Recuperation

[haxxor]

Sam actively could not remember how she'd gotten back to her room.

She had a few theories. One, Kurt had bamfed her back; but she thought she'd have remembered that, or remembered him. Two, she'd blacked out while crawling up the stairs but had continued to operate on instinct. This looked more likely.

Three, she wasn't in her room at all, and was in fact hallucinating. Sam did not like this theory. For one thing, she didn't take with hallucinating, and was unsure she'd be the kind of person who would. Obviously, her brain was just as capable of throwing out random images as anyone else's, but she still didn't like the idea. Too... right-brainy. Too Joy.

Ugh. Even half-nuked to death, the Institute was better than her twin sister.

Sam leaned over the toilet bowl, resting her head on the cool porcelain of the seat. At this point, she didn't care whether or not it was clean. It was cool and it calmed the pounding in her head that restarted every time she started to puke again. She'd pulled all of the major burn damage back inside herself, which was why she was currently experiencing some of the worst food poisoning imaginable. Nothing like stomach acid and your own scorched flesh to freshen the palate.

She could feel her stomach settling, at least a little, though she still felt both sick and disgustingly full. She had a few minutes. Stripping off her shirts, which were both stuck to her with person-goo, she reached over to turn on the shower in her and Alani's (who was blessedly, blessedly AWOL) shared bathroom. Cold, with a side of cold. Something to shock her back to consciousness.

Plus, any more heat and she thought she might literally split her seams.

Crawling into the shower, Sam wormed her way out of the rest of her clothing, which she cast on the already-disgusting floor, streaked with blood and something that was sort of grayish that Sam felt, worryingly, might be brain fluid. And something with black speckles that she knew was eyeball juice. (It shouldn't be discussed how she knew.) She hoped the lady was okay. She could still speak. She had spoken, hadn't she?

Something slid wetly off the side of Sam's head and she raised her hand to find a chunk of her hair missing. She'd burned the follicles and now they were releasing it all.

"Priceless," she said to herself, "priceless..." She tugged at the rest of it and it came easily enough. It didn't even hurt. Soon, a mat of eight-inch black hair was sitting in a little pile on the floor of the bathroom, seeping slightly grayish water, and Sam was giggling in the shower. Her nails were coming out too. Oh, God, it was so disgusting that at this point it was actually funny... Twenty finger and toenails sat neatly atop the pile of hair as she curled into the side of the tub, lashless, browless, nailless and hairless as a rat, even the fine hairs on her body being removed slowly by the friction of the water as it struck her skin. It'd all grow back eventually. It always had before...

I'm a naked molerat. This is so gross, so gross, soooo groooss...

After she looked at her own skin and discovered she was pruny, she finally crawled back out of the shower and into a clean towel and emerged back into the room briefly, small and pale and cold with no hair to keep her body heat in. Pulling on her sophomore class t-shirt and stolen sweatpants from her sister's dance studio, she plugged in the power adaptor she'd made from her cell phone charger and, though she knew it would mean even more barfing when her stomach remembered to be unsettled, she hooked the clamps to her fingers and pressed the button.

Hzzzt.

Her protein deposits depleted slightly as fingernails and toenails began to grow back in.

Hzzzzt.

She was getting a little light-headed as her eyebrows and eyelashes reformed, and the water stopped dripping into her eyes.

Hzt.

She always misjudged that one. Suddenly extremely nauseous, Sam put a new-nailed hand to her head to find three inches of her own oft-dyed blonde hair grown back rather than the little bit she actually needed, sticking up in a corona around her face. She was also both craving steak and needing to get back to the bathroom now.

Choosing the latter, she dashed back into the bathroom, nearly slipping on the gore on floor and barfing her guts up for the fifth time in the last two hours, only to have to change her pants again when she realized she'd knelt in the blood. Pulling all the spare white towels out of the cabinets in the bathroom floor, she laid them down a few inches thick so she couldn't see the red and yellow seeping through any more and called it clean enough.

Leaning against the toilet again with her forehead against the porcelain and her new soft nails hardening slowly as they oxygenated, she wondered again why she thought her power was so cool when this was all that ever happened.

