Dreamland (3 page)

Getting into his dream was easy. His mind barely put up defenses at all—just a series of curtains, many of them torn, fluttering as though in a breeze. Just beyond the line of flimsy fabric was a patchy yard and a cheap, aboveground pool. It was the kind of sunlight that exists only in dreams: it came from every direction at once, so it felt like being on the wrong side of a magnifying glass.

He was in the pool, not more than two feet away from Dea, shirtless. She could have threaded her hand past the curtains and touched his shoulders or run her fingers through his hair. She could have climbed into the pool with him. She could have leaned over and pressed her lips to his, like she'd seen Mishti Barns and Mark Spencer do every morning before homeroom. She wanted to, desperately.

But it was against the rules.

The water broke and Hillary Davis surfaced soundlessly, looking even better than she did in real life. Her skin was golden and her teeth were the white of bleached bone. Her hair shimmered in the sun and her boobs floated like overturned cups on the water.

Then they were kissing. Dea stood there, not two feet away, mesmerized. She could hear the suction sound of their lips and the lapping of their tongues and the whisper of his fingers on her back and shoulders. She stayed there until the curtains became iron walls and she knew Brody was waking up. She had just enough time to slip out of the dream before she felt a sudden, jolting pressure in her chest and she was back in her room, in her body, touching her lips with one cold hand.

Still, to this day, Dea had never been kissed.

The Donahue house was a good seven miles outside the commercial center of Fielding. On the way toward town, Dea spotted Gollum riding her ancient Schwinn. Dea jerked the car off the road, sending Connor careening against the passenger-side window.

“Thanks for the warning,” he said. But he laughed.

“Sorry,” Dea said. Gollum spotted Dea's car and came to a stop by dragging her feet, kicking up a cloud of pale dust. She didn't get off her bike but stood up, straddling it, gripping the handlebars.

Gollum was dressed in her typical style: an assortment of
clothes no doubt inherited from one of her older brothers, which she'd tucked and pinned and rolled so that they would at least somewhat fit. Her blond hair was pulled back, but a crown of wisps had escaped from her ponytail, giving her the look of a deranged angel. For the shortest second, Dea was embarrassed by her and wished she hadn't stopped. Then, furious with herself, she rolled down the window as Gollum looked up, her eyes practically shooting out of her head.

“Connor,” she said. “This is my friend, Gollum.” She pronounced the word
friend
emphatically, still angry at herself for her moment of mental treachery. “Gollum, this is Connor. He's the one who just moved in.”

Gollum stooped down to peer past Dea. Her mouth opened, and then closed. Dea had never seen Gollum speechless before.

Luckily, Connor took the lead. He leaned over the center console, his shoulder bumping Dea's. “Gollum,” he said. “Cool name.”

“Thanks,” she said, still staring at him. “Cool . . . face.”

Connor burst out laughing. Gollum turned roughly the color of beet juice.

“Sorry,” she said. “My mouth isn't always hooked up to my brain.”

Dea reached out and squeezed Gollum's hand. She was filled with a sudden sense of warmth. She was driving in the car with a boy who had a cool face, and her friend—they
were
friends, even if they didn't really hang out outside of school—was standing there, blushing, and the whole scene felt like it could have been lifted straight out of any teen movie.

Which made her, Dea, the star.

“That's okay,” Connor said. “Neither is mine.”

Once again, Dea had a momentary suspicion that Connor must be tricking them. Or maybe he was secretly a freak. Maybe he was hiding a third and fourth nipple, or a secret
Star Wars
addiction.

“Want a ride somewhere?” Dea asked. “You can throw your bike in the back.”

Gollum made a face. “I gotta go home. Besides, the Beast would never fit.” She patted the handlebars.

“I'm getting the grand tour of Fielding,” Connor said, still smiling.

Gollum's face had returned to its normal color. She shoved her glasses up the bridge of her nose with a thumb. “Should be the most mediocre five minutes of your life,” she said, and thumped Dea's door. “Have fun. Don't forget to swing by the dump. It's one of Fielding's most scenic attractions.” When Connor wasn't looking, she mouthed,
Oh my God
and did the bug-eyed thing again.

Now Dea was the one blushing.

Gollum wasn't exaggerating: It took approximately four minutes to get from one end of Fielding to the other. The commercial district was just two intersecting roads and a heap of buildings in various stages of decay. On Main Street there were two gas stations, a church, a liquor store, a hair salon, a fried chicken spot, a mini-mart, and a mega-mart. On Center Street was a diner, a pharmacy (now shuttered), a 7-Eleven, another liquor store, and Mack's, the only bar in town, which everyone always referred to by its full name, Mack's Center Street, as if there were another somewhere else. Two miles past Center
Street, after a quick patchwork of fields and farms and houses that were falling slowly into the dirt, was the Fielding School, serving grades kindergarten to dropout.

