Dreamers Often Lie

by Jacqueline West

  He’d whipped toward me, one hand grabbing my headrest. “Just what do you think you’re doing?” His voice was a barely smothered yell. “Late for class eleven times this semester? Participation grades slipping in every subject? And now, in-school suspension for skipping class?”

  I’d stared at the hole in the knee of my purple jeans.

  Dad’s jaw rippled under his skin. This always made me shiver. “How do you think this makes me look? When it’s my job to motivate students? To make them into winners? And here’s my own daughter throwing every opportunity away, moping around, turning herself into a loser like she’s doing it on purpose?” The veins in his forehead had risen. I could practically hear them pulsing. “So, would you just explain to me, please, what the hell you think you’re doing?”

  “I told your sister I’d drive you straight home.” Pierce’s voice seemed to be coming from behind a black velvet curtain. “But I figure I’m not breaking my word if we just sit here for a minute. I mean, it’s not like I’m driving you anywhere other than home.”

  “Oh,” I managed. “Yeah.”

  “The drive isn’t long enough to really talk. You know?” Pierce angled toward me. He didn’t have to unbuckle his seat belt, because he hadn’t buckled it in the first place.

  “Oh,” I said again. The black curtain was disintegrating, taking the residue of my father’s voice with it.

  Pierce cleared his throat. “I have to tell you: When I said I was doing the play because of you . . . it’s not just because you made it look like a good time.”

  I scrambled for an answer. “Really?” Good one.

  “With what happened . . . you know . . . to your dad . . .”

  My spine went rigid. No. No. No.

  “I knew you probably hated me,” Pierce went on. “I knew you maybe even blamed me. At least a little.”

  Why? I wanted to say. Because your dad’s still alive and mine’s not? Because my dad spent his last minutes with you instead of with us? But I just swallowed one more time and said, “You weren’t driving.”

  “But I was there.” Pierce stared through the windshield. I scraped my gaze along his profile like I was honing it. Perfect nose. Strong chin. Dimples that were visible even when he wasn’t smiling. The ache pounded harder. “What happened—” Pierce went on “—you know—losing him . . .”

  I gritted my teeth. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.

  “It was the worst thing that had ever happened to me. And then, as the months went by, it was like . . . I started to realize I’d lost you, too. I mean, I understood it—why you wouldn’t want to see me or talk to me anymore. But for me, really, that turned out to be even worse.”

  The thing in my chest thrashed. I wasn’t the one who pulled away, I wanted to scream.

  Suddenly Pierce turned to face me straight on. “I’ve missed you, Stuart,” he said softly.

  I slid my papery tongue over my lips. “I missed you too.”

  He grabbed my hand. His skin was warm and dry in spite of the cold. I found myself cataloging all the ways it was different from the hand that had held mine in the red-lit stairwell. This hand felt smoother. Warmer. Golden.

  “When I heard what had happened to you—that you’d been in an accident, and you were in the hospital, and it was serious—that’s when I told myself that I wasn’t going to waste any more time.” Pierce gave me a little smile. “I know it sounds crazy, but it’s like the universe was telling me, ‘Hey! Here’s this thing you lost once, and now you almost lost it again for good, so you’d better wake up and see how much you care about it. Maybe try to get it back, if you still can.’”

  The words falling out of Pierce’s lips couldn’t quite make their way into my brain. I almost said, That’s nice, because he had stopped talking, and I couldn’t figure out what else to say. I just held perfectly still as he wrapped my hand in both of his.

  He ran his thumbs over my knuckles. “Maybe that was the point of all of this. Like, these things had to happen to push us apart and bring us back together. And now it means more. Because we both know what we’ve missed.”

  He looked so earnest—so almost-joyful—saying this. Like he’d just won some fantastic prize and was waiting for me to congratulate him.

  “So,” he went on, giving me the half smile that made one of his dimples flicker, “what do you think?”

  “What do I think?”

  “I mean, I know we can’t go anywhere right now, but how about when you’re better?”

  “When I’m better . . . What?”

