Dreamers Often Lie (11 page)

After the fluorescent light of the hallways, the dimness of the auditorium was a shock. I had to stop just inside the doors. I leaned back against the solid wood for a while, letting my eyes readjust while the headache swelled and slowly shrank again.

A row of work lights burned above the stage, probably left on by crew members working on the set over lunch.
When I was sure I wasn’t going to trip over my own shoes, I shuffled down the aisle toward them.

Titania’s platform was positioned upstage left. I dropped my stuff in the seats, climbed the steps, and sank down onto the grass-colored velvet. The buzz of the lights was lulling. The padding under the velvet was soft. Very slowly, the panic began to drain away. I could feel it trickling down through the platform, into the boards, filtering through the hollow darkness under the stage. I pictured myself floating on a swell of muddy water, like Ophelia, my skirts buoyed up by pockets of air. My body weightless.

“There is a willow grows aslant a brook, that shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream . . .” I heard myself say the words aloud. I was pretty sure they came from
Hamlet,
but I didn’t know how or when I’d learned them. They drifted through me like that muddy stream. I kept my eyes shut and let the words pull me. “There with fantastic garlands did she come of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples, that liberal shepherds give a grosser name, but our cold maids do dead men’s fingers call them—”

“Hey,” said a deep voice.

I screamed something that might have been a word. Probably a rude one.

Something lanky and black flickered in front of me.

“God—I’m sorry.” The thing held out both hands. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

I rolled to a sitting position, tilting my face away. My heart was pounding. Each pulse sent reverberations through my skull. Through the messy strands of my hair, I peered out at the flickering thing in front of me.

Blue eyes. Black hair. Dark clothes.

Romeo.

No,
Rob.

Rob.

“You,” I said blearily.

His face was worried. “Are you all right?”

I skipped the question. “I didn’t think anyone would be here. It’s still sixth period.”

“I know.”

“You know? Then what are you doing here?”

“Skipping chemistry. You?”

“Skipping algebra. Sort of.” I tried to rearrange my floppy hair. “Mr. Costa won’t care if I don’t go back. The teachers are all pretty tolerant, considering . . .” I indicated my monster scar. “So, you’re skipping another class?”
God. Are you the hall monitor?
“I mean—I didn’t see you in anatomy this morning.”

“Yeah. They’re pretty tolerant of us new kids too. If I say I got lost, or I didn’t understand the schedule, or I didn’t realize that the day ended at three o’clock instead of two fifteen, they usually buy it. For the first week, anyway.”

“You’ve done this before.”

“Skipped class? Yes. Terrified a girl with a head injury—I think this is a first.” He took a step away from the platform. “I’m really sorry. I’ll leave you alone if you want.”

“No,” I said. Too quickly. Then, partly to cover it, partly because the question was pounding harder and harder in my head, I said, “How can I be sure you’re even really here?”

Rob’s left eyebrow went up. “The fact that I just scared the crap out of you isn’t proof enough?”

“Nope.” I shook my head carefully. “I’ve seen other people who I know weren’t really there. And I’ve heard them too, so hearing you doesn’t count.”

“Hmm.” Rob reached into his back pocket. Then he crouched down on the floor in front of the platform. “There. Proof of my identity.” He held out a leather wallet.

I took it. Its leather was ancient, buttery and smooth at the corners. It fell open at the folds like a broken-spined book.

“So this is what an Oregon driver’s license looks like.” I raised the card toward my nose and read the small print aloud. “Robert Coltrane Mason. Coltrane?”

“Family name. My mother’s side.”

“I don’t know. It seems pretty improbable.”

He pointed to the wallet. “You can cross-check it with my other IDs.”

I opened the pocket behind the license and pulled out a
wad of paper and plastic. “Geez. How many library cards do you have?”

Rob settled on the stage floor, folding up one long leg beneath him. “I never throw any of them away. They help me remember where we’ve lived.”

I flipped past the library cards. “It might be a challenge to earn this free latte at Seattle’s Finest Coffee,” I said, holding up a blue punch card. “You decided this was worth saving too?”

He shrugged, smiling slightly. “You never know.”

“Here’s a card reminding you that you had a dentist appointment eight months ago . . .” I pulled out a ticket stub. “And you saw something called The Ravages at someplace called The Morgue.”

