Dream Boy (12 page)

We found Will at the kitchen table, explaining the Pythagorean theorem to Nick.

I tried not to think about the pissing contest Martin and Will had had the last time we’d been together in this room. “Hey.” I aimed for casual. “You’re early.”

“I brought pizza.” Will pointed to two boxes from Giovanni’s on the counter. “Triple veggie for you and Mrs. M, Hawaiian for the squirt.” When his eyes hit Martin, he said, “I didn’t see your car.”

“I walked,” Martin said.

“Right…Nice night for it.” Will was clearly
not
saying something, clearly holding back. It’s possible he was just choosing a tactic, but I decided to take it as a sign that he was making an effort to get along.

“So, you guys thirsty? We have milk, probably soda, water?”

Martin shook his head, and Will picked up a glass of water he’d already poured and said, “I’m good.”

I went to the counter, cracked open a box, and sniffed the warm pizza. “Yum, thanks,” I said to Will. And then to Martin, I explained, “Will and I usually watch
The
Wild
Side
on Wednesdays. Have you seen it?”

Since Martin had only been in the Land of Television for the past few days, I was pretty sure he hadn’t. I mean, what kind of freak would dream about
The
Wild
Side
? But then again, it might just be one of those things he mysteriously
knew
. Anyway, I thought asking would make things sound more normal in front of Will.

When Martin shook his head, as I guessed he would, I went on, “They get these super-cheesy B-grade celebrities and abandon them in a cave or something, and they have to find their way back to civilization. You want to watch with us?”

“Hey, I didn’t mean to interrupt whatever you and Martin—” Will said.

“You didn’t,” I said, which was more polite than true. “Martin was dropping something off. Let’s just—”

“I was leaving anyway,” Martin said.

“Don’t be—”

“No, really, Annabelle. I need to get going,” Martin said, and before I could argue, he was out the kitchen door.

After a second, I followed him, pushing the door back open just as it clicked shut. I called out, “Hey, I’ll…” But the driveway was empty. He’d taken off so fast he might have been swept into space. I shut my eyes, feeling tilted and lost. The way I’d felt when my father left. Crazy Annabelle rippled under my skin.

When I turned to Will, I wasn’t thinking with my rational brain—the brain that could have told me, if I’d bothered to ask, that this was not Will’s fault.

“What’d you do that for?” I demanded.

“Uhh.” Will glanced around the kitchen, like he was missing something. “What?”

“You wanted him to leave.”

“I didn’t
do
anything. I’ve been giving him a chance, like you asked me to. And what I want…what I want is beside the point.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Will stood up, knocking his chair slightly crooked. “I always mean what I say with you, Annabelle.”

“Dude,” Nick piped up from his corner of the table, “she’s just PMS-ing. You know how girls are.”

“I do not have—Arrggg!”

Nick went on in a fake-announcer voice, “Tune in next time to
Drama
Teen
and see if Annabelle’s head actually explodes.”

“Hey,” Will said, “cut her some slack.” Because it was Will, Nick listened.

“Let’s go for a ride,” Will said. “Come on.”

For a full second I studied the dull rose pattern of the linoleum floor. Then, without raising my head, I looked up. Something about Will’s face reminded me of a moth I’d once seen trying to get into a window. I remembered how it just kept battering itself against the glass pane, battering and battering until its wing tore.

I was still mad, but I grabbed my jacket. “Tell Mom,” I said to Nick, “and save us some pizza.” We headed out.

The night was cool and the air felt fresh against my cheeks. Just getting out of that kitchen and into the Jeep helped me breathe. Will took his own advice, giving me space. At the stop sign at the end of the street, he turned left toward the highway. He coasted for a minute in silence.

“You want to talk about it?” Will finally asked when he drove up the on-ramp.

“’Bout what?”

“I guess that answers my question.”

“Guess it does.” After a second, I added, “It was sweet of you to bring pizza. Sorry. I’m just feeling crappy. Forgive me?”

I studied Will’s not-Greek profile. Unreadable.

“Of course I forgive you for that,” he said.

After a second, I repeated, “
For
that?
There’s something you don’t forgive?”

“Look, Annabelle, let’s just—”

“No, tell me.”

Will didn’t answer, but instead checked his blind spot. Then he switched into the passing lane, blowing by two bikers and the van for a carpet store. Finally, he said, “There’s nothing to tell. I don’t think you could do anything I wouldn’t forgive eventually.” He didn’t sound particularly happy about it.

