Never to Sleep

Don’t Close Your Eyes.

Sophie Cavanaugh is not going to let her freak of a cousin’s strange psychiatric condition ruin high school for them both. Not after all the work she’s put into cultivating the right look, and friends, and reputation. But then, Sophie sees something so frightening she lets out a blood-curdling scream—and finds herself stuck in a bizarre parallel world where nothing is safe and deadly creatures lurk just out of sight, waiting for her to close her eyes and sleep…forever.

Could this world be real? Or does insanity run in the family…?

Contents

Begin Reading

About the Author

A note from the author:

Never To Sleep is a novella, not a full-length novel, and it takes place within the If I Die time frame, so please be aware before you read this story that it does contain an If I Die spoiler.

* * *

“I know she’s your best friend and all, Sophie, but Laura Bell has got to go,” Peyton whispered, shoving both gym doors open at once so she could walk through the center of the double doorway for a grand exit. Every entrance Peyton made was a production, and every exit was a statement. This exit said, Get used to the back of my head, bitches, because that’s all you’re gonna see when I lead us to the state dance team championship next year.

What Peyton didn’t understand was that she wasn’t going to be leading us.

I was.

In the entire history of the Eastlake High dance team, an incoming junior had never been voted captain. I was going to be the first. But I needed Laura’s support to make that happen. People fear Peyton’s mouth. They respect my talent. And they like Laura. It was going to take at least two of the three—fear, respect, and congeniality—to claim the prize.

If Peyton got Laura kicked off the team, I was screwed.

“She’s a good dancer, Pey.”

“Yeah. In private. Sometimes in practice. But every time we get ready to compete, she flakes out. With all that nervous vomiting, you’d think she’d be skinnier.” The doors closed behind us, and Peyton stopped whispering. “And now another injury.” That morning, we’d been twenty minutes into the second-to-last practice before the final competition of the year when Laura twisted her ankle. Again. “If she can’t bring it when it counts, why is she here? Someone should show her the door.”

I knew what was coming. It was Peyton’s MO—delegate the dirty work.

“It has to come from her best friend, Sophie,” Peyton said, as we rounded the corner into the science hall, where Mrs. Foley had sent us to get the new dance uniforms she’d left in her classroom. “That’s the only humane way to do this.”

“That’s up to Mrs. Foley. I couldn’t kick Laura off the team even if I wanted to.”

“No one’s talking about kicking her off,” Peyton said, and immediately I realized my mistake. I’d been the first to say it out loud, and that’s the only part of this conversation that would make it back to Laura. “I’m talking about counseling her—as her friend—to do what’s best for herself and for the team. I mean, isn’t that what’s really important here? The team?”

“So, were you thinking about the good of the team when you hooked up with Beth Larson’s boyfriend, at her own birthday party?” I asked, brushing past her to pull open Mrs. Foley’s classroom door. Beth was our current captain, an outgoing senior, and Peyton was determined to replace her in every way possible.

She followed me in and pushed the door shut before answering. “No, I was thinking of the good of the team when I threatened to tell the whole school he’s hung like a gerbil if he ever says anything.” She stomped across the classroom between two rows of desks, without even glancing at all the weird biology stuff. Three-dimensional model of the human heart. A row of microscopes lined up next to the utility sink. A dead frog preserved in a jar of something discolored and gross.

There was even a plastic skeleton hanging from a stand behind Mrs. Foley’s desk. It used to be next to the door, wearing one of the dance team’s sequined headbands, until one of the varsity basketballers—Laura’s ex—had been caught molesting it when Mrs. Foley came in from the hall. Laura called him a degenerate. Peyton pointed out that if Laura was as thin as the skeleton, he wouldn’t have dumped her to hump a plastic teaching tool in front of the whole class.

“We have to be together on this, Sophie,” Peyton said, as I followed her around Mrs. Foley’s desk, where she squatted to open a big cardboard box that had already been unsealed. “I’m constantly sticking up for you, when people start talking about your whack-job cousin. I tell them her issues aren’t hereditary, and there’s, like, virtually no chance you’re gonna flip out on us in the middle of a performance.” Peyton pulled out a plastic-wrapped dance skirt and examined it while I tried not to break my new porcelain veneers from grinding my teeth.

