Free Sleepless by Cyn Balog

sigh. “I’m just … tired. I need to get to class.”
    “Let me walk you.”
    I shake my head. “No, I have two feet. They work, too.”
    “Oh, come on. Is it so bad that I want to make sure you’re okay?”
    “That’s nice, but I’m fine.”
    “Right. You say you are. You’re starting to do that girly, emotional, freak-out thing, and it’s breaking my heart. I want the old Julia back.”
    “Maybe I don’t want to be the old Julia anymore,” I mutter. The old Julia would take the abuse and dish out some more. But lately I’ve just been too exhausted to even bother trying to be smooth and quick-witted around Bret, which reminds me how impossible that dream was. I expected that if I kissed a guy in a dream, it would be fairy tale–like, blissful. This was like kissing a Hoover. And it didn’t help that Griffin was standing there, stone-faced, watching us the entire time.
    Griffin.
    Suddenly, it hits me. Griffin was in my dream. Had he ever been in one of my dreams before? No, not that I can remember. But now, now that he’s dead , for the first time ever, I dreamt about him.
    He was wearing a tuxedo, like he wore to prom. He was watching me, as if on the other side of a barrier he couldn’t break through.
    And he was not the happy, carefree Griffin.
    Far from it.
    The hallway seems to blur and spin, like I’m on a carousel. I look down at my hands. They’re trembling. Bret must sense it, because he reaches out and steadies me with a firm hand on my shoulder. “Someone skipped breakfast,” he jokes. But I am far from in a joking mood.
    I take a breath. Dreams are just dreams.
    Right?

CHAPTER 10
Eron
    I t’s a beautiful, bright day and the shade of the oak I’m resting in feels heavenly. The windows are open in Julia’s home and her pink lace curtains sway in the breeze, carrying her perfumed scent, like the smell of clean laundry, out to me. I smile to myself, thinking of wash day as a child, when my mother would hand me a basket of freshly laundered sheets to fold, and I would fall asleep in them, inhaling their sweet scent. I don’t notice the absence of the incessant chirping of the birds that has always been my background noise until a grating voice nearly knocks me off my branch.
    “What are you doing up there?”
    I straighten and peer to the ground, between the branches, for the first time in a long while feeling rather dizzy. A bald man with a bulbous nose and ruddy cheeks is scowling at me. He’s wearing a white T-shirt and gardening gloves. Again, I’m nearly knocked off my branch when a realization floods over me.
    He can see me.
    I quickly scramble down to the grass to meet him. When Iam on the ground, I stand a full head taller than he. “My good sir!” I say cordially, knowing full well how inappropriate a stranger hiding in Julia’s tree must seem. I remove my hat and hold it in front of me. “Pleased to meet you. I am Eron DeMarchelle.”
    At that moment I note the large, rather threatening pruning shears in his hands. He jabs them at me. The scowl has deepened.
    “And you are …?” I prompt.
    He takes a step backward. “Calling the police.”
    “No. No. No. You see …” I turn my hat in my hands. This is not how I expected my first day as a human to go. “I understand it may look strange … me in that tree … but I assure you, I was only …”
    I swallow. What, exactly, was I doing?
    He leans forward, squinting all the more, waiting for an explanation.
    “I thought that perhaps my kite had flown into this tree.”
    The sharpness in his features doesn’t diminish. “Kite?”
    “Uh. Yes.” I’m not sure where the excuse came from; I never owned a kite when I lived in the city, as many a child had lost them in the clotheslines. But did they not fly kites these days?
    He looks up into the tree’s branches. “Aren’t you a little old to be flying kites?”
    I smile sheepishly.
    He points the shears at me menacingly. “You’d better get out of here. If I see