Dream Boy (23 page)

The newspaper ran an article: “Boy, 17, Lost on Mountain,” so by Monday morning everyone knew Will was gone. The article made him sound like some sort of hero, off in the woods, searching for his date’s runaway dog. It mentioned the possibility of foul play and hypothermia. It did not blame me. I did that.

I skipped early morning classes on Monday. My mother said I could stay home all week, but there were things I had to face, and people I had to see. I wandered through the halls of Chilton High, using my pass to collect Talon and Serena. Paolo, who had pre calc with them, tagged along.

We headed to the girls’ bathroom on the second floor, which hardly anyone ever used because it had ventilation problems and smelled like dishrags. Paolo hesitated a minute, then followed us inside.

The four of us dissected my dream, the fishing gear, Will in the sand, and Spice barking, which made Talon have to take a private minute in a stall.

“I still don’t think it was the white space,” I said. “It was just a white hallway. But it wasn’t a normal dream, either. The guy didn’t see me. It was like I was watching TV.”

“Are you sure the person on the bank was Will?” Serena asked for the twenty-fifth time. I knew she was avoiding saying “body.” The
body
on the bank…

“I only saw him for a second.”

“You need to go there again,” Talon said.

“But if I touch him and he’s dead, does his body wash up on the shore of the Roanoke River?”

“Uncharted territory,” Paolo said.

“What about the girl,” I asked. “Is she out there, too?”

He shrugged.

The bell rang, so we filed down to the cafeteria for lunch, which I didn’t plan on eating. Serena sat down on my side of the table next to Paolo, trying to fill Will’s empty space for both of us. Daniel had moved over from the second-tier jock table to sit next to Billy. I guess if you spend homecoming in the woods chasing someone else’s nightmare, it forms some type of bond. Martin was there, too, across from Stephanie. But when he saw me come in, he switched tables.

“How’s it going?” It was more than a casual question. I shrugged.

He nodded and paused for a second. “You’ll find him again.”

“Wish I had your confidence.” But when I looked at Martin, really looked at him, he didn’t look confident at all. His blue eyes were sad.

“Martin—”

“You find someone, you lose someone,” he said. I knew that by losing someone, he wasn’t talking about Will. He was talking about me. “Good luck, though.”

“Why are you even wishing me that?”

“I want you to be happy,” he said. “Is that so hard to believe?”

“Everything is hard to believe,” I said.

He smiled a little and then glanced over at Talon to see if he’d said the right thing. She tossed a potato chip at him and he turned back to me.

“But just to be clear, Annabelle,” he added. “I’m not going anywhere. I’ll be right here, waiting. Maybe when you find Will, the three of us can have breakfast.”

I cringed, remembering the French Toast Incident, as he leaned in and kissed my cheek. It was a gentle kiss, demanding nothing, more of a punctuation mark than anything else. “I’ll be here.”

He rubbed his arms and I saw goose bumps.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“Just cold,” he said.

“But you don’t get—”

“So I’ve heard a rumor,” Stephanie said, stopping by our table as she carried her tray. “The Dreamer, huh?” She leaned down so her full lips were right near my ear. Her lip gloss smelled like fresh strawberries. “Personally, I think it’s bullshit,” she said. “But even if you are her, it doesn’t mean I have to like you.”

She stood up again to her full height, staring at me with those Cleopatra eyes. After all we’d been through, Stephanie Gonzales still hated me. Most of me hated her back, but a sliver of me was grateful; at least this part of my life was still normal.

“Will’s pretty cute for a total reject,” she said. “I hope you find him.” Her words were biting, but her eyes weren’t. Maybe things with Stephanie weren’t so normal after all, because all of a sudden, I wanted to hug her. I sat on my hands, just in case, and she walked away to empty her tray in the trash.

Across the cafeteria, I spotted the one person (other than Will) that I really wanted to see: Mr. Ernshaw.

He must have drawn the short straw, which I’m pretty sure is how they pick high school lunchroom monitors. His shirt was rumpled and his hair looked as if he’d taken grooming lessons from a sheepdog. I walked over to him.

“Matter over mind,” I said, like I was double-checking my homework. “What does it mean?”

