The Vault of Dreamers (11 page)

“She doesn’t even like the cameras, Bones,” Linus said.

The weasel guy, Bones, laughed softly. “They all like the cameras, idiot, or they
wouldn’t come. What did she say when you kissed her?”

“Let me check my notes and get back to you,” Linus said.

“So funny. Truth be told, the visuals were tough with the rain,” Bones went on. “I
only had four decent camera angles to choose from, and I didn’t want to spin between
them too often. Pacing’s everything, especially when you’re respecting an intimate
moment. I had to choose between Otis’s wide shot from the lookout tower and a button
close-up from behind her head. The close-up had no lips, so I went with Otis’s. The
man’s an ace for framing it up, but I could have killed him for not going in closer.”

“Incidentally, I don’t give a crap about your angles,” Linus said.

“You know, I should have mic-ed you,” said Bones. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

“Possibly because I’d beat your brains in before I’d ever let you mic me,” Linus said.

Their voices were moving farther away. I itched to take a look and see what the weasel
guy looked like. I didn’t dare move, though.

“What if Berg insisted on it?” Bones said. “I’m surprised he didn’t. Maybe next time.
I’ll talk to him.”

Next time? Dean Berg? A chill spread over my skin. If Dean Berg could make Linus wear
a microphone, what else could he make Linus do? He couldn’t have sent Linus to kiss
me, or to meet me in the first place. No. Of course not. Linus was on staff, but that
didn’t make him a puppet. I was way too suspicious.

I kept listening to the quiet movement of furniture, hoping to hear Linus’s voice
again. Once I heard my techie Bones again, speaking to Orly, and once, later, I heard
steps coming near that I thought might be Linus’s. I expected he might say something.
My ears strained for a clue to where he was, and how near. I opened my mouth slightly
to take in extra air, and a faint tingling in my lips reminded me of how it had felt
when we’d kissed.

It was a strange kind of suspense, not being able to open my eyes, and not knowing
if I was imagining that he was there.

“That’s enough, now, Pitts,” Orly said clearly from the other end of the room. “We’ve
got the boys’ dorm to do still.”

I felt a faint tremor, as if a hand was set on the end of my sleep shell, and then
I heard footsteps retreating. A minute later, the lights went out again. I took a
deep breath and rolled over to my other side, waiting forever for my pulse to calm.

It was almost as if Linus had known I could open my eyes. As if he’d dared me.

I needed to get some solid sleep or I’d be dead the next day. I let myself go, willing
my muscles to unclench. I tried to recapture the feeling I usually got from my sleeping
pill, the way a warm, easy calm soothed through my veins, wicking through my neck
and shoulders, relaxing my hips and knees. My mind slowed, my fingers went limp, and
the brown mist slipped gently in.

10

FANS

A TRACE OF
dream clung to me as I surfaced into Tuesday morning, a shadow twin who stretched
out from my feet, farther and farther ahead of me along the railroad tracks, until
she detached and slipped away.

Languorously, I smiled and rolled over. It was the first hint of a dream I’d had since
I’d come to the Forge School, and I loved remembering dreams. I’d missed them while
I was on the pills.

The bells from the clock tower were still tolling six as I opened my eyes on a transformed
room. Half the sleep shells were gone, and each of us had been given a straight-backed
chair, a small bedside table, and a braided oval rug. For the first time, the dorm
room felt, if not quite homey, at least less oppressive. Best of all, the clouds outside
had finally cleared.

My sleep shell had stayed at the end of the room, but Janice’s had been shifted next
to mine in the line. She was leaning on the edge of her sleep shell, running her bare
toes over her rug. Sunlight dropped in the windows around her, bouncing off her blue
quilt and bright hair.

“This is a vast improvement,” she said.

I eased over to the nearest window and with a finger on the glass, I located the pale
gray façade of the dean’s tower. It was the most modern building on campus, morphing
out of an older, shorter building. I counted up five stories to the row of windows
where Linus had said my techie worked, and I wished I could see inside.

“Did you ever watch one of those Forge specials about the people who work behind the
scenes?” I asked.

“Sure,” she said. “With the tunnels and stuff?”

“I’d like to get in the dean’s tower sometime,” I said.

