Reverie

by Ryan La Sala

  “What happens if I don’t want to?”

  Poesy eyed him with unrestrained pity. “Saving the world isn’t usually a matter of want, Mr. Montgomery. How cowardly you must be to balance the destruction of reality upon the scales of your own heart. And how selfish.”

  Kane sniffed. The words stung. They stung because they were true; deep beneath the swells of his fear he knew better. He nodded.

  Poesy swallowed the last drops of tea, then unfastened a charm from her bracelet and tossed it to Kane.

  “In my travels I have accumulated many artifacts that not only bend reality but break it in useful ways. The journal is one. This is another. Use it only in emergencies.”

  The charm was a tube of black metal, heavier than Kane expected and ice cold. An old-fashioned whistle. Something told Kane the sound it made would be unlike anything he’d ever heard.

  “Ms. Daisy and I must be going.” Poesy stood and drew her robe around herself. Kane stood unsteadily.

  “And, Mr. Montgomery, if I were you I might keep our meeting a secret. There are others like me—others who hunt for the sacred looms. You cannot be too distrusting in matters like this, I find, because you never know what form darkness will take. A silver-eyed siren or a golden-haired prince, perhaps? Or even a dim-witted ogress? But do not fret. You are not alone. You never were.”

  A chime swelled around Kane, rolling out through the empty space, and Poesy was gone. So was Ms. Daisy, the tea, and the furniture. Then the chandelier flickered away, and Kane was again abandoned to the watery dimness of the library, a small black whistle in his palm and a chorus of unanswered questions chirping in his head.

  • Fourteen •

  NICE AND NORMAL

  Kane called Sophia right away, but she sent him to voicemail. When he texted her a simple what’s up and she didn’t reply, he knew he was in trouble, but how much? What kind? Her silence scared him more than anything. He hoped she wasn’t past trying to reason with him. Not yet. He would need her, if what Poesy said was true.

  At East Amity High School, it was as though the reverie had never happened. Kane drifted through the sunny halls of laughing, clueless students. His eyes were glazed with the memory of a fantasy none of them knew about. He saw familiar faces from the reverie, now scrubbed of blood and grime and ash. He saw the slow pulse of red light every time he closed his eyes. As though acting as a reminder, the black whistle’s cool metal bit into his palm, assuring him it had all been real, that just because the nightmare had ended didn’t mean it had never happened.

  Kane skipped homeroom, instead wandering out to the athletic fields. The locker rooms were open for cleaning. They did not lead to a subterranean city. The football stadium itself did not have a moat of magma. Nothing nefarious skittered in the wavy heat rising from the track.

  The mystery of the loom, and the mission Poesy had charged Kane with, followed him everywhere. Was the loom a thing you summoned, or a thing you found? If it was as powerful as Poesy said, Kane was not eager to confront the person who kept it hidden, and decided all he could do was wait and see (and hopefully not die in the meantime).

  Finally Sophia texted him back: Busy. Over your shit. We’ll talk when I get home.

  And so Kane panicked quietly for the next few hours. Bio class came and went without a word passed between Adeline and Kane. In gym, he only got close enough to Elliot to verify the bruise on his cheek. Then Kane sat in the bleachers and watched Elliot act like an idiot with his friends. They never once made eye contact. There was no sign of Dean Flores whatsoever.

  Then, at lunch, Kane had just finished loading up a tray full of food when he turned to find Ursula right behind him. She looked like she was working up the nerve to say something.

  “Hi,” was all she managed. Her wide, asking eyes panned over the flannel—her flannel—which he still wore, then back up.

  He walked past her and ate lunch by himself, passing the whistle between his palms like nothing had ever happened. Like everything was nice and normal.

  Biking home after school, Kane regretted ignoring Ursula all day. He wasn’t sure why. She’d lied. She was worse than Elliot and Adeline. So why was he mad at himself for shunning her?

