She Has A Broken Thing Where Her Heart Should Be - J.D. Barker Page 0,138

the edge of her bed, her head in her hands. She had brushed her hair and put on a pair of running shorts.

Without looking up, she said, “What happened the other night…I was really drunk, I mean, really drunk. I don’t normally just invite random guys back up to my room like that. That’s not me. I don’t want you to think I’m like that.”

“I didn’t, I mean I don’t. It’s okay, really.”

She reached out a hand and took one of the coffees. “Hand me the sugar? It’s behind you.”

The dorm room wasn’t very large, only about ten feet square. Two single beds lined the walls on either side, a small dresser near the door, and another folding table with a makeshift kitchen under a window covered with a towel to help keep the light out.

I set everything down on the table beside the microwave, and a bowl containing about a thousand packets of ketchup, mustard, and mayonnaise pilfered from area fast-food restaurants. Sugar was in a large Tupperware container. I handed it to her. Kaylie drank about a third of the black coffee, then filled the cup back up with sugar, stirred it with her finger, and drank again. “The coffee from the machine is tar-water, but I think the school pipes in extra caffeine. They know what momma needs. I can feel the lights in the factory starting to come on.”

There was a white down ski parka bunched up in the corner of the room. I nodded at it. “Yours?”

“My roommate’s.”

“Where is she?”

“Dunno. She is into random guys. Why am I hypnotizing you?”

Her eyes had come to life. She watched me now. “And why do you smell like a sewer pipe? You look like you crawled here through the mud. This is no way to impress a lady.”

I should have showered first, but I hadn’t had time. I said the first thing that popped into my head. “Frat stuff, hazing. I’m not allowed to talk about it.”

“Which one?”

“Does it matter?”

“Naw, not really. They’re all the same. Are those for me, too?”

I handed her one of the Kit Kat bars and ate the second, the first thing I’d eaten since yesterday. We split the Snickers.

“You still haven’t told me why I’m hypnotizing you.”

I spent half the drive back trying to figure out what I was going to tell her. I didn’t want to involve someone else. The less she knew, the better. I told her my parents were both killed in a car accident when I was four. I told her parts of that day had come back to me in dreams, but not all.

“And you want to remember the rest?”

I nodded.

“I think I can work with that. Have you ever been hypnotized?”

“No.”

She finished her coffee and reached for mine. I gave her what was left and watched her fill about an inch of the cup with more sugar before drinking it down. “Hypnosis is not like in the movies. You can count backwards, snap your fingers, and all that, but for the most part, that’s all show. Do you know where the term ‘fall asleep’ comes from?”

I shook my head.

“Our bodies regulate themselves with a series of chemical releases throughout the day. Adrenaline wakes us up, gives us that jolt of energy. When the sun goes down, when we lay down to sleep, our body does the opposite by releasing a hormone called melatonin. Melatonin causes us to feel drowsy, prepares our bodies to shut down. As we enter a sleep state, when we’re right at the edge, we sometimes experience a muscle twitch called a ‘hypnagogic jerk,’ which feels like falling to the nearly unconscious mind. It usually feels like it jolts us awake, but immediately after we drop off. When a person is hypnotized, we try to get them to that point, to the sweet spot either right before or right after the hypnagogic jerk. That’s when the door between our conscious and subconscious mind is open widest. When we try to recapture memories through hypnosis, we’re peeking through that door. It’s believed our minds don’t really forget anything. Memories are just stored in different ways, some deeper than others either because our brain considers them to be unimportant, or because they’re traumatic. In your case, if you were really there when the accident occurred and the moments you’ve been dreaming about really took place, we should be able to access those memories, regardless of why they were repressed.”

She finished my coffee and set the empty