I folded my arms over my chest. Good ol’ Kimberly had brought Darlin cheese sticks, while in all the chaos I’d forgotten Darlin’s Reuben completely. Although why should it matter? It wasn’t like I owned Darlin. Other people could do nice things for her, too. Still, my mood plunged from bad to worse.
“Well, good night,” I said, wanting suddenly to be gone. I slipped out of my caterer’s jacket and headed for the door.
“Yeah, I’ve got to go, too,” Kimberly said. “Hold on, Lissa. I’ll walk out with you. Bye, Darlin! See you next weekend!”
Outside, she jogged to catch up with me.
“Thanks for helping me tonight,” she said as I climbed into my truck. “I thought I knew Atlanta pretty well, but obviously I don’t.”
I gave her a tight smile. She was blocking me from shutting the door.
“Seriously, there are so many streets that I’ve never even heard of. Argonne Drive, Tuxedo, Slaton . . .” She rose up on her toes, peering into the truck. “Hey, what are you reading?” she asked, spotting my dream book on the dashboard.
I grabbed the book and hid it in my lap, but part of the title must still have been visible. Her eyes dipped down and she said, “Dreams. Cool. I didn’t know you were into that stuff.”
My face grew hot. “I’m not.” The receipt was still sticking out, and I tugged it free and crumpled it in my palm. “I just . . . I happened to run across it and . . . I’m not.”
“Okay,” Kimberly said. “Whatever.” She hesitated, then tilted her head. “Listen, it’s not even ten o’clock. You want to do something? Go get some Krispy Kremes?”
I wanted to get Krispy Kremes with Kimberly about as much as I wanted to return to Cost Cutters for an entire beauty makeover. I put the key in the ignition and started the truck. “Sorry,” I said. “I’m beat.”
“Yeah, okay,” she said. She stepped away from the truck, and for a second I felt bad, especially when I saw that she was blushing.
But it wasn’t my problem. I shifted into reverse and backed out of the drive.
CHAPTER 5
ALL DAY SUNDAY I STAYED IN THE HOUSE. I did my homework, mainly, and helped Beth with hers. Then, after dinner, I tried to read the first chapter of my dream book. It was interesting, but I’d lost my earlier enthusiasm. It bugged me that Kimberly had seen my book. That she, of all people, thought it was “cool.”
But that’s dumb, I told myself. It was like saying, “Ew, she touched my cupcake, so I don’t want it anymore.” Still, I closed the book.
On Monday, I woke up late and had to rush to get dressed. I’d hoped my hair would somehow look normal again, but if anything, it looked worse. In some places it lay matted to my head, while in other places it did this awful winged-back thing, and nothing I did could make it hang straight. I briefly considered wearing a hat—that’s how desperate I was—but the only hat I owned was a green felt fedora I’d worn to a costume party in the eighth grade. I’d gone as Robin Hood to Kate’s Maid Marian.
“Try some mousse,” Beth said. She stood half inside my room, leaning against the door frame.
“Beth, I don’t do mousse,” I told her. “And besides, I don’t have any.”
“I do.”
I put down my brush and turned around. “You do? Since when?”
“Want me to get it?”
She showed me how much to smear into my hair, and with her help I managed to fluff out the sections that were clumped to my head. It still looked terrible, though. Beth and I agreed.
At school, I kept my eyes on the floor and hurried to my homeroom. I kept expecting people to comment on my hair, but no one said a word. “Hey, Lissa,” said a girl named Terri, “got the math assignment?” But that was it. The only person who noticed was Ms. Horowitz, who was my homeroom teacher and also my science teacher. “Nice haircut,” she said as she moved down the aisle distributing handouts. Terri lifted her head and studied me more closely. “Oh yeah,” she said. Then she went back to her math.
Fourth period was American history, which Kate and I had together. I quickly scanned the room, hating myself for feeling nervous, then walked to the back row and sat down. A guy named Scott thunked into the seat beside me and dropped his backpack. “Mitch, buddy,” he said, punching his friend on the shoulder. “What’d you think of Jodi’s party, huh?”
