There he was standing as pure as daylight, his golden brown hair blowing gently in the breeze with his bright blue eyes boring into mine.
“Help me, sister.”
I jerked out of the dream as if I had had a seizure, with beads of sweat dripping down my face. Gasping for air, I tried to forget the image I had encountered in my dream, but it was all too real and nobody told me about it.
“Laura, are you up yet?” Dad called out.
I turned my head to the digital clock beside my bed that read, “6:35.” My blue eyes widened as I had realized that once again, I forgot to set my alarm for school the next day. “I’m not going to school today, Dad…I don’t feel good…”
Silence.
“All right,” was all he had managed to say; then he walked off to get my younger sister going.
“And why should I go back to school anyway?” I mumbled as I turned around to fall back asleep. “I’ve only been back in the States for four days, and already they expect me to jump into school like nothing has happened?”
Slowly my body began to relax again as thoughts of my year as an exchange student in Australia came back to me. I couldn’t help but smiling when I remembered the first time I went to their school. All the kids my age crowded around me, trying to get me to answer their questions about how “wonderful” the United States was, when all they really wanted was to hear me talk with my accent. It was their accent, originally, that got me dreaming of going to Australia in the first place. ‘Look what I gained,” I thought, ‘a whole new family across the world, a stronger and healthier body, and the knowledge of having an older brother.’
As for my stronger and healthier body, that was the result of the long, demanding hours of working on one of Australia’s cattle ranches, or as they called me, an Overlander, where I drove the cattle over long distances on my mount, Akivasha. And man, was that a tough brumby to train! I was glad I took a picture of that stallion before I left. He was a beautiful, blue roan, registered Australian Stock horse who had been abandoned and had run wile during a stampede in Cairns. He ran all the way down to where my “adoptive parents” were in the suburbs of Noosa. Working on their cattle farm had to be the best experience I’ve ever had, because after four years of dieting and exercising, I was thin without even concentrating on it.
It wasn’t through my “adoptive parents” that I had found out that I had an older brother, however. Whenever it was our time to move the livestock down from the mountains, we usually were not the only ones herding them down. Typically it was my new Pa, new older brother, who had already moved out of the house a long time ago but was still willing to help us out, and any other neighbors who felt like jumping on their mounts and going for a long outing. Pa had told me that they moved the herd only about three or four times a year, all depending on the weather and seasons.
Well, it must have been about the second time out when I had met my “long lost” brother. He came along on this trip with his mount, Dusty, and was of great help to us. The first time I saw him I found that I could not take my eyes off him through out the entire way up the mountains. By and by he had realized this and we got to talk. He was quite easy to talk to, seeing as we were the youngest of the cowhands, but I still couldn’t figure out what made him so interesting. I would ask him questions about living out there in Australia, and he’d ask me questions about the United States. He seemed like the quiet, shy type, but eventually it seemed that he was comfortable enough around me to talk about his life.
