The Cardellian Chronicles Book One: Clinging to Reality
Chapter 5

Alfia woke up to her alarm the next morning. She pulled in a breath and shifted under the blankets of her bed and frowned, blinking her eyes open. The last thing she remembered was the movie she had been watching with Benny and Nate.

“Benny carried you up to bed after the movie was over,” Nate’s voice said from the chair in the corner of her room.

She sat up quickly and looked over, her heart rate picking up a few notches.

“Easy there, tiger. It’s just me,” he said in a soothing tone. He hadn’t moved when she did, just stayed still, leaning forward with his elbows resting on his knees.

She nodded, “Yeah. You just startled me.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s okay. Were you- uh- watching me sleep?” she asked, her voice rough from slumber.

He leaned back against her chair, “I don’t sleep, sweetheart. I wasn’t about to watch your boyfriend sleep.”

She gave him a look.

He grinned, “No, I didn’t watch you sleep. But you’re cute when you’re sleepy.”

She stuck her tongue out at him. He stuck his right back out at her, making her laugh a little. It was strange, how she had only known him for twenty-two hours, but he was already familiar to her. She chalked it up to him being downloaded to her mainframe - which was also why he couldn't be more than a few meters away from her. She got out of bed and walked toward her dresser, opening and closing drawers as she pulled out clothes.

“If I catch you watching me change, I’ll hurt you,” she promised.

He grinned, “Would I commit such a heinous act?”

She wrinkled her nose at him, “Just turn around.”

He did and she changed into her running clothes. When they were on, she told Nate that he could turn around again and started pulling on her shoes and socks.

“I don’t know which I like more: your dance clothes or your running clothes,” Nate said appraisingly as he looked up and down her t-shirt and shorts clad form.

“Perv,” she commented off-handedly as she ran down the stairs to the kitchen to grab a quick snack before she went on her morning run.

He only laughed and followed after her.

When she got back, she jumped in the shower, making Nate promise to stay in her bedroom until she told him she was dressed, and got ready to go to school. She and Benny walked to school together with Nate on Alfia’s other side. That day, Alfia didn’t shrink back from the stares of her peers. She hardly noticed them. Why would she? She had two friends on either side of her and she didn’t even care that most people couldn’t see one of them. She went through all her classes and the only problem that Nate gave her was that he had apparently made it his personal mission to make her laugh at the most inoportune moments of her classes. They had opened a Link and were talking that way so that no one would think that Alfia was insane and talking to herself. He had also seemed to try to distract her in any way he could. It was annoying, because he was able to figure out what was most distracting very quickly and would constantly use it agaist her. She hated that he knew she liked what he was doing because of the attention he was giving her, but appreciated the fact that he was doing it at all. At first, most of it was just stupid stuff to annoy her, which it did, but sometimes he would do something that would leave her flustered and red in the face. For instance, he stretched once and purposely made sure that his shirt rode up enough to give her a good view of his torso and then proceeded to tease her about staring at him. Another time he had managed to fog up the mirror in the girl’s bathroom while Alfia had been using it and so when she went out to wash her hands and then return to class, there was a message that Nate had left for her before hiding saying “Alfia + Benny = LOVE”. She had almost shouted at him before he reminded her that no one else could see or hear him. She had given a big harumph and proceeded to ignore him until he apologized, amused when he only lasted about five minutes of the silent treatment before succumbing. She liked the things that he did to mess with her and the attention he gave her that not even Benny did. Nate was just trying to get a good laugh out of her all the time while Benny was always trying to look out for her, keeping her chain too tight. She wouldn’t trade her friend for the world, but sometimes she just wished that he could loosen up, be a little more the way that she had found Nate to be. It made things less serious and stressful, and more lighthearted and easygoing. It was a good change of pace for her.

After school at practice, everyone split into groups and Alfia started teaching two of her classmates a hip-hop combination she had come up with to show at the next “performance” day. Nate stayed leaning against the mirror and watched her work. It distracted her a little, knowing that the only person he was watching was her, feeling his eyes on her constantly. She had wanted something to add a little adventure to her life before she had met Nate, and that was exactly what he did for her. When practice ended, she walked home with him and she, Nate, and Benny discussed the Virus and the Creator through dinner until they went to bed. This became the new normal for Alfia and Benny, as though Nate had always been a part of their lives.

“So you did that choreography?” Nate asked her as the two of them walked home from dance two months after he had appeared in her class.

She nodded, “Yeah.”

“I approve, very good stuff.”

She laughed, “You’re such a perv.”

“Am not!” he defended, “Well, maybe a little.”