  In part it felt like unreleased potential. All day he had silently rehearsed what he would say to the Others, entire monologues of grief and guilt and acidic words for what they’d done, but with the exception of Ursula at lunch, they’d stayed away, depriving him of the opportunity. So all that acid had nowhere to go. It burned and boiled in Kane, joining with the thousand other things that he had never had the guts to say.

  Somewhere inside him he realized they had respected his wishes to be left alone. Like actual friends. And he couldn’t shake the earnest heartbreak in Ursula’s eyes when he’d turned his back on her. She really did care.

  Let them go, Kane told himself. Let them all go.

  The whistle sat like a rock in his pocket. Even through his jeans, the metal was cool and alive, reminding him that none of this was over. Not for him. Poesy had been right. He couldn’t outrun this, which meant he had no choice but to fight.

  Sophia was Kane’s first battle. As soon as she got home that evening she burst into the den, turned off Kane’s PlayStation, and dragged him outside before their mom could sit them down for dinner.

  “You’re so lucky,” she seethed, pacing circles around Kane in the school playground near their house. Dusk burned around them, alive with the buzz of bugs. “You’re so goddamn lucky you’ve got me as your sister.”

  “Look, I’m sorry, but I already told you I was just doing homework last night.”

  “Where?”

  Kane was ready for this. “Ursula’s house. Duh.”

  Sophia scrunched up her face. “Who?”

  Shit. Kane realized that even though Ursula was his longest friendship, Sophia had no idea who she was thanks to Adeline.

  “Someone from school. She’s my tutor. But who cares? You’ve got to stop imagining I’m running away whenever you can’t see me.” Kane hooked his hands through the monkey bars, changing the subject. “I can’t stay in that house. None of it feels familiar. My room feels like a memorial.”

  “You need to tell Mom and Dad. If your amnesia is so bad you can’t even remember who you are, maybe you should get tested for brain damage.”

  “I know who I am,” he shot back. “And I am being evaluated, remember?”

  “By that psychoanalyst? The one who’s making you keep a dream journal? That’s right. I see you writing in it.”

  “It’s not a dream journal,” Kane said, offended. “It’s just a journal. It’s what the police want. It’s what our parents want. I’m just doing what I’m told so I can stay out of jail. You know that.”

  Kane fled to the swings, and Sophia slumped after, a mirror to his own misery as he kicked off. He hoped the momentum would wrench the conversation apart, but Sophia’s voice came in bursts over the squeals from the rusted metal frame.

  “Sneaking out. Is not doing. What you’re told.”

  “Maybe not. According to you. Little Miss Anal. Retentive.”

  Sophia hoped off and faced Kane with her hands on her hips. His momentum fizzled out beneath her glare.

  “Really, Kane? Little Miss Anal?”

  “Anal-retentive. It means ‘orderly.’”

  “I know what anal-retentive means.”

  Kane smiled, trying to get her to laugh. She didn’t. In the low light, her eyes churned with helpless fury, barely holding back tears.

  “I can’t be the only one watching out for you, Kane. Scare me again, and I’ll make sure you flunk that evaluation. I’m done lying for you.”

  They didn’t talk for days after that. A cold war opened between them, fought in glances over breakfast and silently passing one another in their shared hallway. Their parents noticed but were reluctant to a
dd any more tension to their small, stifling house.

  Kane kept telling himself he didn’t care. Sophia wouldn’t sabotage him, and they both knew it. She was just making this about her, and he had bigger worries than his sister’s hurt feelings right now. Bigger worries, and far greater fears. He had to find the loom for Poesy. And he had to figure out what he’d done to Maxine Osman, for himself. His heart couldn’t take not knowing.

