Be in the Real Read online

Pauline held Kaila’s head in her arms, stroking her long fingers across Kaila’s cheek, and the spiders didn’t come, she knew they would never come again. Strands of Pauline’s dark hair brushed against Kaila’s cheek and the scent of he Jasmine perfume wafted around her, comforting in its familiarity.

  “I saved you.”

  Kaila’s voice sounded odd as if she was trying to speak around a mouth full of water. When she tried to draw in a breath she found that it was impossible to do. It felt as if a heavy weight had been positioned onto her chest.

  “Yes, you saved me. I was so fucking stupid and now…”

  Pauline’s words dissolved into a flood of tears that dripped onto Kaila’s flesh. It was warm against the cool that seemed to now encase her. It was then that she realized that she couldn’t feel anything below her neck; something had severed all the nerves that powered her body.

  “Don’t cry,” Kaila said.

  It seemed Kaila’s words had just the opposite effect that she had been hoping for; more tears brimmed then spilled from her friend, another bath of salty water. She wanted to lift a hand to Pauline’s face, touch the star, a touchstone to the past that they had shared, but her body ignored the request.

  “Don’t try to talk, just rest. They’re…”

  Derrick cut off abruptly, tilting his head to the side, searching for a sound. It came moments later, a siren peeling in the night air.

  “It’s almost here. They’re going to fix you Kaila.”

  His words were hopeful, but there was no conviction in his gaze. He knew as well as Kaila did that what was broken couldn’t be fixed. And for the first time since she had met him, she saw tears glitter in his eyes. Oddly, seeing the emotion in him comforted Kaila because it said she mattered.

  Pauline released an inhuman sound that spoke of immeasurable pain.

  “It’s going to be alright, everything is going to be okay.”

  Kaila knew her words were true, as certain as Kaila had been that Derrick’s prediction about Pauline had been genuine.

  She was going to be okay.

  Then she felt Trillian for the first time since she had come around. Weak and disjointed, Trillian fought to stay, as if she could disentangle her being from Kaila and become a separate entity, but even Trillian couldn’t mend this. Kaila was human, and so was Trillian. Then she felt Trillian fade away until she flickered and was no more. For the first time ever Kaila was alone, completely and utterly, and all the secrets that Trillian had kept from her came rushing to the forefront and she knew it all, knew everything.

  “I can’t stay.”

  The pressure on Kaila’s chest grew, yet she pushed through, determined to say what she needed to.

  Pauline shook her head violently. “That’s not true, we’re going to be together again, I’m coming back to Wildwind, and I’m never going to leave again, and we can…”

  “No.”

  Kaila’s voice was now just a gasp of air. Weariness was pulling her away. She knew that the place she was going to was so very beautiful, but she wasn’t ready to leave, not before she said what she needed to.

  “Don’t go back Pauline, don’t ever go back…be in the real…”

  The words had depleted whatever reserves Kaila had left. She closed her eyes.

  “Kaila stay with me.”

  She tried to open her eyes again, tried to gaze one last time at Derrick’s face but it wasn’t meant to be. And as the last breath left her lungs she remembered something that Trillian had written in what had seemed a lifetime ago, this time they were Kaila’s words alone, and it had changed, she had changed.

  For how could she not have changed after living in a world that sparkled with so much life and beauty.

  There are many things that I can say about me, to show you who I was, and who I will never be, so I could bring you into the world that was mine, the space that I occupied, but time is short so I must rush forward.

  And so I will say, never doubt that the real is so much more than you thought. Do not fool your mind into believing that the virtual is all in the same as the space that is real, for it would be like believing in a fallacy, a lie that you repeat until it becomes your truth. I beg you to heed my words, for I have found the truth, and knowing it makes everything that went before it exactly right.

  There is a memory in my soul now that said that I belonged, a moment that I felt whole, as if I had been placed in just the right second, just the right minute for my journey to have continued. And in that space of time I learned that love IS not a word, it is a state of being, I felt love, and it was so much more than my paltry words could express. Love is in the sun that crests on the horizon, filling the world with light, it is in the caress of a baby’s skin and in the scent of a blossom. It is in the rain that cools on a hot summer day, and the feel of a kiss on fevered lips. I have been that woman in the arms of a man, felt the press of his chest against my cheek, smelled the scent that said he was with me, not just an image that I could never touch.

  The real was everything I imagined it to be, and so much more, and if I must leave this world now, it is with a smile that I usher in the Grim Reaper. He may take me to oblivion or wherever he so chooses, because I have dove into the deep end, touched the bottom of the sea, tasted everything that was sweet, and it was real.

  I was real, forever and always.

  My gilded cage has been opened, and I will fly to places that I have never known but that I had always dreamed about. I lived in the real for a blink of time, but it was more than every day I spent locked away. And in those moments I felt, really felt, and it was enough. And I found peace that those of us who are immersed fully in the world can boast. It was perfect, it was life, it was mine.