She saw him grin when she laughed again. She liked his smile. Not the one he wore when he had achieved the feat of upsetting Benny, or the one he wore when he had made her flustered, but the one he wore when he had made her laugh. That one seemed to be the one he wore when he was the most relaxed. It was nice. She found herself wishing he was human for the umpteenth time. It was another few seconds before she realized they had stopped walking home and were standing in the middle of the sidewalk, doing nothing but staring at eachother. She snapped out of it and started walking again as though they hadn’t just stared at each other for she didn’t know how long.

“Allie, what’s wrong?” Nate asked.

“Nothing.”

“I’m in your head, remember? I know when you’re lying,” he reminded.

“I’m not lying, Nate.”

They reached the house and she went inside and ran up the stairs to her bathroom and took a long shower. When she got out, she heard Nate and Benny talking in the hallway. Benny was telling Nate that she “sometimes gets like this.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. She sometimes sort of closes herself off and won’t talk much for a little while, like there’s something bothering her, but if you ask her what the matter is, she’ll tell you that everything’s peachy. You just have to let her work through it by herself. She always gets out of her funk.”

"How long do these 'funks' usually last?" Nate asked.

Alfia imagined Benny doing his one-shouldered shrug, "It depends. Sometimes a few hours, other times a few days. The longest one was about a three and a half years."

Nate let out a low whistle, "When was that?"

"Right after her parents died. Hardly anyone could get her to talk more than a few words for the first two and a half years, and even when she started talking more, it was really only for school. It took about three and a half years before she would hold a full conversation with anyone," there was a pause as Benny remembered, and Alfia heard him chuckle softly, "Her first full sentence that I had ever heard her say in a voice that wasn't timid or shy was 'Hey, Benny, watch this!' and then she did a chaine, double stag, and a bunch of other crazy dance stuff. It was the first time I'd seen her dance and all I could do was stand there and watch in amazement. After all she had been through, all of the physical trauma that she was still recovering from at the time, and she was the most graceful thing I had ever seen."

It was quiet for a minute before Nate’s voice rang out again, “She’s out of the shower, you should probably go back downstairs before she hears us talking.”

The door to her bedroom opened and closed as Alfia pulled her shirt the rest of the way down. Nate knocked on the door frame a couple of times and then leaned against it, “How much of that did you hear?”

She leaned over to wrap her hair in her towel, “Not a whole lot. Why are you worried about me?” she asked as she straightened.

“Because one minute we’re laughing about something and the next your closed off and I can’t read you.” he said.

“Okay,” she pulled on a pair of old sweatpants, “And?”

“I was worried, I still am, but I’m not going to push it,” he told her.

She nodded, “Thank you. Benny always does until I give him a reason that he decides whether or not is real. I’ll sometimes tell him why right off the bat and then he’ll decide that it’s not the truth and so I have to make something up to satisfy him.”

Nate nodded, “He has good intentions, but you know what they say about those.”

She cracked a small smile that vanished as soon as it was there, “Yeah.”

Three days later, it happened.

“He’s done it!” Benny jumped over the back of the couch and landed beside Alfia where she was doing her chemistry homework, making her and her papers bounce on the couch cushions.

“Who’s done what?” Alfia asked in confusion, wearing little black-framed glasses that didn’t have a prescription in the lenses, but helped her focus on her homework.

“The Creator. Look,” Benny blew up the image and in front of them was then a reporter discussing the thing Benny was so excited about.

“...Thirty people have died in Orchard Homes within the last thirty hours, but no one can seem to figure out why. While it is natural that the elderly pass away in their care-homes, they never do in these proportions.” The reporter said.

“Thirty in thirty hours. That’s-”

“One every hour,” Alfia cut Nate off and pushed all of her homework to the side. She grabbed a permanent marker and started writing on the coffee table, “How big is Orchard Homes?”

“Big,” Nate supplied helpfully.

She ignored him, “Have there been any other mass deaths of the elderly?”

“No,” Benny answered.

“Thank you.” She wrote some more, grateful that the coffee table was made out of glass. “When was the first one?”

Benny and Nate gave her the different times of every death and after a half an hour of scribbling on the coffee table and even on the underside of it, she sat up, hitting her head on the bottom of it.

“Are you okay?” Benny asked.

She waved him off, “Okay, each death is happening every hour at the exact same time.”

“You already have a red spot on your forehead, Allie,” Nate told her.

“Shut up! So if it’s been a half an hour since the last death, we have exactly thirty two minutes until the next one.” She said.

“Okay, so what’s the plan?” Benny asked.

“We need to get to Orchard Homes before the next person dies.”