The Girl Who Could Not Dream

  “Same reason some people love to ride roller coasters. Or read horror novels. Or see scary movies. Except dreams are even more immersive. Mom says it’s therapeutic for people. Dad says it’s also fun.” If Mr. Nightmare had bought all those dreams, why? She’d never heard of anyone buying so many. And she didn’t know why her parents would sell him the distiller. They wouldn’t, she thought, and she swallowed a lump in her throat. “That buyer—he calls himself Mr. Nightmare. Guess he really likes nightmares.”

  “You think he stole them?” Looking at a pile of unfinished dreamcatchers, Ethan picked one up and then put it down quickly, as if it had stung him. He put his hands behind his back again.

  Monster leaped onto the empty shelves. “Stole them and kidnapped her parents. They’d never sell the distiller. And they’re always here when Sophie comes home from school. It’s the only logical explanation.”

  Sophie clenched her hands into fists to keep herself from bursting into tears again. It was no different from what she’d been thinking, but hearing it said out loud . . .

  “Then we should call the police,” Ethan said.

  Pivoting on his hind paws, Monster drew himself upright and fluffed his fur. He spread his tentacles wide, waving them in the air. “You cannot!”

  At the same time, Sophie cried, “You can’t!”

  Ethan shrank back. His eyes shifted from side to side, as if checking for the nearest exit. “Why not? If they’re missing—”

  Sophie tried to sound calm and logical. She didn’t want him to bolt, babbling her secrets to whoever would listen. “What do we tell them? A man called Mr. Nightmare wanted to buy some dreams and now my parents and the machine that liquefies dreams are gone? They’ll never believe us.” Or worse, the police would believe them and tell the world . . . and then the Watchmen would hear and come. She couldn’t risk that.

  “But if they’re—”

  “No police.” If the Watchmen came, they’d destroy the shop. And when they found out about Sophie, they’d take her away, or worse. If that happened, she might never see her parents again. At least now there was a chance she was wrong and her parents were at the supermarket and everything was fine, and they’d be together, laughing about how silly she’d been to overreact. “They can’t find out about all of this—the Dream Shop, my family . . . It’s a secret, okay? It has to stay a secret, or everything’s over.”

  “Then what do we do?”

  “We don’t do anything. You go home.” She’d been stupid to tell him. He wasn’t family. She couldn’t trust him. “And you don’t tell anyone anything. Please!”

  He shook his head, though he continued to retreat. “I’m not leaving you with your parents missing. Plus what about the gray creature? It’s still out there, somewhere.”

  She had forgotten about the giraffe-man. Pressing her hands over her face, she wished she did have nightmares and this was one and she could wake up.

  “Listen, what if we call the police and tell them your parents are missing”—he held up a hand to stop her from interrupting—“but not mention any of the dream stuff. There’s still the mess upstairs, right? That’s evidence.”

  Monster snorted. “Yeah, they’ll be very impressed to hear a few books fell over. Her parents haven’t been gone long. They’ll pat Sophie on the head and tell her to be patient. Or worse, they’ll take her into the station, call Child Protective Services, and keep her there. Then we’ll lose our chance to look for them.”

  Lowering her hands from her face, Sophie looked at Monster. “You think we can find them?”

  “Of course.”

  Ethan shook his head. “Where? How? Do you know where this Mr. Nightmare lives? Do you even know his name? ‘Mr. Nightmare’ can’t be his real name.”

  “Check the ledger,” Monster suggested.

  Yes, she thought, the ledger! “Monster, you’re brilliant.” Mr. Nightmare might have stolen dreams today, but he’d bought one yesterday.

  “Obviously, but don’t feel too bad. As Eleanor Roosevelt said, ‘No one can make you feel inferior without your consent,’ which is a little victim-blaming, if you think about it.”

  She brushed past Ethan to the counter by the dream shelves. Monster jumped up onto the counter beside her and stuck his tentacles into the lock on the drawer that held the ledger. Twisting his tentacles, he unlocked it with a loud click. Hands shaking, Sophie pulled open the drawer and took out the ledger. She set it on the counter with a thud.

  “What’s that?” Ethan asked.

