CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Caden's eyes lock onto mine the minute I step back onto the lawn with Sarah. I do my best to send a message with my eyes, not daring to speak out loud or even mime a sentence. He nods, but I can't tell if he understands; I just have to trust that he does.

Looking away, I continue with Sarah across the Lawn towards the main school gate. No one pays us any mind, but that doesn't stop my heart from racing, as if every eye is turned towards us. And they may as well be, because I can still feel the cold blue-eyed gaze of the young man, waiting to kill me. What is he waiting for? The answer to that question sends shivers down my spine and I store the question in the deep recesses of my mind for a time when I can afford to think about the subject.

We reach the main school gate soon enough, and without a glance at the front office, I step out onto the footpath, walking hurriedly with Sarah by my side until we've reached the next block. We stop under a tree, its shade shifting from side to side in the gentle wind. If not for the sound of rustling leaves and the way my hair flutters at my shoulders, I wouldn't be able to tell it was windy. The air touches my arms, but I don't feel it, and it's for that reason, I think, that maybe I'm feeling the cold more than anyone else. But not the normal cold; the cold that numbs your body until you can't feel anything – that's so chilling that it tricks you into thinking you're hot.

"You cold?" I ask Sarah. It's a test and when our eyes meet, I can tell that she knows it.

"No. And you're not either."

I nod slightly and tear my gaze away from her face, focusing on the path we just walked down. A minutes passes before Caden's tall figure emerges from the school gates up ahead and comes towards us.

"Who's that?" I hear Sarah ask as he nears.

"A friend," I say, and then frown. Is he a friend? I've known him for about a week and I've become closer with him than anyone else since I was young. But still, I get the feeling that I don't really know him at all and that when I look at him, I'm really just looking at projection he's put up so that the real Caden can be elsewhere, doing something else. When I think about it, I barely know anything about him at all.

 He stops in front of us. "What's going on?" He directs his question to me, but looks at Sarah, curious.

"Um, this is Sarah."

I gage his reaction, noticing the slight widening of his eyes before they return almost instantly back to their normal width. If I hadn't been looking so closely, I probably wouldn't have noticed.

"Sarah, this is Caden," I say and she offers a small smile in way of greeting. I sigh. "He knows about everything."

I watch as her expression visibly changes from timid to confident as she absorbs my words. "So you know that Melissa and I were swapped," she says, a scrutiny-filled gaze trained on Caden, her hands moving from her sides to her hips as she shifts her weight onto her left leg.

Despite the fact that she already admitted to not feeling the cold, I'm surprised that she knows we've been swapped – surprised that she knows the term and is so comfortable with saying it out loud.

"Yeah," Caden answers, and I launch into a question the second he closes his mouth.

"How much do you know about all this?" I ask Sarah and she diverts her attention to me.

"A fair bit. My mother – your mother," she corrects herself, "knows a lot about this sort of thing.

At the mention of my real mother, something inside of me freezes, scared by the potential knowledge that could be mine if I just asked.

"My mother..." I mumble, looking down. I snap my head up. "Is she nice?"

Sarah frowns and tilts her head slightly to one side, as if finding my question unusual. "I suppose."

I nod, then shake myself out of my half-frozen state, pushing all thoughts of my mother away. "We should probably get going." I turn away from them both and start walking down the footpath, away from the school.

"Um, where are we going?" Caden asks from somewhere behind me, and I turn to see that neither has moved.

"Well, I was thinking we'd walk to Rand's place – see if he knows of something we can do to fix this situation."

"This situation?"

"You know what I mean." I don't bother explaining myself because it's obvious that I'm talking about Sarah and I, about my 'disease', about being trapped in the wrong body.

"Who's Rand?" Sarah asks.

"A friend of my father and your mother – your fake mother." Caden says the last bit softly and I can imagine he doesn't want to cause offense.

Sarah just nods and I turn away, trusting them to follow me. Their footsteps sound behind me almost immediately and it's not long before Sarah sidles up to me. "Do you burn people when you touch them?" she asks softly, so that Caden won't be able to hear.

I respond quietly. "Yeah."

"But not you – I don't burn you and you don't burn me."

I swallow her sentence, mulling it over in my brain. The inevitable question of Why? pops up and I allow myself a moment to consider it and what it might mean.  But of course, my mind goes blank the second I try to find the answer.

"Do you think maybe it's just because we both share the same disease?" she asks and I shrug,

"I dunno. Maybe."

It's strange how comfortable talking with Sarah is. How, even after all this time, our conversations never feel awkward or forced. When I'm talking with her, I never feel the need to fill the silences, or hide my secrets – It's the exact opposite. I feel like telling her everything, like walking in a companionable silence with our friendship filling the gaps between our words. Being with Sarah is easy.

The walk to Rand's place is slow going. The distance from school to his house is larger than it is from my place, and I tire quickly, working up a sweat. We're three quarters of the way there when Caden – who took the lead when I couldn't remember the way – stops abruptly.

"What is it?" Sarah asks.

"Nothing," he says. "I just thought I saw..."

