Chapter 1

The dream was as familiar as always, but that didn’t keep my heart from practically beating out of my chest from the anticipation of seeing him again. The bright moonlight overhead and the lights from the amusement park in the distance provided just enough light to see him waiting for me. I couldn’t help the smile that tugged at the corner of my mouth as I slowly walked toward him. The hard packed wet sand crunched under my bare feet as I walked along the tide line. I could feel the cold water lapping over the top of my feet, reaching my ankles. The fact that I have never seen his face didn’t diminish the intimacy that has blossomed from the many nights we have spent together. There was a subtle, cool breeze off the ocean that might have chilled me if not for his warm embrace that comforted me like a down blanket on a cold winter night. I hoped against hope that the new twist of the dreams was a fluke, and that tonight would be different. I felt his fingers tighten around mine, and I tried with every bit of strength I had to hold on, but the invisible force yanked him away like a kite in the wind, and in an instant he was gone.

I woke to a damp pillow from the tears I had shed while dreaming.

The dream had changed over the last few weeks and I could hardly control the sorrow that filled me when I awakened. I didn’t understand why, after dreaming about him my whole life, the dreams were now different. What was this mysterious force that suddenly pulled him away, leaving me all alone in the darkness?

I sat up and brushed away the wet blonde strands of hair that was stuck to the moisture on my face.

Glancing at the alarm clock beside my bed, I was dismayed to see that dawn was just minutes away, and my alarm would be going off any minute.

“Well, I might as well go take my shower now,” I told Feline.

Feline was my cat, and even though he was getting up in cat years, and would rather stay on my comfortable bed, he peeked his eyes open at the sound of my voice. When he saw me watching, he closed his eyes back up and snuggled even deeper into the blankets.

For the first time that morning, I smiled. Even though he looked like he was zonked out, I knew he would beat me to the bathroom.

Sure enough, the instant I swung my legs over the edge of the bed, Feline was at my feet.

Bending over, I scratched him behind his ears before heading out of my room. With Feline at my heels, I walked down the hallway to the bathroom.

I was finally getting used to the set up of the new house and had stopped opening the hallway closet door to go to the bathroom. The first night, I actually walked all the way into the closet before realizing I wasn’t in the bathroom. In my defense, I had been half asleep, but it was still embarrassing, especially after telling my mom. My mom teased me and said maybe we should put signs on the bathroom doors like you see in restaurants, if that would help.

I could feel the flush of embarrassment begin to creep up my neck as it headed for my face. I knew my mom didn’t really think I would have used it as a bathroom, but it didn’t take much to embarrass me. “Just joking sweetie,” my mom had said, reaching over and patting my hand.

“I know.” My red face couldn’t hide my embarrassment.

If I could change one thing about myself, it would be the fact that everything made me blush. Most girls would want to change something about their appearance, but not me. Not that I think I’m anything great, as a matter fact, I pretty much feel I’m a lost cause.

If asked to describe myself, I would mumble medium height, blue eyes, dish water blonde hair, average build, and a chest not worth bragging about. There were so many ordinary aspects to my body that I was in the opinion you would have to change my whole palate to make me beautiful. No, if I could change anything, I would change the fact that my face flushed red at the drop of a hat. Everything seemed to tinge my cheeks with color. It didn’t matter if someone paid me a compliment, or if a teacher called on me in class, everything made my face bright with color.

Often, even watching sitcoms was difficult for me. If I sensed something was going to embarrass a character on a show, I would have to flip the channel to avoid almost becoming sick from empathy. My dad used to lightly tease me about it when I was younger. He would call me their “sense-a-meter.”

There was no denying that I was sensitive. If a book was sad, it was a given that I would cry buckets reading it. If a movie had a sad ending, I would walk around sad for days afterwards. My parents quickly learned to curb my movie watching and to keep all depressing movies away from me. They often joked that they were the only parents that had to keep their child away from Disney movies. When I was eight, it had taken me weeks to get over Bambi’s mother dying. It wasn’t just books and movies that I was sensitive to. I was also keenly aware of the emotions of other people around me. If my parents were happy, I was filled with a warm joyful feeling. To the other extreme though, if they were sad, I was filled with unexplainable grief.