  His guilt turned him to the internet, where he learned everything he could about the woman. He found her address and phone number on an old committee mailing page for a banquet she’d organized. He read interviews she’d done for the paper where she talked about her love of the Cobalt Complex, which she lived near. He found a few videos, too, put together for a special about area artists on the local access channel. In them, she was a quiet speaker, but sharp and funny in a dark way. After her husband died, she’d tried any hobby that would tolerate her. Pottery, but it was too messy. Then she got into cross-country skiing, she explained, showing the camera a pair of ancient ski poles. They were pinned into the dirt of her garden as though they’d been there forever, tomato vines winding up them. “As you can see, I was very, very slow,” she said dryly. Then she showed off a collection of bejeweled eggs that lay in glass cases around her living room. “We have more than one hundred. We take them out sometimes,” she said, referring to herself and her friend, another lady who was somehow even older and even smaller, standing behind her. They laughed as they showed the camera a blue egg flecked in gold. “We talk about what would hatch from them,” her friend said. And then the interview turned to Maxine’s studio, which was the house’s second bedroom. “I do most of my work in the field, but this room has the best light in winter,” she said. “The light is important, for the colors. And of course my tan.”

  There was nothing about her being gone. To the world, she was still in her little haven, painting in her studio and surrounded by her many hobbies. Nice and normal. This broke Kane up the most. He hated himself for his role in her demise, though still he could remember none of it.

  Every night—every night—he dreamt of her, and even though he had her face memorized, in his dreams she was always burning. Never dead, but always burning.

  More than once, he found himself seated on the edge of his bed, her phone number glowing on his laptop screen. One morning after he woke up with his burns on fire and his sheets twisted around him, he actually called it.

  It wasn’t like he expected anyone to pick up, but then someone did.

  “Hello?”

  Hi would have worked, but Kane hadn’t expected anyone to answer the phone in a house he thought was empty. It wasn’t Maxine’s voice, but it was somehow familiar. Small, questioning.

  “Hello? It’s very early to be calling. Hello?”

  There was a long silence in which the static between the two phones whirred, and then the voice asked, “Maxine? Is that you?”

  Something clicked. Through his shock, Kane recognized the voice: Maxine’s friend. The one who talked about the eggs.

  The one who didn’t know Maxine was dead.

  “Please,” she said, and behind her voice rose a strange din, a whispering that swallowed her just before the line went dead. Through it, Kane could hear her pleading:

  “Please, Maxine, just come home.”

  • Fifteen •

  SUSURRATIONS

  Kane was still thinking about the call days later. The hope in that voice was unforgettable, but so was the sorrow. And he had no idea what to make of that strange whispering.

  The woman’s name was Helena Quigley. She used to run a small shop downtown, and before that she was a biology teacher at the high school. Aside from appearing to be close friends, Kane had no idea why she had answered Maxine’s phone so early in the morning, and he couldn’t bring himself to call back.

  But he was curious, and Kane usually lost all battles with his curiosity.

  He kept himself busy in Roost, the bookstore downtown that had become his haven from school and his house. He’d been hiding there for the past week, burning through the mountains of homework he needed to make up. Hiding wasn’t the right word, though. Sophia and his parents knew exactly where he was when he wasn’t at the house or his support group. They dropped him off at Roost after school and picked him up at closing, like a day care.

  Kane even went there on Saturdays, like today. Anything to escape the eerie music of Sophia practicing viola and his parents bickering in the backyard about where to put this new plant or that red mulch. The hypernormal soundtrack of a suburban hellscape, which made it impossible to imagine a drag queen sorceress watching over East Amity, and even harder to imagine just a garden-variety, standard-issue drag queen in East Amity to begin with. But here in Roost, among books about curses and adventures and cities that clung to the outermost rim of space, it was all a bit more real. A bit more reachable. Kane didn’t feel so lost.

  And he liked the staff. They knew all about him but never asked about any of the town-wide drama that his name represented. They saved him a seat near the outlets and brought him leftover corn muffins from the café, and they even let Kane bring in his blue Slurpees from the 7-Eleven across the street so long as he put them on a saucer, as not to mess up the wooden tables. In short, they gave him plenty of space.

  Sometimes, though, Kane wished they would ask how he was doing. Or what was going on in his head. But they didn’t, and so Kane poured his thoughts into the journal instead, until his hand was as tight and cramped as his heart.

