hope is smashable, realism is not.

[Carlisle]

[S119 - Julia Guercio - continued from my september]

Julia couldn't pretend that she was massively excited about the senior ski trip. The lockdowns and virtual classrooms had basically sapped what little social status, and capacity, she had. She no longer had a boyfriend, she was falling behind in the swimming pool, since her sister had moved out to go to college in the summer she barely had any friends at school. All she had was her studies, the dream of being valedictorian, and the dream of getting out of a little town like Salem and moving to somewhere more interesting. She had been planning a solo trip to Italy, to visit her family whilst connecting with more of her family heritage, a final chance to enjoy herself before the stress of college took over her life.

So no, she wasn't looking forward to the ski trip. She didn't like the cold, she definitely wasn't an outdoorsy type of person, and most importantly she didn't really know anybody else going on the trip well enough to call friends. Marina and her parents had been nagging her non-stop to go. The threats of regret, the promise that she would be able to use the trip to make new friends and build lasting relationships. Julia was pretty sure her parents would've tied her up and locked her in the cargo hold of the coach if she refused to go. Think of the unmissable memories you'll make, they said. With a heavy heart, Julia eventually decided to go. It was only for a couple of days, after all, what was the worst that could happen?

What was the worst that could happen?

Julia woke herself up with a little fright, head against the window of the bus. A slather of drool sticking her face to the window, an uncomfortably cold sweat had taken over her body. It had been a long time since she last had a nightmare, especially not one so graphic and deplorable. Survival of the Fittest wasn't something she thought about regularly, it was more like one of those weird conspiracy theories that people occasionally whispered about in dark corners, like 9-11 cover-ups, vaccine antagonists, or flat earthers. Yet she had fallen asleep on the school bus, her white earphones playing to her a mix Happiness Begins by The Jonas Brothers, and Heartbreak Weather by Niall Horan, and her dreams had been haunted by that conspiracy theorist wet dream.

Usually you wake up from your dreams and don't even remember them. Your brain boggles trying to think about what you were living and experiencing, yet all you have in return is blank thoughts of emptiness. It happened to Julia more than it didn't, perhaps her lack of imagination was to blame. She was far more in to fact over fiction after all. However, this time her dream was poignant, so poignant that she could recollect pretty much ever fine line of detail over a dream that lasted almost a fortnight. Julia remembered reading that you only remembered the dreams that you wake up during, and each dream only lasts a few seconds at best despite feeling like a decade, or in this case a fortnight.

The dream was the stuff of nightmares. Explicit and violent, the whole thing was like some kind of battleground, like the sort of thing you would see on Fortnite. Piecing together the jigsaw puzzle of her dream sent shivers down her spine, her hands colder than usual. Crystal clear visions of murder, the faces of her classmates turning on each other, unrelenting destruction and uncompromising brutality. The realism of her nightmare chilled her to the very bone, it was so strange that she could recollect the precise faces and even names of her classmates. Their voices, even their clothes. Everything checked out. Things she had no way of knowing, yet somehow inexplicably did. She must've looked agitated because even the girl next to her had called her out on it.

"Are you okay?" the girl said.

Julia could only half hear her, through the music playing loudly in her ears, but she gently smiled in response and nodded. One less word she'd have to say on this big ski trip.

Another few hours and the group had reached their destination; her more popular classmates like Dani and the cheerleaders, Marshall and the rest of the lacrosse team, Donovan and the basketball team all rushing off the bus to get to their chalets. Julia hesitated before getting off, collecting her luggage from the bottom of the coach and looking to find out who she would be sharing a room with. The ones who didn't put the names of their friends would be randomly allocated either to a space in a chalet or in a chalet together. She hoped it would be the latter, at least that way they could be lonely together and not just in a dodgy situation of being awkwardly isolated. Sharing a room with the cheerleading squad would have been the worst case scenario, but maybe she would get lucky. Somebody from the swim team like Evie, or maybe somebody she knew as a friend of the family, like Chiara, would be ideal. Her invisible presence was probably a little more endearing to those two.

