Dreamland (2 page)

He reached out and scratched Toby on the chin. Toby stretched his head to the sky. As he purred, his body vibrated in her arms.

“What's his name?” he asked.

“Toby,” she said.

He kept his eyes on Toby. “And what about
your
name?”

She hesitated. “Odea,” she said. “People call me Dea.” This wasn't exactly true, since most
people
didn't speak to her or address her at all. But her mom called her Dea, and so did Gollum.

“Connor,” he said. There was an awkward pause, and then they both spoke simultaneously.

“So, you live around here?” he said.

Just as she said: “You new?”

He laughed. He had a nice laugh. Nice teeth, too. “You first.”

“Yeah. The farmhouse,” she said, jerking her chin to indicate the direction from which she'd come.

He smiled. Suddenly, his whole face was transformed. The slightly-too-big chin, the crooked nose, and eyes maybe spaced a centimeter too far apart—all of it became perfect, symmetrical. Beautiful. She looked away, suddenly embarrassed.

“We're neighbors,” he said. “We just moved in across the street.”

“I figured,” she said. He raised his eyebrows, and she clarified. “Everyone knows everyone around here. I figured you were the new kid. I saw the moving truck.”

“Busted,” he said. “You go to Fielding? I'm a transfer.” When she nodded, he said, “Maybe you know my cousin. Will Briggs?”

Even thinking the name brought a foul taste to her mouth, like rotten gym socks and watery beer. Will Briggs was huge and dumb and mean; rumor was that his dad, who worked for the police department, had once cracked him over the head with a guitar, and he'd been screwed up ever since. Nobody liked Will Briggs, but he was good at football and his dad was a cop, which meant that no one messed with him either.

Apparently he was the one who'd started calling Gollum
Gollum
in third grade, probably the only vaguely creative thing he'd ever done.

“No,” she lied. In Dea's opinion, Will Briggs was radioactive material: anyone associated with him was contaminated.

He was still smiling. “I thought everyone knew everybody around here.”

“Guess not.” She squeezed Toby tightly, burying her nose in the soft scruff of his fur. Connor would get to school on Monday and hear from his cousin that she was Odor Donahue, friendless freak; then her new neighbor would turn suddenly unfriendly, and make excuses to avoid looking at her when they passed in the hall.

It had happened to her like that in Illinois. The summer before freshman year, she'd spent two months hanging out with a girl, Rhoda, who'd lived down the block. They'd spent hours looking over Rhoda's sister's yearbook and giggling over cute upperclassmen. They'd shopped for their first-day-of-school outfits together. And then, as always, the rumors had spread: about Dea's house, and the clocks; about how she and her mom
were crazy. On the third day of school, Rhoda wouldn't sit next to her at lunch. After that, she would make the sign of the cross when she saw Dea in the halls, like Dea was a vampire.

In fact, Gollum was the only semi-friend Dea had had in years. And that was only because Gollum was weird. Good-weird, in Dea's opinion, but definitely weird. Besides, Gollum couldn't really be counted as a friend, since she knew hardly anything about who Dea really was—if she had, Dea was pretty sure even Gollum would go running.

“I should get back,” she said, not looking at him.

“See you Monday,” he called after her.

She didn't bother responding. There was no point. She already knew how this whole thing would go.

Dea was six years old the first time she ever walked a dream.

It was an accident.

They'd been living on the outskirts of Disney World then, in a large condo meant to look like a castle, with turrets on the roof and flags hanging above the doorway. Inside, however, it looked nothing like a castle. The carpeting was green and smelled like cat pee, and the elevators were always out of order.

There was a central courtyard, basically a paved deck with a pool in the shape of a kidney bean, surrounded by sagging lawn chairs and straggly plants overspilling their planters. There was a tetherball pole, and a small outdoor pool house that held a
bunch of moldy umbrellas, an old bocce ball set, and a foosball table whose handles had been palmed smooth.

Dea was sick a lot back then. She had an irregular heartbeat. Sometimes she couldn't feel it at all, and she'd find herself gasping for breath. Other times, it raced so hard, she thought it might fly out of her mouth. It was as though her heart were tuned to the rhythm of a song she couldn't hear.