  My name is Kaila and this was my story. ∞

  EPILOGUE

  Pauline and Derrick stood close together, shoulders pressed as the minister spoke words that mattered little to the people who had lost so much, but were meant to honor the person who had left their ranks. The sun was hot against the black that Derrick was clad in, but seeing the casket being lowered into the ground pushed all thoughts of comfort away because Kaila was gone, truly gone and it was all his fault. He didn’t think it would ever go away, the ache that said he was responsible for Kaila’s death. Derrick’s guilt paled only to Pauline’s own remorse, her overwhelming need to blame everything on her own actions.

  Desperate for a diversion from the ceremony, he scanned the people gathered in the graveyard. There were over two hundred at least, maybe more. When he had sent out an email to all the people from Franco’s club, and had also made a notation in Trillian’s blog, informing them that Trillian and Kaila had died, the response had been so much more than he had expected. Comments of support and sympathy had clogged the website, and were still coming in daily. He knew that Trillian would have appreciated the show of support, though he wasn’t sure if Kaila would have.

  Just imagining the two as separate entities seemed odd to him, but he had known both women who were as different as day and night. Trillian had drawn him to Wildwind, but Kaila had captured his heart. Her innocence, candidness and the way she had perceived the world, had been unique and somehow, without even trying, she had become a part of his world. Now that she was gone her loss felt like something tangible that made it hard to breathe.

  Pauline squeezed his fingers, bringing him back to the moment. It had ended and he hadn’t been aware. Throngs of people filed away from the hole in the ground, where the pulleys had already lowered Kaila’s body.

  Derrick and Pauline joined the people leaving, blending in with everyone who claimed to have known Kaila, but who never had. A smallish man with a thin waspish face and a wiry build stepped into Pauline and Derrick’s path.

  “Thanks for letting me know about…”

  The man shrugged, pushing his thick glasses up the bridge of his slim nose. Something crossed his face that might have been reticence, but was also sadness.

  “She would have wanted you here N
orm,” Pauline said. Her voice broke with the statement.

  Norm dug his hands into his paint-splattered jeans. A gust of wind flapped his thin white t-shirt that matched his pants in its destruction.

  “Maybe, maybe not…I just wanted to tell you that I appreciate you letting me know.”

  Pauline nodded. Derrick shoved a hand toward Norm.

  “Nice to meet you,” he said.

  Norm looked down at Derrick’s clean hand as if he wasn’t sure what to do with it. Finally he pulled a nicotine-stained hand from his pocket and clasped it. Only after they had grasped each others hands did Derrick remember that though he had known all about Norm from Kaila, Norm had no idea who he was.

  “I’m Derrick, a former resident of Wildwind too, and a friend of Kaila’s.”

  Her name caught in his throat and he tried to clear the phantom phlegm that felt lodged there.

  Norm’s face broke into a wide grin, showcasing the absence of one of his front teeth.

  “I don’t know what the hell she and I were, but whatever it was, will never leave me, she’ll never leave me.”

  He rubbed his hands together, gazing over their shoulders to where Kaila would now rest forever.

  “Anyway I better get back to work, I’m trying to stay on the straight and narrow these days,” Norm said after a few beats. He brought his focus back to Pauline and Derrick.

  They nodded. Norm drew in a long breath and released it, then turned to leave. They watched him disappear into the crowd.

  “She’s dead because of me.”

  The words spilled out before he could rein them back in. In a way it felt good to finally say exactly what he had been thinking every moment since the night that Kaila had died two weeks before.

  Pauline swallowed a few times before she spoke.

  “If anyone can take the blame for her dying it’s me. She saved me and…”

  She broke off. Fresh tears trickled down her ashen cheeks then unexpectedly, Pauline straightened her spine and drew herself to her full height.

  “But I’m not going to waste another minute feeling guilty because Kaila sacrificed her life for me.”

  She locked on Derrick.

  “And you need to let this go too. She didn’t die because of you she lived because of you. If you had never taken her out of there, she wouldn’t have had the chance to see the world. And gauging by what she looked like on the outside, she lived and loved every second that she was free.”

  Derrick shook his head. He wanted to believe that Pauline was right, that he had somehow given Kaila something true, but it felt wrong to minimize that he had encouraged her to leave Wildwind on absolutely false pretenses. He had never predicted a death in his life, and all the stories that he had told Kaila had been just that, stories. It hadn’t taken long for him to glean that Kaila was mystified by predictions of the future and everything that went with it. In truth the only prediction that had rung true had been that Kaila needed to save Pauline, and no one was more sorry than Derrick was, that it had worked out that way.

  “You can’t waste another moment pining and wishing for something different, it’s just a fucked up excuse for people to stay in the same rut they have always been in. You know what Kaila taught me Derrick?”

  He brought his gaze to hers. His head was muddled with remembrance.

  “What?”

  “That it’s okay to be happy, that no matter what shit is going on around us, we don’t have to sink into it. We can still laugh, at the very least smile because it’s in those solitary moments, that we find the light that will eventually lead us out of the darkness. Kaila lived every emotion, every experience fully. When she got mad she could rip a man apart with her bare hands, and when she laughed it was with every bit of her heart and soul. We could learn a lot from the way she lived her life. How she embraced every moment. She wasn’t lost in the past and how it had looked, it was all about the now. She had this kind of wonder about her that made her want to discover what it all meant and how she factored into it. We could do a lot worse than to follow her lead.”