[haxxor]

[Timestamp: early evening, several hours after Rayen goes boom]

Sam finally realized that her computer was missing. Whereas this would have normally induced a full-blown panic attack, right now she was too tired to really freak, despite the fitful ten- and fifteen-minute naps she'd been taking on the towel-covered floor of the bathroom. Today it was just an annoyance.

She really hoped no one was going to steal it. It was a school, after all. But a huge school with tons of money. Who would need to steal a laptop, unless there was just a bunch of random rebels and thrill-seekers around... oh.

Yeah. Right.

She pushed herself off the floor after a longer nap than the rest, one that lasted almost an hour, exploring the patterns the towels had left on her face. She felt stronger, a little; still a lot like she was recovering from a severe flu, but better than she had felt. She should start cleaning. Alani would be bound to come back and sleep soon, and she might want to, you know, shower or pee or something. Plus, the bathrooms down the hall were gross. She'd have to spend energy saved by cleaning on clearing out Alani's system from whatever contagions were breeding there and then end up having to clean anyway. Better to start now.

Laboriously, Sam began her purge of all extraneous matter, moving slowly and gingerly but no less precisely than she would've if she'd been whole. All cloth into a plastic bag for the laundry, surfaces scrubbed and rescrubbed and disinfected, everything rinsed, everything rinsed again, everything dried. Liquid Plumber down all drains, Ajax everywhere she could find tile, Clorox everywhere there was glass.

The bathroom shone like a diamond. Sam peered out of its little door and looked through the window, juding it to be about eight p.m. in the real world. Telling time was hard when you didn't have a little digital clock calibrated to GMT sitting safetly in the bottom-right corner of your existence.

She shut off the light in the bathroom for the first time in several hours, feeling the little hum of power cut off abruptly and return to its path. Staggering into bed, she pulled the covers up and over herself, wondering how long it would take before she was running for the bathroom again.

[Blurt]

Blurt was skittering down the hallway when he recieved a broadcast of some decidedly ill thoughts. He executed a terribly sloppy about-face and slammed into the wall next to a door. The shake made it swing open a little. He peeked inside.

"Heya, anybody home?" he said. He didn't have anything better to do than bother people. In fact, that was most of what he did with the newfound exuberance the mansion instilled in him.

[haxxor]

Sam felt herself melting into real sleep, not naplike dozing, for the first time. Though she usually was awake at least five hours later than this, she felt like she'd pulled three all-nighters in a row, like she had that one time she'd completely neglected to read Wuthering Heights before the English final. Maybe this time she could actually sleep herself out, and though she'd probably wake up a few times to throw up again, she could probably get a few hours in...

Something bounced off the door and she groaned, pulling the covers over her head until not even the blonde nimbus of fuzz peeked out, burrowing deeply into the covers.

"Heya, anybody home?"

"No," she shouted from inside, her throat raw and her voice hoarse. "Go away, freak, I'm sleeping."

[haxxor]

For once, someone in the Mansion did something logical, and the kid wandered away, though she heard him thump all. The way. Down. The hall.

Slipping into a deep sleep for the first time in far too long, Sam fell quickly through the stages into a heavy R.E.M., like she usually did.

She dreamed in flashes; nothing was ever concrete. She was home - no - the wheat fields outside town. Zeke was standing in the field. Light reflected off the chaff and his hair; he looked like an angel, like Samael in all his black, like Michael with his smile that could even make her be nice a little.

The inside of a janitor's closet, a hidden D&D match after school. Keegan spoke Vietnamese and the janitors liked them. They cleaned up and Sam knew how to disinfect anything.

White hallways, striped with silver and red, the school colors; hollow resonances of the school song. Her sisters in cheerleaders' uniforms. The overpowering smell of cooking meat, milk sloshing into tumblers for the kids, wine for everyone else. Christmas laughter.

Finally, one took hold for more than a few seconds - the garden in the yard behind church. For some reason she was wearing her easter dress from when she was nine, but her hair and nails were black, her skin painted, her makeup staining the pastel-pink dress when she touched it.

There was a bow tied on the back.

Ew.