I pulled out my textbook and flipped it open. My head felt lighter without long hair, and I could sense the section to the left of my part starting to flip out again. I smoothed it down, keeping my eyes on my book and maintaining what I hoped was a neutral expression.
Kate was the last to arrive. She hesitated, then took the empty desk next to Missy Colquitt. Oh, Kate, I thought, Missy Colquitt? Instead of me? Missy wore stretch pants and big hoop earrings, and she phrased everything in extremes, as in, “Omigod, could I be more excited than I am at this moment? Seriously, could I be more excited?”
But maybe Kate liked Missy these days. Maybe they were best buds. It wasn’t as if Kate hadn’t changed in other ways. Like how she dressed, for example. Today she wore a light blue T-shirt and jeans. Girls’ jeans, cut to “show off her curves,” as her mom would say.
Kate used to hate girls’ jeans. We liked them faded and loose, beat-up old Levis that had already been broken in.
Mr. Neilson droned for twenty minutes about western expansion, then told us to get into groups and make time lines. Kate looked at Missy, and the two of them scooted their desks together. “Just don’t expect me to be any help,” I heard Missy complain. “I mean, could I be less motivated?”
“Lissa?” Mr. Neilson said. “Do you have a group?”
I glanced around. “Uh . . .”
“Why don’t you work with Scott and Mitch. Guys, make room for Lissa.”
“Sure,” Scott said. “We’re stuck on the gold rush. Do you know when the second wave started?”
We’d been working for about fifteen minutes when I felt someone standing above me. I raised my head.
“You cut your hair,” Kate said. She was wearing eyeliner and mascara, which I hadn’t noticed until now. Another change.
“Yep,” I said.
“It looks good.”
“Yeah, right. You don’t have to lie, Kate.”
“Lissa, I wasn’t—” She shook her head. “I’m just surprised. I thought you liked it long.”
“Well, now it’s short.”
“I know.”
I concentrated on my breathing. With her so close, all I could think about was how it felt when her skin touched mine. I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t help it. It made my legs feel heavy.
“I just wanted to say I liked it, okay?” She glanced at Mitch and Scott and shut her mouth. “Never mind. This is ridiculous.” She turned around and strode across the room.
Mitch waited until she was out of earshot, then whistled. “Damn, that girl is hot.” He glanced in my direction. “She your friend?”
“Shut up, man,” Scott said. “She’s taken. Now come on, we’ve only got a couple of minutes to get this done.”
“Who’s she dating?” Mitch said.
“Ben Porter. You want to take him on?”
Mitch grinned and tapped his pen against his leg. “Nah, not today. But damn is she hot.”
I hunched over my notebook and tried to make my heart quit pounding. It wasn’t Kate’s angry tone, or the fact that she stormed away—it was the way my chest tightened just being near her.
Calm down, I told myself. Breathe. I mean, fine, I felt something for another girl. Felt it stronger than maybe I’d admitted. Except it wasn’t just “another girl” I was talking about; it was Kate. And when friends were as close as we were, well, maybe that closeness took on a lot of different forms, and maybe that meant things got confused sometimes. Like when a little kid said he wanted to grow up and marry his mom—that didn’t mean that’s what he really wanted.
Shit. What if she wanted to work things out between us, and I’d blown it by being such a jerk?
/> Last spring, sitting outside the cafeteria, someone asked a bunch of us which we’d rather be if we had to choose: smart or nice. Missy said, “Nice,” along with most of the people in the group. Kate and I said, “Smart,” and we grinned at each other, knowing each other’s minds. “Because if all you are is nice,” Kate explained to me later, “then you can’t choose to be smart. But if you’re smart, you can choose to be nice.”
“Exactly,” I said.
But now it seemed I was neither. Could I be more pathetic? I glanced at Kate’s back, at the way her hair spilled over her shirt, and dropped my eyes.
Ben found me during lunch. He straddled the chair beside me and grinned like we were old friends. “Lissa. What’s up?”
I eyed him, then went back to my macaroni and cheese. Around us, kids chatted and laughed, and the cafeteria had that overcrowded feeling of too many bodies crammed into one place. The air smelled like steamed vegetables.
