Dream Boy (2 page)

The Chilton High School cafeteria is ruled by a social order that is, to be fair, no more ruthless than any other culture that engages in slavery and human sacrifice. We’re not cutting off our enemies’ heads and displaying them on fence posts, exactly. But there are other ways to claim ownership of human flesh and to torment those who resist.

There is, for example, Stephanie Gonzales.

Captain of the Cheerleading Squad, a member of the Model UN, French Club, and Devils Are Angels, our high school’s team of ostentatious do-gooders, Stephanie is the undisputed queen bee. With her sleek black hair and almond eyes, she looks like Cleopatra, accessorized with pompoms instead of an asp. She moved here at the beginning of last year, and she’s ruled our class with a golden fist ever since.

There are some advantages to being noticed by Stephanie Gonzales, but there are
more
advantages to being ignored. Luckily my friends and I are, for the most part, invisible.

Stephanie sits in the center of the room with the Beautiful People. Her BFF Trina Myers sits on one side and her jock-du-jour (actually, for many jours) Billy Stubbs sits on the other. To either side of them is a roster of the best looking and most athletic people at the school.

Beside the Beautiful People sit the Preps and Second Tier Jocks, including the late, great Daniel Kowalski, whom I rarely see because I sit intentionally facing the opposite direction. Not that seeing him is such a big deal anymore—in the same way it’s no big deal to pluck my heart out of my chest daily so it can be trampled on by a boy who never really got me, even when he had me, and never really wanted what he got.

But on the up side, Daniel has apparently decided his new look involves both a sparse goatee and an excessive amount of hair gel, so looking away is smarter all around.

Orbiting out from the Beautiful-Preppy-Jocky center of our high school universe are tables for the Wannabes, the Geek Squad, the Band, the WWJDs, and the Unredeemables.

I sit at a self-proclaimed table of Nobodies with Will, my other best friends, Talon Fischer and Serena Mendez, and Will’s other best friend, Paolo Langit. Paolo moved to Chilton last year from the Philippines. He and Will immediately bonded because they both owned T-shirts with a bastardized quote from Jack Kerouac:
“Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends…like this shirt.”
Our spot is on the far end of the cafeteria, next to the station where people dump their trays. We talk, eat, and have attacks of major angst while we watch the hormones and humanity that swirl around us.

Will, who
never
has angst, just likes people watching. It’s some kind of anthropological study for him. But this particular Friday, he wasn’t people watching. This Friday, he was watching me.

My cell phone beeped.

Are we on?
It was Will.

On what?
I sent back.

Talon and Serena were talking about some trig equation they couldn’t figure out and Will took a bite of burrito instead of typing. I had to resist the urge to reach over and wipe the refried beans from the corner of his mouth, but he caught it and went back to his phone.

Homecoming
, he typed.

Oh, right. Yikes.

My phone beeped again.
Remember?

!!
I wrote back. I was stalling, I knew. But I needed to have a rethink. I’d made clear that this wasn’t a date-date. We were going as friends, Will knew that. But what if, after an evening under crepe-paper streamers and cardboard stars, I ended up
like
-liking him and he still only
friend
-liked me…or what if he
like
-liked me and I only
friend
-liked him? I didn’t want to bring any weirdness into what I had with Will. It was too important for that.

We can laugh at the DJ
, he wrote.

Ha
, I wrote, at the exact same time Will asked Serena, out loud, “Are you going to homecoming?”

“I’m going camping with my parents,” she said.

“You’re not staying in that rat-infested cabin again?” asked Talon.

“They weren’t rats. They were mice.”

Talon and I had accompanied the Mendezes on their last camping trip, and Serena’s dad found some traps in a wooden storage box. He set them up, after reading in the cabin guest book that it was “ABSOLUTELY VITAL.” The traps snapped all night. In the morning, the cabin was full of dead mice and before breakfast, Serena insisted that we wrap the small, furred bodies in toilet paper and bury them. Part of me was surprised she hadn’t sewn them little suits first. She led us into the woods, looking for a place with enough solemnity for a mouse funeral.