Her mom had forbidden her to swim—she wanted Dea to stay away from the pool entirely—and Dea was too weak to play tetherball. But she killed at foosball. When her mom was away at work, she spent hours playing both sides of the table, watching the ball spin between the plastic players.

There was a girl, Mira, who lived in 7C. Like Dea, she was too sick to go to school. She had bad asthma and legs that were kind of collapsed, so she walked really slowly, knees crooked inward, dragging her feet. She was one of Dea's first friends. Dea and Mira made up elaborate stories about the other residents of the condo, invented a new language called Inside Out, and buried treasure in the potted plants so that aliens would someday find it.

The day it happened, they'd spent the morning pretending to be scientists, inventing names for every flower they could think of, drawing them carefully with crayons in a big book of heavy-duty artist's paper Mira's dad had bought her, of which Dea was insanely jealous. She was jealous, actually, of everything Mira's father did, even stupid things, like coming down to the courtyard and telling Mira when it was time to come up for dinner, standing with one hand on the door, looking impatient.

She was jealous that Mira had a dad at all.

It was hot. Even the pool was too hot to give much relief, not
that Dea would have swum or even known how. Instead, Mira had the idea to drag a lawn chair into the pool house, next to the foosball table, where there was a fan. At some point, they fell asleep, lying next to each other in their shorts and T-shirts, their feet just touching.

And Dea found herself walking down a narrow stone corridor, open to the air on both sides and half collapsed, as in a castle gone to ruin. As she moved forward, the stone shifted and re-formed into individual doorways.

Later, she learned from her mom that this wasn't uncommon. The dreamer, sensing an intrusion, builds walls, buildings, sometimes whole cities, to prevent the strange element, the walker, from getting in—kind of like the body releases white blood cells to the site of an infection.

But Mira's mind wasn't very practiced, and so Dea passed easily through one of the doorways and ended up in the open, standing on a vivid stretch of green grass. Walking someone else's dream was like moving through a stranger's house. Everything was unfamiliar, and Dea knew instinctively not to disturb or touch anything.

On a tennis court several hundred feet away, Mira was playing. She was running back and forth on legs that were both strong and straight, and each time her racquet connected with the ball, there was a satisfying
thwack
. Then, midair, each ball turned into a bird and soared away. Soon there were dozens of birds, circling overhead, as though waiting for something.

Even at six, Dea knew that she was trespassing on something very private.

All at once the birds converged and became an enormous kite, so large it blotted out the sky. Then the court was swallowed
in shadow and she knew it was time to wake up.

Outside the little pool house, it was raining. And for the first time in Dea's life, her heart was beating normally.

Her mom knew what she'd done. At the time, Dea didn't think that was strange. She was
Mom
. She knew everything. She knew how to make the perfect chicken soup by adding cream and tomato to a can of Campbell's. She knew how to catch a single raindrop on her tongue. She knew mirrors and open water were bad, and clocks were good.

That day, Miriam sat at the kitchen table, gripping a mug of tea so tightly Dea could see individual veins in her hand, and explained the rules of walking.

The first rule, which Dea had already intuited, was that she must never try to change anything or intervene in another person's dream.

The second rule, related to the first, was that she might walk as many dreams as she wished if she was careful, and followed all the rules, but she must never walk the same person's dreams more than once.

And the third rule was that she must never, ever be seen.

Her mother explained other things, too—that birds were harbingers and would serve as guides, that mirrors and water were places where the boundary between the worlds was the thinnest, that clocks would keep them safe from the other side—but Dea had barely listened, so disappointed was she by the list of rules, especially the fact that she was forbidden from entering Mira's dreams again.

“Why can't I go back?” Dea had asked.

Dea's mom reached out and took Dea's chin. “I won't let them find you,” she said. Her eyes were very wide; she was looking at Dea as if trying to beam a secret message to her, and Dea knew her mom was afraid.

Then
Dea
was afraid. “Who?” she asked, although she felt she already knew the answer.

“The monsters,” Miriam said simply.

At six o'clock and every six hours afterward, even on Saturday, the clocks started. First a half dozen, then a few more, then a handful more. Dea and her mom had more than two dozen clocks, at last count, many of them fitted with chimes and bells, gongs and whistles. Miriam liked them, said they comforted her. She liked how they pulled her into morning with a song of gears and mechanics.

