Dream Boy (15 page)

It took me a second to realize that a hand really
was
on my shoulder. Two hands. I was lying facedown on something wet and hard. I pushed myself upward and shifted into a sitting position. Martin was kneeling beside me on the slick, rocky edge of the river. Where I fell, what, a year ago? I was not standing on a roof, looking at stars. Not back in the gray—but
back
.

“Are you hurt?”

Dazed, yes. Confused, yes. Hurt? I felt my forehead: a bit sore near my left temple, but nothing bad. “No, not hurt.”

“You look a little weird.”

“Thanks a lot.” I might have just had the strangest, most mind-blowing experience of my life, but I was still a girl. I smoothed my hair.

“How did I get here?” I asked him. I didn’t know how else to put it.

Martin looked confused. “We were in the car,” he said, “and you took off and you slipped, and then I helped you up.”

“And that was when?”

“Just now.”

“The
whole
thing
was just now?” I asked.

“What whole thing?”

“It took how long, from when we left the car to right here?”

“Um, maybe a couple of minutes.”

“So it’s still tonight?”

“What are you getting at, Annabelle?”

I pressed my palm to my temple. “It just seemed longer. Much longer. Eons.” I pushed myself up. “I was stuck in a sea of gray,” I said. “Like your waiting room. And then I was in a cabin and on a roof…” My legs wobbled as I stood, and I put my hand on Martin’s shoulder to steady myself. The world tilted, but I stayed standing.

“A sea of gray.” He put an arm around my waist to steady me, then lowered his voice, like we were talking in class. “You were there?” Now Martin was the one looking weird.

“That’s impossible,” he went on. “You couldn’t have been there. No one can go between worlds like that. No one.”

“You did,” I said.

“That’s different,” he said. “I am—
I
was
—a dream. I belonged there. You’re…”

“I’m what?”

“You’re not.” He said it softly.

I shook my head to try to clear it.

Finally, Martin spoke. “This is where I woke up, you know, when I first arrived. Here.” He pointed to the muddy ground.

“And that little house,” he said. “It was by the lake, in that dream. Our dream. Maybe it’s the same place.”

I gave him my “huh?” face, which lately had pretty much become my expression of default. I could just make out the small, brick pump house in the dim light. Then I looked back into the even dimmer memory of my dream, and I saw it in my mind, there on the edge of that lake—the same little house perched like a fat duck on the bank.

“You see?” Martin went on. “It was
there
in the dream. And it’s
here
in real life. Both. So this,” he spread out his arms, indicating the river, the bank, everything around us, “this could be the real-world version of that dream lake. Or the lake was the dreamworld version of this. They intersect. So when you slipped, maybe you just—”

“—slipped into dreams,” I finished.

He nodded.

“But we’ve been here before.” I could still feel the shimmer of our first mind-blowing real-world kiss. “If there’s an intersection, why didn’t we both get whisked into la-la-land then?”

Martin tugged his ear. “Maybe because we were too close together? Or maybe because it wasn’t the
exact
spot? Or maybe you weren’t looking to get away?”

Or
maybe
I
wasn’t wearing striped socks and hadn’t had tacos for dinner
, I thought.

I took a step; my knees buckled and Martin righted me. “I need to go somewhere I can think,” I said. But I didn’t want to go back to the car. I wanted to be out in the air. “I’m just going to walk home. You want to come with?”

“Are you sure you’re up to it?” Martin asked.

I took a few steps in the direction of the road. “Just tired.”

“About that.” Martin came up beside me, taking my arm in his as we walked—but not in the romantic, strolling-in-the-park way; it was more a helping-the-decrepit-old-lady kind of thing. “I’m not sure sleep is such a good idea.”

I half-laughed, half-yawned. “Yeah, well, it’s something we humans tend to do.”

“There’s no way you could make yourself stay awake?”

“I guess with enough caffeine, I could put it off for a while. But no, it’s not like I can just stay awake forever. Bodies don’t work that way. In some places keeping people awake is used for torture.” Will probably could have given us a list of the countries.

Martin knocked a pebble with the side of his foot as he walked. “I doubt it would make a difference anyway. I mean, she’s probably already here, right?”

“I thought you were talking
if. If
she somehow gets here,” I said. “And now you think she’s already here?”

“Well, I can’t know for sure. It’s just you said you touched the girl in the dream, the way you touched me—”

“I didn’t kiss—”

“No, not kiss. But you
touched
her, and you must have been feeling something, right? A really strong emotion.”