What we found in those woods, though, was more strange than solemn—possibly the strangest place I’d ever been. At the end of a random trail, we came to a grassy clearing, almost perfectly round and edged with moss. In the very middle of the opening stood a single tree, maybe fifty feet high, with wild branches that sprawled toward the sky.

It reminded me of something Salvador Dalí would have painted, only without the eyeballs and melting stopwatches. But in their place was something equally peculiar—bottles, dozens of them, in different sizes and colors. Some had been tied to the tree with cords; others had been jammed mouth-first on the nubby ends of branches.

Serena took it as a sign. She buried the mice at the base of the tree, as the bottles above our heads clinked in the wind.

“Same cabin,” Serena told us. “I’m making my dad bring the Havahart traps from home this time.”

We all rolled our eyes and said things like “that sucks.” But in a way Serena didn’t mind camping with her parents and a bunch of mice because she didn’t have a date to the dance. And in a way the rest of us were jealous. Will’s dad was too busy for camping. Paolo’s mother had malaria as a child and harbored an irrational fear of mosquitoes. Talon’s parents were divorced like mine, but unlike my parents they were trying to one-up each other, so she spent nearly every weekend doing cultivated things like going to the opera in Roanoke. My mom didn’t have the energy for much more than watching old movies on cable. And my dad, well. Anyway.

“You got any homecoming offers—you know, since yesterday?” Will asked me.

“I think Ronny Lobman was checking me out in French,” I said.

“And English, too,” added Talon.

Will smiled. “Yeah, that’s only because you look like Queen Amidala when you wear your hair up.” Ronny Lobman is obsessed with
Star Wars
.

“She really does.” Talon tilted her head, examining me. “If we dyed your hair black and slabbed on some face paint, you could rule entire galaxies.”

I knew Talon, whose dark hair didn’t have to be dyed, looked ten times more Amidala than I ever could, even with her asymmetrical bob and fishing-lure earrings. But I also knew that she got snarky whenever I complimented her looks. So I just gave a solemn half-bow and quoted, “My place is with my people.”

My phone beeped again. I was no good at having two conversations at once. When I looked at the screen, all it said was:
Stph alert.

“Stph?” I asked Will. “What’s Stph?”

He didn’t have time to answer. Stephanie Gonzales, the queen bee herself, buzzed by our table with her tray. At first I thought she was going to stop and I tried to think of a comeback before she even said anything. But she just murmured, “poor creatures,” and walked on.

I yawned. The big, embarrassing kind of yawn that takes over your whole body and ends with an audible sigh.

“What’s with you?” Talon asked.

“Just spent,” I said.

“Let me guess: Your mom kept you up watching
Gone
with
the
Wind
again.”

“No such luck.”

Talon gave a fake shudder. “What you southerners see in that movie I will never understand. The whole hoopskirt and magnolia thing is so…hoopskirt and magnolia.”

Talon said “you southerners” but she’d been born in Chilton like pretty much everyone else. Her dad, though, was from New Jersey. Apparently, that was enough for Talon to consider herself on the other side of the Mason-Dixon line—in spirit, if not in body.

“Fiddle-dee-dee,” I said, fanning myself.

“You really do look tired, Annabelle,” Serena said. “I can see little moons under your eyes again. My mom says almond oil works, and cucumber slices.”

“Thanks for the tip.” I loved how she said “moons” and not “bags.” Leave it to Serena to make total exhaustion seem somehow romantic.

“Well, if that doesn’t work, there is this new thing called sleep you might try,” Will said. “People lie down on stuffed mattresses and close their eyes. It’s all the rage in Europe. Spain has even started a national competition for afternoon napping.”

“Sign me up!” said Talon. “I could totally go for a nap during P.E.”

“It’s not sleep that’s the problem,” I said. “I keep having these crazy dreams. I can’t even remember half of them. One minute I’m running down the hallways in an abandoned hotel, looking for lightning. The other…”

“What?” Will asked.

“Uh, more…stuff,” I finished, lamely. The other I’d been on that boat with Josh.

