Get Out of My Dreams

by Fernando Trujillo Sanz

  “Is your mother all right? Please, tell us!”

  “Yes, yes . . . Luckily she just gave us a scare.”

  The twins sighed simultaneously, and I was astonished at how quickly their faces relaxed. They must really have been relieved to hear that my mother was all right . . . which once again had me wondering how these twins were connected with the twins my mother was carrying. Whatever it was, it was definitely the reason for the anxious looks on the girls’ faces when they found out something had happened to my mother.

  Just then, one of the angels fell to the ground and landed on his back near my right leg. His wings were spread wide. The other one, his twin, was in the midst of a fierce battle with the demon just a short distance away. The various dark stains on their clothing were a telltale sign they were both bleeding from numerous wounds.

  The dark-haired girl grabbed the stick.

  “Come on, let’s get out of here. This isn’t going to end well.”

  “No! First you have to explain some things to me.”

  “Don’t be stupid. Let’s go. We still have to give you a gift.”

  “I don’t want it.”

  “You don’t even know what it is.” The girl’s cheeks reddened slightly. “You’re going to take the gift because you need it,” she said threateningly.

  The blond girl approached us, a black parrot perched on her shoulder. I didn’t know anything about birds; I’d never even paid any attention to the ones my mom had. But somehow I knew this was a parrot—the same bird as the one I’d followed into the city.

  “Thanks anyhow, you little brat. I’ll pass on your gifts. I know you’re up to something.”

  The dark-haired girl huffed, pressed her lips together tightly, and stomped the ground. “Do you really want to find out what I’m capable of? Are you challenging me?”

  “Are you trying to scare me, you nasty, vile girl? Ooooh, I’m so scared. Let me remind you—I’m dreaming, so you can’t do a thing to me.”

  The blond pulled on my arm. She wanted to tell me something but she didn’t have the stick.

  “You’ll regret those words,” the brunette warned.

  “BraAAAAT,” squawked the parrot, imitating my voice.

  The bird flapped its wings, sending several black feathers flying, and then lifted off. He clumsily circled me a few times and then landed on my hand. The dense blackness of the parrot was a stark contrast to this shadowless environment. I shook my hand, trying to get the stupid bird off me. The blond girl, who’d been watching me intently, suddenly looked frightened. Her eyes had grown wide.

  I noticed too late that the brunette had slipped behind me. She drew the stick back and smacked me on the back of my leg. It didn’t hurt that bad, but it made me lose my balance and I fell to the ground—with the parrot still latched onto my hand. I heard a loud thud to my right and turned my head to see the demon with the black wings blast through the wall of a building. The wall—which was immense—came crashing down on top of me. I passed out just as the mountain of rubble was about to completely bury me . . . and not even that cast a single shadow.

  I woke up on the floor of my room, aching, still acutely aware of the sensation that the crumbing wall was about to flatten me into a heap of pulverized flesh and bones. I felt something pressing on my hand and then felt something move.

  “BraAAAAAT . . . Uaaaaac . . .”

  The parrot was there with me, clinging to my hand, batting its wings and shedding feathers all over the place. Apparently I had brought the stupid beast out of my dream just as I had brought out the glasses and the seed. It must have been the gift the twins had said they wanted to give me, but I still had no interest in accepting this one. The brunette had attacked me, which was why I had woken up on the floor. She’d hit me with the stick and as I fell in the city with no shadows, I’d also fallen in the real world. I had no idea what I was supposed to do with this parrot and I wasn’t about to find out.

  Killing it wasn’t an option. I had never hurt an animal and I wouldn’t do so now. But I couldn’t keep it in my room, either. If my mother found it, she’d adopt it without thinking twice; she’d put it in one of her cages or would buy it a new one if she had to. She’d make it part of her personal collection and it would end up staying with us forever. Since I didn’t want anything that came from the girls to come into any kind of contact with my mother until I could figure out what they were really up to, I only had one option.

  “Good luck, bird,” I said as I opened the window in my room. “Sorry, but I can’t take care of you. And anyways, you’re nothing more than a fragment of a dream.”

  I’d said that mostly for myself, to convince myself that I wasn’t abandoning some poor parrot and leaving it to fend for itself. The parrot looked at me, shook its head and pecked my hand.

  “Uaaac . . . Jerk.”

  There was no doubt the beast belonged to the brown-haired girl. He had her same charm.

  I threw the parrot outside and closed the window. Now I had to find something to keep me occupied before heading to school. I didn’t want to fall back to sleep and meet up with the twins again. At this hour of the morning nothing interesting was on TV so I starting leafing through some of my comics, but I couldn’t see clearly. I needed my glasses.

  I looked for them in the mess that had taken over my room—the very messiness that was a source of irritation for my parents and the catalyst for plenty of arguments that, unfortunately, generally ended in some form of punishment for me. I couldn’t find them. The glasses I’d brought out of the dream had vanished; the twins had already confirmed that. But where were mine—the normal ones? Not in my room, for sure. Now I just had to figure out where I’d lost them.

  I ended up reading without the glasses—didn’t have much choice since they were nowhere to be found—and I kept on reading until sunrise. I almost fell asleep a couple of times, but since I was sitting up I caught myself just in the nick of time when I felt my head drop as I nodded off.

  I took a cold shower to see if I could clear my head a little. I’d only slept about three hours, and I knew I’d be dragging all day from the lack of sleep.

  My mother wasn’t in the kitchen when I went down to have breakfast.

  “What’s up with Mom?”

  “She’s fine. She’s just tired. Her burns are bothering her, so I gave her some of her cream to put on.”

  I nodded and poured myself a glass of orange juice.

  “Aren’t you eating anything?” asked my father. “I can make you some toast if you want.”