  “Sounds like you’ve been thinking about this for a while.”

  Derrick shook his head. He so wanted to run with this notion, buy into Pauline’s theory, but it seemed too easy and also disrespectful to Kaila’s memory, given what he had done.

  “I only told you part of the truth about how truly calculated I had been. I guess I was quiet because I was ashamed, but now I need to come clean, tell you everything.”

  He shifted his stance then drew in a huge breath before he spoke again.

  “It was all about the club, the fucking club was my life. It allowed me to believe that breaking her out so Franco and so many others could pick her brain, or at least Trillian’s brain, was absolutely fine. Everyone on the outside, including me wanted to get something from her, to understand the meaning of everything she wrote. Because everyone figured that somehow Kaila…Trillian knew things that we just didn’t. I have to admit that reading her posts was like a drug for me. I could never get enough, ever. Obsession is a master inventor. I mean I jumped off a fucking bridge so I could get admitted. I planned every detail, planted symbols that I knew she would be drawn to after you told me that she was intrigued by symbols. As soon as I knew you guys were tight I used you too Pauline, so I could get to Kaila. By all rights you should never speak to me again…”

  “Wow, you really had this all figured out,” Pauline said. An expression of incredulity spread across her face. “That’s seriously fucked Derrick.”

  Pauline tapped her temple then released a long sigh before skewering Derrick with a stare.

  “So you’re saying that you had no feelings for Kaila at all, that she was an means to an end so you could meet Trillian?”

  Derrick shook his head slowly; shame clouded every one of his features.

  “Yeah, definitely at first. But then later when she ended up getting sent to the other side of Wildwind because I’d stolen her computer, so I could see if there were more of her Musings that she hadn’t published yet, I started to see that she was a real person not a robot spewing out the secrets to life.”

  He raked a shaky hand through his hair.

  “There were times after that, when I wanted to abandon the whole idea because she mattered more to me than I wanted her to.”

  Pauline locked on him in a way that made him feel as if he needed to elaborate on what he had just said.

  “Not in a romantic way, that wasn’t it at all, it was more like I wanted to protect her and…I did a fine job of doing that...if only I had taken her back when I had planned, admitted the truth, told her everything…”

  Pauline was silent for a few moments before she found the words to respond.

  “If I’m being honest I used you too Derrick, because you know you’re cute enough but you’re not really my type,” Pauline said.

  She gazed out across the stone markers that said that the dead lived there, before bringing her focus back to Derrick.

  “I’ll admit that what you did was supremely shitty, mean even, but I saw the way she looked at you, at the world really and…I can only describe it as her being free, really free. And you saw her seizures, the tumor must have been growing rapidly. You took her out when she was well enough to go. Who knows what would have happened later on.”

  “If I had known about how sick she was it definitely would have stopped me from breaking her out. I thought she was having seizures because her meds needed to be adjusted…even so I was selfish, she was clearly unstable. Being obsessed isn’t an excuse, but I have to admit it can make you do things that you never would have expected you could.”

  Pauline linked her fingers with Derrick, squeezing his hand in hers.

  “I think everything happened exactly like it was supposed to, there’s no other explanation. We can try to go back in time, beat ourselves up over and again, but it won’t change anything. But if we spin it in another way and remember Kaila the way she was that last day, it
might make it a little easier to cope with.”

  Derrick pressed his lips together in a way that said he wasn’t convinced.

  “Derrick, Kaila died believing in miracles and magic and her ability to predict the future. I’m sure there are a lot of people in the world that would love to be able to believe, truly believe in what Kaila embraced unquestioningly. She lived, really lived, and though every part of me wants to feel like you, be filled with regret and downplay the effect of her being outside Wildwind. It’s just plain wrong.”

  Tears flooded Pauline’s eyes once again. She smiled despite them.

  “She knew so much more than we did Derrick…be in the real…that’s what she said.”

  A puff of wind blew Pauline’s hair away from her cheek, revealing the scar that Kaila had always been so fixated on.

  Derrick’s fingers grazed the star-shaped scar before Pauline could put her hair back in place. She instinctively moved her face out of his touch.

  “Kaila believed that this scar meant something…”

  Pauline nodded.

  “Yeah, it does mean something, that I was stupid enough to try to blow my head off…”

  Derrick let his arm drop back to his side.

  “For her it was something more than that, like a cryptic message that she needed to figure out.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t for her to figure out, but for me to understand that I have so much to be grateful for.”

  Pauline shifted, leaning her weight to her left side, off the foot that still bothered her a little.

  “I’m a lesbian. So what if I like girls, so what if my parents want to make me into something I’m not, make me heterosexual…none of that shit matters because I have a chance to be better than they are, and most definitely better than I’ve been. I’ve pissed most of my life away pitying myself and my lot in life, but based on the rest of the world I’m doing just fine.”

  Pauline took a few steps forward then paused. She glanced back at Derrick who remained frozen in place.

  “You know she killed her parents?”

  Derrick nodded.

  “But what you didn’t know was that they were completely fucked up people.”