Book Five, Chapter 71: The Eye Candy
~Kimberly~
Before I opened my eyes, all I felt was a pang in my heart.
Something deeply, deeply painful was on the horizon. Whether it was it something in the future or the past, I didn't know. As my eyes began to focus, all I knew for sure was that this character I was playing was real once.
They weren’t always. Most of the time, it felt like they existed within the four corners of the script alone, but in this story and some others, I knew there was more to the character.
I could never explain it to Antoine or Riley, but sometimes I could just feel it—that this was a person, a person who had lived a life and whose story I was borrowing. I could feel the character I was playing in Stray Dawn, and her story was sad and painful and not over.
The others humored me the first few times I brought it up, but, not feeling it themselves, they didn't have much to say. I never really blamed them for that. Bobby was the only person on our team that had felt it and he mostly just remembered small details like his characters' favorite foods or nearby relatives.
I felt them under my skin, in my bones, no matter what anyone said.
I was Kimberly Madison, the girl with no real problems, just the Eye Candy.
Others at Camp Dyer had reported something similar, and the Atlas talked about it, but it never said anything concrete. So a lot of players just claimed it wasn’t real, that it was in my mind, that maybe I was sensing something in the script, or I was being scripted.