“Kaylee’s mental malfunction has nothing to do with me.” I ripped opened the box next to hers to find it full of matching sequined tops. “I think Kaylee hit her head in the wreck that killed her mom when she was a kid.” I’d come up with no better theory, other than that she was faking crazy just to sabotage my entire existence.

“That’s what I always say. But I need you to help me help you.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“You’re not exactly the picture of mental stability lately,” Peyton said, and my blood began to boil. “I mean, we all understand. Any one of us might be feeling a bit fruit-loopy too, in your position. What, with your mom dying and Scott rockin’ a straitjacket in the psych ward.”

Scott wasn’t in a straitjacket. But I couldn’t tell her that without admitting I’d gone to see him. It was just once, back when they first locked him up, right before Christmas. And I didn’t go to visit. I went to demand the truth about what Kaylee was doing at his house that day, and why he was arrested, and how the hell he could embarrass me like that, in front of the whole school. Then I was going to dump him. Right there, in the hospital. He deserved it, for lying, and humiliating me, and for cheating on me with my own cousin.

He and Kaylee were hooking up. They had to be. Why else would they leave school together in the middle of the day?

But in the end, I couldn’t do it. I wasn’t sure how my dad had talked them into letting me see Scott, but they wouldn’t let me see him alone, and I couldn’t yell at him with my dad and his doctor there. And anyway, it only took one look into his eyes for me to see that even if Kaylee was faking crazy, Scott wasn’t. His words all came out crooked, like he was talking around whatever he wanted to say and couldn’t quite find the point. He was broken, way deep inside, and it only took me three minutes or so to decide that was more than enough punishment for what he’d put me through.

“Look,” Peyton said, drawing me out of my own memories. “All I’m saying is that you’ve been through a lot this year. I know you wouldn’t let any of that get in the way of leading this team if you were captain, but I can’t promise everyone else will agree. Especially after what you did to Laura’s hair.”

“That was an accident.” The freaky, I-can’t-really-remember-what-happened sort of accident. All I remember is that Kaylee was there—she’s there every time anything weird happens—and afterward, Laura’s mom made my dad pay for an emergency haircut, then tacked on a day at the spa, for mental anguish.

“Right. You accidentally cut a chunk of your best friend’s hair off at the scalp. That was social road rage, if I ever saw it. And—between the two of us—it was well played. But to the uninformed, it might look like the Cavanaugh family resemblance is starting to show.”

“Wow. I’ve seen more subtlety from angry gorillas at the zoo. And they’d probably look better in this,” I said, holding up one of the plastic-wrapped dance tops.

Peyton glared at me for a second, then shook the insult off and shrugged. “I just thought you should know what everyone else is saying. But you can still turn it around. It would go a long way toward convincing people you still have the team’s best interests in mind if you were to help Laura see the light. Think about it, Sophie. Think hard.”

She stood with her box under one arm, and I tried to make her trip over her wedge heels with the power of my hatred alone. When the door slammed shut behind her, I took a deep breath and stood with the remaining box, already plotting how best to bring Peyton down.

Clearly, I’d sheared the wrong friend….

When I was sure Peyton was far enough ahead of me that I wouldn’t have to stare at the back of her head, I lifted the last box and tucked it under my arm. It wasn’t heavy, but it was big and awkward, and it seemed to poke me in all the wrong places. Like Peyton’s mouth.

At the end of the hall, I rounded the corner, thinking of all the reasons I deserved to be team captain and she didn’t. I was up to “Peyton thinks better on her back than on her feet” when a classroom door flew open in front of me and smashed into the entire length of my body. An ugly grunt of pain exploded from my mouth and the hall tilted around me as I went down on my butt, and the box of uniforms slid across the floor.

“Oh, shit, are you okay?” A guy knelt at my side, and I blinked, stunned, trying to draw reality back into focus as my vision doubled, then threatened to multiply.

“That depends. Are you triplets?”

He laughed. “No, there’s only one of me.”

