Red is for Remembrance Read Online Free PDF Page A

present."
    "There is no present," I snap, shifting a bit in my seat, just to be sure. "But I don't know. It felt like a premonition. It was like she wanted me to join her, to be with her."
    "Who?"
    I shake my head and swallow hard, pulling the bed covers around my shoulders to temper the chill. "She sounded young, like eight or nine, but then she said she was a mother of a girl so blue, a girl who needs help ... or else some boy will die."
    "Slow down," Amber says. "You dreamt about blue people'? Are you sure they weren't green and driving a flying saucer?"
    "Be serious," I say.
    "I'm trying."
    I sigh. "I know; it doesn't make sense and it certainly doesn't help that she was speaking in rhyme."
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    "Rhyme? Are you sure you didn't maybe just take some of Janie's funny dust before bed?"
    "You know me better than that," I say, thinking about my bottle of tranquilizers.
    "I'm kidding, of course," Amber says. "Did it sound at all like-- "
    "Maura?" I ask.
    Amber nods.
    I shake my head and look away.
    Maura was the little girl I used to babysit five years ago. I ignored the premonitions I was having about her, telling myself that they were insignificant, that they were just a bad bout of dreams. The next thing I knew, Maura was missing; she'd been abducted, the victim of a pedophile. Shortly after, her body was found in an old, abandoned shed in the woods.
    Three years later, I was having nightmares about Drea. I dreamt that she was going to be killed by a mysterious stalker. In the end, I was able to save Drea, but I wasn't able to save Veronica Leeman, a classmate who got herself mixed up in the stalking. I found her body on the floor of our French classroom. She'd been hit over her head; there was a pool of blood surrounding her neck and shoulders. Sometimes when I close my eyes, I can still see her looking up at me, her piercing emerald-green eyes disappointed that I didn't get there in time.
    This past summer I lost Jacob, my one and only soul mate. I was so preoccupied trying to save Clara, a girl I'd just met, that I couldn't save him. Shortly after I arrived at the cottage on Cape Cod, I started having nightmares about
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    Clara-- that she was going to drown, that her body would be washed up on the beach. I kept getting this tightness in my chest, nearly cutting off my breath. I chalked the feeling up to stress--
    to the pressure of trying to save Clara's life. But I knew there was something more. I just wasn't able to figure it out. I didn't spend enough time listening to my body and what it was trying to tell me.
    And now Jacob's gone.
    I close my eyes, remembering the stream of water running through my nightmare, wondering what it's supposed to symbolize. And then it hits me.
    "Stacey?" Amber asks. She rubs my back, the way Drea used to. 'Are you okay?"
    I nod and wipe at my eyes, my heart rapping hard inside my chest. "It's Jacob."
    "What's Jacob?"
    "My nightmares . . . the water . . ."
    "What water?"
    "There was water in my dream. Maybe it's supposed to represent the ocean. Maybe there's something Jacob wants me to know."
    "Stacey," Amber says, taking my hands. "Listen to yourself. I mean, I know you've been through a lot, but you're starting to sound like a loon."
    "You don't understand," I say, snatching my hands away. "I haven't dreamt in months."
    "And!"
    'And, now that I am, maybe I'll dream about Jacob."
    "I think you're overanalyzing this," Amber says. "You know as well as I do that not all dreams are premonitions. I
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    mean, I have nightmares all the time-- about getting warts on my ass, about going to class dressed in my mother's granny-panties-- but it's not like those things would ever happen."
    "I can't believe you're saying this-- after everything I've been through. My dreams are real."
    "I didn't say they weren't."
    "Then what? If there's a chance that I can be with Jacob again-- even in my dreams-- I'll take it.
    Can't you understand that?"
    "Sure, but don't you think if this were truly about