“Well, that’s something, I guess,” I said. “Meanwhile, I can’t imagine
you
ever doing something that would even
require
forgiveness. Other than being a jerk to my—to Martin.”

“Saint Will.” He sounded even less happy than before.

“You’re a saint for putting up with me,” I said. “Speaking of which, where are we going, exactly?”

“Where do you want to go?”

I played with the knob to the glove box. “Is there somewhere we can walk?”

“Sure.”

Will took the next exit, then down a back road that cut through the woods.

“Isn’t this the way to Pandapas Pond?” I asked. I thought of the lake from my dream. Of the girl and the boat and the snakes. “No. You know what? I don’t need to walk. I’m good here.”

“You sure? The pond looks cool at twilight.”

“I can’t,” I said. “It’s just—I had this weird dream about a lake. It kind of freaked me.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t want to talk about it. It was scary.”

“We should drive, then.” He pulled a U-turn and headed back toward the highway.

“It’s stupid, I guess.”

“Maybe,” Will said. “But maybe there’s more to it. I mean, dreams aren’t
all
in our heads, are they? What if they’re just another type of reality? That’s what the Iroquois believed. And Australian Aborigines. For them, the real world began as a dream.”

Now
Will
was reading my mind. Except for the aborigine part. “Australian Aborigines?”

Will shrugged.

“That’s a big can of suck, though—if nightmares are real,” I said.

“Maybe not like we think of real,” Will said. “But I’ve always felt dreams are something more than what’s
exclusively
inside us. They’re part me, and part something else. As if they have a life of their own.”

“Tell me about it.” That was the scary part. That the snakes, the girl—whatever it was coming after me in my dreams—could somehow take up a life on this side of the dream/reality Mason-Dixon line. The way Martin had. And Stephanie. And the pipe people, whoever they were.

All that was beyond my control—but this girl, it didn’t feel random anymore. I was beginning to think she was
stalking
my dreams. Like she wanted something from me. And I’m pretty sure it was something I didn’t want to give.

“I keep thinking about it,” I said. “The nightmare, I mean. I’ve put all my conscious effort into figuring it out, but I can’t.”

“That could be your problem,” Will said.

“What do you mean?”

“Maybe what you need is an
un
conscious effort.”

“Okay, sensei.” I gave him a friendly shove. Not enough to mess with his driving but enough to let him know I thought he was full of it. “I’ll be sure to give that a try.”

I hadn’t done anything when my father left. Or when Daniel broke things off. I just let life roll over me. I sulked and stomped and holed up in my room to cry. Reacted, instead of acted. But that wasn’t going to cut it this time. This time I needed to
do
something.

The trick was figuring out exactly what I was supposed to do.

A
flash.

Dark
space.

The
girl
is
twirling, her white dress fluttering out around her.

“Kill the dreamer,” she sings.

A
glimpse
of
streamers, glitter on a glossy wooden floor.

• • •

Thursday started out like that “ideal day” you see in movies—the sky stuffed with fluffy clouds that all looked as though they were just about to turn into teddy bears or hippopotami.

It was Spirit Day, so everyone wore blue and gold T-shirts. The girls wore ribbons. Some of the boys covered their backpacks with blue and gold duct tape and sprayed their hair with blue and gold dye. Wally Ferguson was going around with a two-foot stuffed blue devil perched on his shoulder like a parrot.

It was weird. Martin was the newbie, but I felt like the one seeing everything for the first time. This kind of spirit-wear used to look to me like a prison uniform for the jail that was my hometown, but now it looked…colorful. Almost fun, even. I’m not sure why. Maybe it was just delirium after a week of restless sleep. Or maybe it was the fact that Martin was little-kid excited about the whole thing. Like jump-up-and-down excited. Not that he was
literally
jumping up and down, but still.

He said he’d “never done a homecoming parade.” Of course, I hadn’t, either, but that was by choice. At least, I’d had the chance. I thought about what it must have been like for him—stuck in someone else’s head. He might not have even known parades were possible, just because someone else hadn’t bothered to dream about one. It didn’t seem fair.

And now here he was, at the center of it all. Happy. And I was happy to see him happy. Neither one of us discussed his Houdini act the night before. I for one was content to stash away that particular scrap of drama.

