Dreamology (2 page)

JERRY IS SNORING
directly into my mouth, his warm dog breath wafting at me with every exhale.

“Well, that explains Agnes,” I mutter.

“Who's Agnes?” my dad calls from the driver's seat. Behind his voice comes the light clicking of a turn signal, back and forth like a metronome.

“Nobody,” I say quickly, and he doesn't notice. My dad is a brain guy. A well-known neuroscientist—which doesn't mean much unless you also happen to be one—he understands things about the mind that are a mystery to most. But when it comes to the heart, he's clueless. I have no interest in telling him about Max, so at moments like this his shortcomings work in my favor.

I stretch and sit up. “I must have nodded off,” I say, my voice a little hoarse.

“Motion has been knocking you out since you were a newborn,” my dad explains, perpetually in professor mode. “Planes, trains, and automobiles . . . You and Jerry have been out for hours, but you picked the perfect time to wake up.” He smiles in the rearview mirror. “Get a good look at your new city.”

He makes an awkward Vanna White wave, as though Boston were a puzzle made out of giant block letters yet to be filled in. We are just easing off of I-90, and the historic downtown greets us politely from behind a picturesque Charles River. It makes New York, where we've lived for ten years, look like . . . well, New York. Does anything really compare?

The sounds of our wheels on the concrete off-ramp create a rhythm—one-two-three, one-two-three—and I nervously tap the three middle fingers on my right hand to the beat, like I'm playing piano keys. I was never any good at the piano. My teacher told my father I “lacked discipline” before quitting
me
, which must have been a first in the history of music lessons. But I still love music, particularly rhythm. Rhythm is a pattern, and patterns make sense of things. I find myself tapping one out whenever I'm nervous or unsure.

I lean against the passenger side door on bustling Beacon Street, clutching a box labeled
KITCHEN SUPPLIES
that almost certainly contains winter coats and dog food. I shield
my eyes against the August sun with one hand and try to get a good look at the two-hundred-year-old townhouse in front of me. It's funny how everything seems so big when you are little, but when you revisit it at an older age, you realize in fact just how much smaller it is than you thought, and how tiny you were at the time. In the case of our house, which was my mother's before ours, and her mother's before that, this place is still gigantic. I wonder how I didn't go missing for days as a child.

“You did, a few times,” my father calls from the front stoop when I voice these concerns out loud. “But we'd put Jerry on the case and he'd always find you.” At the moment Jerry is slumped against the backseat, head resting in his usual apathy as he stares at me through the window.

“You must have been more virile in your youth,” I say to him, raising an eyebrow.

The house is five stories of red brick, and the shutters and front door are painted jet-black, matching most of the other houses on the street. Lined up side by side, they remind me of the cliquey girls at my old school who all wore the same sunglasses. I can't help but wonder just how much of a New York City block it would cover if we flipped the building on its side.

“This is all ours?” I ask.

“Yup,” my dad says with a grunt as he finally pushes the front door open, one suitcase tucked under his left arm. “Now that Nan is gone. Since your mom doesn't have any siblings, everything goes to us.” He's trying to be breezy about it, to
mention my mother without weight. But it can't be easy to come back to this house, where we all lived together before she moved to Africa and never came back.

I step into the circular, oxblood-painted foyer of the house, and gaze up the polished wood banister of a spiral staircase that seems to extend all the way to infinity. It smells old. Not
bad
old, just . . . dusty, as if the whole house is a box of antiques that has been left in a basement too long.

My father tours me through a formal dining room on the ground floor, decorated with landscape paintings and a heavy chandelier, and into the kitchen, which is spare but sizable, like it was designed solely to cater grand parties. Little things jolt my memory—eating cream puffs at the table with Nan, lying beneath the grand piano in the second floor living room while a dinner guest entertained a crowd, the mouse hole where I'd leave jelly beans at night that were always gone by morning, until my secret was discovered and the hole was sealed up. These are not the rooms of a modern family. There are simply too many to live in. And now there are just two of us. Well, two and a hairy half.