  “It’s a book,” Monster said.

  “I know it’s a book. I meant, how’s it supposed to help?”

  “Most answers can be found in books,” Monster said solemnly. “As a wise man who wasn’t Eleanor Roosevelt once said, ‘Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside a dog, it’s too dark to read.’”

  Sophie shot him a look. “This is serious, Monster.”

  “Just lightening the mood.”

  “Yeah, don’t.”

  The ledger was bound in brown leather. A thick red ribbon marked the middle, and several pages were dog-eared, stained, and torn. It was at least a thousand pages, with more than half of them filled. She opened it.

  Here was every dream, every sale, every purchase. She flipped through pages, seeing her mother’s neat handwriting contrast with her father’s scrawl. They recorded everything here. “My parents make every buyer and supplier leave their name and address . . .”

  Ethan peered over her shoulder. “Why?”

  “It’s a safety thing,” Sophie said. “This is a reputable dream shop, and my parents want to be sure they aren’t dealing with criminals.”

  “How would they know that?”

  Sophie paused. She hadn’t thought about that before. “I don’t know. It’s just what they do. If you want to buy or sell us a dream, you have to say who you are.”

  “Clearly didn’t work, since they got robbed.”

  Swallowing a lump in her throat, Sophie flipped faster.

  “What’s to stop a criminal from lying?” Ethan asked. “I mean, ‘Mr. Nightmare’ doesn’t exactly sound like a real name. Plus, if I were a thief or whatever, I wouldn’t give out my real home address.”

  Sophie stopped at yesterday’s date.

  And there it was, in her mother’s clear handwriting, in blue ink: Eugene Federle, 263 Windsor Street, Eastfield. They’d made only one sale yesterday, a nightmare filled with mythology. This was it. Sophie stepped back from the book. Her heart thumped wildly.

  Ethan scooted past her to read. He put his fingers on the words, and his mouth moved silently before he spoke. “That’s your Mr. Nightmare? Eugene Federle? That doesn’t sound nightmarish.”

  “Where’s Windsor Street?” Sophie asked.

  Ethan pulled a phone out of his pocket, typed in the address, and then showed it to Sophie and Monster, who inched closer. “Across town, other side of the baseball fields, I think. Look, how’s this for a deal: we go there, look around, try to figure out if it’s really his house and if he left any clues, and if we see anything suspicious, then we call the police.”

  It was . . . not a terrible plan.

  She found herself nodding, then stopped. “Wait. ‘We’? Why are you being so nice to me? Why come with me?”

  “As Monster said before, I’m involved.”

  “Yeah, not really. We don’t know that the gray giraffe is after you. It could be a random coincidence. It might not have anything to do with Mr. Nightmare or my parents. And I could be wrong about Mr. Nightmare and my parents anyway. Why not go home, play basketball, and live your normal life as if none of this had ever happened?”

  Ethan opened his mouth, then shut it as if he was considering what to answer. Finally, he said, “Because you need help. And I can help you. Or at least try.”

  Sophie flipped the sign in the bookshop window from Open to Closed, turned off the lights, and locked the door while Monster squeezed himself into her backpack again. Scooping him u
p, she headed through the stacks to the back door. Ethan followed her.

  The bikes were in the shed behind the house. She didn’t ride much, so hers had cobwebs. Dusting it off, she wheeled the bike outside and hoped she didn’t break an arm on top of everything else. Ethan picked her dad’s bike and found helmets on a shelf next to a garden hose. He handed her one, and she strapped it on. It was pink with butterflies on it, and it barely fit. His was rust-colored and looked a decade old. It occurred to her that she’d never been on a bike ride with a friend, and that’s exactly what this would look like to anyone who saw them. She hoped no one saw them. “You have that map ready?” Sophie asked.

  “Consider me navigation guy,” he said.

  “Good.” She pictured her parents waiting for her, trapped in a stranger’s house. Her heart was thumping hard. She wondered if this was what it felt like to be stuck in a nightmare. “What did you dream about last night?”

  He jammed his helmet on his head and didn’t meet her eyes. “Nothing.”