Dea was used to them. The clocks had come with them to all the houses they'd lived in. Often, Dea managed to sleep through them. Today she was jerked awake and, for one confused second, couldn't remember where she was, which house, in which town,
in which part of the country. As soon as the last clock stopped chattering, she rolled over, pulled the sheet over her head, and went back to sleep: deep and dreamless, like always. Like how she imagined it would be to swim, to sink into dark water.

When she woke up again, sun was streaming through the paper blinds. It was after eleven a.m. She could hear her mom padding around the kitchen downstairs. She loved that about this house: the space, the sense of separation. She hated Fielding, and missed living in cities like Chicago and even Houston—but there they'd lived on top of each other, sometimes sharing a single bedroom.

She pulled on clothes without paying attention to what she was wearing, then moved to the closet and extracted a small mirror from behind the jumble of sneakers and boots and flip-flops worn down to paper. Her mom allowed absolutely no mirrors in the house. Whenever they moved, the first thing Miriam did was dismantle the bathroom cabinets. Dea had a growing collection of forbidden mirrors, all purchased from yard sales: tarnished silver handhelds, makeup compacts obscured with a thick coat of ancient powder. Sometime in the spring she'd told Gollum in passing that she collected mirrors, and for Dea's birthday Gollum had presented her with a pretty chrome handheld, obviously antique, so heavy it hurt Dea's bicep to lift it. Dea had nearly cried, especially since she knew Gollum's family had hardly any money.

“Don't worry,” Gollum had said, in that ridiculous way she had of being able to read Dea's mind. “I stole it.”

She was kidding, obviously. Dea was embarrassed and humbled by Gollum's generosity, especially since for Gollum's
birthday Dea had just gotten her a leopard-print Snuggie (to be fair, Gollum was obsessed with Snuggies, or at least the idea of them). The chrome mirror, along with the picture of her father displayed in the living room, was one of the few physical possessions she actually cared about.

She checked her reflection. Hair: enormous. Skin: clear. Her one good feature. Eyes: pale blue, the color of ice. She made a monster face, then put away the mirror.

“Feeling better?” her mother said, as soon as she came downstairs. As usual, Miriam could tell that Dea had walked.

“A little.” Dea nudged Toby out of the way and moved toward the coffeepot.

A week earlier she'd pocketed a cheap plastic hair clip Shawna McGregor had left on a bench after gym. She knew it would be difficult to use—the best doorway objects were the ones that were cherished and closely guarded, like jewelry or wallets. Her mom speculated that it had something to do with the way that the mind transforms the objects we love best into extensions of the body. Touching someone's favorite necklace was nearly as good as holding hands—and made it so much easier to get in.

The night before, she'd had to grip the hair clip for nearly an hour before she could push her way into Shawna's dream.

She'd been in and out relatively quickly, before the dream had time to change. It was a dream of a standard basement party, the kind of gathering that Dea had never experienced in real life—lots of sweat and bodies packed close and plastic cups, as boring as she'd always imagined parties like that would be, filled not just with the standard assortment of high school kids but also with strangers, including a boy who looked like he'd
stepped out of a fairy tale. Maybe he had. Maybe he was Shawna's Prince Charming.

Hanging back behind one of the walls of the overstructure—a decaying castle hung with moth-eaten tapestries and pictureless frames—Dea had watched him, drawn to him without exactly knowing why. His hair was a dark tangle and fell to his jaw. He was tan, as if he'd spent a long time in the sun, and wearing strange clothes and an old-fashioned belt fitted with a knife. And while everyone else was dancing to an inaudible current of music, he was perfectly still—observing, just like Dea was, as if somehow the rules of Shawna's imagination didn't apply to him.

Then, suddenly, he started to turn toward her. Dea had ducked quickly away.

Dea's mom came over and gave her a squeeze. Even through layers of clothing, Dea could feel how thin her mom was.

“What about you?” Dea said.

“I'm fine.” Miriam pulled away and reached for the coffeepot.

