Dreamers Often Lie (6 page)

O
utside the high school, the morning was still dark. There wasn’t even a hint of sunrise in the black sky, just the electric glow from the city beneath it. It might as well have been the middle of the night.

But inside, it was bright. And warm. And loud.

Sadie dragged me through the crowded hallways. “Excuse us,” she blared, nudging a knot of underclassmen out of the way. “Coming through.”

“Could you maybe try to sound less like a carnival barker?” I jerked my elbow away. “Everybody’s staring at us.”

“Everybody’s staring at
you
.” Sadie grabbed my arm again. “And we’re running late because
you
took twenty minutes rearranging your hair this morning, and Mrs. Taylor will blow a fuse if I’m tardy to AP History.”

She took off, still holding my sleeve. I flopped after her like an untied shoelace.

Locker doors slammed around us. Fluorescent lights blazed. I kept my eyes on the floor and my mind on staying
vertical, but I could still hear the whispers that buzzed us like mosquitos.

“Skiing accident . . .”

“Brain damage . . .”

“Guess she almost died . . .”

Just look at the floor,
I told myself.
Look at the floor and keep walking.

Two pairs of pointed boots strode across the edge of my vision. The boots led up to two pairs of tights, one green and one blue. The legs in the tights were knobby and muscular and clearly didn’t belong to any teenage girls.

I couldn’t help it. I looked up.

“But thou art not quickly moved to strike,” said the guy in blue tights.

Beside him, the guy in green tights and tunic tossed his head. “A dog of the house of Montague moves me!”

They strutted past. In a blink, the crowd of moving bodies had swallowed them. My head throbbed.

Empty stage. Empty stage.

“Come on, Jaye.” Sadie spun me back around. “God, you’re going to make us both tardy.”

Because Sadie was leading the way, and because it was the shortest route between the main doors and my locker, we veered into the hallway behind the old gym.

I usually avoided this route. And I usually avoided it because it meant passing the track and field office.

They’d left Dad’s name plate on the door, right above
the name of his replacement. Somebody had gotten a sign engraved with one of Dad’s inspirational quotes:
“Just do your best, and your best will keep getting better.”—Coach Doug Stuart,
and hammered it up at the top. Then runners had started signing the door, leaving Sharpie signatures and messages and sketches, like it was one big yearbook page. Next to the door was a trophy case crammed with more Dad memorabilia. His face grinning out at us from a memorial plaque. Framed photos of him with his teams positioned between the sparkling trophies. Pierce was in several of the photos. Sadie was in some of them. There was no sign of me anywhere.

Sadie dragged me down the hall, both of us staring straight ahead.

When we finally reached my locker, she waited behind me, jiggling impatiently. I put my fingers on the combination lock. My mind was a cloudy blank. 20. 24? 25? I’d opened this lock eight thousand times. Why couldn’t I remember? I let my hand move without thinking. 20 . . . 25 . . . It still took me three tries to get the combination right. The ache in my head plunged forward as I bent down to grab my textbooks.

“Jaye!”

A small, blue-haired fairy was barreling toward me.

I shot upright. My mouth went dry.

Of course Puck would have followed me here too.

I took a step back, straight into the locker doors.

Puck sprang past my sister and threw both skinny arms around me. The fairy’s hair smelled familiar—like styling foam and cheap incense. She leaned back, beaming up at me, and I realized that she was wearing a very un-fairylike Bauhaus T-shirt.

“Oh my god. Nikki. I’m—” I managed to gasp before a pair of stripy arms shot around me and Tom was bouncing me up and down.

“Whoa. Take it easy, you two.” Sadie’s voice reached me through the barricade of Tom’s shoulder. “Try not to knock the injured girl over if you can help it.”

Tom released me. “Sorry! Sorrysorrysorry.”

“Yeah, sorry!” Nikki grabbed both my hands and swung them back and forth, beaming manically. “It’s just so good to finally
see
you!”

“You look amazing,” added Tom.

“I look like something a serial killer stitched together.”

