Read Journey: The Epsilon Version

Another dream about stars. Or maybe it was more correct to say it was another dream about shooting stars. Streaming across the sky in a fiery blaze, crashing into the planet hanging low in the evening horizon.

Jacquie was sitting on the outside patio of a cafe that was anchored to an asteroid. Her spot gave her a perfect view of the dark purple abyss of space. She took a sip of her usual caramel latte and watched the red planet slowly give up chunks of itself with each meteor sailing into it. Jacquie never liked seeing the planet be destroyed, but everytime she dreamt about the cosmic cafe, she saw the planet being crushed to pieces or eaten by a galazy-sized cat. One of the down-sides of lucid dreaming was that you got to remember a lot more of your dreams once you woke up. And everytime after she woke up, no matter how she had actually felt in the dream, Jacquie felt empty and sad. Perhaps she had felt bad about the life on the planet (she had visited once and was destroyed alongside its citizens by a blast of light) but she thought it was strange to mourn the lives of figmentary people.

Jacquie sighed as a purple feathered velociraptor took a seat across from her. She turned her eyes from the orange planet and watched the veliciraptor use its awkward and short limbs to take a drink of black coffee from a teacup. It might have been from a museum Jacquie recently visited.

"You know you can change this, right?" the velociraptor asked.

"What?" Jacquie didn't think it would talk to her. Most of her dreams were silent or filled with ambient noises. Whenever someone or something spoke in her dreams, it sounded like if the speaker was underwater. Jacquie would be able to guess what they meant but no voice had ever been this clear in her head.

"You can change the future," the velociraptor's voice hitching on 'future'.

"No I can't," she told it, her voice loud than she expected.

"Then just watch."

The velociraptor pointed a claw back to where the planet was suppossed to be. Instead, a whirlwind of vivid colors stared back at Jacquie, slowly eating up the rest of her dream until she was the only thing left. The vortex slowed, and Jacquie could pick up specific colors. Gold and vermillion shards drifting in a pale, creamy yellow. A familiar yellow, Jacquie thought before her body was suddenly thrust downward, arms pressed to her sides. For a split second, the colors gave way to darkness and then Jacquie was in her body, looking through her own eyes, digging around for a textbook in her backpack. Her head swiveled up and around and focused on the stand-up calandar that sat on her teacher's desk.

November 25. Tomorrow's date.

A vision? she thought. It had been a long time since she had had one (thriteen months and seventeen days to be exact). She almost thought her visions had gone away, like whatever magic force gave them to her when she was little ripped them away when she wasn't looking.

Jacquie watched her English teacher walk in, followed by a boy her age. Jacquie tuned out what the teacher was saying about him (at least she presumed the three-page monologue she was giving was about him) and took a closer look at his features.

The first thing she noticed were his eyes. They were an abnormally bright blue, like glowing crystals were placed in his eyes. He had a nose that might have been too big on another person's face, but it strangely fit on him. His hair was jet black, curling in even coifs as it ran down to just below his ears. He was wearing a dark blue cashmere coat, paired with simple, cheap sneakers. His hands were dug firm into his pockets, but he stood straight and still, observing the other faces in the class.

Then he turned to Jacquie and they locked eyes. The blank look he had when looking elsewhere in the room softened, and he gave a her a sheepish grin so small that she had to give one back.

Jacquie could the edges of her vision fading, the corners of the classroom turning into never-ending darkness. Already? Jacquie thought. The problem with her visions is that they never ended in the places she wanted them to. Or that they ended too early before anything interesting had happened.

With the background already consumed, the darkness came for objects and people, their outlines slowly being fuzzed out and eaten.

Jacquie could still make out the new kid as he walked past her desk, now looking more like a skinny blue sillouette breezing by. She noticed something brown fall out of the sillouette, before it quickly turned to darkness as well with everything else. Now she only had sound, as even then the ambient classroom sounds and her teacher's droning voice faded as well.

And Jacquie woke up.

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Sausage, toast, and a glass of orange juice made up the perfect breakfast in Jacquie's mind. And this morning's meal did not disappoint (except for the orange juice that had already been emptied, but grapefruit juice was a fine substitute). Going back to the kitchen for a second plate, she bumped into her sister, Jules. Jules glared down at Jacquie, still with visible crust around her eyes. She may have been only three years older than her, but this morning Jacquie thought she looked ten years older. Jules turned her head, piled high with deep brown hair poofs, to focus more on her task of getting something to drink.

"Well, it looks like someone finally decided to roll out of bed today," Jacquie said.

"Wow, it loooooks like I got stuck with a family full of morning people," Jules drawled, somehow pouring her anger as well as milk into her glass.

Yikes, Jacquie thought. Someone woke up on the left side of the bed today. She didn't say anything else to her sister and silently retreated to grab more toast and juice.

"So how are my two most precious girls in the world doing?" Jacquie's father sang, tromping down the steps and sailing into the kitchen.

"Three most precious girls," her mother chimed in from the living room.

Her father came up behind Jacquie's mother planted a quick kiss on the cheek. "You are exactly right, darling. How could I ever forget about you," he said, bending over to say the words quietly into her ear.

Jacquie took a seat right next to her mother, who always her breakfast on the sofa, watching some form of the local news, which Jacquie thought was uninteresting aside from the weather segments.

Jacquie's mother seemed to have rapt attention on the television as the news reporter moved on to talk about stuff closer to home.