And one was plenty. As my vision merged, his eyes were all I could see—dark brown, with tiny flecks of green and gold in his irises, like jewels had gotten caught there. They were beautiful.

Or maybe that was the concussion talking….

He brushed a strand of hair from my forehead and frowned. “Looks like it’s gonna bruise. I’m sorry ’bout that.”

I’d never seen him before. I would have remembered those eyes.

“How do you feel?”

“My face hurts. And I’m a little dizzy,” I admitted, surprised by the dazed, echoey sound of my own voice.

He grinned, and his smile was as nice as his eyes, and suddenly I was even dizzier, but I couldn’t blame that on my fall. “Well, that’s what you get for walking into open doors.”

Irritation flared inside me, and his face zoomed into clear, crisp focus. Straight nose. Strong chin. Smooth, dark skin from some exotic heritage I couldn’t pinpoint. “I didn’t walk into anything. You—”

“I’m kidding. That was totally my fault.” His smile widened and I kind of forgot what I was saying. And that I was still sitting on the floor. “Before I put you back on your feet, we better make sure there’s no permanent damage. Do you remember your name?”

I rolled my eyes. “Sophie.”

“And what day of the week is it?”

“Tuesday.”

“Good. I think you’re okay, Sophie, but just to be sure—and this is for purely medical purposes—what’s your phone number?”

I laughed out loud. “Does it usually take blunt-force trauma for you to score a phone number?”

“This is a first, but a potential concussion does seem to be an icebreaker.” He stood and reached for my hand. I gave it to him, but instead of pulling me up, he frowned, and his eyes narrowed, staring into mine like he was looking for more than just irises and pupils, and tiny red veins.

“What’s wrong? Am I bleeding?” I touched my nose with my free hand, desperately hoping it wasn’t swollen from impact with the door. That would be just my luck. A beautiful boy literally knocks me off my feet, and it turns out he can’t stop staring because I look like the loser in a boxing match.

“No, I just thought I felt… Nothing. Never mind.” Then he blinked and finally pulled me to my feet. “There’s no obvious damage. In fact, you look pretty damn good for someone who just got smashed in the face with a door.”

His hand lingered in my grip until I reluctantly pulled mine back.

“What’s this?” He knelt to pick up a dance shirt that had fallen out of the box and half escaped its plastic wrapper. Then he held it up in front of me, obviously trying to picture me in the skimpy, snug halter top.

“It’s a uniform. I’m a dancer.”

“I could tell by how gracefully you crashed to the floor.” His mischievous grin widened. “You wear this?”

“Yeah. Well, I haven’t worn this one yet, but I will.”

“And you’re going to dance around in it? In front of people?”

“I don’t ‘dance around.’ I perform. It’s a sport. It takes a ton of discipline, and practice, and stamina.”

“That sounds more like football. I thought dance was about grace and beauty, and self-expression through movement.”

I blinked, surprised, and he laughed. “It’s written on the side of your box.”

I glanced at the box on the floor. Beneath the manufacturer’s label, the definition of dance he’d quoted was printed in a pretty, scrolling font.

“So which is it?” He raised his brows in challenge as he watched me with a quiet smile. “A sport or an art?”

“It’s both. An athletic art.” Although, at the competitive high school level, it was usually just a bunch of choreographed jumping around and gyrating to recorded music. “You have to have perfect control over your body in order to make it say what you want to express.”

“So, you’re saying that you wear this—” he held the top up by one strap, and for the first time, I realized how little material was actually there “—while you express things with your perfectly controlled body? And you have a lot of stamina?” His brows rose suggestively. “I think I’m gonna like this school.” Then he offered me his right hand to shake. “Did I mention my name is Luca Tedesco?”

I shook his hand briefly, and too late, I realized his smile was contagious. “You’re new?” I said, taking the uniform top from him.

“I start next week.”

“Senior?” He was tall. Nicely built. He could be a senior.

“Junior. You?”

“Sophomore. But only for the next couple of months.” Then school would be out for the summer, and I’d return as the first ever junior-year captain of the Eastlake dance team. “So, what were you doing in there?” I asked, glancing past the door that had nearly killed me into the empty history classroom beyond.

