Defy the Dark (20 page)

I hit the ground first, and as I turned back to help the others I felt something tug at the cuff of my jeans. A hand tried to twist around my ankle and I kicked myself free.

Bart dragged himself from the shadow of the coaster, his fingers scraping raw against the concrete. His legs twisted at wrong angles and the teeth in his gaping mouth were broken and sharp. His moans sounded sickly and desperate.

I didn't hear Sarah come up behind me. One minute I was facing my former friend alone and the next she was there, a metal stanchion gripped in her hands and the sound of rage on her lips. She swung it at Bart, slamming it against him with a sickening crunch.

It was so unexpected I didn't know what to say. She brought the stanchion down again and again, screaming as the heavy bottom of it cut into Bart's head.

Wylie leapt next to her and pulled her away but she fought against him. Ultimately she ended up kneeling on the ground, panting and heaving, with Wylie towering behind her, holding her arms behind her back.

She looked up at me and I couldn't hide my horror. Bart had been our friend. Not too long ago he'd told us lewd jokes and thwapped me on the back of the head when I got distracted.

Now he was nothing. In the span of darkness everything had changed.

Wylie dragged Sarah back to standing and as a group we ran for the gates. It was easy to find his car in the lot, and the first thing Sarah did was lock the doors once we huddled inside. When the engine turned over, the radio began blasting music and that was the hardest part, remembering that things had been normal once and never would be again.

Wylie reached to mute the volume and Sarah snaked her hand behind the seat, looking for mine. We drove for Vista, each of us trapped in our own mind, wondering what we could cling to and what we'd have to jettison in this new and terrible world.

And then Sarah began to laugh. I don't know what prompted it, but it was perhaps the most beautiful sound I could have imagined. I joined in and so did Wylie, and we drove down the road, all of us practically crying from the force of our laughter.

We almost felt free.

Jon Skovron

There's Nowhere Else

Monday, February 1, 8:15 p.m.

U
sually I get the dreams when Mom's working the night shift at the hospital and Bill's between demolition jobs and has been drinking a lot. He passes out on the couch and starts to snore. God, he snores so loud. I can hear it all the way up in my room with the door closed. The only way I get any sleep is by putting on my headphones and turning up my music. I don't know why it's easier to fall asleep to loud music than Bill's snoring, but it is.

Those are the nights I have the dreams. They feel different from regular dreams. Mostly because I'm never
me
; I'm always someone else. Well, not even that really, because I don't do anything. I just watch through someone else's eyes while they live their regular lives. Sometimes it's someone cool, like a cop busting a drug dealer or a NASCAR driver in a race. And sometimes it's someone boring, like a guy sitting in an office, typing numbers into a spreadsheet all day.

When I first started to get the dreams, I didn't think about it much. Everybody has weird dreams. They don't mean anything. But last night, I was an old lady in a hospital bed. The smell was disgusting, all chemicals and BO. I couldn't get up because I could hardly breathe. My hands were twisted so bad I couldn't even lift a book. I had a tube attached to my wrinkly old stomach and piss was draining into a bag at the other end. My whole dream was just sitting there for hours watching game shows.

This morning when I woke up, I had this feeling that something about these dreams wasn't normal. I started to get worried. Like maybe something was wrong with my brain.

I decided to ask Ms. Randall, my English teacher, about it. She's my favorite teacher, and not just because she's hot. She knows I read a lot, so she lets me borrow books from her personal collection. But she doesn't make a big deal about it in front of the other students. I appreciate that. She also has a nice voice, especially when she's reading plays in class. Like for instance, we were reading
The Importance of Being Earnest
, and when she read Cecily, she did the English accent, and I closed my eyes and it was like I was right there in the story.

Anyway, I had her for the last class of the day and she was packing up to go home, putting papers into her laptop bag, getting her coat on, all that.

“Ms. Randall,” I said, “can I ask you a kinda personal question?”

“That depends on if it's polite or not, Sebastian,” she said. She's from Cleveland and she has this funny way of saying words with long
A
s in them. All up in her nose. Makes her sound real sharp.

“It's polite,” I said. “At least, I think it is. I wanted to ask, do you ever have dreams where you're somebody else?”

“Sebastian, I think we
all
sometimes dream of being someone better. Or maybe somewhere better.”

“No, I mean, like real dreams,” I said. “And not necessarily about being someone better. Just somebody else.”

She looked at me for a moment and pursed her lips, like she had to think carefully about what she wanted to say next. Finally, she said, “You enjoy those fantasy books I lend you, don't you?”

