Nightmares

"Juana! Juana!" She heard someone call her name and she opened her eyes, expecting to find herself in the empty, deserted, scary room, but she had been dreaming a very scary dream.

"Juana, are you okay?" She wiped her eyes with her left thumb. The table clock read 6:30 am.

"Sorry I woke you up from your sound sleep this early, darling." It was Baron, and he was sitting on her bed, holding her right hand. No, Baron wasn't her boyfriend. He was her biological father, Baron Leon, and he had been sitting on the bed for ten minutes, watching her eyelids shut tightly in deep sleep and waiting for an opportunity to talk to her. So, when she had turned roughly around on her bed, he'd tapped her and called out her name.

"Are you okay?" Baron asked again and Juana nodded, sitting up simultaneously.

"I'm okay, Dad."

"I saw your lights on, and found your door open, so I came in to check if you were up writing or just lying awake in bed. But when I found you deeply asleep, I guessed that you only forgot to lock your door," he said quietly, staring at Juana's frightened face.

"Yeah, I was writing for a moment and then I dozed off." And sure enough, there was her jotter on her bed, lying open. She closed it as soon as she uttered those words.

"It's fine. Don't ever forget to close your door at least."

"I won't. It just happened today," she said and forced a smile, although she was really worried. The dream had frightened her.

Deep down, she wanted to talk to him about it but was scared silly at the prospect. First, the dream was bad. Second, what was the point in doing so anyway?

But she called him back. Baron got up and studied her face. "You look frightened. Did you have a nightmare? Wanna tell me about it?"

"No, I didn't. I'm fine," Juana said but really wished her dad would probe further.

"Okay then. I'll just go back to bed now. Will see you in the morning."

Baron was halfway out of the room when Juana called him. Again.

He pulled back, put his arms around her, and prompted her to talk. Just as she was about to spill the words, two thoughts made their way into her mind. First, was the fact that she had a mysterious attribute. She had hardly heard of anyone with such grace—having all your dreams come true. She hated to sleep just because she worried that she might have bad dreams. Whether bad or good, whatever dreams she had would come to pass in reality. She discovered this about herself before her parents did, and they wouldn't have known if she hadn't told them about it. Her Granny found it interesting, she called it a blessing because it had helped the family in so many ways.

Juana herself didn't think it was a blessing. She found it really strange and scary. She'd rather not know the future, than know and not be able to stop it from happening. At least for the bad parts.

She remembered having a dream when she was seven. It was a very strange one. She saw nothing, literally nothing. She was walking on nothing and staring at a ball of nothing. There was no air, no trees, no buildings. Everything was blank. She herself felt invisible. She screamed right out of sleep that morning. And it was the morning of her seventh birthday. When Baron and Dawn asked her about it, she simply said 'nothing' because she couldn't express herself any better. Of course, Juana had had good dreams too and they made her bubble with excitement whenever she woke up. Every morning either brought a loud shout of fright or a squeal of excitement. Her parents always expected one of the two.

Back to the scene in her room. Juana had a second thought. What she had seen was definitely coming to pass just like her other dreams, so what was the point? "There's nothing I can do about it. There's nothing Mom or Dad can do about it," she thought.

She had seen a corpse hanging loosely on the avocado tree behind her room. Fresh blood was dripping in huge splatters down to the pavement.

"Juana?" Her dad called her back to her senses as her mind had travelled far.

"Err…I only wanted to ask if Mom was awake too," she finally said. She was too overwhelmed with fear to speak.

"No. She had a shower and went back to bed. I saw her while emailing a friend in the sitting room. Why?"

"I'm not sure why I asked."

Baron patted his daughter's face twice and made for the door. Just as he was about to close the door behind him, he said almost as quiet as a whisper, "Your mom will be traveling in two days’ time. With her boss. To Australia. She'll be back in two weeks, and err…if you wanna talk, we're here for you." And he shut the door.

Juana's face flushed.

That was it. Something is going to happen to one of them.

"Mom is traveling? In a couple of days? That'll be 9th August. She'll back in two weeks. My birthday is in two weeks. Why am I calculating the days? Why does this matter?" Juana thought.

Then she reminded herself that it did matter. Bad things happened on her birthday, and they were usually the dreams she had the night before coming true.

They were usually slight occurrences that didn't involve death, but they were still bad. The worst thing about these nightmares was that it seemed there was nothing that could stop them from happening. They were bound to happen, and Juana called it her curse. But her dad and granny thought it was fun or magic…even if it was evil.

"It'll let us know what to do and what not to do," Granny said but the evil still happened. No matter how careful they were in trying to prevent it.

This trait was discovered when Juana was six. Now she's twelve and she's had a bad thing happen on each of her birthdays. The good thing about this was it didn't stop good things from happening. As a matter of fact, it provided a truckload of good things for her family, as if it was compensation for the evil that must happen beforehand.

