Yesterday (7 page)

In this dream place, which is here but not here, I stare through a looking glass at a tall boy with dirty-blond hair. He’s a close friend or maybe even family, someone I’ve always known. He’s protected me, consoled me. He’s someone I can’t do without but I can’t reach him. The looking glass serves as a fence—it keeps us apart.

He’s not himself. He snarls at me through the glass, gnashing his teeth as he lunges.

He detests me. The fire inside him wants to destroy everything. It hates without end and that should scare me but it only makes me sad.

I’m inconsolable at the thought of living in the world without him. I need him back.

When I wake up I’m crying like a child. Sobs rack my body and I can’t catch my breath. The noise is loud enough that I’m afraid it will wake my mother or Olivia and I grab my pillow and weep into it. For the blond boy from my dream. For everything my heart feels it’s lost.

The pain seems bottomless and in my mind, like a looping sound track, I hear the words of Winston Churchill: “You ask, what is our aim? I can answer with one word: Victory—victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival.”

On Thursday morning I’m exhausted and my mother has to wake me up three times. On the third occasion she has a glass of orange juice with her and sits on the side of my bed watching me drink it to be sure I’m really getting up.

My stomach hurts with last night’s sadness but the intensity of feeling that the dream prompted in me is a mystery like so many other things are lately. I’m no longer heartsick, only tired and achy the way children get when they’re coming down from a tantrum or crying jag.

Downstairs, Olivia stares at me from behind a box of Cocoa Puffs. “They plowed the road already so we have to go to school after all,” she complains.

“That sucks,” I mumble, although I’d forgotten that last night my mother mentioned classes might be canceled.

In the light of day my rational side has grown marginally
stronger, or maybe it’s only that I’m too sleepy to cling to thoughts of the green-eyed boy with the same tenacity that I did last night. If it was thoughts of him that made me dream the frighteningly vivid way I did, then I need to find a way to mentally put him aside.

I don’t want to land in that dark place again. The sense of loss was too much to take. It didn’t feel like a dream.

The blond boy was as familiar to me in my dreamworld as the green-eyed guy seemed to me downtown yesterday but what am I supposed to do with that kind of craziness? Is it the kind of break with reality that could’ve been caused by the shock of my father’s death? Or could a brain tumor be loosening my grip on the real world and dragging me into fantasy?

I swallow cold cereal and stare blearily at my sister who seems to be adjusting to life in Canada with much more ease than I am. I wait until my mother’s left the kitchen before asking, “Olivia, do you like it here?”

“It’s okay,” my sister replies with her mouth full. “Do you like it?”

“I don’t know. It feels different … strange.”

“Because we were away for so long,” Olivia says sensibly. She brushes her dark bangs off her face and picks up her cereal bowl to drink down the leftover milk. Since Olivia’s six years younger than me we’re not as close as we might have been otherwise but aside from my mother, she’s the only one who’s been through these changes along with me and I don’t want to worry my mom by bringing any of this up to her.

“I know,” I begin. “But it doesn’t feel as if it’s only because we’ve been living in other countries. Does it ever sort of seem like …” I search for the right words. “Like what’s happening now is more
authentic
than the way our lives used to be?”

Olivia sets down her bowl, her eyes sparking with confusion. “What do you mean?”

My toes jerk against the floor beneath my feet. “Say with Grandpa, right? We saw him on visits home and he came to see us in Auckland but when you think of that—your New Zealand memories of him—does he feel like the same person?”

Olivia gapes at me as if I’ve either lost my mind or she’s hopelessly misunderstood me but I’ve gone too far to back down. “And your friends in Auckland,” I continue, “the kids you went to school with there—do they seem as complicated and”—I flex the fingers of my right hand, grasping for an idea just beyond reach—“genuine as the kids you go to school with now?”

Olivia swats at her bangs again and pokes her tongue inside her cheek. “Canadian kids are just different,” she says slowly. “We’re not used to them yet.” She pushes her empty cereal bowl forward a couple of inches and then slides it back towards her. “But Grandpa is the same as he always was. Remember the time he let me drive the boat?” She smiles brightly.