I yawned again, crumpled up my bagged lunch, and tossed it from my seat into the nearby trash can.

It seemed sometimes like sleeping had become my real job, and the waking hours—school, homework, family—well, that was just me resting up for my dreams. Which maybe wasn’t so bad, in the grand scheme of things. At least my dreams got me out of Chilton, if only for the night.

• • •

I was still yawning through pre calc…U.S. history…chemistry.

“X-ray crystallography captures the distinct lattice pattern of the crystal, so we can see how the electrons that surround the atoms interact with the incoming X-ray photons…”

Mr. Ernshaw might as well have been speaking Xhosa, which is the only language I know of that begins with an X. It wasn’t that I didn’t like chemistry, or even that chemistry didn’t like me. It was just…Friday. And last period. And COME ON, MR. ERNSHAW CAN’T YOU GIVE US A BREAK?

To keep myself awake, I opened my dream dictionary app and read once again the entry for “lake.” According to dream guru Cynthia Rêve, a lake meant either I was unable to express my emotions freely or I had serenity and peace of mind.
So
which
is
it, Ms. Rêve?
I thought.
Because
repressed
emotion
doesn’t exactly scream “serenity.”

There was nothing for “blue eyes,” but under “blue” was “birth and unavoidable change,” while “eye” was (duh) “vision.”

“Annabelle?” said Mr. Ernshaw. “Are you with us?”

I put the phone away, and to make it look like I was taking notes, I sketched a stinkbug that was dead on the windowsill. Then I copied a list of the ingredients in diet soda. Mr. Ernshaw was great about letting us bring drinks into the classroom, as long as it wasn’t a lab day; plus, the list looked chemical-y, so I figured that was
like
paying attention.

Caffeine

Aspartame

Citric Acid

The lab door opened then and I looked up and promptly stopped breathing. There
he
was, standing right by the door of the classroom, smiling, talking to Mr. Ernshaw, like an ordinary person.

Only he wasn’t ordinary. He wasn’t even a person.

He was Josh.

My Josh.

The guy from my dream.

But it wasn’t my dream. It was chemistry, and Josh was
here
. The light—from a window? just the fluorescents?—made him seem golden. I glanced around to see if anyone else was looking at the door, because it was possible I was hallucinating. Other students were staring, too. Then Mr. Ernshaw said something and picked up a paper from his desk and handed it to Josh, who nodded. “Fine,” Mr. Ernshaw said. “I’ll see you Monday.”

Josh smiled his amazing smile and looked in my direction. Before I remembered how to exhale, he was gone.

For a moment, the world was utterly still. It was as if I’d landed on another planet; I didn’t know the language or if my lungs could handle the atmosphere.

The afternoon bell rang, and everything started moving again. The classroom was full of the shuffle of backpacks being shouldered, cell phones being turned on again, and the garble of conversation.

I jumped up too quickly, knocking my notebook onto the floor. As I crouched down to get it, I told myself to keep breathing. In. Then out. I must have just dreamed it up. My restlessness and boredom and overactive imagination had simply combined to create a very realistic waking dream. Right, Ms. Rêve?

Josh wasn’t real. He was
Josh
—which meant he was by his very nature a figment of my imagination.

But he’d looked real. In fact, it seemed entirely possible that right now somewhere beyond my classroom door stood the boy of my dreams.

I grabbed my backpack and started pushing my way through the bottleneck of students. I could at least look, right? But looking wasn’t so easy.

The school was built fifty years ago when the student population was half its current size, so even on a normal afternoon the hallways were as packed as a cattle chute on market day. But this was
Friday
afternoon—and what’s more, it was the Friday afternoon before the football game with our archrivals, the Pulaski Cougars. So the hallways were not only packed, they were packed with hyped-up, pompom-wielding nut jobs.

Some guy had dressed up as a mangy cougar and was being led around on a leash by our mascot, the Chilton Blue Devil. Scattered pep band trumpet players were blaring the fight song. In the middle of it all stood Stephanie Gonzales, decked out in the wardrobe of the privileged class, aka her cheerleader uniform. She was handing out little gold footballs.