Eventually we find ourselves in a corner room on the fourth floor, with heavy blue brocade curtains and pale lavender walls.

“I thought this one could be yours.” My dad shuffles his feet a bit, searching for the right words. “It was your mother's room when she was your age. It's a little more grown-up than the one you slept in before we left.”

I look around, surveying the four-poster bed, photographs of faraway places, and the ornate fireplace strewn with little silver boxes and souvenirs shaped like hippos and giraffes. Now my mother lives in Madagascar on a research compound with real-life versions of these creatures.

“Okay,” I say.

“Are you sure?” my dad asks.

“I think so . . .” I hesitate.

“Great,” he says, and just like that he's gone, back out to the car to continue the business of uprooting our lives.

I have just pulled what feels like my millionth box from the U-Haul, while Jerry follows me to and from the house, staring. They say most dogs don't make eye contact out of respect and to show that they understand you are the alpha of the pack. Well, Jerry only ever looks me directly in the eye. What does that say about us?

Inside the foyer my eyes fall on a large manila envelope sitting on the hall table, with my name written in my grandmother's scrawling cursive.

“I found that in Nan's sitting room,” I hear my dad say, and look up to find him standing halfway up the staircase, struggling with a box labeled
ALICE'S BOOKS
.
“Who knows what it is. She saved everything. She called it meticulous; I called it obsessive. You should go check out her closet. If I recall correctly, it's color coded.”

I study the envelope, feeling a mix of confusion and an odd kind of relief. It's the first sign that I am actually meant to be here. Carefully, I spill its contents out on the marble surface of the table. Out fall a bunch of postcards printed on flimsy brown cardboard paper. I pick one up. On one side is a simple image of a trio of balloons, floating into the sky. On the other side, in thick typewriter font, is written:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, ALICE!

FROM GUSTAVE L. PETERMANN AND ALL YOUR FRIENDS

AT THE CENTER FOR DREAM DISCOVERY (CDD)

I frown at the card, drop it, and pick up another. It says the exact same thing. And so does the next. There are nine postcards, all with balloons on one side, all with the same strange birthday wishes on the back. I check the postmarks and realize one has been sent every year since I've been away, on the day of my birthday. I think of the appointment reminders my dentist's office always sent me in New York—a tooth with a face, wearing makeup. What kind of tooth wears blush?

At the bottom of the stack is a note, written on light turquoise paper, delicate between my fingertips:

Dear Alic
e
—

Who knows if these will be of any use to you, but I simply could
n
'
t bear to throw any of them away.

With Love,

Nan

I smile and shake my head. It's exactly Nan. Simple, elegant, to the point. At least in writing, which was mostly how I knew her. My father had never wanted to come back to Boston after we'd left, always coming up with an excuse. I'd seen Nan a handful of times over the years when she would pilgrimage to New York for the opening of a Broadway play or a show at the Guggenheim. Her hair was always perfectly done, her clothes freshly pressed. I wondered, did everyone just become immaculate in old age, or would I be eighty and still wearing sweaters with holes in the cuffs that I can stick my thumbs through?

Just then my phone buzzes.

“I thought you were dead,” Sophie says when I answer. “Too busy pahking the cah in Hahvahd Yahd to answer any of my texts?”

I am already laughing. “So, do you miss me, or what?” I ask.

“Nope!” she quips.

“How come?” I whine.

“Because I have your clone, duh. I'm with her now. She's kind of pissed I'm talking to you, actually. She wants to know what you can offer that she can't.” Sophie was my first friend in New York and my best friend ever since. We have an old inside joke that we secretly made clones of each other to keep us company when the other isn't around. Nobody gets it, and we prefer it that way.

“Well, I miss you,” I say.

“What's wrong?” Sophie's tone is suddenly serious. She can always tell when something is up. It is totally annoying, for the most part.

“It's just weird here,” I say. “You should see the house, Soph. It's like a museum.”

