Dream Boy (22 page)

“Dude.” A hoarse whisper. Billy.

Everyone talked at once.

“Is she…?”

“Damn.”

“But I thought…”

I tuned them out.

Whatever had been holding me up—fear? adrenaline?—drained from my body, and I sank to the ground in a tattered, pink heap.

It was over, I thought. She was gone…

But it wasn’t over.

Because Will was gone, too.

And Spice.

I looked up at the pocked bark of the maple. The brown beer bottle pegged to the tree seemed dull, ordinary, like something left by drunk college kids.

The others kept talking in funeral voices. There were words, but all I heard was static. Now that the threat was gone, I could only think of what I’d lost. I pictured Will bounding past me, the little dog in his arms, careening toward the branches, out of reach. Will’s face. Blue ash.

I became aware of a pressure at my elbow. Talon. “You in there?”

Was I?

If I spoke, I’d start crying. If I started, I wouldn’t stop.

“It’s safe now,” Serena said. “Come on. Before my parents call out the rangers.”

I thought about my mother, awake by the phone. I thought about the Connors, waiting for a call that Will would never make.

Billy plunked down beside me. “What just happened?”

“Crap if I know,” I said. Then I realized that in the chaos, I had forgotten. “Stephanie should be okay. I’ll bet you can find her now. Back home.”

“Then I’m heading out. Come on.” He stood and reached down to help me up.

I gave him points for loyalty.

“I’ll meet you back at the car,” I said. “Ten minutes, I swear.”

Talon, who looked a little like the Leaning Tower of Pisa with her one broken shoe and one spike, snapped off her remaining heel. She tossed it into the undergrowth and came back toward me. She looked wrong somehow, incomplete, and I realized it wasn’t just her mangled shoes; it was the fact that her hands were empty, that there was no leash, no little dog scampering by her feet.

“We’ll both catch up,” she said.

Paolo nodded. “Let’s find your parents,” he said to Serena. His voice was flat, without the wink of humor it always had when Will was around. In the background, Billy hummed like a power tool. It was the Evasive Maneuver song that had been playing in the car.

• • •

How
normal
, I thought. I tried to be normal, too. I put my body on autopilot, my brain on mute. But my heart felt like a clump of tinfoil in my chest. If a word from me could have made it stop taking in blood, I would have said it.

Together, Talon and I walked back toward the clearing, without even saying out loud where we were going.

“He’s coming back,” I said. “And Spice, too. They’ll be back now, right?”

Talon shrugged.

“Will?” I shouted. “Here, Spice! Will?”

Talon’s voice joined mine.

We yelled the whole way back to the clearing. Occasionally, Talon whistled, piercing the night.

There was no movement, except the wind, soft now in the trees. I marched to the center of the clearing. “WILL CONNOR, GET YOUR SKINNY ASS BACK HERE!” I screamed. Talon almost smiled. Except she didn’t.

“WILL!” I shouted. My voice broke like the bottles. The moonlit grass was sprinkled with shards of green, brown, and clear glass—plus a splash of blue. The luster of it triggered something, a half-formed idea.

At the base of the tree, I crouched down and picked up a sharp edge, cobalt, almost the color of Martin’s eyes. It sliced into my palm, drawing a thin line of crimson across my fate line. The sight of my own blood, the prick of pain, gave me a weird sort of relief, and I thought maybe I should just keep digging in.

“Annabelle, what are you doing?” Talon asked.

“Picking up the pieces,” I said. Isn’t that what people did when their lives fell apart?

I spied another hunk of blue glass, a perfect triangle, and picked it up, too. Will’s bottle, the only blue, flashed in the dirt. I crouched down and pried up a few more pieces. Talon helped, and soon all the shards were gathered in the folds of my dress.

Talon stood and brushed herself off.

I stood, too. We weren’t yelling anymore. We knew no one would answer. Holding the skirt of my dress like a sack, I lumbered after Talon toward Billy’s car, where our friends—the ones who weren’t vapor—waited.

My phone chirped as soon as we were back in range. Seven voice mails from my mother.

Paolo dialed the coach and told him to check the locker room.

“What about the Connors?” Talon asked. “Who’s going to tell them?”

Paolo half raised his hand, like he was in class. “I’ll do it.”

“I will.” It came out harsher than I meant. “Please, let me?”

“What are you going to tell them?” Macy asked.

“Maybe that he’s lost?” My throat ached when I said it.

“Agreed. We should keep our story simple,” Macy said. “Will’s lost in the woods. He took off after Talon’s dog and neither came back. That’s it.”

My phone chirped again. A text from Martin.