Faces of the girls in her chalet were unfamiliar to Julia, but from the small talk they made as they pulled their stuff out of their bags they seemed nice enough. They didn't have long in their room before they had to make their way down for lunch, so Julia awkwardly waited on her bed in the corner before they left to go for lunch, Julia clinging to them ineptly. Like a lost vagrant all alone. Is this what college would be like? Julia's confidence was at an all time low, but she sat quietly and ate her lunch, waiting either to be asked a question or for everybody else to finish. A long, internal sigh at how painfully awkward and alone she felt.

Handing back her tray, Julia was startled by a boy. It wasn't a boy that she had ever spoken to, hell, she didn't even remember seeing him in class. He stood tall, his blonde hair scruffily perched on top of her head, fair skin and piercing hazel eyes, and didn't really react when Julia clumsily bumped into her. Thankfully she was able to find her balance before she went crashing to the ground, or worse, taking him out with her. Julia apologised meekly, locking eyes with him. She had never said a single word to him, yet she knew everything about that boy. His family life, where he lived, his brothers, his name. Joshua James. He idly stared back at her for a few half-seconds, before dipping his head and turning around as if she was staring through him rather than at him. She wanted to say something to him, to ask if they knew each other, or something, anything. Yet no words fell from her lips. They went their separate ways, strangers as they were before.

How are you supposed to explain that, though?

Perhaps she could shrug it off and imagine that everything she had learned about Joshua was just a nonsensical fallacy that she had dreamed up, none of it was true. Yet she knew exactly what he was wearing, even down to the scarf that she had treasured when she found it beside his body in the dream. The whole thing made Julia shudder with trepidation. How could she explain knowing who that was without having ever interacted with him? She remembered him aloof from the store she saw him in that one time, but even then that was a distant memory plucked from some expansive corner of her mind. She felt uncomfortable, like the last thing in the world she wanted to do was go and hit the slopes, yet that is what their chaperone was insisting they did. Another long, internalized sigh.

The rest of the day went by like normal, despite Julia constantly looking over her shoulder. She couldn't help but feel like she was being watched, like something bad was going to happen to her or the others around her. But it never did.

As the trip progressed, she couldn't help but get frustrated at Salem being the main character he lived to be in his head, dressed as ridiculously as he was on the bus and in her dream. Przemek was alive and well, enjoying himself. Julia had tried repeatedly to not think about that one, the dream she had made her want to retch just at the thought of what she did to that poor boy and his petite face, both brown eyes thankfully working in this version of reality. She walked past Victor a few times, him either choosing to completely ignore her or the occasional grunt that he was making. She had befriended Karen on the trip, they even went skiing together, and it actually was the most fun she had on the whole trip. She used that friendship to gauge some of the things that she had learned from her on the island, in the hunting lodge. Her parents were just as strict as she had said they were in her premonition, another key detail that she was

Most people forget about their dreams pretty quickly. Even the most distinctive of memories would quickly fade when confronted by actual reality, the land of make-belief fading into nothingness. Julia was no exception to this rule, if she did remember her dreams when she woke up then there was a pretty solid chance that she would have forgotten in time for breakfast. Some of those memories didn't even last the journey from her bed to the shower. Julia still couldn't shake the uncomfortable feeling burrowing into the pit of her stomach whenever she thought about that dream she had, an obscure, far-flung paranoia that had manifested within her brain.

She refused to let it ruin the trip, even if every night she lay awake for hours trying to stop herself from thinking. If only they had vodka.

Julia?

However, the rest of the trip did just pass on by, uneventful. She even learned how to ski properly by the end of it all. So many times going up that hill, then tumbling down that slope. It was probably a miracle she hadn't broken every bone in her body by the time she got back on the bus to go home. She had braved the ski lifts, overcoming a minor fear of heights, she had eaten so much schnitzel that she must've doubled in weight, she had actually made some solid friends in Karen, Timothy, Ashlyn. They were an eclectic bunch, but she felt like she knew them all so well that becoming friends came along naturally. She had come a long way since getting on that bus and leaving the school car park. Waving off her father, despite being embarrassed by him waiting around until the bus left before going home. Hopefully nobody knew they were related, otherwise that would've been less than ideal. The highlight of the trip? Plucking up the courage to go down the blue intermediate slope by the end of it. On a snowboard. Julia was living her best, craziest life. A stupendous feat amongst the angst generated by her visionary dream.