“But you love museums!” Sophie exclaims. She wouldn't understand anyway, because she lives on Park Avenue in an apartment so spotless I was always afraid my mere presence would stain it. Sophie's parents sell art for a living. Big modern art, like giant spheres made of Astroturf, and videos of strangers swimming that they project onto the walls of their living room. “Really, Alice, if you went missing, the first place I'd tell the sexy NYPD detective who showed up at my door to look for you would be the Met or MoMA.”

“I like to
visit
museums, not live in them,” I say, rolling my eyes. “It's just not a home.”

“It'll get there,” she reassures me. “You're just tired from the drive.

“Actually, I slept most of the way . . .” I trail off, thinking about falling asleep on Max's chest. I tell Sophie about the night at the Met, and she says it sounds really romantic. But her tone says otherwise.

“I know I'm crazy to keep thinking about him like this,” I say. “You don't have to tell me.” We've had this conversation a million times before.

Sophie sighs. “It's just that you have a fresh start here, Al.
Maybe it would be smart to, you know . . . date a guy you can actually, like, be with?”

“It feels like we're together . . .” I say.

“You know what I mean, Alice,” Sophie says, sounding ever so slightly impatient. “Someone you can actually
have
. And introduce to your friends. And make out with behind a bush on field trips. Someone who is . . . like . . . real.”

Real
. The last word hangs there between us, and I shake my head, embarrassed. She's right. No matter how I feel about Max, there is still one problem. The night at the Met was a dream. Every night with Max, for as long as I can remember, has been a dream. Because Max is the boy of my dreams . . . and only my dreams.

Because he doesn't actually exist.

I AM OBVIOUSLY
entirely aware that it sounds one hundred percent nuts to be in love with someone I've never met, who isn't even real. But since I can't remember a time when I haven't dreamed about Max, it can be hard to tell the difference. The locations change and so do the stories, but Max is the constant, greeting me each dream with his mischievous grin and big heart. He is my soul mate.

I know it can't last forever, though. So just to be safe, I write it all down in my notebook. Sophie once called it my dream journal, which sounds like something you'd find next to the incense section in a gift shop. It goes with me everywhere, and right now it's riding in my
I
♥
NEW YORK
tote bag, in the wicker basket of a rusty old Schwinn I found in the
garden behind Nan's house. I named the bike Frank, short for Frankenstein, since I essentially brought him back from the dead.

Currently Frank is standing between the two stone pillars marking off Bennett Academy from the rest of the world—pillars that seem to say,
Oh, no you don't. Not in here
. What they actually say, carved across their granite fa
ç
ade, is
HE WHO FINDS SOLACE WITHIN THESE WALLS, FINDS SOLACE WITHIN HIMSELF.
I am skeptical of this statement.

I survey the student parking lot, chock full of sparkling Volvos and Audi SUVs, and then glance down at Frank. The only reason I am even standing here is due to a reciprocity program Harvard has with Bennett for the children of its professors. The handbook claims it's because Marie Bennett, who started the school on her back porch in the 1800s, was the daughter of a Harvard president, and therefore a “relationship based on mutual respect” has existed ever since.

“Whatever that means,” I'd said when my father read me the description out loud over dinner last night.

“It means having the child of the chair of the Neuroscience Department as a student makes Bennett look good,” my dad explained. “And in return you get a top-notch high school education for free.”

“Are you sure?” I said, tilting my head to the side and twirling some angel hair pasta on my fork. “Because I'm pretty sure I got the scholarship for my athletic prowess.”

“Ah, yes.” My dad nodded, playing along. “It's probably that trophy you won in the fourth grade. What was it for again?”

“Longest hula-hooper,” I reminded him, taking a big bite of pasta. “The highlight of my sports career.”

“That's the one.” He wiped his mouth with his napkin and winked at me.