“I’d rather go to Forgetown. I heard last year, after the seniors graduated, they
all went into town and partied with the techies.” She cupped her hand in a princess
wave. “Hello to you, techie,” she said, and laughed.

“He’s probably choking on his coffee right now,” I said.

“I think of mine as a her,” she said. “I don’t know why. She’s very kindly and soulful.”

I thought of mine as an arrogant weasel named Bones.

The upbeat voices of the other girls made a nice change from the stress of the day
before. Paige was doing ballerina stretches between her rug and a chair, extra wide
splits that hurt me to look at her. Janice began getting dressed. I examined my arms
for new marks, and found none. It was a relief.

Maybe I was going to be okay here now. I could hope.

*   *   *

I saw Linus in the kitchen when I went through the cafeteria line, but he was busy
with the meat slicer, and it wasn’t the right time to flag him down just to say hello.
He was wearing his eye patch again, and I wondered how much sleep he’d gotten the
night before. The blip rank board in the dining room had been reconfigured for the
new total number of students in the school, fifty in each class of tenth-, eleventh-,
and twelfth-graders, and it was satisfying to see myself listed there even though
I was still number 50, the new last rank for our grade.

After breakfast, when I walked into Media Convergence class, a number of the usual
students were gone, cut from the show, and others had been switched in. Burnham sat
at a desk near the back, next to Henrik, and after a moment’s hesitation, I took a
seat beside Janice, near the front.

She put a hair binder in her mouth and reached up with both hands to twist her blond
hair into a sloppy bun. “Kill me now,” she said, wrapping the binder in place. “I
ran into this guy from acting? He hears we’re doing the coolest gender flip thing.
I want to be Hamlet.”

While she chatted, a few other students came in, and then Mr. DeCoster appeared carrying
a metal coffee mug. He paused at the door to speak to his earphone, and Paige edged
in around him.

“Okay, everybody,” Mr. DeCoster said. He pointed to a couple of big tables that were
pushed together. “Circle up the chairs around here. Time to talk.”

We all scooted our swivel chairs toward the tables, like swarming racer bugs. I ended
up with Janice on my right, and Burnham next to her. Mr. DeCoster pulled his chair
up across from me and slid a shallow cardboard box onto the table. Inside was a jumble
of seashells, twigs, and stones. Today Mr. DeCoster wore a silver and turquoise bolo
tie over a black shirt, and he looked a lot cooler than usual.

“First of all, let me congratulate you all on making the fifty cuts,” he said. “I
couldn’t be happier you’re still here. We’ve combined a couple sections to adjust
for the cuts, and you’ll notice a few other changes, too.” He gave the box a little
shake. “Take one and please introduce yourself, with your art.”

Paige, on his right, selected a dainty, pearly shell shaped like a spiral, and told
us she was from Houston and danced. Henrik, it turned out, was a percussionist from
Berlin, Germany. The group also included a playwright, a painter, a singer, and half
a dozen others. The singer, Mae, asked if Mr. DeCoster knew anything about Ellen,
and he reported that Ellen was home with her family. I glanced at Janice, who gave
me a sad little smile. On my turn, I chose a small, black stone and kept it short:
Doli, Arizona. Filmmaker.

When Burnham introduced himself—Atlanta, Interactive Media and Game Development—he
smiled at everyone else except me, and I got an uneasy feeling that something was
wrong.

After introductions, Mr. DeCoster spoke up in a louder voice. “Up until now, we’ve
focused on learning specific, hands-on editing skills,” he said. “They had value for
everyone, whether they were staying on the show or getting cut. Now it’s time for
a different focus. Your next assignment is to create something that’s bigger than
you are. Something at which you’ll fail.”

I waited for him to elaborate, but he reached for his coffee and said nothing more.
Students started looking around the table.

“Like save the world?” Henrik said, laughing.

“That would work,” Mr. DeCoster said.

Paige fiddled with her shell. “Dance can save the world.”

“You could fail at that,” Henrik said.

“Or not, you sad little drummer,” Paige said.

Burnham pointed his finger at Henrik and smiled. “Burn.”

“The answer is yes, your project can be dance,” Mr. DeCoster said.

“How about a computer game?” Burnham said.

“Fine,” Mr. DeCoster said.

