JUNE 24, 2007

IMAGINARY FRIEND

Is this girl Cassie a complete fabrication of my imagination? Did I make her up in my head? What's going on? I'm not home a week and I've already got make-believe friends. My dad doesn't see or hear Cassie, but I know she exists. At least, to me she does. Maybe it's a side effect of the Promicin. Maybe something went wrong. Maybe I'm just losing my mind.

Are people who are going crazy aware they're going crazy?

I'm thinking about this too much. For all I know, she's a P+ with the ability to hide in plain sight. Maybe she can choose who she wants to see her. But why is she doing this? What does she want from me? And how does she know so much?

The weird thing is, it seems like everything Cassie tells me to do makes sense in some way. Or fits together somehow. She told me to go to this random house in the suburbs, said that inside I'd find the answers I was looking for. I'm not sure why I went. I didn't know her that well, but for some reason, I trusted her. Maybe it's because she helped me save Shawn. Or maybe it's because she's right. She's a part of me. My ability.

So I knock on the door and this guy who answers is acting like this sort of thing happens all the time. Would you like to come in and see my cult shrine? He was a weird guy, but he seemed harmless enough. He talked about these people who called themselves "White Light" and showed me this big, leather-bound book with a comet on the cover. The edges were burnt, there were pages missing, but it was pretty obvious that this was the cult's version of a bible. I was flipping through it and suddenly I get to a picture, an image I still haven't gotten out of my head. It was Jordan Collier. It's not that it looked like him; the man in that picture was Jordan Collier. I could see it in the eyes.

But it wasn't just the picture of Collier that freaked me out. It talked about a "sacred elixir" that gives people special powers and changes the world. Okay. There's a book that's almost ninety years old and it's predicting the spread of Promicin? This can't all be just some weird coincidence. Right?

So who were these "White Light" people? And how'd they know what would be going on in the world today? At first I thought, maybe they had abilities too. Like Maia. Maybe they could see into the future. But...what if they were actually from the future? Is that possible? Is this another attempt to affect the timeline in some way? By giving us some manual to work from?

The book says Jordan Collier will lead us to God. I've never been really religious. It was never a big part of my life growing up. Which is why this all sounds totally ridiculous to me. And why at first I thought maybe this cult was still around, and that Cassie was a part of it. But if she is a vision, if she is just in my head...it can't be that simple.

Cassie says I'm the shaman mentioned in the book. That I'm supposed to guide Collier along the right path. But Collier is in hiding; no one even knows where he is. So how am I supposed to guide him anywhere?

As crazy as all this sounds, you know what's even weirder? That I want it to be true. I want to feel like I'm a part of something. Something bigger. I don't know if it's this shaman thing or not. But I'm connected to all of this somehow. And I want to know more. If and when Cassie shows up again, I'm going to listen.