Dreamland

  I reached under my mattress and pulled out my dream journal, flipping through a few full pages to find the first blank spot. And as my mother laughed and trilled from the kitchen, soaking up every bit of Cass she could, I talked to my sister the only way I had left.

  Jan 7

  Dear Cass,

  Remember when we were kids and Mom always made us come up with one resolution for New Year’s we had to keep, no matter what? Like flossing your teeth every day, or not fighting so much, or reading one book every month. It seemed like anything was possible when you had a clean slate to start with.

  Well, it’s New Year’s now but I don’t feel that way anymore. I wonder if you do either. Something’s happening to me. It’s like I’m shrinking smaller and smaller and I can’t stop it. There’s just so much wrong that I can’t imagine the shame in admitting even the tiniest part of it. When you left it was like there was this huge gap to fill, but instead of spreading wide enough to do it I just fell right in, and I’m still falling. Like I’m half-asleep, and I can’t wake up, can’t wake up....

  I went to Corinna’s one afternoon in late February to smoke a quick bowl before practice and found the entire house dark, a bunch of candles lined up and lit on the coffee table. She was on the phone, pleading with the power company and chain-smoking.

  “I understand that,” she said, handing my bowl back to me. Without the TV on, it was strangely quiet: I could hear their cat purring from across the room. She was sitting on the couch with her checkbook and a calculator, crying and trying to figure out what happened to the money that was supposed to cover the bills. “But I’ve always paid them before. I mean, I specifically remember giving the money to my boyfriend to deposit, so I don’t see how—”

  I lit the bowl and breathed in deep. Corinna was listening, shaking her head. She grabbed another Kleenex out of the box on the table and wiped at her eyes impatiently.

  “Yes, okay. Fine. Thank you.” She dropped the phone on the coffee table and raised her hands to her face, covering her eyes. Her bracelets slid down her arm, clanking against the ASK ME ABOUT SIMPLY SOUP-PERB COMBOS! button on the front of her uniform.

  “I hate this,” she said, her voice muffled.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  She looked up at me, half-smiled, and reached out to pick up her cigarettes. “Did you know that today in L.A. it was seventy-two degrees? In the middle of winter?” She sighed. “It’s like a paradise out there.”

  “Sounds nice,” I said. “But I’ll miss you when you go.”

  She put the cigarette in her mouth. “You’ll come visit. We’ll go to the beach, and find movie stars, and get a tan in the middle of February.”

  “All right,” I told her. “I’m there.”

  “I wish I was, right now,” she said. “It’s like all I think about anymore. All I want, you know? Just to be there.”

  I nodded, but to me California was so far away as to not be real, just like so much else these days.

  I was late for practice as usual, and when I walked in everyone was waiting for me.

  “Caitlin,” Chelsea Robbins said. “Glad you could join us. Have a seat; we need to talk to you.”

  I blinked, hard, and started to walk over to the bleachers. Everyone except Rina—who was pretending to be preoccupied with tying her shoe—was watching me. They were all in their practice clothes, shorts and T-shirts, bright white Nikes with white socks. I was in sweats. Even when I was in uniform, I always wore tights and a sweater—I couldn’t remember the last time I’d let anyone see my arms or legs bare.

  This would have been bad even if I hadn’t been stoned. With that added element, however, it was all I could do to sit down and remain calm as all eyes stayed on me.

  The cheerleading intervention, I thought, looking around me at all those perky faces, staring at me flatly as if I was a specimen about to be slapped on a slide. Here we go.

  “Caitlin,” Chelsea began as she sat down, folding her hands in her lap, “we thought it was time we discussed what you see as your role in the future of this squad.”

  All those eyes, on me. I swallowed, and it sounded louder than God.

  “My future,” I said.

  “Yes.” Chelsea’s lips were pink and glossy, and she pursed them a lot when she talked. I had not noticed this before. “It’s no secret that your participation and commitment of late has been, well, lacking. Am I right?”

  There was a low murmur from the pack as everyone agreed.