Now I chain my bike outside the main administrative building, which looks more like the White House than a high school, and all but tiptoe down the sparkling marble hallway, because no other way seems appropriate. I rap on the door of the dean of students' office for my nine a.m. “meet and greet,” a term that made me wrinkle my nose when I read it in my info packet last night.

“Come iii-iiinnnn.” The singsong reply surprises me, but I find nobody in the waiting area, so I wander into Dean Hammer's office, avoiding the serious gaze of old portraits. It looks like the New York Public Library has been condensed into one little room—dark wood, brass lamps, and rows upon rows of books.

“So, what did you do?”

I whirl around so quickly at the sound of someone's voice that I trip over the coffee table, landing flat on my back atop the cranberry carpet. I squint up at the figure now peering over me, grateful that I chose a pair of shorts instead of the tangerine sundress I'd thought about wearing this morning. All I can make out is hair. Lots of it, blond and unruly.

“N-nothing,” I finally answer, blinking a few times. “I'm just . . . new.”

“Well, my advice, run like hell,” the hair says, holding out a hand and pulling me off the ground. The face that comes into view bares a bemused look due mostly to large dark eyebrows that contrast strongly against his bleached surfer curls and bright blue eyes.

“So what did
you
do?” I ask, eyeing him warily.

“Me?” he says, placing a hand over his heart as though I had stabbed him. “What makes you think I did anything?” But something about the way his eyes sparkle tells me not to believe him. “Can't a guy just take a nap in the dean's office in peace? I like the smell of his leather-bound books.” The corner of his mouth rises in an almost undetectable smirk.

“Oh good, Oliver, you're here,” Dean Hammer says as he shuffles in, removing his blazer and hanging it on the door hook. He's stocky, probably midforties, but looks older, no doubt due to dealing with students like Oliver. He wears delicate wire-rimmed spectacles and perfectly pressed pants.

“Yes, sir,” Oliver-with-the-hair says, sitting down on the sofa and resting one arm casually along its back. “I missed you so much, Rupert, I couldn't wait to see you.”

“Yes, you could,” Dean Hammer says, taking a seat at a library table–sized desk piled high with papers. “You're actually here because, by some amazing circumstance I have yet
to comprehend, you are already in trouble, before the school year has even begun.”

“It's a minor offense, really.” Oliver rolls his eyes.

“Paying another student for their on-campus car registration and sticking it on your vehicle because your own privileges were revoked at the end of last semester does not seem minor to me,” the dean says.

“Can you blame me?” Oliver pleads. “How am I supposed to get my lunch? Do you want me to starve?”

“Here's a wild idea: How about the cafeteria,” Dean Hammer deadpans.

“Rupert, if I have to spend days—actual full school days—at this claustrophobic hellhole for my entire senior year, I won't be paying for someone's registration, I'll be paying them to run me over.”

At the word
hellhole
, Dean Hammer bristles, suddenly aware of my presence.

“And who are you?” he asks.

“Alice Baxter-Rowe,” I say. “Though I'd prefer just to go by Alice Rowe, if that's okay. I can wait outside . . .”

“Don't move, Alice,” Dean Hammer orders. “You're the one with the appointment. Welcome to Bennett, by the way. As for you, Oliver, I can't suspend you because I know that's exactly what you're hoping for. Do not leave this campus for the rest of the day, or so help me God I will find a way to make you sleep
here, too. I'll be in touch about disciplinary measures once I've spoken with your parents.”

Oliver's light eyes have gone nearly black. “Good luck with that,” is all he whispers, and stalks out of the room.

“Miss Rowe,” Dean Hammer says after the door slams. “Take a seat. I have to apologize for Oliver. I promise it's rare to find a student here so disillusioned.”

“That's okay.” I shrug, sitting. “He was actually pretty entertaining.”

The dean frowns. “Not too entertaining, I hope. You've only been here about ten minutes, I wouldn't want you falling in with the wrong crowd. Speaking of . . .” He is unmistakably serious. Not necessarily sullen, but clearly interested in minimal bullshit.