While I didn’t go all out, I did wear a blue shirt with my jeans. And in the bathroom after lunch, Serena wrote “Let’s Go” on my cheek with blue eyeliner. Talon dressed all in black and accused us of reckless abandon.

There was a shortened football practice so the players wouldn’t sprain something before the game, and Mr. Ernshaw graciously postponed the due date for our essays on “The Atom: Democritus to Bohr.” So after school, as planned, I worked with Martin to decorate the team float. It was basically a flatbed truck with lots of streamers and electric lights and signs that said things like “DEVILS ROCK” and “GO FIGHT WIN” in glitter paint. At each end, there were goalposts made of PVC pipe. A six-foot cardboard football was attached to each side of the truck on a big metal spring, so it sort of jiggled in midair.

The parade route was only five blocks long and took a grand total of fifteen minutes, but even so, the town went all out. The shops and restaurants along Main Street decorated their windows in blue and gold, and the Chilton Chamber of Commerce tied hundreds of helium balloons to street lamps along the route.

Talon and Serena skipped the whole float-decoration thing, but they showed up a few minutes before the parade started. They were there for moral support since Martin would be on said float, and I dreaded the idea of standing alone on the sidelines like some black-and-white sweetheart in a World War II movie, waving while my hero marched by.

In the long run, it didn’t much matter since I was standing on the south side of the street and my hero ended up on the north side of the float. I saw Martin’s profile for a second, but by the time I got my hand up for a wave, he’d already passed.

I could tell Serena, like me, secretly got into the spectacle of it all—the cheering and band and the big foam glove-thingies that you put on your hand to make you look like you have a huge blue number-one finger. Talon, on the other hand, was her usual snarky self.

“Go, fight, win? Hello. Haven’t you people heard of a noun? And where would the world be if everyone decided to go, fight, and win? It’d be a disaster zone.”

“Yeah, but, Talon, this is football.” I waved my big blue finger in her face. “Where would we be if we
didn’t
go, fight, and win?”

“Well, the team would be in last place,” she considered, “and I would be somewhere that wasn’t so noxiously color coordinated.”

“You don’t have to be here, you know.”

“I know,” she said. Then to show that she was just being difficult because she enjoyed being difficult and not because she actually wanted to be difficult
elsewhere
, she took up the red feather she was wearing as a pendant and used it to tickle my ear. “But if I weren’t here,” she said, “who would point out the irony of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes screaming ‘Let’s Go Demons’?”

I put one arm around Talon’s shoulder and the other around Serena’s and gave them both a squeeze.

“Hey, where’s my homecoming date?” Talon asked.

“It wasn’t my turn to watch him,” I said, although I usually was the one who knew where Will was hiding. I wasn’t exactly sad he wasn’t there, since mixing Will with Martin was sort of like pouring vinegar over baking soda. But I was used to seeing the world half through my eyes and half through Will’s, and I liked the way his half helped me refocus my own.

I got out my cell phone.
Hey
, I texted Will.
Where are you?

I didn’t get an answer, so I texted again.
I’m at parade with S and T. Whoohoo.

I waited, then tried again.
You there?

Still nothing. I put my phone back in my pocket.

The cheerleaders marched by next. It was cold, so they were wearing panty hose under their skirts, which made their legs look tan and shiny. They were doing this skip-step-shake-their-bootie kind of thing. Lots of pompom action. All culminating with them putting their fingers on their butts and making a sizzle-hiss to rhyme with “class.” When she strutted by, Stephanie Gonzales was close enough that I could have reached out and touched her shoulder. Her dark hair was up in a ponytail, and in the sharp slant of late-day sun, I noticed two squiggly lines on the back of her neck. I sucked in a breath. They were faint, a pinkish-gray, not the deep black of Martin’s. It was as if they’d faded over time. But they were the same lines. The same mark.

He’d said they hadn’t meant anything. He’d said it was just a tattoo.

He’d lied.

It doesn’t matter, I told myself. It can’t. So what if they have matching tattoos? It wasn’t like they’d gone off to the tattoo parlor on a Saturday night and gotten the his-and-her special.

But I was lying, too. I knew there was a bond between the two of them, not made of ink, but of dreams. And maybe that was worse.

After the parade, I asked Serena for a ride home before Martin could track me down. I didn’t want to see him, and I didn’t want to see the person I would likely become around him. Crazy Annabelle could take the night off. I needed some rest.

If I could only sleep without having to dream.