[selene]

Selene closed her eyes and fell easily into the dream state before REM, the one in which she could travel. Tonight, Selene had fallen asleep concentrating on the girl she'd met in the library that day, and when she opened her eyes...

She was standing in a garden, the back of a church nearby, she could tell by the windows and the large spire poking the sky in the distance. Selene wore a simple empire-waist soot black gown that dropped to the ground, obscuring even her feet(which were bare, and always were in dreams). A black satin ribbon ran around her ribcage and tied at the back. Selene's chesnut brown hair hung loose and straight around her unmarked face, looking at once younger and older than her years.

Selene looked around her, wondering if she would see Sam in this dream or if she were the sort to not see her self in her own dreams. Everyone was different; "Freud would have a field day," her sister was fond of saying. Selene had to be careful. Frighten too much, and people tended to wake up. Torment them carefully, and you could have fun all night.

Already the sky overhead was darkening, wispy-thin clouds crawling in from the horizon and gathering weight as Selene wandered around the corner. There Sam stood, in a pink dress, looking a little off-centered. Of good. She was already in the right mood for a nightmare.

Looking at Sam with only a hint of a smile, the garden erupted slowly with a line of gravestones rising from the earth in a straight, almost too precise line. Just as Sam began to recognize a few of the names on the tomb markers, hands rose from the ground, digging space for rotten heads to find themselves free. As the corpses lifted themselves from the earth, they began to laugh raspy, harsh laughs at Sam's pretty pink dress.

[haxxor]

She pulled at the dress, trying to figure out how to get the tulle from underneath it out without flashing the empty garden, when she heard thunder rumble in the distance. She smiled; she liked storms.

Her smile faltered.

Something was wrong with her dream. Something was wrong. Obviously there was the fact that she never stayed anywhere this long, never this coherent, but something else...

She whipped around wildly, looking for monsters, but found only another girl in the garden, with dark hair and a dark dress and skin as pale as her own, though tending more towards ivory than the thin blueness that tinged the undersides of Sam's arms and the shadows in her face. The sky thundered again, louder, closer. Too close together.

Stones pierced the earth of a sudden and Sam didn't jump, too confused - only looked down to find a line of slabs rising through soil that parted and crumbled almost too neatly, like they'd been cut out of the ground. Headstones.

Sam looked back up at the girl with a 'yeah, so what?' look on her face. The girl looked familiar, and she was the only other person Sam could see, so she was logically the person causing anything in the dream - if it was being caused. Sam wasn't a huge fan of cemetaries, sure, but it was a church after all and she'd been in churchyards and... oh...

Zombies.

Okay, she'd played way too many video games to be that scared of zombies. Even as they began to rise from the graves, she was more confused than frightened, though a tightness was escalating in her chest. Aunt Rachel, old men from church she'd known only by sight, people she'd known and hadn't known - and she stared at them only in disbelief, even when they began to laugh.

Close to her, the closest headstone of all, was small, and lifted behind the others - really, just a little plate, the kind that was more memorial than headstone. When there wasn't a body. When -

Oh God. What was that -

A tiny, half-formed creature squirmed out of the earth and Sam recognized it with the preternatural knowledge that comes with dreams, nightmares especially. Her mother's miscarriage, the little one that they'd never found the sex of, the one that was going to make her just another middle and not the youngest. A miscarriage at seven months.

She staggered backwards. Tree roots from inside the garden rose out of the ground like they did in every horror movie chase through a forest she'd ever seen and she tripped backwards, crawling the wrong way rather than try to get up as the baby stumbled toward her, too small and with a sac of placenta still surrounding half of it, all malformed features and stubby arms and legs not yet finished growing -

"Go away!" she shrieked at it. The zombies behind it laughed. It gurgled.

"What are you doing?" she yelled at the girl. Why couldn't she remember who she was? She knew everyone else - why not her?

[selene]

Staying silent and still- she found not only was her presence far more disturbing, but she was far less likely to be recognized when she remained an eerily quiet presence rather than interjecting her own dialogue into a dream- Selene surveyed the darkness that had cropped up out of her own subconscious. She rarely had control over exactly –how- her presence would manipulate someone’s dreams. Only that they would.