“Want one?” she asked in a voice that was very diet soda.

I wouldn’t have answered at all but I was stuck going two miles an hour behind some guy in a letter jacket who was as broad as he was slow. If there was time for pleasantries, I figured there was time for unpleasantries.

“No thanks,” I said, just as sweetly. “I’m avoiding unnecessary plastics. But you just go right on killing the planet by increasing your environmental footprint.”

“Whatever.”

Okay, maybe it was rude, but I’ve had what my mother would call “uncharitable feelings” toward Stephanie ever since she moved here because (1) she always asks me where I get my clothes in this super-fake “what a cute sweater” way, even when she knows that half of the stuff I wear comes from Goodwill; (2) on a particularly bad hair day last month, she told me the cosmetology students always needed to practice on “extreme cases”; and (3) she was clogging up the hallway with little plastic footballs at the exact moment I needed to MOVE.

Stephanie turned to offer a football to Macy White, an exchange that went better than it had with me. They put their heads together in a friendly way that suggested Macy wasn’t issuing an environmental impact statement.

Guh! How was I ever going to find anyone in this chaos? Much less someone who probably didn’t exist in the first place.

When I made it to the main hall, it was Will, not Josh, that I found—or rather he found me, since I was looking so hard for Josh that at first I didn’t see Will at all.

“Annabelle!” He shouted over the noise. “Hey, you okay?”

He and Paolo were walking together in the opposite direction of the general traffic flow, probably headed to the photo lab, where they spent most of their time after school.

“I guess,” I said, scooting into a nook outside the teachers’ lounge, away from the press of bodies. “Look, have you seen this guy? He’s about your height, gold-brown hair—”

“Tim Linkous?” Paolo asked. Tim Linkous ate ants when we were in sixth grade, not even on a dare.

“Good God no!” I said. “This guy is new.”

“New how?” Paolo said. “New to Chilton High or new life-form?”

“Guess,” I said.

“I saw a new guy heading for Coach Masterson’s office a few minutes ago,” Will said.

“Wavy hair?” I asked. “Really, really blue eyes?”

“I didn’t see his eyes,” Will said.

“What was he wearing?”

“Jeans. Maybe a blue shirt, you know like a T-shirt, but with a few buttons and a collar,” Will said.

“That could be him,” I said. My pulse quickened, I could feel it.

“For someone who is so smart,” Paolo said to Will, “how can you possibly
not
know that that’s called a polo shirt?”

“Guess I know now,” Will said.

“But I bet you know what they call the padded shirt a knight wears under his chain mail,” Paolo said.

“That’d be a gambeson.”

“Bet you know—”

“So, thanks,” I interrupted, already heading toward the Athletics Department.

“Wait, Annabelle,” Will called. I didn’t.

The halls cleared out as I turned toward the wing that held the gym. By the time I got to the coach’s office, I couldn’t find life-forms of any sort. Just me and a deserted hallway. Cue the tumbleweed.

The five-minute bell for the buses sounded. I hadn’t bummed a ride with anyone, and since Lucifer, the ’73 Dodge Dart my grandma left me in her will, needed a new starter that I couldn’t afford, that bell meant I had to haul my butt all the way back to the front of the school to catch my bus. Fast.

It was humiliating. Not only did I have to ride the bus, which is bad enough since I’m a junior, but Miss Pat had to reopen the doors for me. Plus, I was panting. The only open seat was next to Ronny Lobman’s little brother Dale, a freshman who was as crazy about
Star Wars
as Ronny. They were both nice enough, but I wasn’t up to hearing a thirty-minute monologue about the potential mechanical problems of Darth Maul’s Sith Infiltrator.

As the bus threaded the narrow streets of Chilton’s river neighborhoods, I tried to untangle my thoughts.

I’d seen a guy who looked exactly like the guy from my dreams. But that, of course, was insane. People from dreams didn’t just pop up in a person’s chemistry lab. At least not in Chilton, Virginia.

Things like that didn’t happen in real life. Did they?