Here we go
, I think to myself. It's a tone I've grown accustomed to. Forewarning. “You have a great opportunity ahead of you, Alice.”

“You sound just like my dad.” My voice comes out a little strained.

But Dean Hammer barely seems to hear me. “Your grades are superb,” he goes on, skimming my file. “But it's your teacher recommendations I'm a little concerned about.”

I bite the inside of my cheek. “I assume this is about my focus?”

“You assume correctly,” he answers. “All your instructors
mention the same word.
Potential
. The consensus seems to be that you tend to sort of ‘scoot' by.” He makes little quotation marks with his hands at the mention of the word
scoot
. “If you were to home in on what you really want, there's no limit to what you might achieve.”

I know what he wants me to say. That I am ready! That I know where I want to go to college and who I want to be and what I want etched on my gravestone. But I'm not, and I don't.

At my stubborn silence, Dean Hammer clears his throat. “So, what's first on the docket today?” he asks pleasantly.

“Social Psychology with Mr. Levy,” I answer, double-checking my schedule.

“A solid choice. I'm sure you'll enjoy it.” He gets up and opens the door, and I realize I have not seen him smile once. “And remember, Alice, we're here for you. We just want you to get everything you can from this experience.”

“Thanks.” I shake his hand. And then I promptly roll my eyes as soon as the door shuts behind me.

“That bad?” Oliver asks. He's sitting on top of the desk in the waiting room like it's a kitchen counter, next to an ancient-looking receptionist who is trying not to appear amused.

“What are you still doing here?” I ask.

He hops off the desk. “Chatting with Roberta, my one true love, of course.” He winks at the woman behind the desk. “Don't worry, Roberta, our illicit affair is safe with Alice. She's
new here, so she doesn't know anyone anyway.” In response, Roberta just shakes her head.

“Let me walk you to your first class,” he says. And it's not a question.

“Somebody looks happy for their first day at a new school,” Mr. Levy observes when I walk through the door of Psych 201. “You must be Alice. I had the rest of these guys last spring for Intro to Psych, and you're the only one who I don't recognize. Well, except for Kevin MacIntire, who apparently spent the whole summer eating his Wheaties.”

He says the last part in a lowered voice, leaning forward with his hands in his pockets, a secret between the two of us while the rest of the class is still settling in. Mr. Levy is obviously the “cool” teacher you “respect.” Wearing jeans and an olive-colored buttondown, he's also young. Like just-out-of-college young. And he seems pretty pleased with himself about that.

“You know what this means, right?” Levy continues. “You're going to have to introduce yourself to the group. Alice? Did I lose you already?”

He has lost me. I've stopped listening entirely. I've also stopped breathing. I'm thinking about a letter my mother once wrote me about the beaked sea snake, and how she barely escaped its jaws. Commonly found off the coast of Madagascar, the beaked sea snake has enough venom to kill
five people with one bite and can paralyze a victim with just one strike. But you don't die right away. So you just have to lie there, knowing the end is near, unable to move. That's exactly how I feel right now—totally and completely paralyzed, with the exception of my heart thwacking against my ribcage.

Because standing in the doorway of the classroom, looking directly at me, is Max.

My Max.

My Max of my dreams.

My Max who does not exist.

You've finally lost it
, I think.
You've gone and imagined him
. But just then somebody bustles through the door, bumping Max's shoulder and sending his books spilling onto the floor. I lean down to help pick them up, but he quickly grabs them, avoiding my gaze and moving to find a seat.

Okay, so not a mirage
, I think. But perhaps a doppelg
ä
nger. Because there's no way his name is actually—

“Max!” Mr. Levy calls out, teasing. “I hope to see better coordination on the soccer field this season. Welcome back, buddy.”

Max only looks up to give Mr. Levy a grin, then sits, staring down at his textbook like it's a bomb that might explode at any moment.

“So, Alice, we ready for that intro or what?” Levy asks. The whole class is quiet now, staring at me. Including the boy of my dreams, who just became a reality.