  “Do you want to hang out? Go to a movie, or out for dinner, or something?”

  “Oh,” I said, for the eight hundredth time that day. “Sure.”

  Pierce was still smiling, but now his eyebrows pulled together. “‘Sure,’” he repeated, in my dreamy tone.

  “Yes,” I said, more loudly. “Sure.”

  Pierce gave me one more bemused look. Then he turned back toward the windshield, clicked the turn signal, and edged back out into traffic.

  The moment we bumped into my driveway, I threw open the passenger door. The car hadn’t even stopped moving. If I could get away from Pierce fast enough, I might be able to make it indoors without falling apart. I lunged out of the BMW, dragging my bag clumsily after me, and bolted toward the front door.

  “Thanks for the ride,” I called over my shoulder.

  “Good night, Stuart.” Pierce grinned at me through his open window. “See you tomorrow.” Keeping his eyes on me, he backed down the driveway and peeled away into the thickening dark.

  I paused on the porch for a minute, taking a few cold, deep breaths. Once my heart rate felt halfway back to normal, I reached out and opened the door.

  Sadie was curled up in the living room armchair. She looked up from her computer as I crashed into the room.

  A coy smile spread across her face. “Have a nice ride home?”

  I plunked down on the couch. It gave a saggy squeak. “No.”

  “No? What happened?”

  “I acted like an idiot.” I tipped sideways until my face was buried in a heap of pillows. “I sounded like someone who’s just pretending they can speak English. Huh? Oh. Yes. Sure.”

  The cushions bounced as Sadie sat down beside me. “What were you two talking about that overwhelmed your powers of speech?”

  “Pierce . . .” I turned my face sideways on the slippery pillow. “. . . I think he just asked me out. Sort of.”

  “Sort of?”

  “He said, ‘Do you want to hang out or go to a movie or something?’”

  “You lucky brat!” Sadie shrieked, bouncing onto her knees. “Do you know how many senior girls are going to want to skin you and wear your face?”

  “Well, they’ll have a handy place to start peeling.” I rubbed my forehead. “I don’t really know if he meant it as a date thing, or as a just friends thing, or as an I pity you, you grotesque weirdo thing, or—” I sat up, dropping my voice to a whisper. “Oh god. Mom isn’t here, is she? Is she overhearing this?”

  “I made her go to yoga class. She was getting that long-haul-trucker glaze.” Sadie leaned closer, sweeping the hair back from my face with her cool, apple-scented fingers. “You know, you aren’t acting like a girl who’s just been asked out by the most gorgeous senior in our entire school.”

  My throat tightened. I could feel my face crumpling. For years, I’d tried to learn to cry like Katharine Hepburn: big, barely restrained tears shimmering like diamonds on my lower eyelids, mouth tilting down in a vulnerable but elegant line. I’d practiced in the mirror until I could make my eyes well up and give my mouth that little downward curl—and still, when it came to actual crying, I knew I looked less like Hepburn and more like a wet paper bag.

  “Sadie,” I sobbed. “Today was awful. I made an ass of myself over and over. In front of Mr. Hall, in front of th
is new kid. In front of everyone at rehearsal. Ever since I got home, I’ve been waiting to feel like me again. I keep telling myself it has to get better. The next day, or the next hour, or the next few minutes have to get better. But it doesn’t.”

  “What are you talking about?” Sadie frowned. “What happened that was so bad?”

  “You can’t tell Mom this, okay?” I wiped my cuff across my cheek. “Ever since the hospital, I’ve been having these dreams. Sometimes it’s like I’m stuck inside them, and they’re so real that I don’t even try to wake up, and sometimes I know I’m already awake, but pieces of the dreams—people from the dreams—are still there.” I snuffled into the pillow. “I know they aren’t really there. But I can’t make them go away. And they’re going to ruin everything.”

  Sadie’s hand rested on my shoulder. “Blue Jaye, lots of people see and hear things after a head injury. Medications can make you hallucinate too. That, on top of a concussion . . . It would be weird if you weren’t a little messed up.”