“Are you serious? He gets to play a game?” Henrik asked.

“Burnham designs games,” Mr. DeCoster said. “It’s not the same as playing them.”

“I fail at it a lot, too,” Burnham said. “In fact, most of the time.”

Mr. DeCoster swept his attention around the table. “This is a good time for experiments
that don’t work. For fun. For the things you used to dream up when you were a kid
on a playground or in a fort under a chair. Imagine anything and try to make it happen.”

I’d never had an assignment like this before. Not even close.

“What materials can we use?” Janice asked.

“Anything you can find or borrow,” Mr. DeCoster said. “The shop is full of gear: swords,
black lights, costumes, explosives, paints, paper, cameras, you name it.”

“Explosives? Seriously?” Paige said.

“You hear your voice there?” Mr. DeCoster said. “That’s a good starting point.”

The others laughed again. I was starting to like Mr. DeCoster.

“Can we work in teams?” Henrik asked.

“You can do whatever you want, as long as you fail,” Mr. DeCoster said. “The more
spectacularly, the better.”

“Do we have any deadlines?” the painter Harry asked.

“Your failure is due at the end of the marking period, on October thirty-first,” Mr.
DeCoster said. “I want to see a portfolio of progress every Friday, and by portfolio,
I mean whatever pieces of work or disasters you have to show at that point.”

I looked down at the smooth, black stone I’d chosen, and rubbed its cool surface with
my thumb. I didn’t even know how to start thinking about this assignment.

“How about you, Rosie? Any questions?” Mr. DeCoster asked.

I glanced up. “Do we keep these?” I asked.

“You can. Why did you choose yours?” Mr. DeCoster replied.

“It’s pretty,” I said. “It makes me think of the sea.”

He smiled. “Have you been there?”

“No,” I said. “Not yet. I want to someday.”

“How about the rest of you?” Mr. DeCoster asked. “Why’d you pick your objects?”

“My parents have a summer place on Nantucket,” Janice said. “We go there every year.”
She’d chosen a speckled shell, I noticed.

The others talked on. Burnham had another black stone, much like my own, though the
hue of it seemed different against his dark fingers. I glanced up to find him regarding
me steadily through his glasses, and an odd, slow trickle ran through me, like I was
taking a long swallow of cool water. He couldn’t be mad at me, I reasoned. Something
else was going on. He tapped his stone once lightly on the table and sat back, unsmiling,
still watching me.
What?
I thought, but his gaze shifted to his stone, and he turned it over on the table.

“This box may not seem related to your project, but it is,” Mr. DeCoster said. “We’re
always choosing things, every minute—how we spend our time, what we think about, what
object we pick out of a box. Forge students are incredibly focused, driven people.
Each time we choose, however, we’re also choosing to reject or neglect something else.”

“Like viewers choosing who to watch,” Henrik said, and the others laughed.

“Take the next leap with me, please,” Mr. DeCoster said. “Making choices is natural.
It’s human. Over a lifetime of choosing, we train our minds to select and focus, and
we think of that as a strength. But what happens when you try to think differently?
To dream?” He gave the box a little shake and I saw half a dozen items had been left
inside. “Your customary thinking patterns can become a trap. Creativity isn’t rigid.”

“You want us to think outside the box, obviously,” Paige said.

“That phrase itself is a box,” Mr. DeCoster said. “Think how tidy it is, how cliché.
I want you to see where the edges of your box are, or redefine the box itself. What
if instead I said think outside the room? Think outside the school?”

Think outside the solar system
, I thought. Closing my eyes, I began to see stars, to feel the cool pull of the purple
sky that floated between them. The air began to thin, the molecules to separate, and
I expanded my lungs to fill them while I still could. This could work for me.

“This assignment is a test, isn’t it?” Burnham said.

I opened my eyes, surprised.

“How do you mean?” Mr. DeCoster said.

“You’re testing us to see who’s most creative,” Burnham said.

Mr. DeCoster smiled. “So? This is an art school, after all. Creativity’s part of the
curriculum.”

“It’s a reality show, too,” Burnham said. “We’re competing with each other for our
blip ranks and banner ads. What’s your payoff? If our blip ranks go higher than the
ranks for some other class, do you get some kind of kickback?”