Teaser Tuesday (again)

I can't believe how fast this month is going! Which is not a good thing when I'm trying to write a novel during it... I hit the halfway mark for NaNo yesterday, 25,000 words. I should've hit it on Sunday, but Sunday morning I was struck down with flu of death, and even though I stayed home sick yesterday, I only managed to write about 300 words. Le sigh!

Hopefully with some serious hydration, lots of tea, and much Advil Cold and Sinus (oh, how I love you, wonder drug that can potentially be used to make crystal meth, so I have to buy you from the pharmacy counter now...), I'll be able to keep up the pace this week.

Meanwhile, another teaser! Because I know you guys sooo adore these, yes?! har har.

Short background: my main character, Melika, is narcoleptic. This is right after she hallucinates an old woman on a bus patting her shoulder at her stop:

By the time I’ve climbed off the bus and peeked back at the window where I was seated, the woman has vanished.

A manifestation of my subconscious, my therapist would say. I knew I needed to get off the bus, so I invented the old woman to wake myself up. That’s all.

These shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe.

I don’t remember when I first started to see them. The first time I told anyone, I was eight years old. Before my diagnosis. One night, Mom found me in the kitchen bent over homework. It was 3 in the morning. She sat beside me. “Why don’t you sleep, honey?” she asked. “Are you afraid of the dark?”

I shook my head. “The people don’t come at night.”

She reached out and put her hand over mine, stopping my pencil in mid-stroke. “What people, Melika?” Her black eyes bored into mine, wide lips bent into a frown. I didn’t recognize the expression at the time. But looking back, I realize my mom was terrified.

“The quiet ones,” I said. I wasn’t able to articulate it, not yet. Still, even at eight years old, I knew nobody else saw these people. Sometimes they’d be people I knew. My grandparents, my old best friend Kayla, who moved to Georgia when I was 7, or anyone who’d been on my mind a lot that year. Freshman year, every quiet one I saw wore Hope Li’s face.

But some were strangers. An old man in the middle of the road Dad was speeding down. A child staring from the windows of a long-abandoned apartment complex. A burly, tattooed motorcycle man weaving through the crowd at my favorite coffee shop.

At times, I have trouble telling them apart from real people. I’ll tug on Paige’s sleeve and point them out. She’ll just laugh and shake her head. “Daydreaming again.”

As I grew older, I learned tricks for spotting them. They’d squeeze through impossibly tight gaps; they’d be hit by a car or run screaming into traffic and no one around me would react. I usually only spot them in the daytime, in public places. And the biggest giveaway of all: they always stare at me. Even downtown, where no one meets your eyes if they can avoid it, the quiet ones smile and incline their heads. Silent acknowledgment that we see each other.

But sometimes it’s still hard to tell reality from imagination.