Julia, is that you?

The journey back to the school was okay. Everybody on the bus fell in to two different buckets; those who were utterly exhausted and fell asleep within minutes, or those who were so wired from the successful trip that they were insisting on talking the entire way home. Julia was probably more in the former than the latter, but sat outside of the clearly defined bracket. She sat there, listening to her boy bands like your average teenage girl, prying her eyes open to avoid a repeat of her nightmares from the outbound journey. Her heartrate beat intensely the entire time, to the extent she was panicking at one point about having a heart attack. Maybe everything she saw was just some distasteful foreshadowing. She had watched a Final Destination movie once, the one with the roller coaster crashing and killing everybody in extremely gruesome ways. It was too gory for her, she got a little light-headed watching Grey's Anatomy from time to time, watching the devil hunt down a group of high school students, that all look about ten years too old to be at high school, in unfathomable ways, and it reminded Julia of what she had seen. What if it really was some twisted vision and she was too boring and lame to jump up and down on the bus and bring everybody's attention to the fact that they were about to get kidnapped and murdered. It would all just happen, and some higher being was blessing her with that foresight to be able to prevent it. Jesus, now she really was overthinking.

Wake up!

Christmas came and it was nice. Julia had just about managed to forget some of the things she had witnessed in her dream. Marina had come home from college for the holidays, Boston and the rest of Massachusetts had been doused in a thin layer of snow, which felt sentimentally festive. The Guercio family were all there, together. All under that roof. Her parents had definitely been feeling Marina's absence as much as she had, even if they were too gung-ho to confess it. It must've been hard on them, watching their first daughter leave the house and become an adult. Julia wasn't far off it, either, just a few more months and then hopefully she would be well on her way in becoming a doctor. The house would be getting emptier, the empty rooms feeling bigger than ever. Julia had teased her mother about crying all the way home after dropping Marina off at the college. She regretted that. The remainder of the holidays was spent either studying or lazing around doing nothing. It felt like the prime time of year where lying around all day in bed, watching stupid viral videos and browsing endlessly through social media in her cosy pyjamas. She ended those simple things, and having Marina back around to tell her all about her college experience; the boys, the clubs, the new friends. And, of course, how her studies were going. Julia was a nerd, that was just as important as how many boys her sister liked the look of, or how many parties she had attended.

JULIA? Can you hear me?

Going back to school in January wasn't actually as horrible as it could've been. As much as she hated admitting to her sister or parents that they were right, she did actually make some nice friendships on the trip and she had more of a purpose to being there. It wasn't just all about eating alone, or spending all her breaks in the library. She actually had some friends, something to put attention on outside of studying and swimming. That felt nice. The rest of the term went by normally too, nothing to report.

Come on, Julia. Wake up.

Evie had beaten her in swimming trials again. Julia knew she wasn't at the same fitness that she had been before the COVID lockdowns, but she didn't realise she had slipped that bad. Letting Evie win once was hard enough, letting her win the more important swimming trials was especially difficult. She took an extra-long shower to relieve herself of the pressure and disappointment. Evie had been showering in the next cubicle along, and lightly tapped on the shower door to ask if Julia was okay after realising how long she had been in there for.

"U-uh, y-yes." Julia reassured Evie hesitantly, listening out to the sound of Evie opening the entrance door to the changing rooms and leaving her in solitude.

The water was warm, so refreshing. Swimming had always been her outlet to think, to go over everything in her head and make peace with anything going wrong in her life. There wasn't really anything going wrong, of course, but it was just all very standard. Perhaps even a little stale. Not long to go until graduation, not long

What the hell are you doing? Wake the fuck up.