Tom shook his head. “Amazing. Amazingly alive.”

“Hey, party people,” Sadie broke in. “I have to get up to the third floor. Can you two make sure she gets to anatomy?”

“Of course we can.” Tom tucked me under one arm. “We’ll be her bodyguards.”

Sadie snorted. “That teddy bear who sells fabric softener would make a better bodyguard than you.” She turned to me. “Jaye. Remember. Take it
easy.
”

“Yes, Sadie.
I remember.
”

My sister gave me one more pointed look before rushing toward the nearest staircase.

“Can one of you walk in front of me so I can hide?” I pleaded as Tom steered me into the stream of students.

“Come on, Jaye Bird.” Nikki threaded her arm through mine. “You might as well get used to the inconveniences of fame
.
”

“Here’s the red carpet.” Tom swept one arm across the crowded hall. “You’ve just climbed out of your limousine, being careful not to flash the photographers . . .”

We worked our way through the junior hall, past the vending machines, toward the gym corridor. Two guys in lettermen jackets did an actual double take as we shuffled by. A clump of dance team girls looked up from their pastel vitamin water, their eyes hooking on me. One girl’s pink-glossed lip twisted in disgust.

“Everyone tries to catch a glimpse of the star’s daring new facial piercing,” said Tom loudly.

Just ahead of us, the gym doors burst open.

“Look out,” Nikki warned. “Morning practice just ended.”

I ducked against Tom’s shoulder, bracing myself for a flood of sweaty basketball players.

Instead, a troupe of actors in medieval costumes trotted through the double doors. Hamlet strode in the center of the group. Against their patchwork brightness, his black clothes stood out like an ink stain. My knees locked.

“Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue . . .” Hamlet gave me a slow, deliberate smile as they all trundled past. “But if you mouth it, as many of our players do . . .”

“Jaye?”

I had come to a complete stop. My heart thumped against my larynx.

A few steps ahead of me, Nikki and Tom had stopped too. They watched me with worried little frowns.

“I . . .” I glanced down the hallway. Hamlet and the troupe of actors had disappeared. “I’m okay. Just . . . sometimes the headache doesn’t let me do anything else.”

“We were going too fast.” Nikki swatted Tom’s arm. “Come on. We’ll go obnoxiously slow the rest of the way. Like old people in an art museum. I promise.”

They grabbed my arms again, more gently this time.

A few seconds passed before Nikki asked, “So, are we going to dance night at Third Street this weekend?”

“Not allowed,” I said gloomily.

Tom sighed. “And I don’t have money for cover.”

“What happened to your paper route money?” Nikki asked.

“
Shh.
” Tom glanced around, making sure no one had overheard. “The paperboy thing is my dirty little secret.” He sighed again. “Jonah took it.”

Nikki’s eyebrows rose. “Your stepdad took your paper route money?”

“
Shh!
God, it sounds like a sitcom plot when you say it
that
way.”

“Why did he take it?” I asked.

Tom shrugged. “He doesn’t trust me.”

“What does he think you’re going to do?” Nikki demanded. “Buy eighteen bucks’ worth of cocaine?”

“He thinks I’m going to go out to a club and get corrupted by the druggies and the gays and the girls with blue hair.”

Nikki gave Tom an extra-sweet grin.

Nikki’s hippie-drunk turned born-again Christian mom had provided Nikki with a series of stepdads: first another drunk-hippie type, then just a drunk, and then a surly evangelist who’d gotten her mother to turn her life around and upside down. Jonah was stepdad number one for Tom, but his marriage to Tom’s mother seemed to be the only thing he’d ever stuck with.

Of the three of us, I had the most normal family. The most normal childhood. The most normal house, even with the presence of my father filling every room like some tanned, athletic ghost.

The smell of rubbing alcohol and vinegar grew stronger as we reached the anatomy labs. It was enough like the smell of the hospital that for a second I wanted to turn around and run home and bury myself in my rumpled purple blankets.

But then I remembered: Rehearsal. That’s what all of this was for.

Just seven hours to go.