“You look tired.” Miriam looked worse than tired, but Dea didn't want to say so. Her skin was so pale, Dea could see individual veins running through her wrists and neck. Her eyes—big and beautiful, the color of storm clouds—looked huge in the narrow hollow of her face.

Dea's mother walked dreams too. Dea had known that since she had known what walking dreams was, but Miriam hardly spoke of it except in generalities. Dea had asked her once whether her grandparents had walked too, thinking it might be some genetic aberration. But Miriam just said no and Dea didn't
press it. That was another thing they hardly ever spoke about: family, or why they didn't have any, and where they'd all gone.

The single picture of her father, positioned prominently on top of the living room mantel, was a snapshot from probably twenty years earlier, when he was young and wearing a cheesy red polo shirt and laughing, petting a dog. She didn't know if it was his dog or her mom's, or when the photo was taken, or where. In some ways she didn't like to ask, because then it would ruin her ability to imagine.

And she did imagine. A lot. That he'd been a firefighter who'd perished heroically during 9/11. That he worked for the CIA and had been captured during a dangerous mission, but would someday reappear, having escaped from prison using only a pair of tweezers. That he'd been framed for a crime he didn't commit and would remain hidden until he could clear his name.

Anything but the suspicion that crept up on her sometimes, surprised her when she wasn't paying attention: that he'd simply gotten tired of them, and walked out.

“Are you sure you're okay?” Dea asked. She knew that her mom went as long as she could between walks, until she was so sick she could barely stand.

“I'm positive. Let me do the worrying, Dea.” Her mom finished pouring the coffee, and added exactly three seconds' worth of milk. “Coffee?”

“In a minute.” She sat down at the table and reached absentmindedly for the newspaper, which trumpeted headlines about record heat and a murder all the way down in Aragansett County. She felt good. It was Saturday and sunny and she had forty-eight hours before she had to be back in school.

“I was reading that,” her mom said quickly, moving to stop her.

It was too late. Several real estate brochures slipped out from between the folds of the paper. Each of them featured nearly identical pictures of happy-ever-after-type families: Greenville, North Carolina. Tullahoma, Tennessee. St. Paul, Minnesota.

Dea's whole body went cold. “What is this?” Dea pushed back from the table, as if the brochures might come alive and bite her. “What are these?”

Dea's mother was stirring her coffee. She didn't look up. “There's no need to shout, Dea,” she said. “I'm just looking.”

“You said no more moving.” Dea's stomach rolled into her throat. The blond-haired teenage boy on the cover of
St. Paul, Minnesota
, smirked at her.

“You don't even like it here,” her mom said.

“I won't like it there, either,” Dea said. It was the same everywhere; she knew that by now. New kids, same old rumors. At least here she had Gollum. Weirdly, the new boy's face flashed in her mind—the way it had transformed when he smiled. “I mean, come on. Minnesota?”

“I said, I'm just looking.” Finally, Dea's mom looked up. Her eyes were signaling a warning. But Dea didn't care.

“You promised,” she said. She stood up, feeling shaky. “You absolutely swore—”

“Things change.” Miriam cut Dea off, slamming her coffee cup down on the counter, so a little liquid sloshed over the rim. They stood in silence, glaring at each other. Then she sighed. “Listen, Dea,” she said. “Nothing's certain yet, okay? It's all preliminary.”

“I won't do it,” Dea said. “You can't make me.”

“Of course I can,” Miriam said, frowning a little. “There are things you don't understand, Dea. Things much too complicated for you to—”

There was a sharp knock on the front door. Miriam jumped; Dea, too. Toby began to yowl. No one ever came to the front door, except for the Domino's guy and sometimes a Jesus freak pushing repentance and offering to sell a bible for $3.99. Gollum and Dea met every morning at the gate, and said good-bye every afternoon there too.

“Who is that?” Miriam looked almost afraid. She quickly shuffled the brochures back under the newspaper, as if they were evidence of a crime. Which, to Dea, they were. “You're not expecting anyone, are you?”

Dea didn't bother to answer. She was still furious.

Toby followed her down the hall. She pinned him against the wall with a foot so he wouldn't run out, and then unlocked all three locks. She hadn't bothered to look out the window. She knew it would be a Bible thumper.

But it was Connor.

