Before the Dawn by Kristal Lim

opened his mouth to speak, then closed it
again. He was silent for a minute before he finally said, "I don’t
know. This is all just—" He ran a hand through his hair again,
messing it up some more. "What about your friends?" he wondered.
"What do they remember about last night?"
    "Damn!" she exhaled. "I haven’t even called
any of them yet. I’ll talk to them later," Aline promised. She
hoped he hadn’t noticed the hurt expression on her face when he
didn’t say he believed her.
    He clutched the silver leaf lightly. He
obviously didn’t want to risk getting cut by its thin edges, too.
"Can I keep this for now?" he asked.
    "Sure," she shrugged. It didn’t really matter
to her one way or the other.
    "Okay." He nodded once and stood up. "I’m
gonna go. I think I’ll pass by the place where I woke up earlier.
See what I can find there, if there’s anything weird. I’ll talk to
you again in school tomorrow." His manner had now changed. His
nervousness was gone and he looked determined, like he was on a
mission.
    "Yeah. We’ll talk," she agreed. She watched
him as he walked away, and it struck her just then that there was
something incredibly familiar about him, that he had always seemed
familiar to her somehow. She suddenly wanted to call him back, but
what exactly was she going to say? She had a horrible premonition
that no matter how strange things were right now, they were going
to get even stranger and that she and Trevor were going to be in
the middle of some serious weirdness.
    She continued to obsess about the odd stuff
going on as she went back to her room, carefully avoiding her dad
for now, and started calling up her friends. The first person she
was able to reach was Sam, and her friend sounded kind of loopy
when she answered Aline’s call.
    "Hey, sorry," Sam said. "Just woke up a few
minutes ago and I’m still really sleepy."
    "You slept the whole day?"
    "Yeah. And my feet are killing me. I’m never
wearing heels again!" she swore. "That was some party last night,
huh?"
    "Yeah, it was," Aline agreed, feeling like a
liar as she said it. "What were the highlights for you? I kinda
lost track of everybody once the dancing started."
    "Well," Sam paused, and Aline thought that
she could almost hear her friend’s brain whirring, "uhm, I guess
the dancing was pretty good." She sounded uncertain though, then
she chuckled ruefully. "Oh, God. I think I must have drunk too much
last night ‘cause I don’t really remember much of what happened in
the Ballroom except the dancing. But I think I saw you with some
blond guy and the two of you were pretty much glued to each other
all night. Which was kinda weird. I thought you were going to talk
to Trevor. What happened to that plan?"
    "I—we didn’t really get the chance to talk."
For a moment, the face of Aline’s dance partner from last night
became clear in her mind but, before she could focus on it, the
image disappeared again. But the feeling of rightness, of
belonging, stayed with her and she suddenly wanted nothing more
than to see him again, whoever he was. "Hey, I’m gonna hang up
now," she told Sam. "I wanna talk to the others for a bit before I
try to go to sleep." Considering she had slept the day away, she
was fairly sure that it was actually going to be a long, sleepless
night for her instead. Sam then said her goodbyes and Aline
contacted Meran and Cassie next. They basically said the same
things—they slept most of the day, their feet were hurting, and
they couldn’t really remember what happened in the Ballroom—so the
previous night was still a big mystery. She then tried calling
Gracelyn a few times, but the other girl wasn’t answering her
phone, so Aline just left her a message instead.
    Then she lay back in bed and tried to make
some sense out of everything she knew for sure and everything that
didn’t quite match up.
    One, a silver leaf from a dream had
mysteriously shown up in her room and she had a bad wound that
proved just how