When Rose Wakes by Christopher Golden

herself with the words. “I see you.”
    “Yeah,” he replied, nodding, eyes crinkling further. “I see you, too, princess.”
    His hand closed around the bill and change and he backed away, turned, and hurried along the path toward a trio of women walking their dogs together, his new target. Rose stared after him.
    I see you, too, princess.
    She shivered. Had there been strange weight to the words? What had he seen in her, exactly? She considered pursuing him for answers.
    Her cell phone buzzed in her pocket, making her jump. Flushing with embarrassment, she glanced around to see if anyone had noticed, but only the birds seemed to be paying her any attention at all. The little devil, paranoia, was on her shoulder again. She fished her phone from her pocket and stared at it. She’d talked on it before—most recently last night with Kylie and then with Jared—but it hadn’t rung this time, only vibrated and given two quick buzzes. Now the screen showed a small envelope, telling her she had a message. It took her a moment to realize she had received a text. She hadn’t ever gotten one, never mind sent one, but she knew about texting as a concept. Kids at St. Bridget’s were not allowed to do it during school, but she knew it was a major addiction for most of them.
    Studying the phone, she figured out how to open the message, saw it was from Jared, and smiled. A calm radiated from her center.
    So am I going to see you at this party tonite?
    Rose thought about her aunts and her dreams; she thought about her coma and her lost memories. It was all so screwed up, and even though she had no frame of reference to judge anything by, everything felt so odd to her. Everything except for this. She knew that her brief taste of life at St. Bridget’s must be typical of a high school sophomore anywhere in America, the cruelties and the kindnesses alike, but it had still felt foreign and new to her. But the warm flutter in her chest when she thought of Jared… that felt good and right and normal, and she took huge comfort from that.
    What do I have in common with this guy?
she wondered. And then she laughed at herself. She didn’t really have anything in common with anyone, because she had no real interests at all. Not yet. But she was starting to develop them—a certain taste in music, mostly frantic, edgy pop, and a love of old movies on cable, to begin with. She knew she would love horseback riding whenever she had a chance to try it again. But none of those things were enough to start building a relationship on. No, she had to go by instinct and her own judgment, and both of those made her like Jared very much. He had kind eyes, and that was somewhere to begin.
    The texting thing was remarkably easy to figure out. Hit reply, spell out the words. She had to backtrack a couple of times, but she answered him.
    See you at 8.
    Trying to figure out who the hell she was, she had found one thing that made her feel normal—her attraction to this sweet guy—and she would cling to that.
    The phone buzzed again. Another text.
    Great.
    Rose grinned. Feeling at last as though something tethered her to the world, she left the park and the other wanderers behind and headed back toward Beacon Hill. She dropped her almost empty coffee cup into a trash can and crossed the street, and when a bird took flight from the branches of a nearby tree, she did not flinch. Looking up, she saw it was a seagull that had strayed in from the harbor on the October breeze.
    As she walked up the hill, she did not look back, determined to leave paranoia and bad dreams behind her and to focus on the real and the tangible.
    When she entered the apartment on Acorn Street, she could smell something delicious cooking. Her dreams had combined with her aunts’ strangeness to make the place seem hostile and almost surreal, but somehow that smell—Aunt Fay making her delicious onion soup—welcomed her and eased her mind.
    Rose stepped into the kitchen. Aunt Fay