“Hi.” He lifted a hand and waved, even though they were standing only about a foot away from each other.

Dea was so shocked that for a moment, she nearly said
go away
, which is what she would have said to a Bible guy. Toby wiggled away from her and darted out onto the porch. Connor bent down and grabbed hold of him.

“Not so fast, little guy,” he said.

“Thanks,” Dea said, when Connor passed Toby back, holding him delicately, as if Toby might shatter. When she turned around to place him back in the house, she saw a quick movement down
the hall: her mother, retreating into the kitchen. Dea stepped out onto the porch, closing the door, so her mother couldn't stand there and gape—so Connor wouldn't accidentally get a view of a dozen clocks and the faded silhouettes of mirrors removed from the wall, too.

“What do you want?” she said, which sounded rude, but it was too late to take it back.

“Happy Saturday to you, too,” Connor said, but nicely, as a joke. Dea thought he was expecting her to say something but didn't know what. “Um . . . can I come in?”

“No,” she said. She wished suddenly she'd paid more attention to her outfit. She was wearing flip-flops, ragged cut-off shorts that revealed the paleness of her legs and the smattering of freckles on her thighs, and a faded blue T-shirt with a Mr. Clean logo stretching directly across her boobs. She hadn't even brushed her teeth. “So what's up?” She crossed her arms and tried not to breathe too hard.

Connor smiled wide. She wondered whether his smile was like a negotiation technique, to get people to say yes to him. She wondered whether it worked with other girls. “I thought you might want to hang out,” he said easily. “Give me a tour. Show me the Fielding sights.”

“Trust me,” she said. “There's nothing to see.”

He shrugged. “I thought you might want to hang out anyway.”

For a split second, Dea felt as if she must still be walking a dream. Boys like Connor—good-looking, sporty, prom-court kind of boys—weren't nice to girls like Dea. It was a fundamental rule of nature, the same way that panthers didn't get
chummy with groundhogs unless they were hunting for their next meal. Any second Connor's face would fracture and he'd turn into her math teacher. Or the scene would dissolve, and the front porch would turn into a rolling ocean, and Connor would disappear entirely.

But no. Connor was still there, on her porch, looking extra boy: old jeans and worn black Chucks and a band T-shirt, his hair a little messy, his smile a little crooked, definitely the cutest boy who had ever spoken to her or stood close enough that she could smell the fact that he was chewing gum.

“I don't know anyone else,” he said, almost apologetically.

“What about your cousin?” she said.

He made a face. “I hate that guy. Always have. Do you know when we were kids he used to amputate frogs' legs for fun?”

“That's sick,” Dea said, although she wasn't surprised. Last year, Will Briggs had shoved Carl Gormely into a gym locker and left him there for a whole day. The janitor finally let him out when he was making rounds after school and heard banging.

“Tell me about it.” Connor was looking at her with an expression she couldn't decipher. “Come on. What do you say?”

She wondered, then, what kind of dreams he had. They were probably sun-drenched and happy, full of pinwheeling flowers and girls in bikinis and rivers of Coors Light. Normal dreams.

She half suspected this was some kind of trick. And she knew, definitely knew, that it couldn't last.

But maybe, just for a day, it wouldn't hurt to pretend.

“I'll get the keys,” she said.

Dea's first real crush was on a guy named Brody Dawes, back in Arizona. All the sixth-grade girls liked Brody. He was in eighth
grade and had long sandy hair he was always sucking into his mouth, especially during tests. He skateboarded to school every day and carried around a dingy army-style backpack covered with patches for bands no one had ever heard of. When he wasn't sucking on his hair or a pen cap, he was picking at one of the patches, looking bored. He always kept his backpack in his lap, like he was ready to make a quick exit.

One day, Dea sat behind him at a schoolwide assembly. She hadn't planned it that way. She was sandwiched in the very back row of the risers when he came and plopped down right in front of her. His friends soon joined him and for forty-five minutes she sat motionless, afraid to move or even breathe, afraid he might turn around and tell her to leave.
When he stood up, she saw that one of his patches had fallen off his backpack: red and black with the words
Turkey Army
embroidered on it. She pretended to be tying her shoelaces and pocketed it.