Aunt Rachel freed her swollen left leg from the ground with a jerking movement and joggled over with a strange mechanical twitch to the fetus. Scooping it up into her hands, flecks of dirt and grass sticking to its brilliantly coloured, moist surface, she brought it closer to Sam.

s the other figures grew closer to Sam, laughing with windy, dry guffaws that sounded far from the menacing ring one might expect from zombies but rather the sharply joyful giggling of taunting schoolchildren. Rachel looked almost hurt, a blistered, broken eye fixing on Sam as if she didn’t understand why Sam would be so offended by her own sibling.

The church aged slowly nearby, paint peeling away to the molded crevices of neglect and moisture.

“She’s just like you,” Rachel said, her voice coming through clear as day. Picking the mangled, half-developed corpse(which seemed to grow larger by the moment) up beneath the swollen, malformed arms, Rachel cradled it to her.

[haxxor]

Sam's aunt wrenched herself from the ground in Sam's peripheral vision, her main focus still on the baby. What were they going to name this one? Mercy? She thought that was right, even though Rachel herself had wanted it to be named after her, like Sam was named after her great-aunt Sally, but Mom and Rachel weren't on good terms, were they, not since that one Thanksgiving -

Sam rebooted her head, though the fetus was still closing, though slowly. She stood up.

Be calm. Be logical. It's a dream.

Her index finger twitched convulsively, looking for a thumbwheel that didn't exist. Confused again, she brought her hands up in front of her, staring at them. That was the point at which she realized she didn't have a gun. Or a rocket launcher, or a white phosphoros hand grenade, or any type of blade, to say nothing of potions, wands, crowns, shields, or enchantments.

The baby had been nothing. This was when she started to panic.

Her eyes returned to the main crowd of the dead, behind Mercy (it felt so odd to give it a name), giggling at the exact tone, pitch and cadence she remembered from fifteen years with her sisters. They weren't her sisters, but the high, cold, happy laughter was all she needed to fix a terror and deep, dark hatred of the walking dead greater than any real zombie could have inspired (though not by much).

Aunt Rachel picked up the baby and they all started moving closer. Sam moved backwards automatically, unconsciously adopting the classic female victim's mask of panicky terror. She could feel a scream building inside her chest, but had no voice to release it.

Aunt Rachel had always liked her. That was why Aunt Rachel and Mom fought so much. Aunt Rachel wouldn't hurt her. Aunt Rachel had been all softness and warmth and baby fat that lingered well into her forties. Behind her hurt, scabby eyes, the church lined with dust and age, the vines from the St. Francis garden crawling up the walls and dying.

“She’s just like you.”

The beautiful contralto, the one she and Joy both inherited from that side, not Mama's high, tight soprano. The prettiest voice, the easiest to warm up with love and kill with coldness.

"Go away!" Sam shrieked thinly, more a squeak than a shriek. That was why she couldn't do anything with the voice. No projection. Better than Joy, who got breathy like freaking Jessica Simpson.

Stop thinking!

With a thud to the back of her head, she realized she'd backed into the Japanese maple, her fingernails scrabbling at the bark as if she could rip a knife out of it. "Get - get back! No she's not! She's dead! You're dead!"

Holy Christ, was it swelling?

[eos]

A quick check had informed Eos that her sister was not in her own dreams that evening. She wasn't surprised, it had seemed in the library that Selene had plans, and it was almost with a sense of resignation that she cast her power about to follow after.

It was always harder when she didn't know the person for herself, but her sister's essence was impossible to mistake, and the effect that she had on people's dreams was just as distinctive. She slipped into the dream after her sister, appearing on the opposite side of the garden in a pure white gown that was slightly shorter - hanging only to her ankles to show bare feet - but otherwise the same style as Selene's. It was funny how things like that tended to work out.

"Get - get back! No she's not! She's dead! You're dead!"

Oh dear. Selene had obviously been here longer than Eos had thought.

Her eyes closed for just a moment, eyelids fluttering, and when she opened them again the corpses were gone. Every time she breathed out, the scene seemed to grow lighter, and there was even a butterfly flitting about the garden and fluttering toward the girl - it must be Sam - when Eos gazed over at her sister.