"I've never seen anything like death. Yeah, death of animals but never a human. Why did I see it this time?" Juana thought.

Juana believed in prayer when she was little, but she didn't believe anymore because according to her, 'prayers prevent evil from being sealed, and you can't unseal an already sealed evil.' It seemed to her that if prayers worked, then her parents' prayers should have stopped this menace and let her live a normal life like other girls and not as some weird girl with a weird power.

She started thinking of other ways to cope with 'the curse' without prayer. She didn't know how to pray anyway.

She once decided to stop sleeping and be active for the whole day. At night, she would not even visit her bed. She would sit on the only chair in her room and write. About things that scared her, about living life with an incurable curse. Letters to no one in particular. Letters that bore her feelings about her life. About sports and games and everything she loved doing.

During the day, she would read, play games, and watch TV. It went on and on for eleven days. Of course, during these times, she dozed but it never lasted more than fifteen minutes. That was not enough to build a solid dream, Juana knew.

After eleven days, she felt worse, her concentration in class dipped. She looked and felt drowsy during recess and game time. Her eyelids drooped in class, and she couldn't see her teacher clearly.

Her eyes hurt and she felt these terrible aches in her whole body. Juana tried to hide it, but it was very obvious. In the end, she was hospitalized and what's worse, she refused to take analgesics because she wanted to avoid sleeping. It made Dawn cry. Dawn was Juana's mom and the only other person in the family that found Juana’s dreams scary.

In two weeks, Juana would be thirteen. Thirteen! She would creep into her teenage years on the same day Dawn and her boss would be arriving from Australia. Tick! The clock said 7 o’clock. Maybe being a teenager would bring good things.

Juana should have had her coffee an hour ago, but she was mentally restless. She got up and went straight to the kitchen still in her pink pajamas. She picked up her mug from the rack and made coffee. Each of the members of her family had their own special mug. Plates. Trays. Cutleries. The kitchen was orderly. Modern, furnished, and beautiful, it looked new everyday even though the house was five years old already.

Juana's coffee was transparent with a lot of water, sugar, and no milk. So, she could see her face while sipping it. Her big blue eyes were a bit undefined, but her expression showed fear with a mixture of helplessness and unusual calm. Then the dream came again. Avocado. Garden. Branch. Third branch. Corpse dripping with blood. Loose. Screaming. Empty House. Dream.

"Oh, my goodness," she sighed, dropping her half empty mug. She tried to make meaning out of it, but it was a little creepy.

"Now let me try to understand it." Avocado. In her dream, she was eager to pluck and eat them. As a matter of fact, she was stealing them. Now that was a little weird because, in reality, she never ate them. She hated avocados and even had the tree behind her room cut down when she was ten.

She opened her window and stared outside. She could see Ivy and Alicia's house down the street. Ivy and Alicia were her best friends. She could also see that the only avocado tree they had had grown taller. It was behind their large house. And whenever Juana visited her friends, she dreaded going near it. Ivy and Alicia's parents made a swing under the tree for the three girls, but Juana never played on it. That was even before she had this nightmare about avocados.

Juana? Let's talk about her. She's twelve, tall, pretty, asthmatic, lonely, and a genius. Juana was one of a kind. A smart, emotional person, and an only child. She had eyebrows and eyelashes that had been shaped from infancy and very clear skin. She was adorable.

Juana Leon is her full name. She had been asthmatic since childhood and as a result, inhalers have had to be a constant presence in her life. Doctors actually told her parents to let her know about her condition while she was still a kid because according to them, coping with asthma would be easier for her as she grew up. "She'll be able to cope quite well on her own, especially when you're not available" they told her parents, and they were right; Juana has learnt to cope with it quite well on her own. Being an only child, she grew up to develop interests in pets especially dogs and rabbits but that didn't stop her from feeling like having siblings to call her own, especially a younger sister and an older brother.

Her Grandmother whenever she visited always called her 'Our blessing' and sometimes added 'Princess' to her name, but Juana didn't understand any of it.

She didn't think she was a blessing to anyone, like how can a girl living with three things worse than a disease be revered like a princess? but she never told anyone her mind. "I'm asthmatic, I can hardly live without inhalers, I'm a stupid genius, and I have some silly power to make bad dreams come to pass, how can I be a blessing? No, I'm just a stupid waste, a carrier of some silly curse." She always told herself. Sometimes she writes it in her diary, sometimes she keeps it in her mind, but she's never told anyone how she felt about herself, not even her mom who was the closest to her.

She was not the first born of her parents as she had been made to believe. Although she had always thought she was an only child, the truth was, she was the only child that stayed. Dawn had had three miscarriages before Juana's conception. After she was born, she didn't fall pregnant anymore and she stopped trying. Maybe if Juana had heard this story, she would have believed she was indeed a blessing after all.