“I do,” I say. It was just over a year ago but it feels like longer. My dad was busy with work and my grandfather had rented a boat and taken my mom, Olivia and me for a day trip.
We were out on the water, about a half hour away from the ramp at Kawakawa Bay, and Olivia was so excited by the speed and the sight of the frothy waves the boat was leaving in its wake that my grandfather asked my mother whether it would be all right to let Olivia take the wheel for a while. Surprisingly, my mother agreed and Olivia turned solemn at the helm, steering good and straight, like she’d done it countless times before. My grandfather let her remain at the helm for at least ten minutes before taking over again.

I see the pride Olivia felt that day reflected in her face now. “Maybe we can get Grandpa to rent a boat here sometime this summer,” I suggest. “Explore Lake Ontario.”

I wish I could remember that day in the same way that Olivia’s eyes tell me she can. I remember the fact of it but the memory itself is sterile. Just images, sounds and a transcript of events that didn’t leave any deeper an imprint on me than the latest episode of
Knots Landing
.

“Don’t you like Grandpa?” Olivia asks, unwilling to be distracted from my original questions.

“Of course I do. I think … nothing feels the same after Dad. I can’t explain it.”

Olivia sets both her hands on the table, wriggles her fingers and peers worriedly down at them.

I clear my throat and say, “I miss him. I miss New Zealand. I miss the way everything used to be.” This is far from the whole truth but I don’t want to make my sister anxious. If she’s doing okay, I’m glad for it. “I think it’s just going to take some time for me to settle in here.”

I yawn like I’m bored with the topic and ready to put it behind us. Then I take our dirty dishes over to the sink and wash them so my mother won’t have to, as if that will make up for the weird things going on inside my head. I wipe down the kitchen counter too and even make my bed, which is something I rarely do, if I can trust my memory at all.

As pointless as it seems, at school I try to keep my mind on what my various teachers are jotting sloppily down on their blackboards but during English there’s a knock at the classroom door and the vice principal’s standing there in a white shirt and blue tie, asking to speak to me. He apologizes for “what transpired at the museum” as I think to myself that he doesn’t know the half of it.

At lunch Christine and Derrick want to know if I’m feeling better. I say I’m back to normal but I end up listening to them more than I talk and as the three of us are streaming out of the cafeteria at the end of the period, I find myself within arm’s length of Seth. He pretends I’m invisible and speeds up, breaking away from me.

It’s how I’d probably act if our situations were reversed so it doesn’t come as a shock but what
does
surprise me is that at the end of the day one of the guys Nicolette introduced me to at Corey’s party is leaning against my locker scratching at the knee of his black jeans.

“Hey you,” he says as though we know each other much better than we actually do. “How’s it going?”

“Hey,” I say guardedly.

“I was just wondering if you needed a ride home?” he asks, straightening. “I know you’re new here and all so …”

I narrow my eyes and point to my locker so he’ll stand aside and let me open it.

“Sorry.” He laughs and shifts his weight to the locker next to mine.

My hair falls forward so that I can only make out thin strips of him through my curtain of dirty-blond strands. I enter my locker combo and slide the lock open. “The thing is, I don’t live that far,” I say, more to my locker than to him.

“That doesn’t matter,” he tells me, all perfect teeth and quarterback shoulders. “I’m sure you could still use a ride. It’s real windy out there today.” His name comes to me as he’s trying to sell me on a ride home: Terry. The guys he was hanging out with at the party were calling him something else, a jock nickname I’ve forgotten, but Nicolette introduced him as Terry.

“The cold doesn’t get to me,” I say, because Terry isn’t my type in the first place and in the second, I really don’t want to repeat what happened with Seth.

“So you’re saying you’d rather walk home in the cold than take a ride from me?” Terry recaps like the concept of a girl not being interested in him is a completely foreign one.

“I just don’t want you to get the wrong idea.” I turn to stare Terry straight in the eye. Distracting myself with a guy from school isn’t a workable concept and if it was, I would’ve chosen Seth. Meanwhile, the boy I won’t let myself actively think about is still blinking his green eyes inside my head.

“How do you know it’s the wrong idea if you haven’t given me a chance?” Terry quips, a smarmy grin taking over his face.

My eyebrows slant together in aggravation. “I guess you just have to trust me on that.”