"Caden?" I ask. I walk up to him until we're standing side by side and follow his gaze. At first I don't see anything, but soon enough, I spot the dark figure standing at the end of the block, watching us, waiting for us.

Fear has my body freezing up and my heart pumping twice the necessary amount of blood. But my brain is still working and I force myself into action.

"Let's cross the road," I say, my voice surprisingly calm. "We'll take a different route."

No one replies, but they follow when I start to cross the street, strangely void of all cars. The figure doesn't move and as we turn onto another street and he disappears from view entirely, I find putting one foot in front of the other slightly easier.

"Who was that?" Sarah asks nervously after we've moved a fair distance away.

"Probably just some random," I say. But something tells me I know exactly who it is and that we'll be seeing him again – soon.

-:-:-:-:-

Rand's not nearly as surprised as I expected him to be when he opens the door and sees the three of us on his doorstep, looking slightly frightened.

With a steaming coffee in hand, he ushers us in without a word, closing and locking the door behind us. Like the first time I came to his place, I follow him down the short hallway until reaching the living room and take a seat on one of the old couches.

Sarah sits tentatively down next to me, Caden and Rand taking seats on the opposite couch.

"How are you, Sarah?" Rand asks, kicking off the conversation with a surprising first sentence.

"Um, good?" she replies nervously. "Sorry, do I know you?"

"Not yet. But I know you, and your, uh, mother." He moves on. "So why are the three of you out of school so early?"

"Sarah showed up and I suppose I thought that maybe we should leave school and see you, you know, in case there was anything you wanted to, like, I don't know..." I trail off, giving up on my lame attempt at explaining.

"I wanted to see if there was anything I could do to help swap us back," Sarah supplies helpfully.

Rand sighs, placing his coffee mug on the table and leaning back. "Not at the moment. We're nowhere near working out how to swap anyone back. The only people with that information are doing their damn hardest to do the opposite and ensure that you two don't swap back."

"So then we should be focusing on finding these people and working out who they are," Caden says.

My vision of Patrick talking to the man who was the cause of my parent's car crash comes bubbling up to the forefront of my mind. Already I know more about this nameless group than anyone in this room and I'm not sharing it. Why haven't I told anyone yet? What's stopping me?

I open my mouth with the intension of telling them everything but come up with no words, no voice. It's as if I'm protecting Patrick – no, protecting Rand and Caden from the truth. And it's more than that too: I'm scared – scared that they won't believe me, that I'll ruin a friendship. What if, just this once, my vision was wrong?

I shake off the doubt and fear. I can't just sit about, with-holding information, when I could very well save both mine and Sarah's life with just a few words.

I open my mouth. "Patrick is working for the people who swapped me and Sarah."

Silence. Dead, ugly silence. I'm drowning in the space between words, consuming the nothingness that lingers after speaking – the nothingness that presents you with all the possibilities, hanging in the air like apples hanging off a high tree, and inviting you to pick the one you like even though you'll never be able to reach.

I focus on their faces: Sarah appearing bored, picking at the soft pink nail-polish on her fingers; Caden, staring off into the distance, frowning; Rand breathing deeply, his eyes closed as if he could block out what I've just said by not looking at me.

The silences bites at me, tears me apart piece by piece as I wait for a reply, a response, something. It's been a minute, an hour, a day. I'm floating through a timeless void where things can both be single seconds and lifetimes – a place where waiting for things to happen and realising they're over is one and the same.

Finally, a voice rises from the deafening nothingness and I find I'm able to breathe. "That's not possible."

It's Caden, his voice shaky, disbelieving. Already, he's in denial.

"I saw it in my vision," I say, treading carefully through a dark house of emotions and words, not wanting to step on the sleeping dog's tail and set off a chain reaction that leads to bright light and noise and inevitable arguing.

Caden shakes his head; Rand is still.

"No, he wouldn't do that. Not to you," Caden says.

I focus on my breathing, steadying my frustration and anger. "So you think my vision was wrong?"

"No, but maybe it was someone else who looked like him."

"And sounded like him," I say.

Caden looks defeated. Rand's eyes are still shut. Sarah is admiring a painting on the wall.

"Look, I've seen him before: in dreams; in memories. I'm not just saying this based off my vision."

No response.

"You have to believe me. This is the one lead we have on these people – maybe the one thing that could help me and Sarah swap back."

Sarah's eyes lock onto my face at the mention of her name, like a child suddenly interested in an adult's conversation now that it's about them.

Caden sighs and looks to his right. "Rand?"

Rand sucks in one last deep breath before opening his eyes. "You can tell her," is all he says, his eyes on mine, and I can immediately feel the frown appearing on my forehead.

I look to Caden, my eyes saying what my mouth cannot: tell me what?

Again, Caden sighs. "The reason it's hard to believe he would do something like that, especially to you, is because he's..."

"Because he's...?" I prompt.

"Because he's your uncle," Caden says, letting his words out onto the air like I did when accusing Patrick of working for the people who swapped me.

And just like that, my life gets a whole lot shittier.