  “So you’re a writer now?”

  Kane closed the red journal quickly, unaware anyone had even sat down next to him. When he looked up, he was staring through a sweep of dirty-blond hair, into laughing, hazel eyes.

  Elliot.

  “Wait!” He put his hands up, trying to keep Kane from running. “I just want to talk, okay?”

  Kane pushed the journal under some books. How long had Elliot been sitting there, invisible? Had he seen what Kane was writing? It was a list of places the loom might be.

  “What do you want, Elliot?”

  Elliot glanced around. “Can we maybe find somewhere else? I’ve got my car out front.”

  “No. We stay here. And don’t use your powers again. That’s not fair.”

  “All right. But you, too, okay?”

  “I don’t even know how to use my powers.”

  This was a lie. He had been practicing summoning the ethereal fire, then dousing it when the objects in his room began to float.

  “Adeline said you did well in the Cooper reverie. Like a natural.”

  “Well, don’t worry. I won’t be doing any snapping or clapping anytime soon.”

  Elliot did a good job pretending this reassured him, but overall the boy still looked a bit surprised to find them actually talking. He fidgeted until Kane repeated his question.

  “What do you want?”

  “I guess I wanted to apologize. We were always planning on bringing you back into the Others, but not like that. Nothing went according to my plan, and it’s my fault.”

  “You like plans a lot, don’t you?” Kane bit the straw of his drink. “Plans and facts.”

  “I’m that obvious?”

  “Yeah. I’ve witnessed like three conversations with you, and in every one you can’t stop correcting people. I don’t know how Adeline and Ursula deal with it. You’re extremely patronizing.”

  A blush climbed up Elliot’s neck. He looked like he was going to defend himself, but then he looked at his hands.

  “I deserve that,” he muttered.

  The old words stirred in Kane, all the acid he’d saved up for Elliot and the Others, but those emotions were flat now, like old soda. He didn’t know what to say to move the conversation past it, though. Thankfully, Elliot offered a path forward.

  “You and I were working on t
his theory together, before, you know,” he said. “About how our powers come from our pain or from parts of ourselves we hate. For instance, I really like facts and planning, but all I can do is create illusions. Lies and manipulation. And Ursula, right? She’s like, the least confrontational person I know. She hates violence, but her power gives her that brutal strength. Seems kinda strange, right?”

  “What about me? And Adeline?”

  “You can ask Adeline that. And we never figured yours out.” Elliot’s face was still red, his shoulders tense like he was waiting to be eviscerated again, but Kane wasn’t buying the hurt act.

  “It’s kind of weird that you hate manipulating people with illusions. You seem very good at it.”

  Elliot’s laugh was humorless. Resigned. “Runs in the family, I guess. My dad was a big-time liar. Super manipulative. And sometimes I don’t even think he knew he was doing it. I think that’s why my power freaks me out. Like, what if one day I don’t know, either? I never want to be as good at lying as he was.”

  “Was?”

  “Yeah. We moved away from him. My aunt lives in East Amity. That’s why we came here. It’s a lot better now, for my mom, I mean. And my sisters.”

  Elliot felt far away now, out to sea on the swells of huge and mysterious thoughts. Kane wanted to reel him back in.

  “And what about you?”

  Elliot rolled his lips together, then nodded. “It’s better for me, too.”

  This boy who had scared Kane—who still scared Kane—had shared something precious, placing it right into Kane’s poised jaws. Was this vulnerability sincere, or was it all just manipulation after all? Either way, Kane had to proceed gently.

  “I’m sorry,” Kane said finally. “I didn’t know any of that.”

  Elliot seemed to remember who he was talking to and cleared the emotion out of his throat.

  “Yeah, see? And that’s my fault, too. You’d know everything if we didn’t mess up your memories. I’m really, really sorry things happened the way they did. That’s what I wanted to say.” His mouth pulled into a tentative smile, showing his dimples. Ah. So this was the Elliot everyone apparently knew. Charming. Charismatic. Persuasive.