Growing up, once my parents became aware of just how sensitive I was, they tried to mask their emotions to spare me the agony they felt I went through. This adjustment made life easier for me and for the most part I lived my life relatively happy. That is until a year ago when my dad died from a heart attack during his morning run; my world was shattered.

After his sudden death, I wound up spending a few weeks in the hospital. At first the doctors thought I was suffering from depression, but it was more deeply rooted. My own grief compounded with my sensitivity to my mom’s sorrow was almost enough to kill me. The doctors were flabbergasted that even sleeping pills did not seem to give me the peace I needed. They observed that if I fell into a natural sleep, I seemed more peaceful.

My dreams had always been the soothing medicine that I needed for any pain that I experienced in life. We have never once, in all our years together spoken a single word, but we share a conscious bond that makes it unnecessary.

For obvious reasons, I had to keep this info to myself since the doctor’s already thought I was a basket case. I could just imagine what they would think if I told them I was comforted by some boy I had been dreaming about all my life, and even though he always stood in the shadows, and I had never seen his face clearly, I was in love with him. Not even my parents knew everything about the dreams. Sure, they knew that I occasionally dreamed about some boy I had never met, but I never let on that I dreamt of him every night, and that he is the reason I paid no attention to the boys in school.

My grief over my dad’s passing gradually lifted, and I started to function again. I knew a big part of this was because my mom realized that I could not handle her grief on top of my own. She learned to hide her own grief when I was around. I felt bad that she had to mask her own sorrow, but I could not help appreciating the loosening of the band of sadness that had encircled me.

I knew my mom still missed my dad even a year later, and often at night I could still sometimes hear her crying in her room.

That’s why we were in a new house, in a new town.

Two months ago after our first Christmas without my dad, my mom abruptly closed the book she had been reading at the breakfast table. At the slam of the book, I looked up startled from my own book.

“That’s it,” she had announced. “We’re moving.”

“What?” I asked, not sure I heard her right. “Moving?” We had lived in this house as long as I could remember.

“Were moving,” she repeated.

“Why?”

“Because we are never going to let go of him if we stay in this town, everywhere we go reminds us of him. The movies, our favorite restaurants, even the mall. I’m reminded of him wherever I go, and I know you are too. We need a new beginning.”

“Isn’t moving expensive?” I asked, not sure my mom had thought this through completely. We weren’t poor, but I knew that both my parents had to work to maintain their lifestyle. I had been worrying about how we were going to make ends meet since my dad had died.

“We have the money from your dad’s life insurance.”

“Dad had life insurance?” I asked surprised.

“Yes, we both had policies in our name. We took them out after we adopted you. We wanted to make sure if anything ever happened to us, you would be taken care of.”

I felt the familiar pang in my heart. I knew I should get over being abandoned, but for some reason I could not let it go that my “real” parents didn’t love me enough to keep me. I knew my adoptive parents loved me like I was their own flesh and blood, but I couldn’t help wondering why I had been left behind by my real parents.

“How much money is the policy?” I had asked, shaking off the bothersome thoughts.

“Enough that you never have to worry about college and you get to spend your last couple months of school in private school.”

I was thrilled. Attending a private school had been a lifelong dream of mine. Not because I was vain and wanted to surround myself with other smart kids, but because I felt if I attended a school where there were other kids with high IQ’s, I could get lost in the crowd. Don’t ask me why I had assumed everyone at private school were smart, I had just always perceived it that way.

In public school I always seemed to be the smartest in my class, and my teachers were always trying to get my parents to have my IQ tested, but I always fought it. I didn’t want to skip grades. I didn’t want to be tested for gifted classes. I just wanted to be like any other teenager. For years my goal was to fly under the radar. I always got straight A’s, but I never went beyond that. The less attention I got, the happier I was.

It was easier when I had teachers that didn’t care much about their jobs, and had only gone into teaching for the summers off. They appreciated kids like me who made their jobs easier. The teachers that actually liked their jobs were harder to fool. Usually, after a couple of months, they would catch on to just how smart I was and then the cycle would start over again. They would meet with my parents.