"You shouldn't do this."

[haxxor]

Sam dreamed about angels a lot. It was hard to avoid when you got it pumped into your brain for two hours every Sunday. Usually, though, they were traditional view - raiment white as snow, with faces like lightning and hands and feet that shone like bronze, all very Matthew 28. But something like a cross between the (wildly inaccurate) cherubs painted all over the nursery at the church in Ohio and the terrible masters of Colossians was emerging out of the woodwork of the dream itself: a girl, her age or thereabouts, looking just like Selene, but in white. Her feet touched the ground, too. The tiny portion of her mind not occupied with panicking tried to figure out whether that was an affirmation or denial of her being an angel, what with angels' feet being too pure to touch the base earth, or whether it was considered right for her to bare her feet to holy ground, which the church courtyard surely was.

The sun broke back through the clouds and the zombies and gravestones disappeared to regions unknown, but Sam still pressed back into the tree for security, her dress ripped a little at the back and stained from crawling through mud and zombie funk. One of her hands slipped into the back of her own hair, pulling and twisting, a convulsive nervous tic earned many moons ago in English classes she'd then still been afraid of failing.

The angel-girl gazed over at her sister - they must be sisters, or twins, they were so like, and so unlike. Sam knew about that kind of twinship. They looked like they were talking in each other's heads, that weird telepath stare she was already used to. Sam realized, abruptly, that this wasn't just in her head - it wasn't her dream.

This was Selene in her dream, messing with her head just because she could.

A thin veil of hatred fell over the sudden mortification at having been seen terrified and helpless, but both steeled her nerves and washed away the jittery part of the fear that was left, leaving her able to stand back up under her own power. She was still wearing a stupid dress, and, upon further inspection, saddle shoes. But she still had her dignity.

"Get out of my head," she said in the most dangerous voice she could muster. It was shaky, with its eternal lack of projection. But in a dream, did things like that matter?

God, she was really starting to hate telepaths.

[selene]

Selene shot her sister an acidic look. "She won't remember most of it in the morning," she said in Eos' mind. "We won't be anything but figures, black and white."


Stepping forward, she looked around with a distinctly unhappy expression, the lines of her dream-mouth drawing downward at an unnatural angle. Firelight flickered from the interior of the church, shining through the stained glass brightly.

"I'll burn it all down, Eos, if you don't leave me alone. She deserves this. You weren't there, you didn't hear."

Shifting her eyes towards Sam, she nodded once and boils sprang up from every bare patch of skin available, oozing pus, pulsing like little creatures all their own.

"I hate it when you act like you're the boss."

[eos]

"It's going to be alright." Eos did her best to reassure the girl, ignoring her sister's threat. Of course, she couldn't ignore what Selene had just done, and her brow furrowed just slightly before she brought one hand up to her mouth and blew, a dramatic gesture directed toward this Sam person that changed her back to normal (clothes and all) with the slightest scent of vanilla and a few little sparkles that might have been mistaken for glitter.

It was just another contrast with her sister. Selene did things with just a thought, maybe a small gesture, Eos had always given some sign of what she was doing. Maybe that was an attempt at being comforting. Maybe it was just the way she worked.

"I can stay here as long as you, can fix everything you break." They'd always been matched in power, so their squabbles were never easily resolved. "I just don't want us to start this again." Her face fell a little. Things had been going so well. They weren't even the creepy twins who never talked here. They were just the twins. But Selene was going to ruin it all and turn them into the creepy twins who messed with your dreams.

"I don't want..." She shook her head, looking up at the church sadly. The flickering light of the flames inside faltered, but didn't disappear completely.

[haxxor]

Sam smelled smoke - acrid. Burning paint, or adhesive, in addition to wood and brick. The church was on fire.

It's fine. It's fine. None of this is happening.

She curled her hands into tiny fists and glowering at Selene.

They said something to each other again, that weird stare, and suddenly Sam cried out in pain, her skin suddenly raw on the inside, everywhere anything touched or rubbed - her dress's sash burning at her waist, the barely-there pressure of a pearl necklace white-hot at her throat. She was covered in something white, something partially liquid - no... she was white and liquid. It was her skin.

