Prologue

The girl in her dreams was smiling at her, her long wavy hair flowing in the wind like waves. She was always smiling, for a reason that Opal couldn’t fathom, since her dreams apparently didn’t like showing her different scenes, and she instinctively knew she was the object of the girl’s affections. The upper half of her face was always shadowed, so Opal couldn’t discern her features, but she didn’t care: she was just happy to be with her.

At some point, however, her reoccurring dream, usually so cosy and comforting in its constant repetitiveness, changed: the girl put a hand on the top of her head, tenderly, and caressed her, only to let it fall a few moments later and turn around, beginning to leave. Opal immediately tried to follow her, but her legs felt like lead, so she tried to call after her instead, but her voice held no sound. The girl stopped in her tracks to look at her and say something, but she was too far away already and, whatever it was that she wanted to tell her, Opal couldn’t hear it. The wind picked up, raising a cloud of dust, leaves and blades of grass, and Opal closed her eyes, shielding them with her arms, but when the wind calmed down again the girl was nowhere to be seen. Opal’s hand shot forward, but it was a useless effort.

In that moment, as if that wasn’t enough, the ground under her feet started trembling, and she fell…

… and fell…

… and fell…

… until she opened her eyes and found herself looking dazedly at the creamy white ceiling of her bedroom. Her phone was buzzing on the mattress, insistently telling her she had to get up for school with way too much energy. She blindly searched for it among the pile of stuffed animals she liked to keep on her bed, thinking about what a bad idea it had been to put it there instead of on its usual and nice spot on the night-stand, and finally turned off the alarm. Blessed silence returned to reign free and she rolled onto her back with an arm draped over her eyes, taking some time to think back to her most recent dream. As usual, she couldn’t recall anything well apart from the girl’s smile, a single defined spot in an otherwise out-of-focus image, but she was bothered by the upsetting turn the events had taken. People said that dreams always had a meaning, but then, if that was true, what was it? She didn’t actually know the girl and she never recognised her surroundings, but she had been seeing that scene in her dreams for years now and in recent times it happened nearly every night, with something resembling insistence. It sounded like her subconscious was trying to tell her something, but what exactly was that something? Could it be that it wanted her to-

“Opal!” Her mother’s voice thundered through the walls, making it seem like she was standing right next to her and not in another room entirely, and Opal sprang to her feet, anxiously looking at the hour. She could still make it, but just barely. “If you don’t get ready soon, you’ll have to make a run for school! Again!”

“Yes, mum!” she replied diligently. Leaving her musings behind, she grabbed her school uniform and made a beeline for the kitchen. Despite her penchant for distraction, she had – miraculously – never actually arrived late to school and she was determined to keep it that way.

It didn’t mean, however, that her dream stopped haunting the back of her mind.