  “You show up late, you have no energy, you barely make it to games,” Chelsea continued, ticking each reason off on a slender finger. “You don’t attend squad functions. And there’s been some speculation that you may ... have some kind of problem.”

  More murmuring. Eliza Drake nodded her head, her ponytail bouncing. The lights in the gym were so bright and I could hear them buzzing, like a swarm of angry bees about to sting. I looked up at them, wincing in the glare.

  Problem, I thought. You don’t know the half of it.

  “Caitlin.” Chelsea was losing patience. Beside her, Lindsay White, whose teen modeling career had been lost when I fell on her, rolled her eyes. Bitter. “We wanted to give you a chance to respond. To make your case.”

  I looked around at them, all so pretty and healthy, the best and the brightest. I saw Rina, looking sadly at me, and Eliza Drake, who had lost those nagging fifteen pounds and was ready to make top of the pyramid again. And then I thought of Corinna, crying in the dark at her house as the sun went down and it grew colder and colder.

  “Caitlin,” Chelsea said as she shook her head, her ponytail bobbing from side to side, “don’t you even care anymore?”

  I didn’t belong with these people. I never had. Next to my life with Rogerson and the ongoing struggle to avoid full contact, cheerleading seemed even sillier and more unimportant than ever. It was like another world, another language that I’d hardly learned and already forgotten.

  Don’t you care anymore? Don’t you?

  This question seemed ludicrous to me. Of course I didn’t care. If I did, I wouldn’t be hiding a bruise on my arm and one on my back. I wouldn’t be shrouding myself in long sleeves and chain-smoking, watching myself shrink down to nothing as I tried to be invisible.

  Don’t you care, Caitlin?

  They were all still watching me.

  “No,” I said bluntly to Chelsea Robbins and her pink, pink lips, then lifted my eyes to look across all their faces. “I don’t.”

  I could feel them all reacting to this as I walked down the bleachers and started across that shiny gym floor, where I’d done a hundred cartwheels and climbed atop so many pyramids what seemed a million years ago.

  “Caitlin,” Rina called after me. “Wait.”

  But I was already gone, pulling my arms tight against my chest as the door slammed shut behind me.

  I walked out to my car, got in, and locked the door. Then I sat there, in the empty parking lot, and cried. It was the worst kind of sobbing, the kind that hurts your chest and steals your breath. No one could hear me.

  I couldn’t believe I was upset about being kicked off the cheerleading squad, since I’d hated it right from the start. But it wasn’t just that. It was that at least while I was on the squad I had some semblance of a normal life: my old life. But now, I was just a girl with a boyfriend who beat her, who smoked too much. I was drowning in broad daylight and no one could tell.

  I was due to meet Rogerson at my house right after practice, at six sharp, so I had time to take the long way home, following Rina’s driving and crying path. When I passed Corinna’s, all the windows were dark and her car was gone. I thought of her coming home that night to a pitch-black house, holding her hand out in front of her face as she found her way to a candle and a match. The dark might not be so bad when it was everywhere, even outside.

  I drove out to the lake, then back into town through Rina’s old neighborhood, pausing for a minute in front of her second stepfather’s house to
curse him, just like she did. Then I headed home, taking my time, and passed my house, driving up the street to hang a right and pull into Commons Park.

  I hadn’t been there in years. The slide and the swing set were new, but the sandbox—where Cass had reached out with a shovel and changed my face forever—was the same. I went and sat on its edge, reaching down to scoop up a handful of the grainy, wet sand, imagining the layers beneath it, full of lost buttons and action figures and Barbie shoes, all buried and fossilized like dinosaur bones. There was something of mine here, too.

  I reached up with my finger and traced the scar over my eyebrow, remembering when that was the greatest hurt I’d ever known. When I closed my eyes, I pictured my mother carrying me all the way home, and my father holding my hand while the needle dipped in and out, outlining the arc of my scar. And finally, with my own memory, I saw the way Cass’s expression changed whenever her eyes drifted across my face, taking it as hers as much as my own.

  That had been a different time, a different hurt. I couldn’t even remember that pain, now.

