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A/N: Well, here goes nothing. Revised version of this chapter. Happy reading!
Center for Distressed Youth
Chapter I
Kari Silvers was sitting on a coach bus as it bounced down a country road. The TVs on this bus were shot, and she didn’t have a book. Nothing to do but look out the window.
The born-and-bred city girl glanced bemusedly at the meadow flashing past her window. Oh look. Cows. But it was hard to find anything to take her mind off this trip.
Because Kari Silvers was going to the nuthouse.
No, that wasn’t right. She was going to an orphanage. But it might as well be a nuthouse. This orphanage was one was the worst around, the one for the kids who’d struck out on a few foster families, or the ones that looked too nasty for any family to be able to put up with.
Her parents had died only a few years ago, and the night was burned into her memory: they had all been in their car, the battered blue family Ford, coming home from a trip. The highway had few other cars on it, and was lit eerily by the pale streetlights. The fog had come in, thick and white, glowing from the headlights. After that, Kari had dozed off in the backseat. The next thing she remembered, she had been screaming as she awoke in the grips of a nightmare. Her mother and father had both turned anxiously towards her…
And then another, very real nightmare began. Somehow, a huge truck heading the other way, had flipped over and tumbled across the divider to land in our lane. Mom screamed, Dad turned, his hands going to the wheel, his feet to the brake. But it was no good. There was nowhere to go, they were too close to the truck already. And there was no time to react; the car slammed into the truck, there was a huge explosion—something in the truck had probably been ignited, a lawyer told her later—and Kari blacked out. The last thing she had seen had been her parents’ bodies, slumped over in death. Her father’s big hand tightly gripped her mother’s.
So, she had gone to an orphanage. Okay place, the people there seemed to care about the kids. Almost immediately, she was shipped off to a foster home. But from there, everything went downhill—further.
The family had seemed nice. It was just so hard to endure their pity, the way they whispered behind her back about the “poor little orphan,” the way they bent over backwards to make things perfect for her. And she endured it. But it was hard.
What made it even worse is that she had… well, cracked. Started to go nuts.
But maybe I am crazy, she thought anxiously. It was the kind of thought sparked by scaring a family—several families—so badly that they dumped you back in an orphanage.
Kari sometimes had visions. Or at least, they seemed like visions. More likely, though, that they were hallucinations.
She remembered her first one vividly: it was at her first foster home. She had been sitting on her bed when she had seen, right in front of her, a strange group of people, within a year or so of her own age, two guys and two girls. They looked at her and all smiled encouragingly, and the boy in the front started to say something, but then the phone rang and she was jolted back to reality; she blinked, and the group of people had vanished.
And she started seeing things. Car crashes, strange people, her friends (the few she had been able to make, or those she remembered from before her life had turned upside-down, fires, her foster family. It would play out in front of her eyes, as clearly as if she was standing right there. And she’d made the mistake of telling her foster parents about it. They’d all freaked, thrown her out. And now she was… here.
She’d keep her mouth shut from now on. Or else they’d think she was crazy, and put her in a mental hospital or something. Maybe she was crazy, but she wouldn’t tell.
Kari glanced around her. There weren’t many other people on the bus: a boy in the front stared blankly at the windshield. A girl sat across from Kari, muttering to herself. A boy directly in front of her pounded his fists on his seat. Oy. Nothing to see here. Nothing to distract her from the reality that she was probably crazy. If it’s any consolation, she thought glumly, the people on this bus are probably weirder than me. With that not-so-comforting thought, and the nagging doubt of her own sanity, she leaned back against her seat and stared at the ceiling.
She blinked, and she was looking at the bus… no, wait, it was on its side. The door—now on the top—opened, and the driver emerged, swearing…
Kari looked up; her eyes locked with those of the boy in front of her, who had twisted around in his seat and was staring openly at her, his expression a combination of fear, bewilderment, awe, and confusion.
