Sovereign Hope Read Free

the
air. An acrid smoke twisting upward from her scorched limbs.
    And none of it
had been real.
    Doctor Reynolds became a regular fixture after that. He
suspected the brightness of the sun had affected my vision and
diagnosed me as suffering from migraine with aura. That meant my
sight might go haywire if I got a headache. No one seemed to listen
to me when I told them that my sight hadn’t just gone weird,
though—that my mom had actually been  on fire.  
    They hadn’t
listened afterwards, either, when I told them about the explosions
I saw in the sky from time to time, or when the neighbor’s cat
turned up without its skin. Which was often. Eventually I learned
to keep my mouth shut. It was easier to lock myself away in my room
and pretend that they were right than face the possibility that I
might actually be losing my mind. Sometimes, I liked to think my
episodes were totally normal, a hereditary defect passed down by my
father. It was a convenient lie I told myself, given that my father
had died in a car crash before I was born and wasn’t around to deny
it.
      It had been that way for the last ten
years, and now, at eighteen, I was still no closer to understanding
what was wrong with me. Still no less scared.
    The echo of that emotion resounded through me as Tess pulled
into my driveway. This was different. Imagining my mother on fire
was one thing, but having people,  real people , coming after me for no
apparent reason, left me on edge and feeling significantly out of
my depth.
    “ Here we are. Home, safe and sound,” Tess said in a singsong
voice.
    Home was a
white Colonial with sunshine-yellow shutters framing the windows,
traditional, and perhaps a little more run-down than the neighbors
would have liked. Completely different from their white stucco
Spanish villas with heated pools out back. I turned from staring
numbly out of the window and gave Tess a doubtful look.
    “ I don’t know about safe. That Dodge was parked on the corner
this morning.”
    It did feel
better being back in Monterey Hills, though, and Figueroa was far,
far away. All the same, I knew it was a false sense of security,
like running to hide in your bed when your house is being
robbed.
    I opened the
front door, for once not feeling my stomach knot as I waited for my
mother to call out. I should have been used to coming home to an
empty house by now, but it was still hard. Things might have been
different, of course; I could have been taken into foster care.
Social services hadn’t exactly been pleased with the idea of me
living alone after all, but I’d made it perfectly clear I would
make my foster parents’ lives hell if I had to. There was no way I
was going to leave the house I’d grown up in, and my eighteenth
birthday had been on the horizon anyway, so they’d agreed to let me
live alone so long as I kept up with school.
    Once inside
the house, I triple-checked that the door was locked and paused at
the window, peering anxiously up and down the street.
    “ Come on, there’s no one there. You want coffee?” Tess
asked.
    “ Yeah, sure, why not? I’m only on the brink of a nervous
breakdown. I can’t imagine why caffeine wouldn’t help this
situation.”
    We walked
through to the kitchen. I sank down onto a stool at the breakfast
bar where me and my mom had completed the New York Times crossword
every Sunday as a ritual.
    The rain had
finally stopped, and the late afternoon sunlight slanted through
the kitchen blinds, stacking long, thin strips of cool yellow over
the linoleum floor and up the opposite wall. It barcoded Tess as
she shifted around the open kitchen, preparing the coffee.
    “ You’ve got messages,” she said, gesturing to the answering
machine at my elbow. It was true. The red light blipped
malevolently at me. Getting voicemail was usually exciting; there
was always a glimmer of hope that it might be from my mom. Not
today, though. There was only one person who would be leaving me
messages today. I