Dream Boy (6 page)

The
little
girl
is
lost. She has been left here, and I am trying to find her, to lead her back home.

Beside
the
lake, the ground is soft, but full of bony rocks that tilt under each step.

I
hear
movement—something shifting in a line of trees beside me.

“Hello?” I don’t know her name.

A
twig
snaps. In a rush, two black birds flap off a branch and disappear into the darkening sky.

It
is
growing
cold. I need to find the girl.

“Hello?” I call again.

“…Hssss…” A moistness gargles in the mud below me.

I
look
down, confused, as a thick brown snake, newly hatched, ripples from the clay between my feet.

I
stumble
back, away from the snake, alarms blaring in my head.

Across
from
me, maybe six feet away, a small figure shuffles out from behind a tree.

The
little
girl
from
my
dream
about
Josh. The one abandoned on the shore.

Her
face
is
shadowed, but I know it is her in that white tea-party dress.

“Don’t look,” I say, hoping the snake won’t spook her. “Hold still.”

But
the
girl
walks
toward
me—her hands over her face, as if we’re playing hide-and-seek, and she’s It.

She
counts
with
each
step. “One. Two. Three…”

At
“Four,” she raises her foot over the snake. “Watch out!” I yell, but as if she hasn’t heard me, she sets her foot down. The snake flexes, spiraling itself around the girl’s ankle and up her calf. It rubs its head against the girl’s leg with the purr of an eager cat.

The
girl
bends
down, curious.

“No! Get back!”

She
drops
her
hands
from
her
face, and the snake stretches up and wraps itself around her head. She stands, the snake masking her eyes like a blindfold.

I
want
to
move
toward
her, but I have no control of my limbs. The ground between us becomes a river of snakes. Some are brown, some black, some gray with bands around their necks. The girl keeps walking, oblivious.

“Stop!” I shout. But again, she doesn’t hear. I flounder backward, sinking into the mucky border between lake and land. A large black snake slithers toward my feet.

I’ve never been the type to freak out over nightmares. I figured dreams were just dreams—my mind’s way of talking to itself. If the dream was frightening, well then no big deal; I simply had something frightening that I needed to say.

But now I knew how real dreams could become.

So yeah, if you call running into my mom’s room at the break of dawn and catapulting myself onto her bed “freaking out,” then I guess you might say I freaked out.

Luckily, my mom, who had been up late all week, was groggy enough that she just mumbled, “Okay?” and flopped over, mid-snore.

I had plenty of time to stare at the beige ceiling and contemplate life, the universe, and the relative likelihood of a bunch of snakes slithering up the side of the bed and carting me away to my doom. On one hand, it seemed pretty far-fetched. On the other hand, so did Martin.

In the end, though, it was Martin, not a passel of snakes, who carted me away. And not to my doom, unless an overload of butter and sugar could be considered instruments of the apocalypse. I thought we’d be walking or riding bikes downtown, but Martin showed up in a shiny red sports car, like something Mac Z would drive. It had soft leather seats and smelled like cinnamon, and for once instead of overthinking (
Where’d it come from? Why cinnamon?
), I hopped in and enjoyed the ride.

Our lunch date turned out to be breakfast—not breakfast time, but breakfast food—because that’s what he wanted to eat. I guess he liked my mom’s cooking.

“You need some pancakes to go with that syrup?” I asked, handing him a napkin.

“That’s a joke, right?”

We were sitting in an orange vinyl booth at the MELET SHOPPE, which would have been OMELET SHOPPE, except some drunk hunter had shot out the O.

“It’s a joke,” I agreed. “What I mean is: that’s a LOT of syrup.” I looked at the pool of liquid cascading off the edges of his plate.

Martin smacked his lips in a way that wasn’t gross, like if an old person did it.

I smiled. “So I take it you didn’t eat, you know, before?”

“Not much,” he said. “In fact, I’m not sure I even
have
to eat yet. I think my body’s still getting used to…being a body.”

He raised a wedge of pancakes on his fork and crammed it in his mouth. “It’s surprising how infrequently people dream about food. Food causes dreams. Like pizza. But people don’t dream about actually eating it. Except grapes. A lot of people dream about eating grapes.”

“Oh.” I made a mental note to look up grapes in my dream app, but I was starting to think Cynthia Rêve was out of her league.

“Grapes and strawberries,” Martin continued. “Or maybe it was just my people.”

“Your people?”

“My dreamers. Like you.”

I tried to take this in. “So I’m
one
of your ‘dreamers’?”

“Well, sure.” He looked at me, tilting his head in that high-frequency-dog-whistle way.

“I don’t know why, but I thought you were, oh, you know.” I was thinking
mine
, but what I said was, “I thought you were new.”

Martin put down his fork and extended his hands, flipping them back and forth, back and forth, examining them. “I am,” he said.