“It’s an idea Jim—Coach Masterson and I—were playing around with,” he said. He took off his glasses and wiped them, then put them back on his face. “I suppose I keep trying to find a scientific explanation.”

“Did you?” I asked.

“Are you taking notes?” he asked, but his eyes were kind. “Okay, how about this,” he began. “What if a dream—or some dreams—exist beyond the confines of our minds? What if they’re matter?
Real
matter. Solid, liquid, gas, and then a fourth state, if you will.”

“Not nothing,” I whispered.

“Exactly. Not nothing.”

“And the fourth state, if there was a fourth state, might be something else and even exist somewhere else, in another realm.” Now he was combining science with fiction. But he was on a roll. “What if dreams exist in that fourth state?”

I looked over and his eyes locked into mine. “Nothing is lost, Miss Manning,” he whispered. “Because nothing ever entirely disappears.”

Mr. Ernshaw concluded in a normal voice, “My theory is that Mr. Connor has changed states. He simply needs a catalyst to help him change states once more. You may be that catalyst, Miss Manning. It’s a stretch to call any of this remotely scientific, but it puts it into a context that makes me feel a little more comfortable. And it has the added benefit of providing hope.”

“So what we need to do is…”

“Change one form into another.” He gave me a weak smile, then shrugged. “Of course, that’s just my hypothesis. It’s up to you to test it.”

“Test it how?” I asked.

But I knew that answer myself.

Like the song goes, all you have to do is dream.

That night, I closed my eyes and tried to cast myself into the white space. I knew my chances; I had read somewhere that more than 1.5 billion dreams are produced on a single night in America alone. With all those dreams pinging off the stratosphere, how likely was it I could find my way back to that hallway, though the door, and across that river. To Will’s body.

No.
I chased the thought away
.
To
Will.

If
I’m the chosen one, then I get to choose, too. And I choose to find Will, to bring him home.

White space. White. I thought about snow and milk and pillowcases and the mysterious bleached spots on fingernails. I thought about gym socks and the porcelain figurines of sheep my grandma had kept on her living room mantel. I thought about feathers and bare museum walls.
White
, I sang to myself,
white
white
white.

But sleep didn’t come. Maybe there was too much pressure. My dad always said I had a stubborn streak, and he was right. It was hard for me to do anything on command.

The clock by my bed flashed 9:30, 12:30, 2:00 a.m. I thought I drifted off for awhile, but when I looked at the clock again, only seven minutes had passed.

Finally, I slept. I woke at 4:23 a.m. to find that I’d dreamed about my father, who was with me and Nick on a fishing boat with a talking salmon. It was the closest to Alaska I’d ever been, and for a moment I saw what my dad saw: huge mountains, untouched water, beauty. Until one of my dad’s shipmates cut the salmon’s head off.

Then I was somewhere else, a playground. I was a child, still in preschool, and I wore a flowered sundress and sat alone in the sandbox, banging a red shovel against the flat bottom of a blue bucket. And then I wasn’t alone. There was a small boy a few feet away. He had messy hair and a grim, determined look on his face as he tried to poke a straw in his juice box. He kept missing the hole.

I woke again, but if I dreamed, I wasn’t aware of it. It was after 5:00, nearly morning.

I checked my phone and saw texts from Talon and Serena, and one from Martin that said simply,
I’m here.
I didn’t write any of them back. I texted Will instead.
In bed
, I wrote.
Where are you?
I waited for an answer, and slipped the phone under my pillow so I would hear the beep if there was one. But there was no beep, just a faded drone as headlights from a passing car cast long shadows across my wall. And eventually, the door slam and grind of the street waking up. I buried my face in my pillow.

I thought about the white space. I thought about Will.

If he was a dream, like Martin said, I should be able to find him, to dream him. But the thing was, with Will, it wasn’t dolphins and sunlit waters. To me he was
real
. If Will was my dream, he was my first, my purest, my truest and best.

I shut my eyes and tried again to retrace my steps, wind my way back into the white hallway of last night’s dream. I tried to visualize my bare feet on the floor. If I concentrated, I could feel the floor, too, the coldness of it. At the end of the hall was a door, and I opened it.