"In local news, Saberon's longest-running movie theater will be shutting its doors permanently this Friday. Trambell Cinema Hall has been operating for over 64 years, but it hasn't been able to save itself from the decreasing popularity of movie theaters."

"Hey if the place has been around that long, I'm sure you and Dad have good memories of the place," Jacquie said, nudging her mother's side with her elbow.

Her mother snapped out of focus and looked at Jacquie. "Of course," she replied, "We had your 12th birthday party there. Oh, you were so excited to see your friends you couldn't stay still for the entire--"

Jacquie's mother's face stiffened, her eyes focused away from Jacquie and down to the stack of books on the coffee table. Her pinky rubbed the coffee mug she was holding in a repetitive, circular motion. Her mother parted her lips, about to speak.

"Haha starshine," her father said, jutting his head in between Jacquie and her mother. "You're forgetting that we moved here when we were much older than you are now."

Jacquie saw her mother's face relax as she turned towards her with a smile. "That's right. Now if you had asked us about what we did in the theaters when we were in our 20's..."

"Moooooom," Jacquie groaned. She wasn't upset about her mother referencing what she and her dad got up to back in their day (mostly anyhow). She'd never been able to get a straight answer about her mother's childhood. Or even her father's for that matter. Jacquie would hear about cool stories her classmates' parents had gotten up to when they were younger, like how someone's parents met at a riot where they both flipped over the same car and got arrested for it. She didn't have any stories like that to tell. Nothing about her parents, her grandparents, or even an annoying or distant cousin. Her family tree started with her parents and ended with her and Jules.

"You ought to get a move on if you don't want to miss your bus," Jacquie's father said, moving to grab his coat and shoes before he left for his job.

Holy stars! Jacquie thought as she looked at the time. Her body automatically jolted into action, tossing her plate into the sink and running upstairs to grab her backpack. Pulling on a lavender coat, she raced out of the house, shouting, "Bye!" and ran at full speed all the way to the bus stop.

The morning bus was never the right temperature. Hot enough to give you skin burns in the summer, and cold enough to water in your eyes freeze in winter. Sometimes Jacquie thought that walking the 30-minute drive to school would be better than suffering one of the two climates that the bus had. And since Jacquie had one of the first stops on the route, she had to take a window seat. The glass of the window radiated a pure coldness that threatened to make the left side of Jacquie's face freeze in place. She burrowed her head into her coat, so far she couldn't see much of anything for the next three stops. She swayed softly with the motion of the bus, as more kids piled on making it louder with each hiss of the bus doors opening and closing. Footsteps thumped past her until she heard someone stand still right next to her seat.

"I would make a joke about how you look with your head in your coat, but my brain's too cold to be funny."

Jacquie recognized the voice and popped her head out of her coat. She smiled up at Johnathan as he took a seat next to her. He grinned back, hiding his amber-colored eyes for a few moments. "So," he said, "what are you thinking about bringing to Maize's party next week?"

Jacquie thunked her head on the back of her seat. "Oh no, I completely forgot about that." She'd been invited to Maize's white elephant party—just like everyone else in her class—three weeks ago. It had completely slipped Jacquie's mind that she would actually need to buy something for the party. She looked to Johnathan and asked, "Do you have anything you're bringing?"

He nodded. "I've got this huge lava lamp that's been sitting around doing nothing in my basement for years," he said as he stretched his arms to show how big it was. "I think it was my brother's before he left for college." Johnathan kept talking, but Jacquie stopped listening. She didn't feel like finding some old, unused thing lying around the house. She had to get something new. A gift that everyone would like no matter what. An impossible task...

"And the frog he caught was so tiny and cute," Johnathan was saying, cupping his hands together to mimic holding the frog. His fingers were a bold pink at the tips and Johnathan didn't move them as he finished the story, looking back at Jacquie.

"Why aren't you wearing gloves?" she pointed at his hands, still cupping the imaginary frog.

"I was in a rush this morning and I figured the embarrassment of wearing no gloves at all was better than wearing socks for gloves."

"But are your hands... okay?"

"Oh no, I can barely feel a thing," Johnathan said, banging his knuckles on the seat in front of them, which got an annoyed "Hey!" from whoever sat there. "I'm pretty sure they're blocks of ice now. See?" he quickly placed one of his ungloved hands into Jacquie's.

He was right. Even through her glove, Johnathan's hand was freezing and his joints kept his hands in a stiff position. After two minutes in her hand, Johnathan wriggled his fingers in Jacquie's grasp and intertwined them with her fingers.

Oh, Jacquie thought. Jacquie didn't give herself much time to think about it because the bus doors hissed again and everyone began piling off the bus.

"We're here," she said, waiting for Johnathan to let go and let her leave. He didn't hear her, just sitting around in his own thoughts.

"Are you two stragglers going to leave?" the bus driver yelled. Jacquie and Johnathan were the last two on the bus. "I can take you two to the depot with me."

Those words got Johnathan to snap out of whatever trance he was in. He and his hand leaped out into the bus aisle, slugging his backpack and muttering an apology to the driver. Jacquie came after him with a quick "Sorry. Won't happen again." to the bus driver. She caught up with Johnathan at the school entrance and and tried to speak. "Hey, is everything al—"

"I'm fine," Johnathan spluttered, choosing to keep his back toward Jacquie instead of looking her in the eye. His hands gripped the thick straps of his backpack as he walked into the school, a bobbing head of honey-colored hair, and leaving Jacquie without a real answer.