“Do you know Krista is gifted?” They would ask.

“Yes,” my parents would reply.

“Would you like us to test her?”

“No,” my parents would say. “We think Krista is comfortable where she is.”

I had seen this cycle many times and just wanted to put it all behind me. I felt a private school was the way to go, but they were expensive and I knew that it would be too costly for me to attend one, so I had never asked.

“Yes,” my mom replied.

“There’s more, I’ve been researching private schools and guess where one of the best in the nation is located?”

“Santa Cruz?” I asked, not daring to believe my good fortune.

“Yep!” she replied, using one of my favorite slang words.

Except for being overly sensitive and dreaming about some guy I had never met, the next craziest thing about me was my ridiculous, burning desire to visit Santa Cruz. My parents could never explain this strange desire of mine, but I couldn’t help wondering if I was born there or something like that.

The Department of Children and Family Services had no information to pass on about me, except the fact that some woman found me sitting on a park bench at a rest stop in Utah, when I was two. I was found clutching a bear and a small backpack. I couldn’t tell them my name, and all the social workers could get out of me was that “Franklin,” or what sounded like Franklin, had told me to sit until someone came to help me. The authorities searched the area high and low for anyone close to the name of Franklin, but their searches proved to be fruitless.

“Santa Cruz,” I had repeated. Saying the name out loud filled me with an unexplainable rightness.

Now, two months later, here we were. From the moment we drove through the town limits, I had felt it. I didn’t know why, but I knew I belonged here.

I studied my reflection in the mirror over the sink as I smoothed moisturizer on my face. The sea air was playing havoc on my complexion. I hated the constant gritty texture my face seemed to have and the dark black smudges under my eyes that made me resemble a NFL football player. I couldn’t help feeling a little frazzled about starting school the next day. It was one thing to feel like a freak on the inside, but a whole other thing to look like one.

I traced the dark smudges with my fingertip. The gritty texture of my skin could be fixed, but the smudges would be harder to cover up. The dream had shaken me more than I was willing to admit. I was terrified at what they meant. Was he going to leave me after all these years? How would I function without him? Who would I turn to in my times of need?

All of these thoughts filled me with despair, and sleep was now a double edge sword. I longed to see him, but I feared for the day he would no longer be there.

I stepped into the shower after laying down an extra towel under the bathmat. The shower door was older, and no matter how hard we closed it, it still leaked around the edges.

Hoping the water would wash away the last lingering side effects from the dream, I deliberately twisted the knob to the hottest setting. Of course it took a while, since the hot water heater in the house must have been installed when the house was built twenty years ago. My mom told me that it couldn’t be that old, since typically hot water heaters only lasted about ten years. It may not be twenty years old, but it had definitely seen better days, and was another item on the endless “to do” list hanging on the refrigerator. My mom and I aren’t the handiest with tools, so the list keeps growing while nothing ever gets crossed off. My mom promised to call a handyman last night after the pantry door fell off its hinges. I could only laugh; the new house may be in a great location being only a block from the beach, but it definitely needed some work done, my mom called it T.L.C (Tender Loving Care). I felt it needed a lot more than that, like maybe a bulldozer.

I rushed through washing and conditioning my hair to conserve some of the limited hot water for shaving my legs. The sunny California weather was nice, and I definitely liked wearing shorts, but shaving my legs every day was getting old fast. At least it was better than wearing my regular attire of jeans and long johns like I would have to if we were still in Montana.

I was forced to switch off the shower when the hot water turned lukewarm. I toweled off with one of the plush rose colored towels my mom and I had special ordered when we still lived up north. We both hated stepping out of a hot shower and at least the plush towels helped ward off any chills. Of course, the mild temperatures in California were a lot different than the frigid temperatures we were used to.

I pulled on a pair of blue and green plaid board shorts and a Roxy t-shirt. I let out a sigh of contentment; I loved being able to wear such light weight clothes in March. Though before the move, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you the difference between a Roxy shirt and the standard Target t-shirts I usually wore during the summers back in Montana. I have never been a name brand junkie, but there was no denying that the Roxy shirts were super comfortable, not to mention they were very flattering, even for someone as flat chested as me.