Starcrossed

know which. Helen wiped the moisture away and smiled at her dad, trying to calm him down. It didn’t work.
    “What the hell, Lennie? That was not normal,” he said in a strange, high-pitched voice. “You were saying things. Really awful things.”
    “Like what?” she croaked. She was so thirsty.
    “Mostly names, lists of names. And then you started repeating ‘blood for blood,’ and ‘murderers.’ What the hell were you dreaming?”
    Helen thought about the three women, three sisters, she thought, and she knew she couldn’t tell her father about them. She shrugged her shoulders and lied. She managed to convince Jerry that murder was a pretty normal thing to have nightmares about, and swore that she would never watch scary movies by herself again. Finally, she got him to go back to bed.
    The glass on her nightstand was empty and her mouth was so dry it felt tender and sore. She swung her legs out of bed to get water from the bathroom and gasped when her feet touched the hardwood floor. She switched on her lamp to get a better look, but she already knew what she was going to see.
    The soles of her feet were cut deep and peppered with dirt and dust, and her shins were scratched with the hatch-mark pattern of thorns.

Chapter Three
    I n the morning when Helen woke up and looked at her feet, the cuts were gone. She almost believed that she had imagined them—until she saw that her sheets were dirty with dried, brown blood and grit.
    In order to test her sanity, Helen decided to leave her sheets on the bed, go to school, and see if they were still dirty when she came home. If they were clean when she got home, then the whole thing was an illusion and she was only a little crazy. If they were still dirty when she came home, then she was obviously so crazy that she was walking around at night and getting dirt and blood in her bed without remembering it.
    Helen tried to eat a bowl of yogurt and berries for breakfast but that didn’t work out very well, so she didn’t even bother to take her lunch box. If she got hungry, she could try buying something more tummy friendly like soup and crackers later.
    Riding her bike to school, she noticed that it was unbearably hot and humid for a second day in a row. The only wind was the breeze created by her spinning wheels, and when she locked her bike up at the rack she realized that not only was the air still, but it was also lacking the usual insect and bird sounds. All was unnaturally quiet—as though the entire island was nothing but a ship becalmed in the middle of the vast ocean.
    Helen arrived earlier than she had the day before, and the halls were crowded. Claire saw her come in. When her face broke into a smile, Helen knew she had been forgiven. Claire fought the flow of traffic to double back and join her on the walk to homeroom.
    As they made their way toward each other, Helen suddenly felt like she was trying to trudge through oatmeal. She slowed to a stop. It seemed to her that everyone in the hallway vanished. In the suddenly empty school Helen heard the shuffling of bare feet and the gasping sobs of inconsolable grief.
    She spun around in time to see a dusty white figure, her shoulders slumped and quivering, disappearing around a corner. Helen realized that the sobbing woman had passed behind someone—a real person staring back at her. She focused in on the figure, a delicate young girl with olive skin and a long, black braid trailing over one shoulder. Her naturally bright red lips were drawn into an O of surprise. To Helen she looked like a china doll, so perfect she could not be entirely real.
    Then the sound switched back on and the corridor was full of rushing students again. Helen was standing still, blocking traffic, staring at a glossy black braid swinging against a tiny girl’s back as it vanished into a classroom.
    Helen’s whole body shook with an emotion that took her a moment to recognize. It was rage.
    “Jesusmaryandjoseph, Len! Are you gonna faint?” Claire asked anxiously.
    Helen made her eyes focus on Claire, and she took a wobbly breath. She realized that she was drenched in cold sweat and shivering. She opened her mouth, but nothing came out.
    “I’m taking you to the nurse,” Claire said. She grabbed Helen’s hand and started to tug on it, trying to get her to move. “Matt,” she called out over Helen’s shoulder. “Can you help me with Lennie? I think she’s going to faint.”
    “I’m not going to faint,” Helen