They didn't even have a Walmart. For that, you had to drive all the way to Bloomington.

“Voilà
,”
she said to Connor when they reached the Fielding School. The parking lot was mostly empty. In the distance, she spotted a bunch of guys from the football team running drills. “Tour complete. What do you think?”

“I think the mega-mart was my favorite,” Connor said. “But the mini-mart's a close second.” One thing that was nice about Connor: he didn't fidget. He was way too tall for Dea's mom's car, another simulacrum: an exact replica of the original VW Beetle, with its engine in the back and everything. Even though Connor was squished in the front seat, knees practically to his chest, he looked perfectly relaxed. He didn't even press Dea about the fact that the rearview mirror was blacked out with masking tape, even though she'd had an excuse ready: the glass had shattered and they were waiting on parts to replace it.

“I told you there was nothing to see,” Dea said.

“Depends on your perspective,” Connor said, looking at her in a way that made her suddenly nervous. She put the car in drive again, and rumbled slowly out of the parking lot. Plumes of red dust came up from the tires. The sun was so bright, it was hard to see. She was glad, at least, that the air conditioner was the modern kind.

“So. Anything I should know about F.S.? Trade secrets? Words of warning?” he asked.

“All schools are pretty much the same,” Dea said. “Don't
backtalk the teacher. Don't touch the hot lunch. Try to stay awake during history.”

He laughed. He had a great laugh—just like his smile, it made him about a thousand times more attractive. “You been to a lot of schools?”

“Half a dozen.” Actually, she'd been enrolled at ten different schools, and lived in twelve different states. But no point in launching into a monologue about it. “My mom likes to move around,” she added, when he made a face. “How about you?”

He hesitated for a fraction of a second. “My dad got laid off,” he said. “My uncle—that's Will's dad—is a cop down here. He hooked him up with a landscaping job. Dad was a teacher before. My stepmom has some family nearby.”

So the woman she'd seen unpacking was his stepmom. Dea waited for him to mention his real mom but he didn't, so she didn't press.

He was quiet for a minute and Dea started to panic. She couldn't think of anything to say. Then he blurted out, “It's too open here. Too much sky.” Almost immediately, he laughed again. “I guess I'm used to the city.”

She knew exactly what he meant—the sky was like a big mouth, hanging open, ready to swallow you whole. But she just said, “Where'd you move from?”

“Chicago,” he said.

“I lived in Chicago for a while,” she said. “Lincoln Park.”

He turned to look out the window. “That's where we lived,” he said. Then, “Where to now?”

She got a flush of pleasure.
Don't trust it
, a voice, her logical voice, piped up quickly.
You know you'll only be disappointed.

Maybe not,
another voice said stubbornly.
Maybe he's got those four nipples after all.

It was so absurd: she was actually hoping that the boy next to her had extra nipples.

“We could go to Cincinnati,” she said. “It's only two hours.” She was joking, of course. But Connor's reflection, overlaid across a plain of brown and gray, smiled. “Drive on,” he said.

Dea found it easy—almost too easy—to open up to Connor. In less than an hour, she'd told Connor more than she'd told anyone in years—way more than she'd ever told Gollum. They shared likes and dislikes, words neither of them could stand to hear, like
cream
and
moisture
. They'd hopscotched from Dea's love of old junk to her hatred of bananas to the months she'd spent living next to a military base in Georgia. Her mom had a boyfriend then, the only boyfriend she remembered.

“So it's just you and your mom, then?” Connor asked. She appreciated that he didn't just straight-up ask her about her dad. Not that she would have anything to say, except
he looks good in a red polo shirt.

She nodded. “What about you?” she said. “No siblings?”

A muscle twitched in Connor's jaw. “No. Used to, though.” His fingers drummed against the dashboard, the first time he had shown any sign of discomfort. Dea tried to think of something to say, words of comfort or a question about what had happened, but then he was smiling again and the moment, the impression of past pain, was gone. “You really hate bananas?”

Dea felt vaguely disappointed, as if she'd missed an opportunity. “Despise them,” she said.

“Even banana bread?”

“Even worse.” She made a face. “Why ruin bread by putting banana in it? It's like a banana sneak attack. I like them out in the open, where I can see them.”