Steph and I are okay
, it said.
Are you?

I was a million miles from okay.
On way home
, I texted back.

Meet at your house?
he wrote.

In the morning
, I said. But it was morning already.

• • •

When Billy dropped me off, I barely had time to say good-bye before he peeled away, gunning to get to Stephanie.

My mother, who had seen our headlights, ran across the yard to meet me, phone in hand. She gave me a long hug, then looked at my ripped dress, the mud and blood. “I’m calling the cops.”

“Don’t,” I said. “I’m fine.” Then the tears came, so hard and fast I gagged over the words I had practiced in the car. “Will’s lost. I looked and looked.”

“Dear God.”

She held me again.

My mother went with me to tell the Connors. Nick came, too, his eyes wide and his mouth, for once, silent. Then we did call the cops, though I knew they wouldn’t find anything.

At home, my mother tucked me in like I was a baby, adjusting the quilt and then readjusting it. “They’ll find Will, Annabelle. I’m sure of it.”

“How do you know?”

“It’s
Will
,” my mother said. “Twenty bucks says he’ll find us. Will and Spice, both. That dog’s as smart as she is ugly.” Finally, she forced herself to stand. “Get some sleep, sweetheart.”

I wanted to believe her. I wanted to believe Nick, who, on the way back from the Connors’, shared his vision of Will building a compass out of a shoelace and a sharpened stick. I wanted…What did I want? For everything to be back to the way it was before? For none of this to have happened? For none of us to have ever dreamed?

But that didn’t seem right, either. Martin, Macy, Stephanie, Paolo, and all of the rest of them. They were here now. They were real.

Will.

I wanted Will.

I had my own vision of him—when we were four, clutching a worn copy of
The
Velveteen
Rabbit
, which had always made me cry.
“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time…”

My chest tightened on nothing, a fist gripping empty air.

I could hear my mom down the hall, starting to scrub the bathroom floor, which she hardly ever did, and never at three in the morning.

I didn’t know what to do with my brain. I dug out a sketchbook from under my bed and began to draw, letting the lines and curves form their own design.

The strokes of my pencil became Will’s hair, Will’s face as it appeared to me outside the cabin—shadows and light. I touched his face with my finger, and put the sketchbook down.

Billy had given me a bag from under his seat for the pieces of glass. I untied the knot and emptied the contents on my desk. I still had some superglue in a drawer from when I knocked over a lamp. Starting with the triangular piece of glass, I puzzled the bottle back together, bit by bit. When I was done, I tore out the sketch. I would have let Will see it, if he’d asked.

Will
, I wrote at the bottom of the paper
. I can’t lose you, either. Come back. —Annabelle

I scrolled up the note, stuffed it in the bottle, and sealed it with a cork from the junk drawer. Then I sneaked out the back door. The light was silver now, not yet dawn, though the birds had already started singing. I listened to them as I ran all the way to the river.

Tears came again—the world, a blur of burnt orange and gray.

When I got to the water’s edge, I tossed the bottle into the current. It went under but then a few yards down, it bobbed back to the surface.

In the rising light, I watched it float away.

I
am
standing
barefoot
in
a
long, blank hallway. All around me is white, like the space that surrounded Martin and Stephanie when they last tried to reach me. At the end of the hallway is a door. I open it to find a small, tidy den. The paneling is wood, the white space is gone. I am in.

In
the
corner, a gray-haired man is collecting a fishing rod and tackle from a trunk. He doesn’t look up when I enter the room. As if I am not here.

I
follow
him
out
the
back
door, across the yard, to a spot where grass turns to rock, and the rock slopes to sand and a wide expanse of water. The early morning light casts fragile shadows. The air smells of salt and rot.

The
man
sits
on
a
large
flat
rock, selects a hook and lure, and knots them to the end of his line. He looks across the water and his eyes narrow.

I
follow
his
gaze
to
the
other
bank. A tiny, spotted dog scampers along the edge. She runs back toward the river, barking, but then she stops. A body is sprawled in the sand. Will’s body.

Motionless, bent, one bare foot still submerged in the moving water.

Martin was still beautiful, his face unscathed as he stood on my porch in the late morning sun.

My own face was etched with scratches. He reached out, like this time he wanted to make sure that
I
was real. Then he held me in his arms. I stood there, stiff, not able to exhale.

“I needed to be with you last night,” he said. “After.”

“I couldn’t.” My eyes misted. “But I’m glad you’re back.”

“I’m glad
you’re
back,” he echoed when he released me. “Should we walk?”

I told my mother where we were going and she let us leave, though I could tell she was fighting the instinct to lock me in a tower like Rapunzel.