“Yeah but—”

“Fear. Love. They’re both powerful in their own way,” Martin went on. “I’ve been trying to figure it out ever since I got here. Why me? How you did it. I’m pretty sure it has something to do with the way you touched me. I could feel your whole heart in your kiss, Annabelle. And I think that emotion, that touch, is what got me here.”

I’d tried too many times to tell him it wasn’t me. This time, I was too tired to argue. Slower now, Martin and I started walking again toward my house.

“So now what?” I said. It was late and I felt fatigue press against the back of my eyes.

“Get some sleep if you have to. Just don’t dream.”

“But you said she probably isn’t even in my dream. You said she’s probably already
here
.”

“We can’t know for sure, right? Just to be safe.” He rubbed his palm over his mouth, the poker tell again. Even he didn’t buy that “safe” was a viable option.

“Listen, why don’t you stay with me tonight?” He took my cold hands and rubbed them in his. “I’ll keep watch.”

“That’d be nice,” I said. “But if we made it through the night, I’d be facing another kind of nightmare with my mother in the morning.”

“Your mother,” he said. “Sleep with her. I’ll watch the house.”

He pulled me in, but I didn’t lose myself in his kiss. “We’ll figure it out,” he said.

More than anything, I wanted to believe him.

In the basement, I rifled through our old camping gear, grabbed my sleeping bag, and dragged it up the stairs to the darkness of the living room. My mother was still on the couch, the television casting a glow that moved the shadows around the room.

“Mom?” I said.

She opened her eyes, not all the way, just part.

“Hey, Pumpkin,” she said. “You have a bad dream?”

“Yeah. Can I rest down here?”

“Of course, baby,” she said.

I made myself a cup of instant coffee, rolled out my sleeping bag next to the couch, and watched movie after movie. Halfway through
To
Catch
a
Thief
my mother’s arm dropped so that she was touching my shoulder blade. With her hand on my back, I fell asleep.

There’s a point in a bad dream when you have to wake up; your body jerks, and your eyelids fly open, like a door that’s been kicked. For me that point came at 4:43 a.m., according to the mantel clock. I wasn’t sure where I was just before that moment, but I knew I was alone. I’d been looking for the little girl all night, dreading, fearing—but I’d been stood up. Even without her, though, there’d been plenty of horrors. Cynthia Rêve would have had a field day: my mother drowning, my father and his bride holding hands as they jumped off the edge of a mountain, Nick walking out in front of a bus. I must have cried out at that last one because my mother stirred as I woke.

“Honey?”

It was still dark, but something about the glow of the darkness made it feel closer to morning.

“Another dream?” she asked.

I found my voice. “Yeah.”

Her hand reached down to touch my forehead. My hair was wet with sweat.

“You want to tell me about it?” she asked.

“No thanks,” I said.

She smiled through the darkness. “When you were little and I asked you what you dreamed, you’d never tell me, either,” she said. “You were always scared that I’d be scared, too.”

Tonight
you
would
be,
I thought.

“You were a very brave four-year-old,” she said. “But you didn’t have to be.” She rubbed her eyes and left her fingers there. “Do you think you can dream about something good now?”

There were still a couple hours before morning. “I can try.”

“Martin?” she suggested, as her fingers moved away. “Homecoming?”

“Yeah,” I said softly. Martin and homecoming. Both had been at the top of my list. Now my list pretty much consisted of “staying alive.”

“To be a teenager again,” my mother said. “That’s what I’ll dream about.”

“It’s not all it’s cracked up to be,” I told her.

“Yes, well,” she said. “Neither is getting old.”

We lay there, together in the darkness, but I didn’t sleep. When the sun rose, I watched the sky turn from black to gray to an impossibly cheerful shade of blue.

“French toast?” my mother asked when she got up.

For some reason, just the thought of it made me want to cry. “Cereal’s okay,” I said. “I’m not really that hungry.”

We went to the kitchen. I ate a few bites of Rice Krispies and let the rest disintegrate into a soggy mess as I called Martin.

“Hi,” I said.

“I’ve been waiting for you to call. I’m outside.”

“Where?”

“In front of your house.” I looked out the window and there he was, waving from the sidewalk. It could have been a week ago, his bike at his feet. Only, it wasn’t.

On my front lawn, Martin caught me in a hug.

