Uninvited: An Unloved Ones Prequel #2 (The Unloved Ones Prequels) Read Free

your breakfast. You’ll be late for school.”
    I stumble. I try to say the word “Becka,” but can’t get past the B. I feel weak and lightheaded, but I still feel like I’m in danger. I need to get away from these people. I turn to go back toward the bedroom, and come face to face with a girl holding a guitar over her head.
    It’s a mirror, my mind registers. I lower the guitar slightly, and the image in the mirror does the same. Then I drop the guitar and stumble backward, and so does my reflection.
    Only the girl in the mirror is not me. She has messy black hair and mascara running down her cheeks.
    The girl in the mirror is Becka.
    I
am Becka.

Chapter Two

 
    My shoulders—
her
shoulders—are heaving up and down as I gaze at the reflection. I still have that feeling of detachment, and it occurs to me that I must be dreaming.
    “Becka, are you feeling all right?” the man at the table—Becka’s father—asks me. When I don’t respond, he pushes back his chair from the table. But dream or not, I don’t want any of them near me. It’s too creepy. Before he can get up, I rush back into the hallway.
    But now I find myself with a new problem: there are doors on either side of this hallway, and I can’t remember which one I had been in before. They all look the same. I hear footsteps behind me. “Becka?” her father calls.
    I open the first door to the right. It’s a small bathroom. I slip inside and lock the door. It’s dark, so I flip on the light. A moment later I can hear Becka’s father outside.
    “You’d better be getting ready for school in there,” he says. His voice is authoritative but not cruel. The doorknob doesn’t move. Even if the door wasn’t locked, he would have respected my desire to be alone. When he speaks again, his voice is at a lower volume, as if he doesn’t want anyone but me to hear. “Come on, Becka,” he says. “Your mom and I let you go out last night with the understanding that you’d get back in time for school.” He sighs. “But I guess that was our mistake. Parenting doesn’t come with a manual, you know. I’ll tell you what, if you’re tired, why don’t you go back to bed and take a half day? Your mom can drop you off after lunch.”
    “No!” I yell. The idea of being trapped here with them is horrid. “I’ll go to school. I
want
to go.”
    “Okay, sweetie.”
    I wait until I hear his footsteps walk away, and then I turn toward the mirror and see myself—see Becka—leaning against the door.
    “This is a dream,” I whisper to myself. “All you have to do is wake up.”
    The first thing I can think of is to pinch myself. I squeeze a bit of flesh on my upper arm between two fingers, but it doesn’t hurt. I can feel it, in a detached sort of way, but I can’t feel the pain. I swallow.
    I don’t remember ever swallowing in a dream.
    I try to quiet my panic, telling myself that if I can’t wake myself up, I’ll just have to go through the motions of the dream until I wake up naturally. If you’re going to be in a dream, you might as well do it right. Just because it’s a dream is no excuse for laziness.
    I look back at Becka in the mirror. She’s a real mess in the mornings, and I feel embarrassed for her. Her black hair is matted down on one side, and sticking up on the other, and her face looks dirty from her smeared makeup. I don’t want to be seen like this, even if it isn’t really me, and even if this isn’t real. She looks that bad.
    There’s a comb on the countertop. It’s covered with stray hairs, and I clump them out and toss them into an overflowing garbage can. The whole counter is dirty. There are toothpaste clumps in the sink, with bits of hair stuck in them, and the mirror is streaked with water droplets. I struggle to drag the brush through her split ends, doing little more than hiding the worst of her bed head, and end up using one of the hair clips left out on the counter to keep her bangs out of my (our) eyes.
    I squint