  I wound an unraveling thread from my cuff around my fingertip. “Maybe.”

  There was a beat.

  “So . . . who did you see?” Sadie’s voice was very soft. “Did you see Dad?”

  I froze. I could feel the locked door between us inching open, icy air from the other side blowing in.

  I shook my head, looking down.

  Sadie’s voice turned crisp again. “Well, if this is a symptom of the injury or a side effect of the drugs, either way, it has to get better with time. Right?” She gave my shoulder a brisk pat, and I knew the door was safely shut. “I mean, you just got out of the hospital a few days ago. You probably still have Jell-O in your veins.”

  I pulled the unraveling thread tighter. “Probably.”

  “Did you tell the doctors or nurses about this stuff?”

  “No. At least, I don’t think so.”

  “Jaye! You should have told them.”

  “But I needed to get back to normal. I had to get back to the play, and school, and I couldn’t keep watching Mom walk into that hospital room trying to look like she wasn’t going to fall apart if somebody breathed on her too hard . . .”

  Sadie wrapped her arm around me. For a minute, I sagged against her shoulder, snuffling, while she patted my messy hair.

  “Don’t tell Mom,” I said at last, into her collar.

  Sadie sighed. “I won’t. But you have to tell her if it gets worse.”

  “I will.”

  “You swear?”

  “I swear, damn it.”

  This was an old Dad joke. It was as close to opening the door as we could comfortably get.

  Sadie and I smiled at each other for a second. Then she reached for her computer, and I got up and climbed the stairs to my room.

  I sank down on the bed and checked my phone.

  So glad UR back! Hannah had texted at 2:06 p.m.

  Pierce Caplan? said one from Tom. Yr full of surprises.

  The first text from Nikki read: Call me.

  The second one, sent five minutes later, read: CALL ME NOW.

  Nikki picked up her phone on the first ring. “Are you alone?”

  “Yes. I’m alone.”

  “Pierce isn’t there?”

  “No. That’s what alone means. He dropped me off twenty minutes ago.”

  I heard Nikki let out a breath. “What was that? Him insisting on driving you home?”

  “I don’t know. I think he was trying to be nice.”

  “Nice? Pierce Caplan?”

  I got up and shuffled across the room toward one of my collages. A photo of Tom and Nikki and me in our costumes from Snow White was hanging askew. All three of us were dwarves. I pushed it back into place. “I know he’s not, like, a friend or anything, but we used to be close. Best-friend close.”

  “You know what he and Josh Hedlund and Bryson Rayder and those guys did to Anders, don’t you? Leaving the specimens from dissection in his locker? Sending him those creepy messages?”

  I closed my bedroom door and leaned back against it. “I don’t think Pierce was part of that.”

  “Well, Josh definitely was. He got suspended for it. And he’s, like, Pierce’s right-hand man.”

  “Are you saying Pierce commanded him to do it or something?”

  “No, I’m just saying that Pierce’s current ‘best friend’ is someone like that.”

  The ache twisted behind my forehead, making one eyelid twitch. “You don’t know him like I do. Or did, anyway.”

  “I guess not. Because he doesn’t talk to people like me.”

  “I wish you’d give him the benefit of the doubt. I think he’s trying to change, trying to do new things. Like the play. To be a little more open-minded and friendly to everybody. I think the stuff with—you know—everything that happened . . . I think it really screwed him up.”

  Nikki was quiet for a beat. “That’s generous of you,” she said. There was another exhaled breath. In the background, I heard a blast of her mother’s Christian folk music, followed by the loud slam of a door. Nikki was shutting herself in her own bedroom. The music got quieter. “I can try. It’s just . . . I’ve seen what he’s like when he loses his temper.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Didn’t I tell you about this? I suppose not. It’s not like seeing Pierce Caplan throw a fit had any bearing on our lives last year.”

  “Nikki, what?”