“Haven’t seen you in a while,” Ben said. “You go to Jodi’s on Saturday?”
I didn’t respond.
“Lissa, listen,” he said. “This thing between you and Kate—you’ve got to work it out. She’s really torn up about it.”
“Uh-huh, and that’s why she hasn’t talked to me for two weeks straight.” I neglected to mention our encounter in history. That wasn’t really talking.
“She says you’re the one who won’t talk to her.”
I put down my fork. “I don’t want to do this, Ben.”
“It was that night at Rob’s house, wasn’t it? The weekend before school started. Did you have a fight or something?”
My stomach clenched. There was no way Kate had told him, I knew that, but even coming this close to the truth made me feel dizzy. “Yeah,” I said. “We had a fight. It was stupid. It was over this sweatshirt she borrowed.” I checked his expression.
“A sweatshirt? You two aren’t speaking to each other over a sweatshirt?”
I wadded up my napkin. I shoved it under the edge of my plate and slid my glass over to trap it in place. “So . . . did Kate’s mom ever find out about her tattoo?”
Ben rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Yeah, she saw it when Kate was getting ready for school one morning.”
“Was she mad?”
“Are you kidding? She wanted Kate to go back and get it removed.”
“Did she?”
“You can’t remove a tattoo, Lissa. Once it’s done, it’s done.”
I frowned. You can remove a tattoo; it’s just difficult. And supposedly it’s pretty painful. Some things, on the other hand, can’t be undone.
I looked at Ben, but I had nothing to say.
CHAPTER 5
AFTER SUPPER, I HOLED UP IN MY ROOM and got my dream book back out. I read for an hour or so, then leaned back against my pillow, thinking about what I’d learned. According to the book, the average person sleeps for a third of her life. And when you sleep, you dream—at least part of the time, anyway. Which means that the smart thing to do is to figure out how to learn from your dreams so that you’re not wasting all those hundreds of hours.
I wanted to believe that was true. I wanted to believe I could make a difference in my life, as long as I was willing to put in the work. And the way the author talked made it seem possible. I’d read through chapter six now, and I’d gotten past the technical stuff to a more nuts-and-bolts section on lucid dreams. I loved the idea of a “lucid dream,” a dream in which you’re actually aware that you’re dreaming. Aware in the same way as you’re aware of things in your waking life, where you’re able to choose to lift your hand or jump up and down or whatever. But if you were dreaming—and aware that you were dreaming—you could choose to fly. Or travel to another country, or to another world altogether. Anything you liked.
You could also use lucid dreaming to explore your own “normal” dreams, a possibility that scared me at the same time as it drew me in. The author said a lot of people used lucid dreaming to deal with recurrent nightmares. To explain, he talked about a little girl from Denver who kept having dreams about being attacked by a shark.
“But you know there aren’t any sharks in Colorado,” he told her.
“Of course not,” she said.
“Well, since you know there aren’t really any sharks where you swim, if you ever see one there again, it would be because you were dreaming. And once you know you’re dreaming, you can do whatever you like—you could even make friends with the dream shark, if you wanted to!”
A week later he talked to the girl again, and she said, “Do you know what I did? I rode on the back of the shark!”
I liked that story, corny as it was, because for about as long as I could remember, I’d been having my own recurrent nightmare. Or maybe nightmare was too strong a term, since it wasn’t as if I woke up screaming or anything. But it was unsettling, especially since it was a dream that was based on something real. When I was five—not in my dream, but in real life—I went with Mom to Service Merchandise. The checkout line was really long, so I asked if I could wait outside. Mom said okay, but to stay right in front of the store where she could see me. The next thing Mom knew, I was walking hand in hand across the parking lot with a man she’d never seen before. Mom ran out the door and yelled, “Lissa! Lissa!” and the man dropped my hand and fled.
Mom had told me that story a hundred times, and every time, it gave me the shivers. That’s probably why I liked hearing it so much. But then I’d started having dreams about it, dreams in which I was walking off to be kidnapped, or worse. In my dreams I knew I should turn back, but I couldn’t.