Juana was a special kind, not the normal breed of children anyone had. She was a born genius, and it was such a peculiar thing. Sometimes being a genius could be good. Sometimes it could be accompanied with loneliness. Juana's genius brought her the latter, and that was why she hated being a genius. She wanted to be normal, have friends and be cool but it did her no good pretending to be normal because she knew she wasn't.

By the time she was four, Baron and Leon had noticed some things about her and had known that she was not a normal child.

Maybe not abnormal, but not regular either. From the age of four when they had discovered that she was intellectually gifted, Juana had been the object of a conspiracy of protection. She grew up alone in libraries and laboratories, classrooms and lecture halls, and mostly writing and talking to herself. "Stop knowing what will happen in two months, okay? Try to breathe normally without any help, okay? Juana, you're not a genius. You're stupid. You need to read before understanding anything. Listen to your teacher or you'll fail your subjects, okay?” But it didn't help. Her genius brought her both good and bad though. She excelled in hopes of winning her classmates' love and company for a while before her friends began to act like she was an alien.

Everyone including few insensitive teachers thought that she was proud and arrogant, and others who didn't think that just bullied her and alienated her like a plague just because they were jealous of her incredible intelligence. Some weren't jealous. They just thought she was abnormal, especially when she was caught talking to herself in the old empty library during recess. Juana had that memory plastered in her brain. It was an embarrassing moment for her.

Some of her bullies had heard her talking to herself and had secretly hidden somewhere to record her voice. In five minutes, it became the talk of her class. In the audio, she was heard telling herself: "Lisa will be hit by a motorbike in three months’ time, I don't hate you Lisa, but I can't stop this from happening. It must happen, because that's how it's been. I didn't see you die, but you were badly injured. I'm sorry Lisa, you'll have to miss a whole term in school.”

Lisa was a girl in her class, one of her top bullies and a child of an influential person. The other students who had made the audio showed it to her and she began to rant and threaten around, looking for Juana.

Juana returned to class after recess not knowing what had just happened, and Lisa confronted her with the audio. She was shocked and silently begged the ground to open and swallow her whole, but it was Lisa who almost swallowed her. She punched and hit her, and Juana almost passed out but for the timely intervention of a teacher.

"I've not beaten you enough. After school, I'm gonna hunt you down," Lisa threatened in class.

So, Juana didn't wait to hear the closing bell before she ran to the empty library and hid there until she was sure everyone had gone home. She didn't run home for a big reason. She would be alone and Lisa knew where she lived. She kept avoiding Lisa for the rest of the week. Exactly three months later, Lisa had an accident and died. Juana's parents had to take their daughter away from that school to save her from further emotional torture. That was how Juana started in another school, but the bullying never stopped.

She was the perfect girl for the phrase, "innocent, not ignorant.” In her new school, she tried to behave herself and spoke to no one. She was not like most of her classmates who loved partying and clubbing with their boyfriends. She just did her own thing: assignments, sports, practicals and classes, breaks in the library, and home after closing hour.

When Juana was four, she was already doing simple algebra. She could wear her shoes right and tie the laces correctly. She could pack her hair into a ponytail and make neat cornrows just by staring at the mirror. She could take her toys apart and put them back together.

At seven, she had learnt to bake and lay her bed neatly. She grew up to be an emotional coward too, she cried too much. She got a dog as a birthday gift from her dad when she turned nine. He was a big, fluffy, white dog that she named Campbell. She took the dog with her everywhere—to malls, restaurants, pools, the beach. It was her dream pet, but it gave her allergies and aggravated her asthma in the space of seven months. So, it had to be taken away from her. It was a sad thing for her because taking away Campbell from her made her lonely again. "Play with it from a distance or say goodbye to it forever" Baron had given her that condition. But she could not do without Campbell. He was her best friend.

Juana had two friends: Ivy and Alicia. They were her next-door neighbors, and they became friends when her family just moved in, but they too soon stopped talking to her and avoided talking to her as if she were some sort of epidemic. She wondered why for a long time, until she learnt to accept the fault as her own. Of course, there were few people who wanted to be friends with her, but they all turned strangers after few weeks of knowing her.

Each year passed lonelier than the last, and she ached for human contact. Her parents were supportive and took good care of her, but she still wanted friends.

Somehow Juana knew that she was a mixture of goodness and a touch of mystery or misery that is.

Her parents made her a priority, and she knew it. The only place she felt loved was at home, and she always looked forward to closing hour every day. Juana was very close to her mom, she could tell her anything, but she did save a little from Dad's knowledge because she thought, 'Dads should not know one hundred percent of everything about girls'. For instance, the fact that she began her period few weeks after her twelfth birthday was unknown to Baron. She loved her family, and her mom and her were like twins. They did everything together and cuddled in her bed whenever she was lonely or sad . Every time they were together, Juana felt good, but she couldn't hide the fact that her greatest fear was losing her. That is why she was especially scared about the nightmare she had, two weeks to her thirteenth birthday because she thought it might involve her mom