His eyes were amazing. They were brown, but unlike any other ‘brown’ she had seen. Kari felt as if she could dive into them. They were flecked with gold, and there were uncharted depths within them. And it felt like they were pulling her in…
Oh crap, Kari, you’re supposed to be sane she reminded herself angrily. Snap out of it! She came to her senses, realizing that she had been staring avidly at a complete stranger, a stranger moreover who had done something to be kicked out of at least one foster home. She shot him a ‘don’t even think about it’ look.
A sudden pain lanced through her head and she winced. The boy turned around in his seat again, and Kari’s head cleared, although it was still throbbing slightly. I’ll have to get an aspirin, she thought, feeling a bit more normal as the bus trundled on. She was totally unprepared, however, when the bus suddenly gave a shudder and, with a bang and a crunching sound, tipped over.
Her eyes were amazing.
Kai had never seen anything like that light, sparkling shade of gray. He didn’t know her at all, true, but she still fascinated him. He shook his head to try and clear it as he faced forward again, but it was no use. Her face had been burned into his memory, danced in front of his eyes: the round nose, the full lips, the strong chin, the wavy blonde-brown hair…
He was on this bus because people thought he was crazy. He might be, he wasn’t really sure. It wasn’t really his choice. He profoundly hoped he wasn’t, but oh well.
The sooner he got out of wherever he was going to, the better.
And then the bus tipped over.
It had been hard, getting the bus back upright. Most of the time, everyone was standing outside in the hot sun, while the mystified bus driver tried to figure out why his bus had screwed up like it had. An hour or so later, totally beat, Kari entered the surgically white-painted brick building – one of a complex that the bus driver had marched her and her busmates toward. She felt drained, worn out by the floods of emotion and the inner battles that had been raging through her all day, and too tired to really notice what was going on around her. She had let her own thoughts absorb her once she had seen the rusty, creaky sign that read, "Center for Distressed Youth".
A chunk of rock, falling right at her feet and exploding into fragments that showered in every direction got her attention, though; she twisted away from it as more debris pelted down from the ceiling. In fact, the very walls of the building seemed to be closing in, and the floor seemed to be giving way beneath her feet. She screamed, and tried to run away...
“Back in line!” a gruff voice snarled at her; the bus driver was glaring at her. She gulped and rejoined the solemn column of new arrivals making their way across a white tile floor to a white desk and the white-clad woman behind it, dull gray hair pulled up in a bun.
Kari’s footsteps echoed loudly in that bare, silent room. There was no sign at all of the bits of rock that had shattered on the floor, or of the building buckling and collapsing. God, another one, she thought with dread and fear. I’m seeing things. I’m really crazy. And now I’m in… in a “Center for Distressed Youth…” Her mind drifted back to the cold iron gates that they had passed through to enter the complex. There was no going back now, no escaping. She was stuck here, with people who would no doubt treat her like a time bomb that was ready to explode and do whatever had scared off her foster families to them, and she was completely, utterly, hallucinating-crazy. She choked back a sob.
“Mathews,” called a bored voice, and Kari’s head jerked up as the guy with the killer eyes that has given her the headache on the bus walked up to the woman behind the desk. He looked remarkable calm, although his hands were shaking. He hid them in his pockets as the woman read off a sheet of paper, “Kai Mathews, room 411. Up the stairs three flights, to the left,” she told him, and he walked off.
Kari’s stomach gave a jolt. While she had zoned out, they had started assigning rooms. If she had missed hers…
“Silvers.” She allowed herself as much of a sigh of relief as she could as she stepped up to the desk, throat dry, but maybe getting a room assignment would be worse than not getting one. She could only hope…
“Kari Silvers, room 414,” droned the woman. “Up the stairs three flights, to the right.”
Kari trudged over to the door marked Stairway II and climbed, her legs pumping automatically as she tried to empty her mind and not think about her bleak, foreboding future. But she couldn’t help it. She was certifiably nuts, and she was alone in this bizarre place, without a friend…
Head buzzing, exhausted and drained, she left the stairs at the fourth floor, turned right as she had been instructed. Found the door with a tarnished bronze plaque above it that said “414.” With a shaking hand, she pushed the door open.