“Looking for a little excitement.”

“Did you find it?”

“I have now.” He looked right into my eyes again, and again I wondered what he was looking for. “I feel bad about nearly killing you with a door. Let me make it up to you? I could carry this box full of hard-core sports attire…wherever you’re taking it.”

“No, that’s okay.” Like I was gonna let the pretty new boy anywhere near Peyton before I’d had a chance to thoroughly stake my claim.

“Since I’m the one who gave you this bump…” He brushed hair back from my forehead, and I winced when his fingers touched a tender spot just above my temple. “I think you should let me do the heavy lifting, until you’re fully recovered.”

Well, if you insist… My afternoon was looking better already.

I smiled at him. “I’m still a little dizzy. Who knows how long that could take?”

“I’ll clear my schedule.” He replaced the shirt that had fallen out and picked up the box. “Which way?”

“Take the next right, and head straight for the double doors.”

We were almost to the hallway junction when Luca stopped in the middle of the floor. His eyes narrowed at nothing, then closed entirely, and when they opened, he looked…cautious. Like he’d seen something or heard something weird. Or like he’d felt a draft. But all I could hear were some locker door squeals and muted voices from around the corner, and I couldn’t see anything but an empty stretch of hall in front of us. And there was no breeze.

“Yeah. Let’s go this way.” He took my arm and started to turn back the way we’d come.

I pulled loose from his grip. “The gym’s that way.”

“Is there another route?” He frowned at the intersection behind me, and I turned to look again, but there was nothing there—just the junction of two hallways, with a set of restrooms on opposite corners.

“Only if we go around the whole building. Are you okay?”

“Yeah.” Luca fell into step beside me again, reluctantly this time, and I took a critical sideways glance at him. He was beyond gorgeous. But Eastlake High was full of pretty people who acted like total freaks. I blame the local water supply. Which was why I drank bottled water.

Still, Luca was new, and he was hot, and he was the first guy who’d looked at me with something more interesting than pity in his eyes since my mom died and my boyfriend was committed to a mental institution. If the universe was finally throwing me a bone—and let’s be honest, it owed me the whole damn skeleton, after the year I’d had—I wasn’t going to throw it back without at least taking a good look at the offering.

We turned the corner, and I glanced up when the voices I’d heard fell into a sudden hush. There were only a few people left in this corridor, and they were all staring at a couple in the middle of the math hall, making out like they were trying to swallow each other whole.

I didn’t recognize the guy’s pale curls or athletic build, but I would have known her anywhere. Thin, curveless body that she didn’t know how to showcase to its own advantage. Plain, thick brown hair that could be pretty, if she’d use a decent conditioner or let me flatiron it. But she never did, so I’d stopped asking when I was twelve, and I realized it’d be easier to pretend I didn’t know her than to try to explain how she could be so mousy when we sprang from the same genetic line.

“Who is that?” Luca whispered, and I had to swallow a groan. Of course the first things he’d see at Eastlake were me, flat on my butt with a bruise rising on my forehead—not my finest hour—and Kaylee, starring in yet another public spectacle.

I shook my head. “I’ve never seen him before, but she’s my cousin. And that is not her boyfriend. I swear, she is such a closet slut.” She’d gotten double detention for public display with Nash two days ago.

Luca glanced at me with upraised brows. “Looks like the closet’s open.”

“Great.” The only thing worse than a quiet, crazy cousin was a slutty, skanky cousin with an exhibitionist streak. At least Peyton knew how to keep her secrets secret.

For the millionth time, I wished my parents had let me change my last name so people would stop mistaking me and Kaylee for sisters. That’s all I’d wanted for my thirteenth birthday, and those little-girl diamond heart earrings were a poor substitute.

A second later, Nash and his creepy, goth-freak friend stepped around a corner on the other end of the hall and stopped cold, staring just like we were. I couldn’t decide whether to stick around for the fireworks, or run from the drama before I became collateral damage by association. Again.

“Kaylee?” Nash said, and my cousin and the mystery hottie jumped apart like someone had lit a fire at their feet.

