Panicking, I reached for something, anything to help me breathe. I felt hands on me. Calm, murmuring words. Wetness on my cheeks. Salt on my tongue. And my heart… it felt like it was going to explode it was racing so hard.
I was dying.
“Breathe, Jocelyn.”
Those words were said in my ear over and over again until I focused enough to concentrate on just breathing in and out. After a while, my pulse slowed and my lungs opened up. The spots across my vision began to disappear.
“That’s it,” Ms. Shaw was whispering, a warm hand rubbing soothing circles on my back. “That’s it.”
“We should get going,” the DSS woman’s voice broke through my fog.
“Okay. Jocelyn, are you ready?” Ms. Shaw asked quietly.
“They’re dead,” I answered, needing to feel how the words felt. It couldn’t be real.
“I’m sorry, sweetheart.”
Cold sweat burst on my skin, my palms, under my arms, across the nape of my neck. Goosebumps rose up all over and I couldn’t stop shaking. A rush of dizziness swayed me to the left and without warning, vomit surged up from my churning gut. I bent over, losing my breakfast all over the DSS lady’s shoes.
“She’s in shock.”
Was I?
Or was it travel sickness?
One minute I had been sitting back there. There, where it was warm and safe. And in a matter of seconds, in the crunch of metal…
… I was someplace else entirely.
~1~
Scotland
Eight years later…
It was a beautiful day to find a new home. And a new roommate.
I stepped out of the damp, old stairwell of my Georgian apartment building to a stunningly hot day in Edinburgh. I glanced down at the cute, white and green striped denim shorts I’d purchased a few weeks ago from Topshop. It had been raining non-stop since then and I’d despaired of ever getting to wear them. But the sun was out; peeking over the top of the cornered tower of the Bruntsfield Evangelical Church, burning away my melancholy and giving me back a little bit of hope. For someone who had packed up her entire life in the US and taken off for her motherland when she was only eighteen years old, I wasn’t really good with change. Not anymore anyway. I’d gotten used to my huge apartment with its never-ending mice problem. I missed my best friend, Rhian, who I’d lived with since freshman year at the University of Edinburgh. We’d met in the dorms and hit it off. We were both very private people and were comfortable around one another for the mere fact that we never pushed each other to talk about the past. We’d stuck pretty close to each other freshman year and decided to get an apartment (or ‘flat’ as Rhian called it) in second year. Now that we were graduates, Rhian had left for London to start her PhD and I was left roommate-less. The icing on the cake was the loss of my other closest friend here, James, Rhian’s boyfriend. He’d run off to London (a place he detested I might add) to be with her. And the cherry on top? My landlord was getting a divorce and needed the apartment back.
I’d spent the last two weeks answering ads from young women looking for a female roommate. It had been a bust so far. One girl didn’t want to room with an American. Cue my ‘what the fuck?’ face. Three of the apartments were just… nasty. I’m pretty sure one girl was a crack dealer, and the last girl’s apartment sounded like it got more use than a brothel. I was really hoping my appointment today with Ellie Carmichael was going to go my way. It was the most expensive apartment I’d scheduled to see and it was on the other side of the city center.
I was frugal when it came to touching my inheritance, as if that would somehow lessen the bitterness of my ‘good’ fortune. However, I was getting desperate.
If I wanted to be a writer, I needed the right apartment and the right roommate.
Living alone of course was an option. I could afford it. However, the God’s honest truth was that I didn’t like the idea of complete solitude. Despite my tendency to keep eighty percent of myself to myself, I liked being surrounded by people. When they talked to me about things I didn’t understand personally, it allowed me to see things from their point of view, and I believed all the best writers needed a wide