Terry flinches and focuses on the floor. “Wow,” he mutters. “You’re pretty hostile. I think I’m starting to get why Seth dumped you.”

A startled laugh chokes up from my diaphragm. “Is that what he told you?” I smother the impulse to set Terry straight. Who cares what someone I met
once
and have never had a conversation with thinks?

I need to keep my head on straight. I need to keep my problems to myself and not let them bleed into my mother’s and sister’s lives. I need to cement myself in strength and logic, lock my brain into the here and now and forget about dreams and visions. Someone like Terry, I don’t need.

Having made that decision so resolutely, it’s doubly annoying to face a similar situation the very next day with a guy I get paired up with in English class for a short assignment on Greek myths. Kyle’s not a jock or any other obvious thing and I like the sound of his laugh as we joke together about King Minos, Prince Theseus and Princess Ariadne but then he spoils it by telling me how cute I am when I smile. “Well, you’re cute all the time,” he says. “But especially when you smile.” Then he pauses, slouches down in his chair and adds, “Maybe I shouldn’t say this but I was glad when I heard you weren’t with Seth anymore.”

“I was never with Seth,” I correct. Not that it’s anybody’s business.

The guy nods slowly. “Better still.”

I bite down on my pen cap and scan the story of Theseus and the Minotaur as Kyle, in his long-winded and self-deprecating way, proceeds to ask me out. There’s a part in Theseus and the Minotaur where Princess Ariadne writes to Prince Theseus. Her letter begins, “I am a beautiful princess as you probably noticed the minute you saw me.” A couple of minutes ago Kyle and I were kidding around about how conceited Princess Ariadne was to note her own beauty but from my first day at school so many people seemed to have judged me by my appearance.

I’ve gone from being unnerved by it to slightly flattered (on occasion) to feeling straitjacketed by it and when the final bell rings on Friday afternoon I dash for Christine’s locker with a special request. If people can’t get past how I look without a shove, I’ll give them the push they need. Maybe Princess Ariadne was cool with guys fawning over her for the wrong reason but I’m tired of it.

Christine’s head is down and she’s yanking on tall boots with a zillion chunky straps down the front. Her black top hangs on her like a piece of drapery, cinched at the waist and then falling in pleats halfway down her thighs. She doesn’t notice me until I’m right next to her. “Oh, hey, Freya,” she says, glancing up at me. Her shock of heavy black eyeliner highlights the stunning light blue, nearly violet, of her irises
in a way that makes my breath catch when I stare at them straight on.

“I was wondering if I could ask you a favor,” I say. “Do you think you could help me dye my hair?”

“Are you serious?” Christine’s fingers tug at her own black locks as she stands up next to me. “Why do you want to do that?”

“Because”—I ball up a fistful of blond hair in my right hand—“this doesn’t feel like who I am.”

Christine tilts her head to one side and says, “So how do you want to look?”

“More like you,” I admit. “I want to change my image.” I want the people who only talk to me because of how I look to leave me alone. I want my outsides to match the prickly, shady, mysterious way I feel on the inside.

Christine’s lips curve into a small smile. “That sounds radical. Are you sure?”

As sure as I’ve been about anything lately. I don’t have any control over what’s going on inside me but buying a tube of hair dye and some new clothes is definitely within my power.

“Positive,” I tell her. “The sooner the better. When do you think you could do it?”

“Um … tonight,” Christine says, smiling harder. “If that’s good with you.”

Tonight is excellent.

A
s soon as my mom’s home from work I ask her if she can drop me off at the mall after dinner to meet a friend from school. In Auckland I had a restricted driver’s license that allowed me to drive around by myself during the day, which usually only happened on weekends when I had access to one of my parents’ cars. We moved back here before I was old enough to get a full driver’s license in New Zealand and now I’ll have to start over from the beginning—qualify for a learner’s permit and take driver’s ed.

My mom looks as tired as I felt after my bad dream the other night but she chauffeurs me to the mall later anyway. Christine and I hit the store where she usually buys her hair dye and the girl at the cash register gives me a discount because she knows Christine. Afterwards we pick out the palest pressed powder we can find in the department store makeup counter along with a brand of eyeliner Christine recommends and I tell her what Terry said about Seth dumping
me. “I guess that’s him trying to preserve his reputation or something,” I add.