I ducked into a classroom doorway, behind a row of lockers, and Luca glanced at me in surprise. “That’s her boyfriend. At the end of the hall, with the scary brunette.”

Luca stared down the hall again, and when the shouting started, I grabbed his arm and pulled him around the corner with me. “You’re right. Let’s go this way.” I started back the way we’d come and he fell into step beside me, still carrying my box, as the drama behind us grew louder and even more embarrassing.

“I take it you’re not close to your cousin?” Luca said, watching me with those beautiful eyes.

“I’m close to never speaking to her again. Does that count?”

“Why? What’d she do?”

“You mean other than the Jerry Springer-worthy public display back there? She lived with me until this year—her own dad didn’t even want her around for, like, thirteen years—and she’s been trying to wreck my life since junior high.”

“With serial public displays of affection?”

“No, that’s a recent development.” Thank goodness. “Kaylee’s kind of…unbalanced.”

“Meaning, she falls over a lot?”

“Ha-ha. She’s nuts. My eighth grade dance recital? We had to leave before my solo because Kaylee had this stupid panic attack.”

“A panic attack?”

“She was totally faking. She just started screaming at the top of her lungs, for no reason at all, and everyone stared at us, and my dad had to carry her out like a baby. Every time she does it, they fuss over her like she’s all fragile, when it’s my life she’s turning into a public tragedy every time she opens her mouth.”

“And you’re sure she does it on purpose?”

“So sure. She’s a social assassin. She sabotaged my run for Snow Queen. She got my boyfriend arrested and committed to a mental institution, and—”

“Boyfriend?” Luca looked disappointed, and my pulse rushed so fast I got a little dizzy again.

“Ex.”

But the worst part—the part I hadn’t told anyone—was that she was there when my mom died. Kaylee did something—or, at the very least, she knew something—but she wouldn’t tell me what really happened. She couldn’t even come through for me the one time I truly needed her help, yet she went to great lengths to hold me back from the social existence I was born to live.

“The moral of the story is that my cousin is a malicious freak, and you should avoid her like the social equivalent of the black plague.”

Luca’s brows rose. “That sounds a little harsh.”

I shrugged. “Survival strategy. If you’re not careful, this place will eat you alive, and Kaylee’s like bait for the beasts.”

“You make your school sound like a war zone. Should I come dressed for battle?”

“Always.” And it doesn’t hurt to have designer labels on your chain mail. “The key is to know which battles are worth fighting.”

“Would these be dance battles?” Luca said, his eyes sparkling with good humor. “If so, I’m afraid I’m not very well trained. Maybe you could give me some pointers.”

“Yeah,” I said, trying not to look or sound as nervous as I felt. He was so pretty, and he’d just heard all about my psychologically challenged cousin and wasn’t scared away. “I could probably make time in my schedule for some private—”

A boy appeared in the hall, right in front of me, inches from where I’d been smacked by the door minutes earlier. I squealed and jumped back, my heart pounding so hard I could hear it echo in my ears. “What the hell?” I backed away, my gaze glued to the boy who’d appeared out of nowhere, kneeling, head bowed like he was praying, hands flat on his own thighs.

“Sophie, wait…” Luca came toward me, his focus shifting between me and the guy in the middle of the floor, like he was afraid to let either of us out of his sight. Me, and the guy who shouldn’t exist. Who hadn’t moved since he’d materialized, right in front of us.

How hard had that door hit me?

“You see him?” I demanded, eyes wide, pulse racing so fast my vision was starting to blur. “It’s not just me?” Maybe Kaylee wasn’t faking crazy after all. Maybe it was hereditary, and I was losing my mind too.

“I see him. He’s real.” Luca backed toward me, the box still tucked under his left arm, his right hand held out at his side, like he’d grab mine.

“Then why aren’t you freaked-out?” I couldn’t drag my gaze away from the guy-who-shouldn’t-be, still kneeling in black pants and a white button-up shirt like he was on his way to church. Or to wait tables. How did he get there? Why wasn’t he moving?

“I’m good under pressure,” Luca said, his voice soft and steady. “When I say go, we’re both going to run.” He knelt carefully and set the box down. “Okay?”