didn’t see Morgan. We didn’t talk, we didn’t do anything. But it—
    It felt so real. Embarrassingly real.
    Frighteningly real.
    Alive real.
    “What’s this?” the chemistry teacher says, and he’s the one who told me to wake up just now.
    I heard it twice, though. He said it and then before . . . before it didn’t sound like a voice at all. It was something else, it was action, I was being pulled back, away.
    “I said, what’s this?” the chemistry teacher says again, pointing not at my fallen English book, but at my notebook, at the little branching sticks with number and letters appended to them that I drew, a squiggle tagged C 3 H 6 N 6 O 6 .
    “I don’t know.”
    “You think you’re funny?” he says, voice rising on every word. “We’re studying chemistry here, and you—you think drawing the formula for a lethal explosive is a good idea?”
    “I—”
    “Go to the office right now!” he says, and strangely, his anger and the way everyone around me falls silent because it feels far more familiar than all the other classes I’ve sat through, like somehow I’m used to being silent in class.
    To being scared.
    In the office, I’m told to sit and wait, that Jane will be called.
    “You know about Mr. Green’s son and what he did, of course,” the woman who calls Jane tells me when she gets off the phone.
    When I stare at her blankly, she clears his throat and says, “I—Sorry, Ava. Why don’t you spend the rest of the period in the nurse’s office while we wait for your mother.”
    It’s not a question.
    I get up, but instead of going to the nurse’s office I head outside, wanting to get away from the school and whatever is going on with me. This morning, with Ethan, and then just now, what happened, what I dreamed—
    No. What I know.
    What I remember.
    Not that this Ethan is one I know, not that he’s someone I remember. No one here—except for Morgan and Clementine—reaches into that strange, hazy place inside me. In my head.
    But still, somehow, someway, I remember a different Ethan. A different Jane. It’s like some people—Jane, Sophy, Olivia, Greer, Ethan—that are in this Ava’s life were . . .
    Were somehow, and in very different ways, in memories that I’m not supposed to have.
    Were in a life I know better—deeper, truer—than this one.
    When I get outside, I look for Jane’s car even though I know it won’t be here yet. It isn’t. There is nothing to see but a guy sitting on the white stone bench by the street, watching me.
    Morgan.
    When he sees me looking, he stands up. Walks toward me, stepping carefully across the road. He doesn’t look like he belongs here. There is something not quite right about him; the way he walks, as if every step pains him, and how he looks around, as if everything he sees is unknown, not terrifying but new.
    “I know you,” I say, and he smiles like I have given him the world.
    “I would have come sooner,” he says. “You know that, don’t you? I just—it was hard to find you.”
    “Why?” I say, and his mouth opens, but no sound comes out. The world flutters,