“Oh, yeah.” He laughed. “A punk show in Portland.”

“How was it?”

“Pretty bad. But really loud.”

“At least you got your money’s worth.” I leafed to the bottom of the pile. “And . . . oh.” The last thing in the stack was a photograph. It was in black-and-white, its corners almost as battered and soft as the wallet itself. In the picture, a beautiful girl with long, wavy dark hair and an old-fashioned swimming suit leaned against a boulder, with a rocky seashore spreading out behind her. The photo could have been an antique, or it could just have been a filtered shot of a cool vintage girl. The kind of
girl who knew how to make pin curls and where to find Bettie Page–style swimsuits and who probably went to punk shows in Portland.

I felt a jolt of ice in my stomach.

Was it actually jealousy?
Don’t be an idiot, Jaye. Or at least don’t act like one.

“Who’s this?” I asked, keeping my voice light.

Rob craned to look at the picture in my hand. “Oh. That’s Vera.”

Even lighter. “Is she a friend of yours or something?”

“I don’t actually know her name.” Rob sat back again, bracing one arm on his raised knee. “She just looks like a Vera. When I bought the wallet at a secondhand shop in Belltown, she was inside.”

“Oh.” I ran one fingertip over the photo’s most battered corner. “And you just left it in here?”

“Well—yeah. It seemed right. I mean, she’d been there for decades already.” He nodded toward the photo. “Look at the back.”

I flipped it over. A message was written in faded, feminine cursive:
To Teddy with all my love. June 1942.

“I wonder what happened to Vera and Teddy,” I said, after a beat. “If they ended up together, or . . .”

“Me too,” said Rob, when I didn’t finish. “He kept the picture for a long time, anyway. Or somebody did. And then whoever it was eventually gave his wallet to the Salvation Army.”

I put the picture at the bottom of the stack of cards and slid them all gently back into the leather pocket. “It’s sweet,” I said. “That you kept it.”

“So.” Rob held out a hand. “Now you know all the weird contents of my wallet. Does that qualify as proof?”

I tilted my head to one side, considering. “I don’t think so. I could have come up with all of this in my own subconscious.” I handed the wallet back. “Well—maybe not Vera. But everything else.”

Rob’s eyes caught mine. Looking into them felt like edging my toes into a cool stream. A shiver raced up through my legs, into my spine, and for a second, I wanted to plunge the rest of the way in, to know everything, to tell everything, to be completely
there—
but then I remembered the hideous gash on my forehead, and all the mess that went with it, and a second later, I remembered Pierce. Gorgeous Pierce. Perfect Pierce.

I pulled my eyes away.

“How’s your head feeling?” he asked.

“Not great.” I scraped my hair over the scar. “Like an ugly mess inside and out.”

“Most people can’t lie around and quote
Hamlet
perfectly if their heads are a mess.”

“So that
was
Hamlet
. See?” I crossed my legs on the platform, angling slightly away from him. “I didn’t know I knew that speech. I didn’t even know what it
was.
”

“Maybe that head injury gave you some kind of crazy
gift. Like those people who have a seizure and can suddenly play every piano piece Mozart ever wrote.”

“But it’s not like I can recite all of
Hamlet
. Or any other play. It just—it comes out in these weird little pieces, at the worst possible times.”

“Okay. Maybe it’s Shakespearean Tourette’s.”

I laughed. The tightness in my skull was loosening. “How did you know that was from
Hamlet,
anyway? Have you done that play?”

“We were studying it in lit class at my last school.”

“But you said you’ve been in other plays, right?” I felt the sudden need to move the conversation away from myself, away from real thoughts and feelings. “Which ones?”

Rob leaned back on his elbows. “In reverse order:
Much Ado About Nothing, Our Town, Tom Sawyer, The Three Little Pigs,
and
Alice in Wonderland.
I was the Dodo.”

I felt a faint, deep sting at the words
Alice in Wonderland.
I rubbed it away. Put on a smile instead. “The Dodo? I love it. And please tell me you were one of the Three Little Pigs.”

He grinned. When he smiled, the shape of his chin sharpened, and asymmetrical laugh lines appeared on either side of his mouth. I found myself studying that smile, feeling my own face trying to imitate it, even though I knew I’d probably never get it right. “I just built sets for that one,” he said. “I like being offstage more than having to be on.”