“Were you out here all night?” I asked.

“I said I’d be.”

I touched his hand, warmer than the air outside. “Thanks.”

“I didn’t see her,” he said. “What about you? I mean, when you slept?”

I shook my head. “Not that I remember.”

His voice was flat. “Did you, you know…
do
it
at all?”

It sounded like he was asking me if I had sex or picked my nose or something.

“I dreamed. It was bad. My family was basically decimated. But no crazy little girls.” I bit my lip. “I’m sorry, Martin. I tried not to.”

“You couldn’t help it,” he said. “I should have snuck in and prodded you with a stick or something.”

“That’s romantic.” I stretched my back, catlike. “So, what do we do next?”

“Well, I’m thinking first thing is to find out if anyone else has
seen
her. It might give us some idea about what we’re up against. We’ll track down the other dreamers. Ask if they’ve had any nightmares. I mean, anyone might have seen her, right?” He shrugged, and a curl of his hair slipped down on his forehead like an exaggerated comma. “We should talk to some of the other dreams, too. They might have known her
before.
If so, they could have some ideas. And we need to do it today. Before the dance.”

“Should we even go?” I said. “I mean, a dance doesn’t seem very important anymore, does it?” It knew it was stupid, but I still wanted to. The nightmare was dominating my sleeping life. I didn’t want her to have power over my waking life, too.

In a flash, I saw a freeze-frame image of the girl twirling in her white dress, streamers littering a ballroom floor. It was like something I’d seen in a dream.

No. It
was
something I’d seen in a dream.

“Martin.” I clutched his elbow. “She’ll be there. At the dance.”

His bright eyes darkened. “How can you be so sure?”

“I dreamed it. But just a sliver of a dream. I don’t think it was something she wanted me to see. She was twirling, singing something. It was so quick. I don’t remember.”

“Okay,” he said, but his voice said anything but okay. “This is good, right? Is there anything else you remember from your dreams with her? Have you told me everything?”

Snakes? Check.

Nasty doll? Check.

Freaky girl hunting me down for creepy-time games? Check.

But there was one thing. “I keep thinking about the forest where I saw the girl in that last dream. Like it’s important.”

“What about it?”

“I don’t know. It was different in my dream.”

“You came to a clearing and saw the girl—”

“On a stump!” The words stumbled over each other, my mind snapping like castanets. “In the dream, in the dream where the stump was…was a tree, in real life. That crazy tree we saw in the woods! Martin!”

“Annabelle!” he echoed, clearly lost.

“I went camping with Serena this summer, and we buried some mice under this huge sprawly tree that had all these colored bottles tied to the branches!”

Martin stared at me as if a second head had just sprouted from my shoulders. “Why were you burying mice?”

“Not important! What’s important is the tree. Martin, the tree! My mind has been going back to that spot. And now I know! I just…” I sputtered out like a sparkler, the cheap kind. “I just don’t know why.”

Martin took out his phone. “A tree with bottles tied to it, right?” he asked.

I nodded. He typed.

“Okay. Bottle tree. It says here that a bottle tree is an old folk tradition. It’s supposed to protect against evil spirits. The empty glass bottles would capture spirits at night. Then you’d cork the bottles and toss them into the river.”

“Evil spirits,” I said. “Do you think that includes evil dreams?”

When Will told me to make an “unconscious effort” to figure out what I needed to do, maybe he wasn’t just blowing smoke. Maybe this is what he meant. My unconscious had tried to show me the tree by taking me back to that place. But in the dream, the tree wasn’t a tree; it was a stump. A stump where the little girl sat. Like she had tried to hide it, to cut it down.

But she hadn’t cut it down. I had found it.

“Okay,” I said. “The tree is up on Black Beak, where Serena is camping this weekend. We have to get the nightmare to those woods.”

Martin nodded. “She’ll be at the dance, like you said. It’s a perfect place for a nightmare. They feed off angst, drama. All that high emotion in one spot, it’s like a dream come true for her.”

“Ironic.” I snorted.
So
maybe
I
did
snort.

“So we find her at the dance and we lure her to the tree.”

“With what?” I asked.

“With you.”

Oh.
Oh.
Right. It was
me
the girl wanted. For whatever reason.

No more hiding in my room. Like she couldn’t find me there anyway. Time to put my big-girl pants on—or my big pink dress on, whichever came first—and do what needed to be done.