Dream Boy (13 page)

I
am
running
down
a
path
in
the
woods. It is dark, thick with moss. The trees on each side of the path grow dense and gnarled. Behind me, there is a dull scraping, like something being dragged across the forest floor. Scraps of far-off music shuttle along in the wind.

Ahead, a hazy light pulses. I sprint toward it. The path opens, and I burst into a clearing.

In
the
center, on the large flat stump of a tree, sits the girl in the white dress.

She
sews
something, the needle pulling taut and then looping back. A wisp of smoke rises in the air and she begins to hum under her breath. A lullaby?

The
distant
music
in
the
woods—the murmurs caught like torn paper in the wind—had been hers.

She
doesn’t look up, though I sense she knows I am there.

In
her
lap, I see what she is working on—a dirty rag doll with brown yarn hair and broken button eyes. She is sewing thick red stitches along the side of the doll’s neck.

“Martin!” I shout. He can tell me why this girl is haunting my dreams. He can tell me what I need to do.

And
then
he
is
there—without warning, like a jump in a snippet of film. Not exactly himself, but a sort of hologram. I feel like I am watching him through a pane of tinted glass. He stands on the other side of the girl, facing her, facing me. I can tell he wants to come to me, but he doesn’t—or can’t—move.

I
stop, catch my breath. “What is it?”

The
girl’s voice is in my head, small, like a bird. “That’s right. Ask him. He knows.”

She
stands
and
for
the
first
time
looks
at
me.

Only, her eyes are wrong. They don’t fit that little girl face; they are an old lady’s eyes—washed out, so pale that they’d almost turned completely white. Worst of all, they are pricked with a tiny red pupil, like when someone takes a photograph and the flash isn’t quite right.

She
walks
to
where
I
am
on
the
edge
of
the
clearing. I feel a clammy sickness in my gut. Her voice rises and deepens in my mind. “I’m going to get you.” She holds up the rag doll and turns it to face Martin. “I’m going to be you.”

My
own
body
also
turns, like a puppet. “Why—” I start to speak, but my throat closes on itself. Someone is choking me from behind. Strong hands clamp around my neck. I haven’t seen the girl move, but she is suddenly closer, both her hands firmly around the doll’s thin neck. She squeezes and I feel the fingers around my own neck constrict.

The
girl
jerks
the
doll, and its arms flail. At the same moment, my arms flap and spasm.

“I’m going to be you.”

Fighting
for
control, I raise my hands to my neck to pull the girl’s invisible fingers away. They feel small and brittle, like peppermint sticks, and the moment I touch them, the girl shivers, excited, like she is made of electricity.

She
laughs
and
her
doll
disappears
in
a
throb
of
light. For a second, the girl’s grip releases me, and I can breathe. But then, my own hands creep up my neck—closing tight against my will. I look to where the girl stood at the clearing’s opening. She isn’t there. I try to pull my hands away, but I can’t stop. Under my palm I feel a line of thick, sloppy stitches in the same place the girl had sewn on the doll. I want to gag, but my throat won’t open.

Surging
in
and
out, my vision goes painfully bright, then almost black. I feel my brain expanding star-like, too big for my skull, the forest, the universe. I squeeze my eyes shut and tumble down into darkness.

The
ground
is
not
hard, as I expect it to be, but…muscly and writhing. Alive. I open my eyes to a landscape bloated with snakes. They swarm me, covering every inch of my body with their leathery scales.

“Martin! Help!” I think the words more than call them.

In
the
last
second
before
I
am
lost
below
the
swarm, I concentrate and force my head to turn. I look to where he’s been standing.

It
isn’t Martin there at all. It is Will.

“Will!”

He
runs
to
me, but I am sinking beneath the snakes. They are weaving me in, another cord in their gruesome carpet.

His
pained
face
rises
above
me. “Annabelle, you know. You know what to do…”

Dying
is
not
what
you’d expect. I am there in that dark earth, aware but not alive. I hear Will’s voice fade above me. “You can’t go, Annabelle. I won’t let you.”

But
I
am
already
gone.

I watched Martin glide through the crowded halls Friday morning—the morning after the girl tried to strangle me in my sleep. People stepped out of his way, and I could see why. He was gorgeous, confident, strong. The air around him literally seemed to shimmer. He smiled when he saw me, but as he walked closer, he must have been able to make out the panic I was trying to bury under a bright smile and a black turtleneck.