I took his two outstretched hands and held them across the table. Together we made a little slanted roof for his pancakes. It seemed like a romantic gesture, but really his hand-flipping had started to bug me. “Tell me about the others.”

“There’s not much to say. They were just people.”

“Like girl-people?”

“Some.”

“And that means what? Dozens? Hundreds? Thousands?” There must have been an edge to my voice, because Martin eyed the exit and shifted in his chair.

“More than a hundred,” he said, “probably not so many as a thousand.”

“And in these dreams you…did what?”

“Lived, I guess. I mean, lived the way we live there.”

He looked at me to see if I was getting it.

“Most of it wasn’t so bad,” he said. “Some was, but the dreaming never lasted very long. It was the in between that was the worst. It lasted forever.”

“In between?”

“Between dreams. When we don’t do anything. We just wait.”

“Wait?” I was an echo.

He dropped my hands and leaned back in a stretch, as if talking about it made him tired. “Like there was one woman who dreamed she was in a doctor’s office. In a waiting room? She was waiting to find out if she had cancer or not, and I was one of the people in the waiting room.”

“Did she have cancer?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I didn’t go into the examining room; I was just waiting. But when you’re a dream, that’s what you’re doing all of the time. You have no idea how long it can be, waiting for the next dream.” It didn’t sound so different from the waiting I was doing: waiting for the weekend, for my dad to call, for my turn in the bathroom. Waiting to meet a boy. “Unless you’re
in
a dream,” Martin went on. “And then you’re, you know, doing whatever the dreamer has in mind—swimming in a lake or something.”

“I thought swimming was your idea,” I said.

He picked up his fork and held it like it was the neck of a guitar. “It was your dream, Annabelle. Not mine.”

I pondered for a moment. “So dreams have dreams, too?”

“No!” He dropped the fork, making a loud clatter on the tabletop.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean—”

“No, no, it’s just…where I come from, the ones who try to dream, well, they’re not very nice.”

“I see,” I said, though of course I didn’t see. “Like, how?”

“Well, it’s not natural, is it? For a dream to take control. The whole thing about being a dream is that it’s not up to you. Where you are, what you do. You just have to accept it.”

“But that’s crazy. It’s not like
we
control what we dream.” I picked up the syrupy plastic menu from the little stand behind the ketchup. “We don’t place an order.
‘I’ll take Being-president-for-a-day, with a side of Flying Monkeys.’
Dreams just happen. And even if our subconscious
is
what makes things happen, our subconscious is”—I tossed the sticky menu onto the even stickier table—“sticky.”

We were quiet for a minute, and in the silence, I kept thinking about all of the dreams I’d had—and the nightmares, too, like last night’s snake extravaganza, which Cynthia Rêve says represents temptation, sexual feelings, or hidden fears. Whatever. I certainly didn’t choose any of that. I hardly get to choose how I live when I’m awake, much less when I’m sleeping. I thought about those hundreds of dreamers Martin had had—all controlling him. “So in a dream, have you ever kissed—” I stopped, embarrassed, but he laughed.

“Yes,” he said. “Haven’t you?” I thought about Daniel, and then I tried not to think in case Martin was in my head.

I nodded. There was a pen on the table, and I picked it up and doodled a blue jay on the flat part of my palm just under my thumb. “But did it ever—”

Maybe he was in my head because he seemed to understand what I was asking without me finishing. “This is all new to me, Annabelle. I didn’t realize it could happen. There were rumors,” he stumbled over his words, “but I didn’t really believe—I’ve never been here.”

“But why?” I asked. “Why now? Why me?”

He reached across the table and touched the back of my hands. His fingers were sticky, too. “I think it’s
because
of you somehow,” he said. “You’re special, Annabelle. You’re…perfect.”

That word again. My heart shot straight into my throat and I started to cough. I took a sip of water to settle myself, but ended up coughing it up, too. Out my nose. Smooth. I grabbed a wad of napkins from the little metal box and covered my face.

“Did I say something wrong?”

“It wasn’t wrong,” I said. “It was just that no one’s ever said anything like that to me before.”

“I have,” he said.

“Yeah, but…” That was then. In dreamland or whatever. It was different hearing it in real life, with the glare of the everyday all around me. The orange plastic booth with a little tear on the seat, the stained ceramic mug, the jittery light from the ceiling fans. “Right,” I said, pointedly changing the subject. “How does it all work then? How did you get here?”

“Who knows?” he said. “In old stories, there was
our
world, the world of dreams—the place
you
go when you dream. And on the other side, there was Earth, which was empty except for shadows. They say a dream crossed into the shadow Earth through a tunnel of mist. And she became the first dreamer.”

“That’d be like…what? Our first human? Are you saying she came from your world, that she was like Eve?”