  I sat at the park for a long time, running my fingers through the sand. I thought about everything: cheerleading, my bruises, Rogerson’s face in the picture I’d taken of him, my mother’s chipper voice on the phone, and Corinna at Applebee’s, pushing Super Sundaes and dreaming of California. But mostly I thought of Cass, and how I wished she was here to claim this hurt, too.

  I was still there when Rogerson slowed down, seeing my car, and pulled in. His headlights moved across the swing and slide and monkey bars to finally find me, staying there like a spotlight. He didn’t get out of the car, but just left the engine idling as he waited.

  I squinted as I stood up, pulling my jacket around me. Like always, I didn’t know what to expect from him. I slid a handful of that sand into my pocket, wondering what relics it had once held. I rubbed the grains between my fingers, like charms, then took a deep breath and stepped into that bright, bright light.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I didn’t tell my mother that I’d been kicked off the squad, exactly. In fact, she was so busy winning Cass back—phone call by phone call—she didn’t even question my flimsy explanation about how in the lull between winter and spring sports there were fewer practices. So I began spending more time in the darkroom at the Arts Center when she thought I was doing cheerleader stuff: sticking to my former schedule and going there after school, then showing up at the same time for dinner. On game nights, I’d just call Rina from wherever I was with Rogerson to find out who’d won before I went home.

  This was surprisingly easy. My mother was distracted not only with Cass but also with her annual April Fool’s party, my father with a new semester, a chancellor search and the men and women’s basketball teams in the thick of March Madness. Now it almost seemed that I was becoming invisible, passing through the house in my long sleeves and jeans—even as the weather heated up—my eyes red regardless of Visine, hardly talking except to answer their standard queries: How was school? Who won the game? Would you please pass the potatoes?

  And the answers came easy, automatically. Fine. We did. Yes.

  The only time I ever felt safe anymore was when I was at the darkroom, in the half-light with the door locked, everything quiet as I worked developing my pictures, watching each of the images come into being right before my eyes. Since Christmas I’d focused mostly on portraits of people. I was fascinated with the way light and angle could completely change the way a person looked, and I’d spent the last two months taking pictures of everyone I knew, trying to capture each one of their different faces.

  Behind the camera, I was invisible. When I lifted it up to my eye it was like I crawled into the lens, losing myself there, and everything else fell away.

  I’d shot Corinna sitting on her front steps in the sunlight with the dog, Mingus, lying beside her. She was wearing a long, gauzy skirt and a big wool sweater fraying at the cuffs. She’d cocked her head to the side and propped one hand under her chin, her bracelets glinting in the sunshine, the TV in the distance behind her showing static. Her hair was blowing around her face and she was smiling, with Mingus looking up at her adoringly. I’d had the picture framed and gave it to her as a gift. She’d hung it on the wall in the living room, next to a huge Ansel Adams print of a canyon. She said she couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen a picture of herself that she liked, and sometimes when we were sitting on the couch just hanging out I’d catch her looking at it, studying her own face as it smiled back at her.

  I posed Boo sitting in the grass of her backyard, cross-legged, right beside her chipped cement Buddha, both of them smiling and content. And I found my mother, her chair pulled up close to the TV, leaning forward to scan the screen during Lamont Whipper, looking for Cass. She’d been so absorbed she hadn’t even heard me take the picture, her face hopeful, intent, watching carefully so as not to miss a single thing. That picture I buried deep under my sweaters in a drawer: it just hurt me, somehow, to look at it.

  Rogerson didn’t have much patience for getting his picture taken, but occasionally I caught him: bending over the engine of the BMW with the hood up, reaching with one hand to brush back his hair. Standing in Corinna’s kitchen drinking a Yoo Hoo with that big velvet Elvis taking up the whole frame behind him. Lying on his bed right next to me, the lens just inches from his face, smiling slightly, sleepily, as I clicked the shutter.

  These were pictures I rushed to develop, holding my breath as they emerged before me. I’d examined them so closely, as if they were proof, absolute documentation that he wasn’t a monster, that he was still the guy I’d fallen in love with. I’d bring them home and stick them in my dream journal, as if him smiling here or looking at me nicely there would balance out the truths I’d written to Cass in those same pages.