“We need to talk,” I said.

He hesitated for a second before answering, “Shoot.”

What I gave him, though, was not a single bullet, but the scattered explosion of buckshot, metal bits flying everywhere.

“The snakes were back. They were all over me. And this weirdo doll. And then she choked me—”

“The doll?”

“Martin, the girl. The. Girl. She’s following me. In every dream. She won’t leave me alone.” Images flashed through my mind: the girl as a girl, as a parasite, as a snake, as the sound of a footfall behind me, tracking me. “She says she wants to
be
me. We were in the forest but it was my hands and you were—”

“Shhh. Slow down.
What
girl?”

“You know. You were there, right?”

“What? Where?”

“My dream.”

“You saw me in your dream?” he asked, his voice dropping to a whisper.

“Yes.”

“With a girl?” He looked pale.

“She was the one on the bank, near the lake,” I said. “In that first dream when we kissed.”

He took a deep breath, reining himself in. I knew from his look that it wasn’t just a fluke. It wasn’t just dream diving, or addiction. The girl was haunting me. Hunting me.

The morning bell clanged. “Look,” he said. “I need to know what happened. All of it. Start at the beginning.”

“Now?”

“Yes.”

“But we’ve got class—”

“Class can wait.” Maybe in dreamworld you can skip class and not get in trouble. That doesn’t happen in my world. But when Martin drew me down the hallway that led to the gym, I went. He waited for the hall to clear, then pulled open the door to the boys’ locker room. “In here.”

“Are you kidding?” The thought of a crowd of half-naked freshmen giving each other wedgies wasn’t exactly my idea of a good place to talk.

“No one’s in here first period. Coach uses Friday mornings to set the playbook strategy for the game.”

I stepped tentatively inside. It smelled like dirty socks, ripe urine, and bleach. “I shouldn’t be here.”

“What, the girl who sneaks into the field house at Pulaski Stadium doesn’t feel right at home?” Martin smiled for the first time since I’d mentioned the dream.

It warmed me, like it always did. “There weren’t so many urinals in the Pulaski field house,” I said.

Being in there, alone, smiling at each other—that was what I wanted. Not nightmares and panic. I leaned toward him so my head was on his shoulder, my lips reaching toward his neck.

“You’re making it hard for me to think,” he said.

I didn’t want to think, either. “Do you have to think when you kiss me?”

He met my lips and gave me a long, ragged kiss.

And it worked. I didn’t think about the nightmare once. I raised my lips again, but he stepped back.

“We need to focus, Annabelle. I need to focus.” He sat down across the room on a bench beside the lockers. “Your dreams. I should have listened closer. Tell me everything you remember.”

“They’re just dreams,” I said, backtracking. “It’s not like…I’m not going to lose you, am I?” My voice echoed in the locker room.

“Nothing like that,” he said, but he rubbed his face when he said it, covering his mouth. I’d played enough poker with Will to know a tell when I saw it, and I would have bet money that he was bluffing. “Tell me what happened,” he said.

So I did. The girl on the bank, the girl on the boat, the girl in the forest. The whole spiel.

He started pacing. “She had milky eyes?”

“Yes.” I hadn’t mentioned her eyes, and there was no way he could have seen them that first time, not all the way across the lake.

He kept pacing, thinking. “And I was in the dream?”

I nodded. “But you didn’t quite look like you. You weren’t exactly solid. You were,” I didn’t know how else to put it, “bluer.”

“But no one else, right? Not Stephanie? Not anybody?”

“Yeah…no.” I hadn’t mentioned Will. I didn’t want to now. “At the end I looked to where you’d been. Only you weren’t there anymore. Will was.”

Martin looked like I had sucker punched him in the gut. “I see.”

“Oh come on,” I protested. “You don’t
see
anything, Martin. You can’t blame me for something in my dream. It’s not like I decide what happens. Anyway, it wasn’t real.”

“Just what
is
real to you? Is this real?” He picked up a towel that had been abandoned on a bench, wadded it up into a ball, and threw it across the room into a laundry basket. “Is this?” He kicked the bench between us, then turned to face me. “Am I?”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“It’s a simple question, Annabelle. Why can’t you just answer?”

“Yeah, well, I’d like some answers, too,” I shot back. “That little girl. It’s like she’s trying to get in my skin. You know her, don’t you? Is she a friend of yours? Like Stephanie?”