“What’s eve?”

“
Who
,” I corrected. “It’s a name. Our first woman.
Eve
.” Which made me think about last night’s serpents again.

“The dreamer didn’t have a name,” he said. “But her dreams were so powerful, they spun a cord between the worlds—yours and mine.” Martin’s eyes grew distant, like he was looking out a plane window. “The legend says she would walk along that cord between the worlds. And sometimes she’d lead others from our world back with her to earth. They lived with her there. So, I guess if she was your first woman, they’d be your first people, right?”

“Weird.” I was getting tangled in all this talk of different worlds.

“Of course, it wasn’t like that for me,” he went on. “I didn’t see any rope or a tunnel of mist or anything.”

“What did you see?”

“It happened so fast. Everything flexed at once, and then contracted.” He paused, looking for the right words. “I felt like I’d been squeezed inside the nozzle of a vacuum. And I was here.”

“Vacuum,” I repeated, but so softly he couldn’t hear me.

“I’ve heard stuff about that, too. And these stories aren’t so old. They say one dream escaped to your world by running through fire. One crawled through pipes. Compared to them, I got off easy. Not that I ever took it seriously, the stuff I heard.”

I think this was the first time in my life that my jaw literally dropped. “So there are others like you? And they come through pipes?”

“Yeah, I guess it sounds strange.”

“You think? Pipes!”

“I’m not saying it happened that way,” he said. “They’re just stories. It’s not like I know they’re all here exactly.”

He rubbed his jaw with the flat of his hand.

I waited for more but it didn’t come.

“Anyway, I’m here now, right?” He nodded his head a little too emphatically. Maybe he was avoiding saying something, or maybe the sugar from the syrup just kicked in. “And I bet the longer I’m here, the more human I’ll be.”

“Oh.” I could actually feel my mind whir. “You’re not human now?”

“No, I totally am.”

“But you could be
more
human?”

“Right.”

Apparently dream people aren’t real big on logic. There are degrees of human-ness? This is the kind of thing that would have made Will zap into debate-mode. Well, this and the pipes.

“Oh my God.” It just hit me. “Do you have a belly button?”

On the boat, what I’d seen of his body looked totally normal, but suddenly I wasn’t sure if I’d noticed his belly button.

He rolled his eyes and lifted his shirt just enough for me to see a standard-issue belly button and a few dark hairs trailing down his stomach. If it were Will, I would have poked him. With Martin, I just tried to breathe.

He pulled his shirt down. “What if I didn’t have a belly button?” he said. “Would you still…”

I waited to see what word he’d use, but he just left it hanging, which was not a bad thing, given that we’d known each other a grand total of twenty-seven hours.

“It would just be hard to explain,” I said. “You have to admit, it’d be a little weird for you in the locker room after a football game.”

“It’s already weird in the locker room after a game,” he said. “How is slapping someone with a wet towel a sign of friendship?”

“It’s a guy thing,” I told him. “Anyway, you’re the one who decided to play football.”

“I thought you decided that.”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “We hate football.”

“You mean there are others like
you
?” he teased.

“Look, as much as I’d like to take credit, I don’t think I had anything to do with the fact that you’re…here. And I certainly had nothing to do with the fact that you’re on the football team.”

“You had everything to do with the fact that I’m here,” he said. It was the surest he’d sounded about anything. “You remember that kiss, in the water? It was electric, like the edge of everything blurred. Nothing like that had ever happened to me before.”

I looked down, suddenly shy.

“What happened to you, after that kiss?” he said.

“I…I woke up,” I said.

“That’s what happened to me,” he said. “I woke up. Here. And as for football,” he went on, “maybe you didn’t plan all of that consciously, but did you ever consider that maybe you had a subconscious desire to have a boyfriend who’s a member of the football team? Like you said, the subconscious is sticky.”

I’m not the sort of person who constantly turns into a tomato, but I felt my cheeks flush.

I was torn. Part of me homed in on the word “boyfriend.” The other part of me was pissed. I most certainly did
not
have a desire to date a football player, subconscious or otherwise. Just like I most certainly had
not
chosen a name like “Martin Zirkle.”

This time it was Martin who flushed. “In case you wondered, Annabelle,” he said softly, “there are some things that are just mine.”

I fully expected to pay for lunch, but apparently lots of people dream about money because Martin had some and knew what to do with it.

We walked down Main Street, where every shop that hadn’t closed was cute and struggling and mostly useless. Martin stopped in a flower shop (useless until now) and came out with a bird of paradise. It looked spiky, but was soft. “These must be the wings,” I said, touching it.

“They had other flowers. But you’re different, so I wanted you to have something different.”

I pulled the flower to my face. It smelled sweet and ripe, like peaches topped with vanilla ice cream. “It’s exquisite.”