I’d had that dream a lot when I was younger, then less and less the older I got. Until recently. When I was a kid, Mom would sit with me after these dreams, stroking my hair until I fell back asleep. But Mom was no longer here to soothe me. The whole thing was stupid, I knew. I was sixteen. There was no way anyone was going to kidnap me. Who would want to? But the dream wasn’t really about being kidnapped, not anymore. Maybe it was about this Kate stuff, how I’d walked smack into a big mistake and now I had to be careful what I did next. I wasn’t sure.
But to banish the dream, maybe I had to find out. So after brushing my teeth and washing my face, I crawled into bed with the goal of having a lucid dream. I shifted around, smushing the pillow down just the right amount, and then I slid my feet farther into the cool sheets. I lay there, ready to begin, but my brain wouldn’t calm down. Now that I was committed to trying this, I was scared of what might happen.
I smoothed my quilt over my chest, my fingers finding its nubbly seams. On my bedside table, my Felix the Cat alarm clock ticked its muted tick. On the other side of the bed was the tall chest of drawers Jerry had found at a garage sale, its shadow stretching over the wall. Everything was familiar. Everything was safe.
When at last I felt ready, I closed my eyes and tried an exercise in which I tensed and relaxed my muscles, working my way up from my toes to my head. With each muscle group, I imagined a flow of energy traveling up my body, spreading through me in a wave.
The exercise was supposed to bring me closer to the dream state, but I must have done something wrong, because all that tensing made me feel weak, like I was going to faint. Plus, somehow during the course of the exercise, I forgot about my stomach altogether. I skipped from my hips and lower back straight up to my shoulders. What did that mean, I wondered?
I kept with it, though, imagining a flow of energy moving through my body, and after a while my arms and legs started to tingle. The book said that if you felt odd vibrations, you were supposed to try and intensify them, so that’s what I did. I relaxed my muscles and kind of pushed on the vibrations, like how you’d push on something if you were trying hard to remember it. The tingling sped up until my whole body hummed, including my heart, which whammed against my ribs. Oh, God, I thought. What if I accidentally kill myself?
I tried to pull out of it, but it was hard. My arms and legs felt leaden, and it took all of my strength to sl
ide my hand out from under the sheet. I felt like I was moving under water. Finally I wrenched free, and everything went ZAP back to normal. My heart was no longer racing, and I could move my body again. And then I wished I hadn’t gotten so freaked out, because maybe I’d been on the verge of doing it, of slipping into a lucid dream. What if I’d ruined it?
Not that it would have made much difference, because a minute later Beth pushed open my door and padded into my room. The light from the hallway spilled onto the floor.
“Lissa?” she whispered. “Are you awake?”
“No,” I said. I was irritated that she’d barged in, because even though she didn’t technically wake me up, she could have.
“Can I sleep with you?” she asked.
“I guess. But you better not talk.”
“I won’t.” She walked to the other side of my bed and climbed in. “I’ll scratch your back if you’ll scratch mine. You can even go first.”
I snorted. She meant that I could scratch her back first and be done with it, which was supposedly the best strategy, since it left me free to drift off as my own back was being rubbed. But Beth almost always fell asleep before fulfilling her end of the bargain. Still, I knew I’d be lying awake either way.
“Roll over,” I said.
She flipped onto her stomach, and I started scratching. I listened as her breathing slowed. She sighed, and I wondered why she had woken up, what unwanted dreams had troubled her.
I smoothed down her hair. “Sleep tight,” I whispered.
CHAPTER 7
AT SCHOOL, KATE AND I DANCED AROUND each other like two like-charged magnets: close enough to keep tabs on each other, but with an invisible force preventing us from fully connecting. In history, she laughed too loudly at Missy Colquitt’s jokes, knowing I was watching, and in the cafeteria she sat one or two tables away when she could have chosen a seat at the opposite end of the room. For my part, I tried to strike a balance between not staring at her and yet not looking away if my glance did happen to fall on her, and the result was that I was hyperaware of every move I made, as if I were trying to act cool at a party where I felt totally out of place.