Our feet took us again to the river, but I turned us left instead of right, away from the pump house. The river didn’t seem to mind. Before I turned to Martin, I scanned the bank, but it was empty.

“Did Paolo tell you everything?” I asked.

“I think so.”

“Then maybe you can tell me,” I said. “Because I don’t understand. Why Will?”

He shrugged. “From what Paolo said, it could have been anyone. Or not
anyone
, just…”

“Just what?” I asked, not wanting him to say it.

“Dreams.”

I held his gaze. “You knew all along, didn’t you?”

Martin nodded. “He had the mark—the tattoo, like mine. It was faint, almost the color of his skin.”

“The mark,” I murmured. “I’m an idiot.” Of course the lines on the back of Martin’s neck had looked familiar; I had seen them before—not on Stephanie, but on Will. He usually wore his hair longish, but I remembered seeing those same waves on his neck years ago, when his mother still cut his hair. He’d said it was a birthmark, and I’d shown him mine, shaped like a little fish on the back of my leg. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Would you have believed it?” he asked. “I’m not sure
he
even knew what he was.” His pace slowed and he kicked a pinecone out of his path. “You didn’t know what you were, either, right?”

What? In love with Will?

“That you’re the Dreamer,” he said.

He waved away my protest before I could voice it.

“The nightmare knew. That’s why she targeted you. She wanted you at the edge of the wood. Where she became real. An intersection. So she could force you back into the gray and take your place.”

“She was insane.”

“That, too,” he said. “But she was also right. You’re her. The Dreamer. Capital D.”

“I’m not a ‘capital’ anything.”

“But it makes sense. You asked me yourself: Why Chilton? Why here? But it wasn’t the town. It was
you
. You brought me here. And Paolo says—”

“Look, I
know
Talon dreamed Spice, and Will dreamed Stephanie. That’s more than one dreamer by my count and—”

“But you were there, too, in those dreams?”

“They weren’t mine—”

“You
made
them yours. Remember I told you about the first dreamer? That she walked among the dreams. That’s what you’ve been doing. It’s the only explanation. It’s like,” and here he took my hands in his, “it’s like you’re Eve.”

“Okay, what kind of drugs are you even on?”

“You’re the one,” he said again.

“Yay, me.”

“You
are
. The sooner you accept it, the sooner you have a chance of finding Will.”

A
chance.

I looked back at him; his eyes were bright with, I don’t know, sincerity? Reverence? And maybe a little regret, too. He dropped my hands.

I know Paolo hadn’t told him about me and Will in the woods, because Paolo hadn’t seen. But I had the feeling that somehow, Martin had. That he knew.

I didn’t want to lie and tell him I wished I could feel differently. Because I wanted my feelings for Will, as much as they hurt. They were real, and they were mine. They told me what I needed to know: that Will was never just my friend; he was always more. The mirror that saw me as I really was. The boy who loved me anyway.

And Martin? I guess Martin was everything I thought I wanted. Everything I dreamed of. The perfect boy. Imperfect for me.

“What if—” My words rushed along with the river. “What if I did find him? Will. What if I found him and he was—” I didn’t want to say it. But I did. “Dead?” I forced myself to look in Martin’s eyes. “What if this Dreamer touches a person who is dead, in a dream, I mean. Does the person come to this world dead?”

Martin shook his head. “I’m sorry. I don’t know.”

My face twisted in a way even Martin, with his rose-colored glasses, could not have thought was pretty. But he leaned in anyway, to kiss me. I turned my head so that he hit my cheek. It was still warm, his kiss. Part of me wanted to turn to him, to lose myself and forget everything. But my mind was full. Will’s being gone didn’t leave me free to love Martin; it took up all the space I had. Will was nowhere, and his being nowhere was
everywhere
. I couldn’t let him go.

“So it’s like that, then,” Martin said.

“I’m still trying to figure things out.”

“Looks to me like you’ve figured them out already.”

“Some of them,” I said.

And I had. I knew what I wasn’t willing to lose. Who I wasn’t willing to lose. And I was beginning to understand what I might have to risk to get him again. I would have to believe the unbelievable. That I
was
the Dreamer, capital D. That I could find him and bring him back alive.

The thought of it went against everything I’d ever believed about my life and about myself. I had power? I had control? It didn’t seem possible, but it needed to be.

Martin stared out over the river, but his eyes were glazed. I’m not sure he was seeing anything. Then he turned and retraced his steps without waiting for me to follow.

“He was my
best
friend
,” I called after him.

Martin didn’t answer, and he didn’t look back.