  “Okay. Last spring, after some track meet or something, where I guess the team had come in fourth and he was totally furious with everyone, he had this meltdown in the parking lot. I was at school late, doing layout for the magazine, and I came out into the lot and saw him smashing his car with a trophy.”

  I ran my hand across my pulsing forehead. “The BMW?”

  “It was scary. He just kept hitting it over and over. He smashed the rear window. He smashed the lights. He just kept hitting it and hitting it until the trophy was in pieces, and then he got in and drove away, with me and a couple of his track friends staring after him.”

  “You’re sure it was Pierce?”

  Nikki gave a little snort. “It was him. Plus, I heard from Josh that he’d already punched a couple of the guys on the team who he thought were slacking off or something. But none of them reported him, so the school never did anything.”

  “I never heard that.”

  “Well, I did.”

  Silence lengthened between us. There was no point in arguing with Nikki. I hadn’t been there; I hadn’t seen whatever she’d seen. But she didn’t know all the things I’d seen, either. All the good things. Even if they’d happened a long time ago.

  “My . . . um . . . my family really loved him.” I forced the words out. “They thought he was just the greatest guy.”

  I heard Nikki let out another long breath. “Sorry, Jaye. I’ll try to be nicer. Like I said.”

  “Thank you. And you know you’re my very favorite person, right? Way above Pierce Caplan?”

  She laughed. “Good night, fairy queen. ‘May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.’”

  “That’s the wrong show.”

  “I know. You’re not the only person who can quote Hamlet. See you tomorrow.”

  After she hung up, I stood in the darkness for a while, keeping still, letting the ache rumble inside my head until it had worn every other thought away.

  CHAPTER 11

  The bile-sweet smell of cider vinegar saturated the anatomy room. The class had clustered in the lab, where Mr. Ellison shuffled between the high black tables, arranging a set of dissection pans. I huddled in a corner, staring down at the cuffs of some torn black jeans that I couldn’t remember putting on. I couldn’t remember brushing my hair or my teeth that morning, either. I couldn’t remember smearing deodorant under my arms, or packing my book bag, or ho
w I’d gotten to school. I rubbed one eyelid, and my finger came back blackened. At least I’d remembered eyeliner.

  The second bell rang, its buzz exploding through my skull. I jerked away from the wall before the sound and the smell and the headache could combine and make me throw up my breakfast all over the anatomy room floor. If I’d even eaten any.

  “Today we embark on our dissection unit,” Mr. Ellison announced. “I know you’re all raring to go. But remember, scalpels are not toys. Pins are not toys. Your frogs and their parts are not toys. This is science class, not a slasher film.”

  While Mr. Ellison droned on, I glanced around the room. The new kid wasn’t there. I checked each table again, just to be sure. No tall, blue-eyed guys with black hair.

  Something inside me sagged.

  Was I actually disappointed?

  Why was I looking for him in the first place? We’d shared a few M&M’S, he’d touched my hand, and my brain had started spinning a web that connected him to some dreams and a sad old play. If any of that had actually happened.

  My stomach tightened. It couldn’t all have been a hallucination. Other people had talked to him. Looked at him. Mr. Ellison had called on him.

  But in the backstage stairwell, it was only me.

  “If anyone needs to step out of the lab for a moment, they may,” Mr. Ellison was saying. “But I’ve been teaching this unit for twenty-one years, and I haven’t had a student faint over a frog yet. Fetal pigs, on the other hand . . .” This was supposed to be a joke, but no one smiled, Mr. Ellison included. “All right,” he finished. “Go to your stations.”

  Head down, I edged toward my spot at table twelve.

  My partner, Emma Kraus, snapped on a pair of latex gloves. I caught myself starting to imitate her shoulders-back, chest-out posture, then went back to my usual slouch.

  In front of us, our frog lay on its back in the tarry pan, its little froggy arms and humanoid legs splayed out. Its belly looked like a cold fried egg.

  “I’ve never seen a frog this size in the wild,” said Emma.

  “Me neither.” I looked at its long, pale toes. “They’re probably only found on the frog farms that raise them to ship them off to high school anatomy classes.”