He laughed and chucked her chin. “You're a piece of work, Donahue.” But the way he said it made it sound like a compliment.

Connor plugged in his iPhone and played her some of his favorite songs—stuff by Coldplay and the Smiths, plus a bunch of songs from bands she'd never heard of—but he never stopped talking over the music. He didn't like the color red (“too obvious”), or raw onions (“it's texture, not taste”), or highways. “They look the same everywhere,” he said. “Back roads are way more interesting. They have flavor. Except,” he quickly added, “for this beautiful highway, of course.”

He gestured out the window; they were passing an industrial farm. Dea knew only one way of driving to Cincinnati, on IN-46. The view had been the same since they'd left Fielding. The three
F
s: farms, flatlands, firearm ranges.

Connor had been a swimmer in Chicago and was “decent—good for state, not good enough to go national.” He hated football and mozzarella cheese (“it's like weird alien skin”). He believed in ghosts—really believed. Scientifically.

“Are you serious?” Dea couldn't help but say.

He spread his hands wide.
“There are more things on heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
She was impressed that he'd memorized a Shakespeare quote, and didn't want to tell him she disagreed. There were plenty of things that were dreamed about, more things than you'd believe.

He'd been a vegetarian for four years, which was weird, because he didn't seem like one. When she asked him about it, he shrugged and said, “I really like dogs.”

“We don't eat dogs,” she pointed out.

“Exactly,” he said cryptically. “Anyway, I'm not vegetarian anymore. One day I went crazy at a steak buffet. It wasn't pretty.” He had to rearrange his whole body to turn and look at her. He reminded her of a puppet whose strings aren't working all together. “What about you?”

“I'm not vegetarian,” she said.

“No.” He laughed. “I meant what about you? Weird quirks? Dark secrets?”

For a split second, she thought of confessing:
I walk other people's dreams. I get sick if I don't. Mom is afraid of things I don't understand. That's why three locks. That's why no mirrors. She's probably nuts, and I might be nuts like her.

“
I don't have any,” she said.

Something flickered behind his eyes—an expression gone too soon for her to name. “Everyone has dark secrets,” he said.

They went on a hunt for billboards. The weirder the sign, the better. She got three points for spotting
LAVENDER'S: INDIANA'S LARGEST EMPORIUM FOR XXX TOYS, VIDEOS, AND POSTERS
. Connor got a point for
THE FIREWORKS FACTORY
and two points for a faded billboard featuring an enormous Jesus on the cross and the words:
MEET JESUS FACE-TO-FACE!
In smaller letters:
RESULTS NOT GUARANTEED
.

They'd crossed over the Ohio border when Connor shouted. Dea nearly drove off the road.

“Pull over, pull over!” he said
,
so she did, barely making the
exit. A big billboard, faded from the weather, was staked into the dirt:
OHIO'S LARGEST CORN MAZE
. In the distance, she saw it: golden walls of corn, stretching toward the horizon.

“Really?” she said.

He was still gazing at the sign, enraptured. “It's the largest, Dea. We have to.” He turned to her and put a hand on her thigh just for a second. Her heart went still. But then his hand was gone, and her heart started hammering again, even though she'd walked a dream the night before.

The last time Dea had been in a maze of any kind was in Florida. That one was made of walls; it was part of an amusement park called Funville, which was only thirty miles from Disney World but smaller and older and cheaper, the dollar store equivalent of the amusement park industry. Dea's mom hated crowds but she loved mazes because they reminded her of dreams: that same twisty kind of logic, the same sense of being suspended in time, moving forward without moving forward at all. She especially loved the maze at Funville, which was all white, made from cheap plastic studded with glitter so it looked kind of like snow, especially if you lived in Florida and didn't see snow very often. In Dea's memory, the white walls were the size of skyscrapers.

Dea and Connor climbed out of the car. Dea had been expecting a crowd but there was no one around—no parents and kids rushing in and out of the maze. The ticket booth was padlocked and marked with a sign that said
CLOSED
. There was just a bleached fence and a gap in the corn where the maze began, and the high white sun staring down impassively.

At least it was cooler inside the maze. The ground was dark
with shadows. Connor suggested they race to the center. Dea quickly agreed. She didn't know if it was the heat or the maze or Connor, but she was feeling a little dizzy, almost drunk, like the time at Christmas in Houston when her mom made eggnog with too much rum and let her have a full cup, and they ended up outside in their bikinis, tanning until the sun went down, and she woke up with a headache and a slick tongue and a bad sunburn.