"It was so real Liz." I repeated breathily as if she hadn't heard my proclomations the first ten times that I had shouted them. "It was like he was there," I paused,"it was like I was there." I stared into her eyes looking for some form of compassion.
Liz giggled,"Oh come on Abigal, even you can't be this stupid. It was a dream." she said trying to convince me again. Her words fell upon my deaf ears.
"Then where's my neckalce?" I demanded. "If it wasn't real, where is my necklace? You know I never take it off. Ever. You would have to use the jaws of life to get that thing off of me. So where is it?" I challenged.
She shrugged and rose from her position in my blue air chair. She walked slowly towards my dresser, absorbed in her image in the mirror,"Maybe," she pondered aloud as she played with a piece of her curly, red hair,"aliens abducted you and took you to Taylor Hanson's house..."
I rolled my eyes.
She turned to face me, her blue eyes shining as she continued,"I bet it's all some cosmic plot that revolves around you and Taylor and the vapor."
"It was fog." I mumbled picking at the pillowcase on my tattered old pillow.
Elizabeth laughed and flopped onto my bed causing me to bounce and she stared at me hard,"Fog shmog! This whole thing is ridiculous and I refuse to spend my time dribbling over some dream that you had about Taylor. I mean, do you really expect me to take this whole thing seriously?"
I looked away from her eyes which tried frantically to burn logic into me. I stared out of my window and through the jungle of green leaves in my backyard. The sunlight shimmered through the leaves with a silver glow before bouncing off of the bay across the street. I nodded to confirm my thoughts. It was real, I just know it.
"Tay, man give it a rest. Please I am begging you!" Isaac pleaded with his brother as he walked around the kitchen in the back of the recording studio.
"Ike, she was there! I swear to it!" Taylor argued refusing to just let this go. It was too weird.
Isaac slammed the door of the mini refrigerator and leaned against it with a Diet Coke in his hand. He popped the tab and took a gulp and then eyed his brother once again. He went and took a seat across the small table that took up almost all of the space in the room,"There was no girl in our house, Tay. There was no gray cloud hovering in our front hall! It's just unreasonable!"
Taylor shook his head,"No," he persisted,"no, she was there. I talked to her, I had a conversation with her. Her name is Abigal, Ike. How could I know that if she wasn't there?" he questioned.
"Abigal what?" Isaac inquired raising his eyebrows and sitting back in his chair.
Taylor thought for a moment,"I don't know, she didn't say." he replied quietly.
"She didn't say?" Isaac asked in disbelief,"Tay! Man! Listen to yourself! It's ludicrous, it's insanity!" he declared.
Taylor reached into his pocket and pulled out the necklace that he had found on the floor,"This is hers." he said smugly as he dropped it on the table and slid it across to Ike.
Isaac set down his can and picked it up. He studied the delicate cross carefully, a look of shock clearly painted across his face.
"Don't you see?" Taylor practically yelled,"She was real!"
Isaac placed the jewelry back on the table and leaned forward on his elbows. He clasped his hands together,"Okay, let's say she does exist. Hypethetically. How did she get to our house and what does it mean?" he asked.
For the first time in this conversation, Taylor was speechless.
I trudged home silently, listening to the sounds of twigs and small rocks crunching and scraping the ground beneath my feet. I quietly pondered all that was going on in my dream world.
Was it possible that God was actually giving me Taylor Hanson? Maybe I just dreamed it all because it was the last thing on my mind. But, no it couldn't be. Where was my necklace?
I couldn't push that thought out of my mind. My necklace never came off. Ever. It was the last present that I recieved from my grandfather before he passed on. I fondly called him Pop-Pop. He called me his "Little Sunflower". I smiled as I remembered that. I was so pleasant all the time when I was with him that I reminded him of a sunflower. They were always so pleasant to look at, he would say.
A tear formed in my eye as I remembered my grandfather. I reached up to grasp a hold of my necklace as I would under any other circumstance in which the memories became too clear to deal with. I waited for the familiar feel of it in my palm. I waited for my thumb to run over the coarse inscription on the back of it. I felt neither. I felt no comfort and no remembrance of the last Christmas spent with Pop-Pop. I wanted my necklace back.
Taylor sat quietly in the back of the van as the Hanson family slowly drove home from the recording studio. They hadn't been recording, they were meeting for a discussion about the tour dates for the Albertane Tour.
Taylor scowled at himself for being so finicky in the meeting and not paying more attention to such an important aspect in the career of the band. He should have been completely there for the meeting. He silently vowed to pay more attention next time.
In the back of his mind there was a little voice that lectured him relentlessly. It whispered to him about how it wasn't his fault that he couldn't get his mind off of Abigal. She was so mysterious. That dark hair and those bright eyes. They stayed perfectly clear in Taylor's mind. Haunting him everytime he blinked or closed his eyes. Forcing him to remember her.
He shook his head, trying to knock the picture of her face away. He stared out the window of the van and into the rain. He slipped his hand into his pocket and it knocked into the gold cross. There was something on it that wasn't as smooth as the rest of it, some sort of deformation.
He pulled the cross out of his pocket and secretly stared at it. He ran his hand over it to feel for the rough spot once again. There it was. He tilted it towards the window as the van passed a streetlight. To My Little Sunflower, Love Pop-Pop.
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