  “Nothing as in no dream, or nothing as in the Nothingness that destroys Everything?”

  Foot on the bike pedal, he froze. “How did you know that?”

  Sophie shrugged. She’d seen it plenty of times before. It was always creepy. Dad filed those dreams under “existential dread.” They didn’t sell well, unless the terror was acute enough. Given Ethan’s reaction, she guessed his was acute. She wondered why.

  He pushed off the ground and rode forward. Backpack balanced on her back, she pedaled after him. They skirted the side of the house. She caught up with him as they rode out onto the sidewalk. “I’ve had that dream before,” he admitted. “And worse. Sometimes I dream I can’t scream, no matter how much I want to. Or that I can scream, but no one hears me. Or I dream that I’m alone in the middle of the ocean.”

  “Sharks?” She veered around a parking meter. Concentrating, she tried to keep her balance. Last time she rode her bike, she’d crashed into a mailbox. She wouldn’t be able to help her parents if she hurt herself.

  “No sharks. No birds. No raft. No nothing. And the ocean goes down for miles underneath me. The dreamcatcher last night . . . That was the first time in days that I didn’t wake up terrified. And I’m only saying the word terrified because I’m trusting you not to tell my team. But seriously, the dreamcatcher helped. I still remember the dream, but it’s more like the way I remember something I watched on TV or read. It’s not as intense. It doesn’t feel like I lived it.”

  “You’re welcome.” She wanted to ask why someone with so many friends would have such classic loneliness dreams. But before she could figure out how to ask, Ethan sped up and crossed the street at a break in the traffic.

  Sophie braked as a truck rattled past. Two more cars zoomed by in its wake. She looked up and down the street, then up and down again. Don’t be a chicken, she told herself. Mom and Dad need you. Her head down, she pushed off the curb and biked across the street. Ahead, Ethan was turning onto one of the side streets. Speeding up, she followed him.

  Monster bounced on her back. “Ow, ow, ow.”

  “Sorry!” She tried to steer around the potholes, but she couldn’t help hitting patches of dirt and cracks in the road. On the side street, the houses looked as if they were waking up—people were out walking their dogs, coming home from work, kids were playing in the driveways. She’d been down these streets before, but they looked different from a bike than they did on a bus. She noticed every tiny incline.

  As they rode farther from the center of town, the houses were more spaced out, and the sidewalks disappeared. When they were side by side again, Ethan asked, “Would you really have sold my dream?”

  She was panting, but he looked as if he’d just hopped on the bike. She reminded herself this was her idea. It wasn’t her fault she was out of shape. Well, technically, it was. “Weren’t you happy it was dulled?” she puffed.

  “Yeah.”

  “Then why does it matter what happens to it afterward?”

  “Because it’s mine.”

  “But you didn’t want it,” Sophie pointed out. “We’re just recycling your trash. Really, it’s not so different from the people who ride around in pickup trucks on trash day and rescue things from people’s trash to sell at scrap yards or at flea markets.”

  “But people don’t know dreams can be sold.”

  And so long as the Watchmen are out there, they never will, Sophie thought. It was sad. There were so many wonderful dreams that could be shared. Her parents sold thrill rides and sweet moments and surreal journeys and experiences that you couldn’t find in the awake world. They shouldn’t have to do it in secrecy and fear. Her parents, the way they could distill a tangled dream . . . they were artists. It was beautiful, and she wished it didn’t have to be hidden. But it did. They didn’t dare stop hiding. If the Watchmen found out about the Dream Shop, they’d destroy it, down to the very last bottle. Her parents had heard of it happening before. Even the police hadn’t been able to help—all they’d seen was a bunch of broken bottles and two scared people babbling about things that the police believed couldn’t be true.

  Pausing at a stop sign, Ethan checked the map. “This way.” He pointed toward a street, and she winced. Of course it had to be uphill. “How long have your parents run a dream shop?”

  “As long as I can remember,” Sophie said, pedaling again. “My grandparents—my mom’s parents—used to have a shop too. They retired to Florida a few years ago. Not near Disney World, though.”

  “I don’t know why anyone would live in Florida not near Disney.”