“Sure,” I said. “I know it's not great literature or anything. It's just escapism.”

“You say it like it's a bad thing. Like that makes it less important, less useful. But sometimes, it's the only thing that can keep you sane. There's nothing wrong with dreaming of another life. Especially if things aren't so great at home.”

“Right . . .” I was getting the feeling like we weren't exactly talking about the same thing.

“If you need anything,” she said, “someone to talk to about . . . things at home, my door is always open.”

“Okay, Ms. Randall. Thanks. I really appreciate that.”

As I walked out of the classroom, I wondered if maybe I didn't explain myself right. Or maybe I had just asked the wrong person.

Max is one of those big, red-faced guys who get pissed off real easy. But at least he hangs out with me. I can't be real picky. I'm not the most popular kid in school. Anyway, we were shooting some hoops in his driveway after school, and I asked him if he'd ever had dreams about being other people.

“Sabe,” he said and shook his head. “You're the weirdest guy I know.”

“Yeah,” I said. I couldn't really argue. I was the weirdest guy I knew, too. “So I guess that's a no, then?”

“Damn right I ain't never had no dream about being an old lady,” Max said. Then he punched me in the shoulder. “Now take your shot.”

I shot the ball and bricked it.

“You suck,” he said as we watched the ball go rolling into his patchy crabgrass yard. “Now, go get it.”

So tonight is one of those nights. Mom is working late, something that seems to happen more and more these days. And Bill is downstairs with the TV so loud it almost drowns out his snoring. Almost. I went down there to turn the TV off, and he woke up and yelled at me to turn it back on. So I did. But about a minute after I was back upstairs I could hear him snoring again.

I probably should have been doing my homework, but I couldn't really concentrate, so I ended up just putting on my headphones and picking up the paperback Ms. Randall gave me a few days ago. It's one of those thousand-page monsters with lots of warriors hacking each other to pieces and hooking up with babes in chain-mail bikinis. I never get tired of those kinds of stories.

I wonder if I'll have the dreams. And if I do, will it be someone cool? I hope so. Something to look forward to, anyway.

 

Tuesday, February 2, 2 p.m.

S
omething different happened last night. I had the dreams. And like I'd hoped, it
was
someone cool. A basketball player for the Cavs. A big Hawaiian guy who moved so fast and so strong, for the first time I understood why some people actually like to play sports. He was pounding down the court, slamming that ball to the floor over and over again, not missing a single dribble, not even thinking that there was a possibility he could. And that was all really great and I was having a lot of fun. Maybe too much fun. Because toward the end of the game, I had this crazy impulse to shoot the ball from half-court, just sling it, one armed. And I did it. I mean,
he
did it. The guy I was being in the dream threw it. And of course he missed and everybody on the team got mad and started yelling at me. I mean,
him
. “What's wrong with you, Kapono?!” and “What's your problem? You on drugs again, man?” and “What kind of juvenile stunt was that, you moron!” I wanted to run away and hide.

I started to wake up, but right before my eyes opened, I heard his voice in my head say:

“What the hell did I do
that
for?”

And then I was awake in my bedroom, sweating so bad my sheets were sticking to me. It was only about four in the morning, so it was still dark out. I turned on the ceiling fan and lay there and tried to fall asleep as the fan dried my sheets, turning them cool and stiff against my skin. I kept remembering how it felt to be that basketball player. The power, the freedom. I wanted so bad to fall asleep and go back there and be that guy again, and this time I wouldn't screw it up. But I couldn't fall back asleep.

About two hours later, right around sunrise, I heard the front door slam and I winced. Mom was home from work and she must have been pretty tired, since she forgot how much Bill hates it when people slam the door. A minute later I could hear him yelling and her yelling back and then some things breaking.

One time, about six months ago, I tried to step in when they fought. I thought I could stop him from hurting her. But I ended up in the hospital, which was worse than she usually got. After that, she made me promise not to get in the way. She could take a lot of things, she said, but not me getting hurt on her account.

So now I just try not to listen, wishing I was anywhere else. Yeah, maybe I did want to escape from my life sometimes. I wouldn't mind being a big warrior guy with a chain-mail babe. But then I thought about these dreams I've been having and I wondered if Ms. Randall was wrong. Maybe instead of keeping me sane, all this escapism was making me crazier.

Mom was hiding in her room when I got out of bed, which meant he'd probably left a mark on her face. It made me mad, but not in that way you see in the movies where the hero gets this tough look in his eye, makes a fist, and punches out the bad guy with some amazing strength. It just made me feel like I was going to throw up. And that's more or less how I felt all through my morning classes.