It's not happening, it's not happening, it's not happening, it's not -

"I hate it when you act like you're the boss."

"I hate it," she screamed, "when you're a psychotic bitch for no reason! Get out of my head!"

Dream-powers didn't make her sick at all. In fact, the dream suck-in of the damaged flesh didn't make her want to barf it up again. It made her feel great.

That might have been, she noticed belatedly, because it wasn't her changing her skin back - it was actually the alter-Selene, the angel, blowing glitter and her mother's perfume at her, turning her back into the real Sam. Even her dress was gone, replaced by skinny black jeans, her favorite purple faux-corseted top, her tough (if worn) motorcycle boots, the purposeless leather bracer around her left wrist. Still. She wasn't covered in boils anymore, and though the church still burned, she could feel sparks popping around her head. Something the girl had done had given her dream-control of her powers again, or at least reminded her she had them.

The sparks crescendoed into a heavy glow and intense heat, a danger sign to anyone who knew Sam - but Selene didn't know Sam at all. If she had known anything about her, a lot of the dream might have been avoided, but what could you do?

"I can stay here as long as you, can fix everything you break. I just don't want us to start this again."

She could hear them. The angel-girl had fixed a whole lot. Now they were in her head and she was sort of in theirs. It wasn't fair, but it was fairer.

"I don't want..."

It's not her fault. It's Selene's. Save it for where it belongs.

With an effort, Sam pulled some of the sparks in, lessened the heat that surrounded her. "Please," she said, appealing to the girl in white rather than to her sister, who'd probably just laugh and fill the room with giant spiders. (God, Sam really hoped they weren't all the way telepathic.) "Just get out. I can only hold it in so far."

There was still steel in her voice - as much as she could get in, anyway - and it was still a threat. But hopefully it was one they'd heed. She didn't want to fry her own dreams (would that mean she'd fry herself?), but she was starting to think she might not have an absolute choice.

[selene]

Selene looked at her sister, a half-hurt, betrayed expression on her face. Most of all, she seemed disappointed.

She didn't say anything, knowing she'd lost this one. Served her right for telling her sister where she was going that night. And in these sort of face-offs, neither of them could win. Though Selene always seemed to get the last say.

While Eos was as accustomed to the dream world as Selene, Eos didn't live in a nightmare when she closed her eyes. Selene banked on that.

One arm snaking out, growing thinner into a rope, Selene wrapped it around her neck and it quickly became a noose. The rope grew up into the sky until it disappeared, then yanked Selene off her feet. Selene choked, wriggling on the noose as her eyes bulged. Blood and spit fell from her lips, her neck hanging at an unnatural, quickly purpling angle as her neck had broken. The smell of urine drifted across the vanilla on the air, fluid dripping from Selene's bare feet onto the ground.

Within a matter of seconds, her body was decaying. Blood settled into her extremities, she turned ashen, then greenish, the magenta areas rotten to blackness, her eyes shrivelled in her head, putrid smelling rot flowed from beneath her dress, staining the black satin a shiny gray-red. Then she began to dry, head shifting in the noose until it held her up by only her chin, neckbones showing through the thinning skin.

As the clouds overhead lifted and the fires within the church went out, Selene's corpse withered and began to disintegrate before their eyes, falling to chunks that broken into powder on the ground. Soon all that was left was the ghastly flesh-noose, which was pulled up into the sky like a string on the end of a helium balloon.

[eos]

OK, ew. She hated it when Selene did things like that.

They couldn't be hurt in their dreams. At least, not physically. But it still hurt her emotionally to watch her sister do something like that, to have to watch her die and fade away, and by the time the other twin was finally gone from Sam's dream, Eos' eyes shone with tears.

"I'm sorry." The girl turned back to Sam, and when she spoke her lips actually moved. It was the only time she ever did it, in dreams without her sister there. It made people more comfortable... But for some reason, it felt like a betrayal of everything that they were.

Even though defending the girl that she didn't know at all was probably more of a betrayal in Selene's eyes.