  She wondered if he was distracting her on purpose, keeping her talking so that she wouldn’t panic. He didn’t seem to be good with tears, which Sophie understood, since she hated crying. “There’s supposed to be a dream shop inside Cinderella’s castle, but that could be just a rumor.” She puffed as she pedaled, and then they hit the top of a hill.

  Side by side, they coasted down. Trees flickered past on either side of the street. There were fewer houses here. In fact, she realized, she hadn’t seen a house in a while. It was mostly swampy woods. She’d never been out this way before.

  Ethan led them down another street. They passed a field, a house, then another stretch of dense trees. “How many dream shops are there?”

  “I don’t know. We’re rare. A few, I guess? My parents don’t let me meet too many people in the dream business. Anyone, really. I wasn’t supposed to meet Mr. Nightmare. It was an accident.” Did that somehow lead to whatever happened with her parents? Was this all her fault? If she hadn’t met Mr. Nightmare, he never would have left the birthday card. If she hadn’t found that card, Mom and Dad wouldn’t have met with him again. The bike wobbled under her, and she concentrated on keeping her balance.

  “Just keep talking,” he coached her. “If you think too much about bad stuff, you’ll lose control and fall. Take it from a guy who’s broken his arm twice. How do people know about your dream shop? I mean, it’s not like you have a sign or anything.”

  She forced herself to focus on the question. “It’s like people who are really into knitting. They know where all the yarn stores are and they tell each other. Dream collectors are the same way. Word of mouth. But more, you know, secret.”

  Ethan braked.

  She squeezed the hand brakes and jolted forward as the bike jerked to a stop. Ahead, surrounded by marshy woods, was a house with a freshly shorn lawn, pink flowers along the walk, and a mailbox in the shape of a swan. It was all alone, the only house visible in either direction. It looked as if it was all dolled up for a party, just waiting for neighbors to join it. It didn’t look like the house of a thief and kidnapper. “That’s it?”

  “263 Windsor Street. It’s not very . . .”

  “Ominous?”

  “Yeah.”

  It wasn’t. It was the kind of house where kids would set up a lemonade stand in the front yard while the adults barbecued hamburgers in the backyard. Stepping off her bike, Soph
ie walked closer. Parked in the driveway was a sleek blue car with a license plate that read: MISTER N. Mr. N, she thought. Mr. Nightmare. At least this was really his house, so that was one question answered. He hadn’t lied in the ledger. Of course, that didn’t prove he had anything to do with her parents’ disappearance . . .

  Steering her bike off the road, she knocked the kickstand down and removed her helmet. Ethan parked Dad’s bike next to hers. Kneeling, she took off her backpack, lowered it to the ground, and opened it. Monster was curled into a tight ball. “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “Seasick.” He slunk out of the backpack. Groaning, he flopped on his side under the bushes. “Never, ever want to do that again.”

  She winced. “Sorry.”

  He waved a tentacle weakly, which could have meant either “I forgive you” or “I surrender.”

  “You stay here,” she told him. “We’ll check it out.”

  Launching himself to his feet, he said, “Oh no, I have to protect you.” His knees wobbled and his eyes widened. His cheeks bulged as if he was trying to keep from being sick.

  “We’re just going to peek in the windows, right?” Ethan said. “Nothing dangerous.”

  Sophie nodded. “We’ll be as sneaky as opossums.”

  “Are opossums really sneaky?” Ethan asked.

  “No idea,” Sophie said.

  Monster shook his head. “Coming with you . . .” And then he clapped tentacles over his mouth and sank into the pine needles.

  “Stay. I’ll scream if I need you.”

  “I’m fine. But I’ll . . . keep to the bushes.” Slinking underneath the bushes, Monster headed for the house. Sophie and Ethan followed, tromping between the trees.

  The mossy ground squished under her feet. Birds chirped from the branches overhead. She spotted squirrels scurrying through the trees. It felt like they were on a nature walk, not a spying mission. Everything about this felt wrong.

  The forest ended abruptly at the lawn, as if both the grass and the trees were respecting the border. No weeds sneaked onto the lawn, and no grass ventured into the woods. Sophie squatted in the underbrush and stared at the house.