“Really? I
love
being onstage.” I shuffled my feet against the fake grass. “My favorite thing is that feeling when you’re waiting in the wings, in the dark, totally hidden, but you can
feel
the audience out there, and then you step out and the lights hit you, and you’re blinded for a second, and you could be anywhere
,
but you know you’re inside this thing that you’re helping to create, and it’s like—it’s like electricity. I’m completely addicted to it.” I gestured to my forehead. “That’s why I was in such a hurry to get back here. Even with this giant thing on my head.”

“I get it.” Rob watched me for a second. His smile had softened a little, but it changed again before I could figure out what was behind it. “What’s been your favorite role so far?”

“Probably this one.” I pulled a petal off one of the silk daisies. “I’ve played a lot of crappy parts.”

“Such as?”

“Oh, god. Let’s see. The stupidest of the seven dwarves. An ear of corn. A talking tumor—”

“A tumor?”

“It was an anti-smoking skit.”

His left eyebrow went up. They were great eyebrows. Stage makeup eyebrows.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I think a talking tumor is cooler than a fairy queen. For sheer messed-up-ness, anyway.”

“Maybe. But the tumor had fewer lines.”

Rob laughed out loud. I felt myself smiling too, the
constriction in my body starting to release. There was something about having him near—something exciting and comfortable at the same time. Something familiar yet totally new.

But it
wasn’t
familiar. My brain was stretching feelings that didn’t belong over moments that hadn’t happened at all. I yanked another petal off of the daisy, making it tremble on its wire stem.

I’d been quiet for longer than I’d realized. When I looked up again, Rob was watching me closely. His eyes made my neck tingle.

“Are you remembering your roles as other inanimate objects?” he asked.

“No,” I said, looking away. “Actually, I was thinking that maybe it would be better if I
was
imagining all of this. Because then at least I wouldn’t be acting like such a freak in front of everyone. And then I was thinking that maybe it would be worse, because this is the most realistic hallucination I’ve had yet.”

“So you need, like,
metaphysical
proof of identity. Yeah. I don’t carry that in my wallet.” He paused, looking thoughtful. “You’re supposed to pinch someone who thinks they’re dreaming, right?”

I pulled my legs out of his reach. I actually heard myself giggle, like a girly idiot. “Don’t pinch me.”

“I wasn’t going to. I swear.” He extended one hand toward me, palm out. “What if we just shook hands?”

“We’ve done that before.”

“And it was real.”

I shook my head. “Not every time.”

Now he frowned, but he looked more intrigued than confused. “What do you mean?”

The red-spattered hole in the snow. The hospital room. Rob lifting my hand, kissing the back of my wrist . . .

“Nothing. I’m—don’t listen to me.”

“But I like listening to you.” Slowly, Rob reached out and ran one fingertip down my forearm, over the place on my wrist where I could almost feel that kiss. Then he leaned back, meeting my eyes. “Feels real to me.”

My stomach fluttered with paper-thin wings.

“Hey,” he went on. “After rehearsal—”

Before he could finish, the final bell blared through the auditorium.

The sound tore through my brain. I hunched over, squinting. Red spots flared in my half-open eyes. The sound hadn’t even died away when the auditorium doors slammed open and cast members started to pour in.

Anders and Hannah and Tamika were some of the first down the aisle. Nikki and Tom showed up together, laughing about something as they threw their bags into the seats. Pierce strolled in several steps behind them. His light gray sweater seemed to glow with its own magical spotlight. His hands were tucked casually into his pockets. He saw me, and his face curved with that crooked half smile that
made my heart jump halfway to my larynx. Then he noticed Rob.

His eyes flicked from my face to Rob’s, the two of us caught alone in the onstage dimness. His expression shifted. Then he turned back to me, and his smile was even deeper than before.

“There,” Rob whispered to me, under the noise. “I think that might have been proof.”

I didn’t give any sign that I’d heard him. I inched backward up the sloping platform, keeping my eyes on Pierce instead.

“Hey, Stuart.” Pierce leaped onto the stage. “Look what I found in my parents’ storage room.” He crossed to the platform and stopped in front of me, his foot almost crushing Rob’s outspread fingers. Rob leaned out of the way. Pierce didn’t glance down.