“How long do you think I should wait for you, Eileen?”
my best friend’s angry voice came in through the handset. “Do not tell me
you're still sleeping! I've been stuck in this godforsaken cafe for an hour
already! Do you think that I have nothing better to do at seven o'clock on
Sunday?”

“Good morning to you too,” I said in a sleepy voice,
answering all her questions at once. However, in less than five seconds, my
legs carried me to the bathroom, smashing on their way a heavy stack of books
on the history of ancient Greece, which I didn’t have the time to pack
yesterday. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes, I promise!” I snapped.

How could I have forgotten about the meeting with
Amanda? It was
me
who made her wake up so early on our last, as it
seemed, day off in this life. I say
the last
because exactly in three
days we are leaving our home-town Norfield, in south-west Britain, for the
University of Sheffield - one of the best universities in the United Kingdom.

Two months ago my best friend Amanda Jane Caitlyn Fairey
and I graduated from high school; after long and painful hours of writing
essays and filling out application forms, we are finally going to Sheffield. By
the way, Amanda couldn’t stand being called by her full name, it sounded too
pompous. We’ve been as thick as thieves since childhood. We both wanted to go
to a prestigious university, get a good education, find a prince, fall in love
and live happily ever after just like in fairy tales.

Speaking of the prince, that reminds me of something…

For several nights I have had the same dream. I'm
standing on the shore of a huge lake and it seems to be so pure that the tiny
grains of sand on its bottom can be seen through the crystal clear water. I
want to touch the crystal surface, so I sit down and put my hand on it,
watching a wonderful golden picture of complicated lace lines appear in front
of me. It seems to be floating across the boundless lake, further and further
away from my hand. I’m looking at it, mesmerized, until I notice another hand
next to mine, a stranger’s hand. This hand touches the water surface together
with my own and begins to draw its own picture on top of mine, and though at
first it seems as if drawing a different from my own, I soon notice that the
picture is identical to mine. And the lines of my pattern that have already
found their reflection in the stranger’s picture begin to shine and sparkle
with thousands of colors, creating an illusion of endless sunlight and warmth.
But when I look up in the direction of the person standing next to me, I wake
up with my heart beating wild and an odd tingling on my right shoulder. I get
up, walk over to the mirror, trying to see what could be wrong with my
shoulder, but can’t see anything unusual.

I have been having this dream for seven nights now.
Hardly anyone would think that such things could be a mere coincidence, and
neither would I. That's why I decided to tell Amanda everything.

“We have to do something about it Eileen! Immediately!
I am sure, it's a sign. But the sign of what, I don’t know,” she said
thoughtfully.

“Thank you, darling, for being helpful,” I muttered.

“Hey! I would ask you to spare me your
sarcasm! By the way, this is my great-great-great, well, it doesn’t matter, my
grandmother
was a clairvoyant. So I know that such things do not just happen,” she said
irritably.

“How long ago have you inherited this uh,
the gift
of clairvoyance from your grandmother? I didn’t even know that you are a
hereditary witch,” I chuckled.

“No. I'm not a witch,” Amanda said aggrievedly, pursing
her lips. “I just want to say that my intuition has never failed, if you
remember.”

Well, about the intuition she was definitely right.
Amanda has always surprised me with a strange ability to guess the questions
that she got correct on the tests, which is why she spent much less time to
prepare for them, remembering only the answers to certain questions. She could
as easily guess the weather for the next weekend, when we were planning another
sally into
a Big City
. We called so our trips to London, as compared to
Norfield it seemed to be a whole separate country, where you could always go on
tour.

“So,
Miss Intuition
, what should I do with all
these dreams and signs?” I asked. “If this craziness goes on, and I have even
one more sleepless night, you will have to go to Sheffield without me, as not
even you will be able to pull me out of bed,” I added gloomily.

“No way!” Amanda cried. “Of course, I can’t allow this
to happen, I’ll think something up,” she said optimistically.

And she really did…

That's why now, running around the house and knocking
down everything on my way, I tried to keep my promise of twenty minutes, and
meet my friend at the named place. Nothing better than a haunting with a
fortune-teller Amanda, unfortunately, couldn’t come up with. But in the absence
of other ideas for ridding myself of insomnia, I agreed.

The area where we had a meeting with the fortune-teller
wasn’t one of the best places in our town. Except, perhaps, for the only cafe,
where Amanda and I agreed to meet. Although the cafe itself, according to the
malicious tirade, which my friend shouted out in the morning, also couldn’t
have fallen into a category of the most attractive places of the district.

So here I am, with my hair still wet after the shower
and a terribly annoying pain in my leg after running into the stack of books,
sitting in my maroon Mercedes heading for
the godforsaken cafe
on the
outskirts of Norfield.

As I had been expecting, my prudent and devastatingly
coward friend was not waiting for me in a cafe at all, she was in her brand new
sky-blue BMW. Only Amanda would have chosen that color for a car. She locked
all the doors and windows, and eagerly peered into the mirror, waiting for me.
I even smiled at how ridiculous and out of place her polished car looked among
the endless piles of rubbish in front of the unfortunate cafe. I dropped off my
car, went to Amanda’s BMW and knocked on the passenger window, raising my
eyebrows questioningly.

Other books

Lace & Lassos by Cheyenne McCray

A Pizza to Die For by Chris Cavender

The Castle of Llyr by Lloyd Alexander

Charlotte by Keane, Stuart

Damaged: An Erotic Romance Story by Mackenzie, Laurie

A Graveyard for Lunatics by Ray Bradbury

The 14th Colony: A Novel by Steve Berry

Flood by Andrew Vachss

Better Than Good by Lane Hayes

Made to Love by DL Kopp