Conspiracies - Mercedes Lackey [25]
Yseult. Tristan loves Yseult, not me. And he isn’t even real!
The things they did made her blush when she thought of them, even though she knew about them from movies and television she wasn’t supposed to watch. And the last time she’d slept over at Marcie’s house, Marcie’d had an actual DVD with real sex in it, and they’d all watched it, muffling their giggles and squeaks behind their hands. But Elizabeth had thought (privately) that the DVD had been kind of, well, gross. Not at all like what Tristan and Yseult did—when they could get some privacy, because Yseult’s castle didn’t have a lot of that.
She kept having to remind herself they weren’t real. Sure, sometimes she thought she was going crazy. But it wasn’t as if she was seeing things when she was awake. And it wasn’t as if she believed in all the magic she—Yseult—was doing in those dreams. She had a good imagination, that was all. She began to think about writing her dream-life down as a story, and maybe it would be good enough to get published, like the boy with the dragon books had been.
And that was the way her life went while she turned fourteen, and fifteen, and sixteen. She never told anybody that she didn’t dream about anything but Yseult’s life, but she didn’t think of herself as keeping bad secrets. Who did her dreams hurt, anyway? Nothing in them was really real, any more than magic was really real.
That was what she’d believed right up until three months ago.
September, and she was a junior, and head of the Cheer Squad for the Junior Varsity football team. They’d all been at the game when Terry Bishop, who looked a little like Tristan in the right light, jumped for the ball and got clotheslined, and there was an awful snapping sound, and he screamed.
She got there first, even before the coach, and she still didn’t know how because she didn’t remember moving. Terry’s leg and knee were lying all wrong, and before anyone got there to stop her, Elizabeth put her hands on them, and did what Yseult had been doing in Elizabeth’s dreams for months.
With a weird snap, the bones went back the way they belonged, and she felt a rush of something pouring out of her and into Terry. So much something poured out of her that she nearly passed out, and she hardly noticed when the coach and everybody else shoved her aside and told her to get back to the sidelines with the rest of Cheer Squad. She stumbled back to the sidelines, and she must have looked really wrecked, because Marcie told her she probably shouldn’t do any of the stunts, and Elizabeth knew better than to try when she felt so awful. She sat through the rest of the game in a daze, then went straight home instead of going to the after-game party, and when she woke up the next morning she discovered she hadn’t even taken her shoes off before collapsing on top of her bedspread and pretty much passing out. Mom had a few careful words to say to her at breakfast about drugs, and how she wasn’t going to preach but she hoped Elizabeth would tell her if she’d decided to experiment because a lot of them were a lot more dangerous than alcohol, and Elizabeth had stumbled through an explanation about the game and seeing Terry get hurt. At least that explained her behavior.
The game was Friday, and normally she’d have had to wait until Monday to find out anything, but Marcie’s older sister was dating Terry’s best friend, so it only took Elizabeth one phone call to find out that Terry’d wrenched his knee and he’d be out for a couple games but not the season. That certainly didn’t match Elizabeth’s memory of a leg broken in at least three pieces, with the ends of the bone pushing against the skin and threatening to break through. She spent the rest of the day trying to convince herself that Daphne and Marcie were right—just a sprain—and she hadn’t seen—or felt—what she