In the doorway, Nikki gave me one more hug. “See you at three!”

Tom blew me a kiss. The two of them raced off around the corner.

Keeping my head down, I threaded the half-empty rows of desks and took my place at the back, letting my bag thump to the floor. I slouched in the blue plastic seat. No matter how many times I rearranged my hair to fall over the scar, it kept flopping back to its usual position. The twenty extra minutes at the bathroom mirror that morning had been a total waste. Beneath the shaved spot, the ache rolled and kicked like a creature trying to hatch.

Across the aisle, someone sat down in a desk that was usually empty.

I angled my face away.

Still, from the corner of my eye, I could see that he was tall, with long legs and heavy black boots stretching out beneath the seat ahead of him. One dark-sleeved arm rested on the desktop. I tried to stop it, but my eye followed the arm up to his face.

Angular jaw. Dark, thick eyebrows that arched high and tapered down to neat points at the ends. Pale blue eyes. Tangled black hair.

Great. Romeo had followed me to anatomy class.

As though he’d felt my stare, he turned toward me.

I jerked my eyes away. Someone had scribbled
Ellison Bites
on the surface of my desk. I studied the scroll of the last
s,
ignoring the dark shape that was leaning farther and farther into my peripheral vision.

Be normal. For god’s sake, just be normal.

“I think you dropped this.” Romeo’s voice was deep and soft. Just like I remembered.

I ignored it.

“Hey,” he said, a little more loudly. “Is this yours?” One long-fingered hand waved a pill bottle in front of my face. I watched the letters AMITRIPTYLINE—JAYE STUART flash back and forth on its label. “I think it fell out of your bag.”

“I can’t see you,” I hissed through my teeth.

Romeo lowered the pill bottle and craned closer. “What?”

“I can’t
see you.
” Two desks ahead of me, Kayla Vang turned around. I lowered my voice and tried to keep my lips from moving at all. “You’re not really
here.
”

Romeo’s eyes traced the wound on my face, following it up and over my skull. “Okay,” he said slowly. “Then I’ll just leave these pills right here, on the edge of your desk.”

The bottle landed with a soft click.

“God.” I let out an exasperated breath. “Couldn’t all of you leave me alone for just half of one day?”

“All of us?”

“You. Everybody in the hall.
All of you.
” I scraped my hair sideways again. “And since when does Romeo say ‘okay’?”

The warning bell clanged, cutting off whatever he might have said back. My head rang. The room was filling. I kept my eyes pinned to
Ellison Bites
until all the other seats had been taken, and Mr. Ellison himself was sauntering to the front of the room, positioning his
There are no stupid questions, just plenty of stupid answers
mug on the podium.

The ache was getting worse. My cheeks were hot. The scraped skin beneath my right eye stung.

The second bell sounded, slamming through my brain with the force of a shot put.

Mr. Ellison’s lips began to move, but his drone was drowned out by the pulse in my head. The pressure was building, tightening.

Then I heard my name.

“—Jaye Stuart.” Mr. Ellison nodded at me. “We’re glad to have you with us again, and that you’ve made such a quick recovery.” He paused for a second, as if he expected the sleepy classroom to break out in applause. It didn’t. “As we’ve been studying the bones of the skull, I think we’ve all taken an extra interest in your situation.”

He paused again, obviously waiting for me to speak. Heads were swiveling toward me. I could feel the stares of my classmates clustering like flies around the scar.

“Oh,” I said. “That’s . . . nice.”

“Would you be willing to tell us a bit about your experiences?” He gestured to the podium. “If you’re feeling up to it, of course.”

I clutched the edges of my desk. “Sure,” I managed. Casual. Polite. “I’m up to it.”

I forced myself to my feet. Blurry faces turned with me as I made my way up to the front of the room.
Empty stage. Empty stage.
But the stage wasn’t empty. I was standing on it. I aimed my eyes over everyone’s heads, just like I would do in the auditorium. Still, I could feel Romeo staring at me from the last row, his gaze like a cool, steady stream of air.