But if I thought
I
was in a bad mood, Max was even worse. All through lunch he just sat there, looking at his roast beef sandwich like he wanted it to turn back into a cow just so he could kill it again. I knew better than to ask him what was wrong, so I just kept my head down and ate my lunch.

“You see the game last night?” he asked after a while.

“No,” I said. “Who won?”

“Damn Heat, man!” he said, and slammed his fist on the table. “Because of goddamn Kapono!”

“What?” I said.

“Yeah, I know, right?” said Max. “The Cavs were in the lead just about the whole game. Then in the last minute, Kapono was heading for the hoop and he got this crazy look in his eye, then just chucked the ball from half-court. It bounced off the backboard, the Heat got the rebound, ran it back, and hit a three-pointer before the clock ran out and won the damn game.”

I stared at him for a couple seconds before I realized he was expecting me to say something.

“Wow,” I said.

“Yeah!” he said. “They should fire his ass, don't you think?”

“Um,” I said. Because I was pretty sure the poor guy shouldn't be fired for something that was my fault.

So now I'm sitting here in study hall, not sure if I'm going crazy or if I'm some damn Harry Potter wizard. And I don't even know who to ask about this. Not Ms. Randall, and definitely not Max. Especially if it's true I made his team lose.

Maybe there's nobody I can talk to.

 

Tuesday, February 2, 7:05 p.m.

Y
ou know, I'm never going to ask anyone about anything ever again. Well, okay, maybe not never. But I'm going to really think about it before I ask other people about weird stuff that happens to me.

When I got home from school, Mom was sitting at the kitchen table, staring at a nice bouquet of flowers in front of her. Our kitchen is small and it's all different shades of brown, so flowers always really stand out in there.

“Hey, Mom,” I said.

“Hi, Sebastian,” she said. She had a bruise on her left cheek, and her eye was a little swollen. It looked like it hurt pretty bad. I guess that was why she was drinking wine coolers at four o'clock. Even Bill usually waited until dinnertime to start drinking.

“How was school?” she asked.

“Okay,” I said as I grabbed a bag of pretzels from the pantry.

“Yeah? Then why did Ms. Randall just call me to tell me she's concerned about you? She asked how things are at home. Why'd she ask that?”

“I don't know.” I stuffed a handful of pretzels in my mouth. “I didn't tell her nothing.”

“Sebastian Younger, don't you talk with your mouth full.”

I swallowed real quick even though I hadn't finished chewing. It hurt a little.

“Sorry,” I said.

“So, Ms. Randall, she says you're having trouble sleeping? A lot of bad dreams or something?”

“I didn't tell her anything about bad dreams,” I said. I started to head for the stairs and the safety of my room.

“Stop,” she said.

I stopped.

“Sit,” she said.

I sat down at the kitchen table across from her.

“So,” she said, leaning in, still clutching her wine cooler, which made it tip a little. But it was mostly empty so it didn't spill. “What
did
you tell her?”

I thought about lying, honestly. But I just wanted to talk to someone about the crazy thoughts I was thinking right now, and if you can't talk to your mom, who can you talk to, right?

“Okay,” I said. “Now, I know how this sounds, but hear me out. I been having these . . . well, I thought they were dreams. I thought I was dreaming I was other people or something. And I thought that was kinda weird so I asked Ms. Randall about it.”

“Why Ms. Randall?”

I shrugged. “She was just the person who was there when I thought to ask someone, I guess.” I didn't want to hurt Mom's feelings that I would choose Ms. Randall over her. “So that's what I thought it was. Dreams. Then last night I was a basketball player for the Cavs and I accidentally made him mess up a shot. But today I found out that the
real
basketball player, the same guy, messed up in real life in the same way that I messed him up in my dream!”

She stared at me, and I could tell she wasn't getting it at all.

“Mom,” I said. “Somehow, while I'm sleeping, I'm, like, possessing other people's bodies or something! It's like . . . I don't know what.
Magic
, I guess.”

She was still looking at me and I couldn't really tell what she was thinking, partly because of the bruise on her face. But then she took a last swig of her wine cooler and put the bottle down. She rubbed her good eye with the heel of her hand. Then she looked at me again.

“Sabe, honey, I know things are hard right now,” she said. “And I promise things are going to get better someday.”

“Mom, I don't think you're really getting what I'm talking about. Maybe if—”

“No, Sabe. I get it. I'm not dumb. You wish you were somewhere else. Someone else. Can't say I blame you. But come on, it's time to grow up. It's time to—”