Going Lucid Read Online Free Page A

and looking like she was having a seizure.
    “You’re
laughing at her,” Malakha realized. Then she frowned and said it again. “You’re
laughing at her.”
    The
laughter only continued.
    “Stop
it. Stop laughing. Stop laughing at her,” Malakha said, volume increasing. When
the laughing continued, Malakha groaned loudly and then screamed, “Damn it.
Leave her alone! Stop laughing at her.”
    The
laughter stopped, and Malakha looked around again to see if she could tell
where it had been coming from, but found nothing. Then she noticed that
everything in the room had stopped. The priest had stopped his exorcism. The
woman’s cries had quieted. And everyone in the room was looking at her.
    Malakha
looked back at them in confusion at first, and then it dawned on her.
    “You
all… you all didn’t hear the laughing.”
    John
answered her first, after he exchanged a look with Father Thomas and the
priest.
    “What
laughing?”
    Malakha
stared at them, wide-eyed at first and then her eyes narrowed as she huffed,
turned on her heel, and said, “This is bullshit. I’m done.”
    With
that, Malakha stomped out of the room, not caring that Father Thomas was
calling her back, not caring that she would probably be in more trouble. She
didn’t care at all. All she knew now was that she was going to that rave.

Chapter Three
    The Rave

 
    Malakha stormed
down the hall, ignoring the fact that if she was caught right then, she’d
probably be accused of causing trouble. They wouldn’t believe that she was
actually coming back from her punishment. No one believed anything she said.
Malakha was starting not to believe herself. Hearing the piano in the music
room was one thing, but hearing laughter that no one else could was something
else entirely. It concerned her to say the least.
    Still,
the fact that she heard laughter wasn’t what bothered her the most. The fact
that someone was laughing at all was the problem. While she didn’t believe in
exorcisms, she didn’t find it remotely funny that someone else found humor in
the girl’s trauma as she was supposedly exorcised.
    Malakha
was so focused on what she had witnessed earlier that she didn’t realize she
had made it back to the school part of the building until she was about to take
the stairs up to her room. She paused on the steps. If she went back to her
room, then Sabrina would not only want to know what happened, something Malakha
didn’t want to talk about, but she would also try to convince her not to go to
the rave. While on any normal day, Malakha wasn’t easily persuaded by Sabrina’s
arguments, she felt a little too unnerved to argue with her friend. And Malakha
really wanted to go to that rave. Malakha needed to go to that rave.
    Decision
made, Malakha looked at the time on her phone, a simple old-fashioned flip-up
phone that the school distributed to them. 8:45 flashed at her. Tucking the
phone in her pocket, she took her foot off the first step and started down the
halls, heading in the direction of the courtyard. As she got closer to her
destination, the halls slimmed. Then she began to pass walls with large windows
that looked out into the courtyard.
    It
wasn’t too late, so the there were no hall monitors yet to catch her sneaking
out. It would be sneaking back in that would be the problem and even then it
would only be slightly harder. She would just wait until about six o’clock in
the morning when it wouldn’t be too odd to see a student up and about in the
halls headed to the dining hall for an early breakfast.
    Malakha
crossed the courtyard and then went through the arched entryway that led to a
shorter hall with stone walls and damp concrete floors. The hall led to the
garden, which was bordered by large hedges on the side, with only one official
exit at the end, usually guarded by one of the many nuns or monks that
volunteered at the school. However, there was another, unofficial exit; a hole
through the hedges that would free her from