She closed her eyes, every breath she took filling Eos with light that creeped up gradually, like the sun slipping over the horizon at dawn.

"Sweet dreams." It escaped her when she opened her mouth, so bright that it seemed as though the sun was inside her trying to shine its way out, and when she opened her eyes once more they too glowed. Eos was only there for a fraction of a second before her entire body burst into a cascade of golden sparks, the dream returning to normal as her light drifted away on the wind.

Sweet dreams. The thought echoed in her mind as she slipped back into her own body and drifted off to sleep.

[Exit Eos]

[haxxor]

Sam blinked, then sat down heavily on the stone bench under the Japanese maple tree in the courtyard, curling her legs into her chest and holding them there. She rested her chin on her knees, thoughtfully.

Well, that was weird.

I need to remember this dream, Sam told herself of a sudden; I need to remember it, I need to tell someone about Selene. I need to make sure it doesn't happen again. I need to tell -

I BUY HER ALL THE RIGHT CLOTHES AND PRETTY JEWELS TO WEAR!
MY FRIENDS SAY SHE'S A DUMB BLONDE, BUT THEY DON'T KNOW SHE DYES HER HAIR

...why was Thomas Dolby playing in her dream.

Better question, why was the landscape vibrating.

SHE THINKS THE FIGHTING IN CENTRAL AMERICA'S EASILY SOLVED
BUT WHAT TO WEAR TO BEL AIR PREMIERES IS A PROBLEM SHE COULD NEVER RESOLVE

It was getting louder and louder. Suddenly, Sam realized her church wasn't vibrating, it was her -

'cause she's an AIRHEAD, STUNGUN AND MACE
COMMANDEERED PLATES SAY 'LOST IN SPACE'
and she's an AIRHEAD, THOUSANDS IN TRUST, CUSP AQUARIUS
GET SERIOUS!

- cell phone. God, where was it. She scrabbled blindly down the side of the bed for the charger, but no, she wasn't at home, it was on the other side of the room... she stumbled out of bed, walking stiffly the way she always did when she first woke up, then hit the ground harder than strictly necessary as she knelt next to the outlet, unplugging the phone. What time was it?

and she's an AIRHEAD
TINTED CONTACTS DON'T CHANGE THE FACT THAT BLACK IS BLACK

Midnight-thirty, and Joy's ringtone - all her other sisters had "Another Dumb Blonde," her mom had "Don't Tell Mama" and her dad had "The Only Gay Eskimo," and all her real friends had... well, good songs. But Joy's ring. It was a crazy dream call again. Sam briefly entertained the thought of letting it go to voicemail, but knew her sister would just call back.

and she's an AIRHEAD
and while I'm impressed with the length of those legs...

"She's not an intellectual giant," she sang quietly as she picked up. "Hi, J - what? No, I sing it every time because it's always true. Because it's my ringtone, dumbass. Joy, I - Joy - listen, you need to stop calling me with your crazy dreams, okay? Because you know when you have crazy dreams? The time of day when I should be having my own crazy dreams. Nighttime. Joy - Joy - I'm hanging up. I'm hanging up. Keep talking, I'm hanging up."

She didn't hang up, of course. Sam sat on the line until her sister was done babbling, like she always did. Apparently a snake had infiltrated their family and was slowly eating them alive, person by person, but Sam had been protecting it because she thought it was misunderstood, and when it was down to just Sam and Joy, Joy had realized the only way it could be defeated was to feed it fire extinguisher fluid...

"Ha," she said dryly, once her sister was done. "You're funny. Go back to sleep."

She did hang up the phone at that point, then pulled the fully-charged little battery off the wall and set it on her nightstand before crawling back into bed. She could feel her stomach churning, but it wasn't as bad anymore. She was past the barfing and onto simple nausea, but she was tired enough she could sleep back through it. She'd take a Midol in the morning, that should be enough to cover it.

Slowly, she slipped back into sleep, her customary flashes of dream-picture slowly and methodically erasing any details about the pair earlier in the night, until they were nothing more than the church on fire, two faces lit by sunshine, and the overhanging sensation of horror and things not quite right.