When he looked up, some of the blue washed out of his eyes, melting his rage away. “No.” He shifted his gaze to his feet, his face intentionally blank.

“You’re a crappy liar,” I said.

“I’m not lying.”

“Sure.” If he had been made of wood, his nose would have grown two inches by now.

“She’s not a friend,” he said. “That’s the truth.” He rubbed his face again.

The bell for second period rang.

“We should get out of here,” he said.

Martin and I made our way through the crowded hallway, so close my elbow jostled into his rib…but inside, where we breathed, we could have been on opposite ends of a frozen lake.

“You may as well go to class,” he said. “I need to—I’ll figure this out. I promise.”

He abandoned me outside the art room.

I thought about following him, but Ms. Sage had already seen me. “Annabelle, get in here and pull out your sketchbook,” she said.

She’d arranged a bunch of random stuff on a drape of light blue fabric: green plastic grapes, a gray mug holding three pencils and a wooden back scratcher, a metal eyelash curler, a dollhouse stove, the jeweled pink collar for a cat. “Five minutes looking, twenty minutes drawing,” she said. “Starting now.”

At first, I was relieved to have some time to think things through. But it was more of a curse than a blessing because my thoughts took me nowhere good
.
I zoomed in on the eyelash curler and began to draw, but I had plenty of time to think:
He’s lying. He’s freaking, so there must be something to freak about
. Time to think:
Does
he
really
know
that
girl? What does she mean “ask him”? What does she want from me?

And then in my brain, I could almost hear the girl’s answer. “I don’t want something from you. I want
you
.”

While Martin might be lying, the girl was not.

• • •

Martin missed lunch. When he didn’t show up in the cafeteria, I noticed Stephanie was missing, too. But Billy and Trina were there at the golden table, so it wasn’t some football-cheerleader thing. It was a dream thing.

Will was in the photo lab, probably with Paolo, who was also AWOL. So that just left me trying to assure Talon and Serena that nothing was up.

Martin wasn’t next to me in chemistry, either, because there was no chemistry. As if Spirit Day and the parade weren’t enough to get all of Chilton High frothing at the mouth for the big rah-rah homecoming game that night, the last period of Friday classes had been canceled and we were funneled into the gym for a pregame pep rally.

The team filed in. I watched, wondering if Martin would skip that, too, but he didn’t. He stood down there looking gorgeous and mysterious. Stephanie was in the alpha position on the gym floor with her pack of cheerleaders. I slumped in the bleachers and gnawed my fingernails. Randy Simpkins sat down on one side of me. Everyone called him Moon because he marched out of his pants two years ago while he was playing the bass drum during the Christmas parade. Not a big believer in belts, that Randy. Or underwear.

Will came in and squeezed in the empty space on my other side.

The cheerleaders had started a sort of cowgirl-meets-kung-fu routine and Brazen, the worst band in the history of pop music, was blasting over the loudspeakers.

“You know, ‘gymnasium’ comes from the Greek word meaning ‘to exercise naked.’” Will spoke in my ear. “Coincidence? Or do you think that’s what Stephanie’s going for?”

I shrugged.

“A
shrug
?” Will was outraged. “That’s all I rate? No guffaw? No titter? Not even a snort?”

“I don’t snort.”

He looked at me, then leaned back toward my ear. “What’s up? You look shot. Bad day?”

“Bad night.”

“Oh.” He twisted his neck around, like his collar itched, only he wasn’t wearing a collar, he was wearing one of his trademark tees with a picture of a guy wearing a leaf crown like Julius Caesar. “Carpe Weekend,” it said.

“I texted you.”

“What?”

It was impossible talking over the ruckus of
watch
me
walking
now/watch me talking now/watch me dance.
I raised my voice. “I texted.”

“Yeah, I got that this morning.”

“Why not before?” The pep band started playing, which was even louder than the speakers.

“I turned my phone off. Went hiking up to the Cascades. I just wanted to get off the map for a while.”

“What’s it like there?” I asked.

“What, the Cascades?” Will looked surprised at my question—which only made sense, as we’d hiked to the falls a ton of times.

“No, off the map?”

“I’m not sure I got there.” Will smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “Turns out there are some things that just keep following you.”

“Like what?”

The pep band got, if possible, even louder. Will shrugged. I couldn’t hear his answer, but I was pretty sure his lips formed the word “you.”