Julia decided not to go to senior prom, much to the protests of her family. Her sister even threatened to fly back home to force her to go, outraged by the idea that Julia wouldn't attend an inevitably awful party. Of course she had dreamed of the moment some handsome boy would sweep her off her feet by asking her out to prom, the many teenage coming-of-age movies and tv shows that portrayed prom as a magical Cinderella moment. But this belle wouldn't be going to ball, there was no magical pumpkin chariot, no sparkling dress suitable for a princess. Instead, Julia's plan was to stay in and binge more episodes of Riverdale whilst desperately ignoring the Instagram stories of the people who would be revelling at the party.

Her mom called up to her, offering a last minute ride to the school hall and a hot cup of cocoa simultaneously. She appreciated her tenacity, but she had made up her mind and she wasn't going to be deterred. The cup of hot cocoa sounded delightful.

This isn't funny anymore. Wake. Up.

Eighteen years old. Her birthday was a momentous occasion, a little bit upstaged by Marina by returning home after her freshman year of college. They had a nice family meal out, then her parents took her little sister and vacated the house so they could have a casual party. It was good to have all her school friends back from their first year of college, but Julia definitely spent the night feeling a little bit removed. She hadn't been able to experience that, the thrill of moving out, standing on her own two feet. Being independent. It sounded like they all loved it, it had been a great rush and a definite change of pace. Exactly what Julia had been craving.

She was really looking forward to going to college.

It was going to be the making of her, she just knew it.

WAKE UP JULIA.


...


...


...


Julia's eyes opened slowly, the rest of her head still reeling like she'd just been smacked round the head with a metal pole. Her vision still distorted, her view of the ground resembling the fish-eye lens from a camera. Her ears were ringing, her gut wrenching from the shock of what Salem did in front of her. She felt around, for her phone, or anything to comfort her, yet all she was met by was the sticky cold of the snow-coated grassy knoll she was lying down on. The world was spinning around her, like she was recovering from an absolutely insane hangover, and her hands tingling in what she later found out was a sticky red substance.

It didn't take long for her wandering hands to meet with Salem's arm. He felt cold, even colder than her numbed face. She felt up his arm, not sure whether she was searching for a pulse or just a hand to grab hold of. Somebody to pull her up, wake her up from her disillusioned state and set her on her way. She found the hand, still limp, and squeezed it harder and harder, achingly willing him on. She slowly raised herself up, realising she had been lying in a growing pool of viscous blood that had surrounded Salem's corpse.

He was as dead as could be. The gun he had used to shoot his brains out sat there mocking his cadaver. Julia wanted to scream, to cry out, to vomit, maybe even all three at once. But silence was all that came. Her frantic dreams trying to rationalize what she had actually just seen. She couldn't work out what reality was hopeful falsity, and what was outright illusion. It was difficult to decipher, it was exactly how her dream on that bus had ended when she awoke startled. She was going to pinch herself and wake up again, right?

Surely.

She felt dazed and confused, the ringing in her ears failing to subside. Her blood-drenched skin felt scratchy, irritable. She was desperate to cleanse herself, but desperate to escape. How long had she been out cold? Her collar hadn't detonated so it couldn't have been that long. Were the rescuers still on the beach waiting for her on a boat? Had they already left?

Julia bid farewell to Salem, bid farewell to the church and the body of Przemek that was rotting away inside of it. Waved goodbye to the unholy, evil memories that would plague her for as long as she lived, the duelling actions of self-defence and self-preservation that she had sought out over the past few days.

Stumbling from left to right, struggling to keep her balance as she tried to descend the snowy hill. Eventually she simply defaulted to rolling down it like a child enjoying a wintery trip to the sledging ravines. She had left her bag of belongings at the top of the hill, so if the rescue was as much of a falsehood as her wasted dreams of prom and college admission letters, then she would be done for without any of her rationed food or water.

This was all or nothing.

She prayed the boat wouldn't leave without her.

[S119 - Julia Guercio - continued in V8 Rescue]