I
am
in
the
same
den, watching the same fisherman rifle through his closet. I look down at my T-shirt, and find that it has been replaced by my homecoming dress. Not the one Martin bought me, the one I bought myself—periwinkle blue, so I look as if I’ve stepped out of a jazz club from the 1960s. I follow the fisherman out of the house, and feel the rocky gravel of his driveway under my feet, then the smoothness of the red, clay path that leads to the river. I will him to hurry, but he takes his time, whistling a little.

We
hear
the
barking
at
the
same
time. The fisherman swears under his breath, then swears again when he sees what is near the dog. He puts down his fishing gear and runs back toward the house. I force myself to continue forward, toward Will’s body where it lies on the bank across the river. The water is cold, the rapids moving faster than I’d imagined. My dress swirls like seaweed around my legs. The rocks are slippery under my feet.

I
call
his
name. “WILL.” He doesn’t move.

When
I
reach
the
other
side, he is still on his back, his eyes shut, a slight stubble of beard on his face, his hair coated in grit and his lips baked by the sun. A handful of broken glass is scattered next to him. The blue of the bottle, shattered again, shines in the early light.

Spice
scuttles
around
my
ankles, whimpering now instead of barking. I bend down close to Will and reach out one tentative finger, until I almost touch his face. Just inches away, I stop, afraid. There is no movement, no sign of breath. If I touch him now, do I send him back, dead, to the land of the living? My fault. My fault. My fault.

“You’re not—” My throat is raw. “Tell me you’re not—”

I
kneel
on
the
ground, my hands pressing into the sandy earth beside him. My fingers hit on a small river rock, like the one I keep at my bedside. I pick it up, rubbing my thumb against the smooth surface. I think of what Martin said, that at any moment a dream pebble can turn into a feather or a chunk of ice.

I
close
my
hands
around
it, making a fist. It feels cold and wet in my palm, and when I open my hand again, it glistens. Not a rock anymore, but ice, melting into the warmth of my skin.

I
look
toward
the
river
and
think
of
Will. Not as he is now, but as I really know him: his crooked smile, the gleam of his green-gold eyes. I see the real Will, the one who teases my brother and listens to strange music and tells me things I’ve never heard before. The one who says he can’t lose me. The one I cannot lose.

“Please,” I whisper to the air.

In
my
periphery, I see something. Movement? A slight rising of his chest?

“Will!”

His
eyelids
waver. I am sure of it. And then slowly, slowly they open. Will, the Will I have known almost my whole life, squints up at me. His cracked lips spread into a smile. His voice is dusty, and I can barely hear it over the rush of the river. “Annabelle Manning, as I live and breathe.”

Spice
licks
my
feet
and
her
whimpering
ceases.

“Is this a dream?” Will asks, trusting me to have the answers for a change.

My
eyes
stare
into
his
eyes, my smile melts into his smile. I tell him the truth. “For now,” I say.

Then
I
grab
his
hand, and lead him away from the river.

CHILTON—A Chilton boy was found dehydrated but essentially unharmed early Tuesday when a fisherman spotted him near the shallows of the Roanoke River. The boy, William Connor, 17, of Lorcum Lane, told rescuers he wasn’t sure how he’d ended up on the river’s north bank, still dressed in a suit and tie from the Chilton High Homecoming Dance. Connor’s parents last saw him before the dance Saturday evening, but friends said he disappeared from Black Beak Mountain, 90 miles away from where he was found.

He was disoriented Tuesday, and in serious but stable condition at Chilton Community Hospital.

The fisherman said he was alerted to the boy’s presence by a small dog.

“She was running in circles, just howling and a’yipping,” said Ray Dalton of Pulaski, Virginia. “She was scaring the fish so I waded upstream to see if I could shut her up. That boy was the last thing I expected to find.”

The dog, also missing since Saturday, was treated by Osbourne Veterinary Hospital and released to its owner, Talon Fischer. Fischer was Connor’s date to the homecoming dance, which celebrated Chilton’s 42–17 victory over Cave Spring.

Friends kept vigil outside Connor’s hospital room for much of the day Tuesday, though none of them spoke to the media. Connor’s parents also refrained from comment, saying only that they were grateful to have their son returned to them, and that he was sleeping peacefully.