Some mornings I wake up and everything seems okay. It's something my brain does. I suppose everyone's brain does it. You're in dreamland, and the wish fulfillment fairies take over and douse you in their bogus happy dust. Peek into your hidden desires and make you believe that you've satisfied them. Paint pictures that your eyes, flicking back and forth behind your closed lids, devour with an embarrassingly ravenous greed. And by the time you open your eyes, you're full of ill-gotten endorphins, convinced that all is well with the world.

Sometimes I can float there for thirty seconds, a minute, two minutes. I can will myself to believe I'm just a regular teenager whose biggest problem is figuring out how to sneak out after curfew. I can look at the sky outside my window and think, Good morning, sunshine! Are we ready for another fabulous day?

But reality always gets me in the end.

Before I can even wipe the boogers out of my eyes, I start to remember.

That's when the fairies take off. The minute they see my eyelids flicker, they start laughing like a bunch of punky eight-year-olds and take off out the window. And all the good feelings they gave me get slowly squished by the lead-and-tar mixture of the very real mess that is my life. I sink under the weight of reality. And pretty soon the bright colors of my dream fade to the dismal black-and-white of facts.

Fact one: Ed, my boyfriend up until last night, but more important, the person who's been my closest friend through all of this... well, he hates me. Wants to keep distance between us, where there used to be nothing but the best of friendships.

Fact two: Sam, my first love -- as in the person you never fully get over -- turns up just long enough to ruin things with Ed and then turns out to be a two-faced killer. Just like George Niven and everyone else I tried to trust.

And worst of all, fact three: My dad is missing. A particularly gut-wrenching fact that should make all boyfriend troubles irrelevant. He's out there somewhere, and nobody seems to know the first thing about how to find him. I might be his only hope. Which just makes me that much more of a target for whoever is trying to kill me.

Oh, yes. Trying to kill me. Shots fired, life in jeopardy. Someone actually wants to take this dismal life from me, and I'm damned if I'm going to let them. My father needs me too much.

For one brief moment I had everything I wanted: a family -- two parents and a sister. A boyfriend. And I let myself believe it was mine, that those stupid dreams had really come true. And it all fell apart.

Note to self: Never fall for that one again.

Period.

End of story.

Beginning of day.

Rise and shine!

This was so WEIRD. Like a new reality show: When Best Friends Go Bad.. They didn't speak to each other like this.

GAIA MOORE EXITED THE BUILDING SHE lived in, on East Seventy-second Street, in a foul mood. She didn't even know where she was heading; she just knew she had to get out of that apartment and go somewhere, anywhere. It was stupid to stay in one place for long if her would-be killers -- with or without the help of Sam -- were looking for her. She wanted to search for her dad, but with nothing to go on, her energy just floated around in a hyper haze. It made her feel wired and weird.

To make matters worse, some asshole was letting his cell phone ring. Probably an idiot yuppie fresh from his morning workout getting a frantic call from the office asking what was going on with the Hooper account. Or a frazzled mom with two bratty kids who left her phone in the diaper bag and couldn't find it. Or some "boutique" dermatologist avoiding her needy patients jonesing for their Botox fix.

What Gaia couldn't understand was, why did people carry cell phones if they didn't want to answer them? And if they knew they were going to blow off a call, why not turn off the ringer and save everyone from having to hear that incessant, bleating whine? The worst part was, whoever the phone belonged to seemed to be following Gaia down the street. She glared at the people passing her, trying to shame whoever it was into turning off that annoying ring, but it kept going and going. Jesus, it sounded like it was coming right from her own backpack. Who the hell...?

Crap. It was Gaia's cell phone. She kept forgetting she was one of the wirelessly enhanced masses!

She dropped her backpack to the ground and quickly unzipped it, yanking the zipper up so that the grimy pack flopped against the ground. She spotted the cheerful silver phone in the dank recesses and reached in to get it, at which point it finally stopped.

Aaah. Sweet silence.

She checked the incoming-calls screen and saw that the phone number was for Dmitri's apartment. She hit the talk button twice and stood in the middle of the sidewalk, legs planted on either side of her open backpack, listening intently. She'd never get used to this tiny electronic dork tool. It clicked a few times, then beeped. She tried again, but the damn thing wouldn't connect. She waited to see if the little envelope would pop up -- maybe he was leaving a message -- but after about a minute and a half she realized that nothing was happening. Maybe Sam had signed her up for one of those low-rent plans.

Sam. As she closed up the phone, Gaia was disturbed to realize that her heart was thudding. Despite all evidence that he was a two-faced, double-crossing, wanna-be killer, there was still a part of her that just didn't get it. That wished he was calling. How dumb was that? The guy had given her instructions to meet him at a Ukranian church the night before, and as soon as she got there, bam, gunshots were headed straight for her gut. He had to be involved. He'd obviously been the willing bait to bring her there. But some small, idiotic part of her still felt a connection to the guy she had fallen for long ago.

The human heart was undeniably the stupidest organ in the body.

Forget it, she thought. There's nowhere to go and nothing to do. I might as well go to school.

Stuffing her nonworking phone into her backpack, she disappeared down the yawning maw of the subway tunnels. She'd try calling Dmitri again when she got to school.

Copyright © 2003 by Francine Pascal