  I kept collecting faces, as if by holding all these people in my hands I could convince myself that everything was still okay. So I had Dave, rubbing his eyes with hair askew, half a frozen burrito in one hand. Rina in her cat’s-eye sunglasses and cheerleading uniform, smoking a cigarette and sticking out her tongue. My father in his chair, watching a basketball game, his face so expectant as the seconds ticked down and his team took a last-chance, do-or-die shot. And Rogerson, again and again, smiling, not smiling, scowling, laughing, glaring. The only expression I didn’t have of his was the one I knew by heart: the dark eyes, angry face, flushed skin—the last thing I usually saw before squeezing my eyes shut and bearing down.

  My favorite picture, though, was one I hadn’t even taken. Rogerson and I had been at Corinna’s, sitting at their kitchen table, when she’d picked up my camera and leaned in close to us, telling us to say cheese. The day before, Rogerson had gotten upset with me for some reason—it was easier, sometimes, to just forget the specifics—and punched me in the arm, which meant in the picture I was in my safe zone, when he was trying to make up with me. In the picture I’m on his lap as he sits at the table, my head against his chest. He has one arm around my waist, and just as Corinna hit the shutter he’d tickled me, making me burst out laughing, and he had, too. It is one of those great moments, the kind you can’t plan. Sometimes the light or the expression is just perfect, and you’re lucky enough to catch it, usually accidentally.

  I spent a lot of time looking at that picture. Wondering what I’d think of that girl, if I was someone else, seeing how easily she sits in her boyfriend’s lap, laughing, with his arms around her. I would have thought her life was perfect, the way I once thought Cass’s was. It was too easy, I was learning, to just assume things.

  One day I took all my pictures and hung them around my room, tacking them to the walls, the mirror, even the ceiling. Then I stood and stared at each of the faces, studying them one at a time. I learned them carefully, aware of every nuance in their expressions. They stared back at me, frozen, but even though I could read their entire world in their faces, none of them were looking that closely at me.

  Cass usually called after din
ner, when I was already long gone out the door to another “cheerleading meeting,” or on the weekends, when I was locked in the darkroom or with Rogerson. But one late Sunday afternoon I was the only one home when the phone rang.

  “Caitlin?”

  It was so strange to hear her voice, and I felt myself catch my breath. But I didn’t say anything.

  “Caitlin. It’s me,” she said. She sounded so far away. “It’s Cass. I can’t believe you’re finally there when I called. How are you?”

  I swallowed, hard, and looked out the window. I could see Boo in her backyard, misting a row of ferns.

  “Caitlin.” She sounded confused. “Hello?”

  I ran a finger up and over my neck, feeling down to the spot below my collar where I’d hit the top of my seat belt the night before when Rogerson had pushed me. I pressed down on the bruise: It didn’t hurt that badly. I was learning even the smallest push could bring a swelling, blue-black spot, the body infinitely more dramatic than it needed to be.

  “Hello?” she said again, and I closed my eyes. “Caitlin? Are you there?”

  I could see her in my mind, that time on the Lamont Whipper Show, ducking her head and smiling as she wrote something on her clipboard, and the way she glanced up for that one second, like she was looking right at me. Like she could see me, sitting on Corinna’s couch, stoned and lost.

  “I understand if you’re upset with me,” she said, suddenly. “But I had to leave. My whole future had been planned but it wasn’t what I wanted. It was like I had no choice anymore. That’s a terrible feeling, Caitlin.”

  I could see her reaching out with a finger, smoothing over the scar, and sighing.

  She looks just like you, Corinna had said. She could be you.

  “Caitlin?” Cass said, and I turned away from the window, looking down the stairs and out the front door, trying to picture her making that walk away from this. It seemed like so far, and I was so tired. Tired of keeping time, of studying faces, of hiding bruises. Of disappearing, bit by bit, while my world kept going without me, even as I slipped farther beneath the water, drowning.