  I shook my head. I wasn’t hungry.

  “Dad, can sleepwalkers be cured?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “It’s Ivan. Yesterday he fell out of bed. He thinks he’s been sleepwalking.”

  “Tell him not to worry about it. Falling out of bed doesn’t necessarily mean he’s a sleepwalker. We all move while we sleep. He might have had a nightmare.”

  I took a huge gulp of juice.

  “But he thinks he’s doing stuff while he’s sleeping, and that kind of scares him. You know he’s a big baby. Can sleepwalking be dangerous?”

  “Sleepwalkers can do some strange things while they’re asleep. I think I read one case about a person who drove a car. But that’s really unusual.”

  “So can it be cured?”

  My father rubbed his chin as he considered my question.

  “I’m not sure it’s really considered an illness. If Ivan is worried about it, then he should go to a doctor and tell him his symptoms. But the causes of sleepwalking aren’t always clear from what I understand. It can be due to stress, for example, or drugs or alcohol.”

  “Ivan doesn’t drink or do drugs.”

  “That’s not what I meant to imply. But that’s surely something a doctor would look into to find the cause of the sleepwalking.”

  I immediately ruled out going to a doctor. My problem had nothing to do with drinking or drugs. And as for stress, well, that was something I heard adu
lts talking about but I didn’t understand it at all. Sure, lately I’d been going through some tense situations, but I didn’t know if that was “stress” or not. I’d never heard anyone my age say they were stressed. The only people I ever heard talk about being stressed were all over thirty, and it usually had something to do with their job or a divorce or something—like when Ivan’s mom left his dad.

  What I did get out of the conversation with my dad was that I wasn’t a sleepwalker, at least not until a few days ago, or my parents would have realized it. It was highly unlikely that I’d been sleepwalking for years and neither of my parents had ever mentioned anything to me about it. So it had something to do with the twins, as always.

  I would have liked to find some way to broach the subject of them with my dad, especially about the phrase that both he and the brunette had said in exactly the same tone of voice. But I couldn’t think of any way to bring it up without making him think I was losing my mind. Besides, I just didn’t have the energy since I’d gotten no sleep.

  “Thanks, Dad. I’ll tell Ivan not to worry. By the way, I lost my glasses.”

  “Again? Look in your room; they’ve got to be in there somewhere. You’re just not seeing them.”

  “I looked all over and they’re not there.”

  “Then I guess we’ll have to buy another pair,” he said, annoyed. “But right now you’re going to go to your room and straighten it up. I want it spotless.”

  “C’mon, Dad, I didn’t lose them on purpose.”

  “Well, your room still looks like a garbage dump.”

  Obviously, but just the same I didn’t like being scolded like a ten-year-old.

  “A stupid pair of glasses is no big deal with all the money you make.”

  “Having money doesn’t mean you should squander it. You have to learn to be responsible. No new glasses until you get that room cleaned up. That way we’ll be sure they’re not in there somewhere.”

  “Great. Next time I’ll tell Mom—she would’ve taken me to get new ones. But then, you never take me anywhere.”

  I hurried back to my bedroom, knowing I had to make it look like I was obeying my father’s orders. I stuffed all my clothes in the closet—without folding or hanging anything—and closed the door. Books and everything else were booted under the bed. The only thing I put away carefully was my comic books—my most prized possession. When I finished, I smiled in satisfaction. I seriously doubted my father would inspect my room to make sure I’d done what he’d asked.

  I grabbed my backpack and went to school.

  “Test next week,” the math teacher announced.

  My classmates responded with a collective grumble. Some swore under their breath—Ivan included. Since I was good at math, the news didn’t bother me at all. That is, until the teacher reminded me as I was leaving after class that if I didn’t turn in the paper, I couldn’t even take the test.

  “What paper?” I said, making a surprised face. “No—I’m joking. I’m really enjoying writing this paper. You’ll see, it’ll be so good you’ll give me an A+. I’m almost finished with it already.”

  The witch didn’t even bother to ask me how I was doing after taking a soccer ball to the head the day before. She’d been a complete pain about me going to the school nurse to get checked out; now . . . nothing. But God forbid she should forget about that stupid math paper.

  “You’d better hope that’s the truth,” she warned. I was about to say something else, but one of the janitors came in. She frowned at him and barked, “I need you to fix the window in my office.”

  “What’s the trouble with it?” the man asked.

  “It’s not closing right. There must be something wrong with it.”

  Seeing the interruption as my chance to escape, I used the excuse of having to go to the bathroom to spare myself the rest of the riveting discussion between the witch and the janitor. Luckily, she was so preoccupied with the window she didn’t seem to notice.

  I found Ivan in one of the hallways where we usually met up between classes. [left off here]

  “What’s up with your face? You look even uglier than usual,” I quipped. “Are you obsessing about the math test?”

  “Well, I wasn’t thrilled about that, but that’s not what’s wrong. I had a horrible night, dude; I didn’t sleep at all.”

  He looked exhausted and had dark circles under his eyes.

  “Don’t even tell me about your bad dreams,” I said. “If I told you—”

  “Right now I’d rather have nightmares just so I could sleep a while. I didn’t sleep a wink.”

  “Bummer, dude. No idea what you can do about that. Come on—let’s skip class and go play some pool. My treat. We gotta do something about that foul-looking face of yours.”

  “I can’t.”

  He was serious. Too serious. I looked at Ivan with a mixture of surprise and worry.

  “What’s up with you?”

  “Nothing. But I can’t keeping skipping classes. There’s not much time left before exams and I’m going to flunk them all . . . starting with math. I’m clueless in that class.”

  “Oh, is that all it is?” I felt relieved. For a moment I’d been afraid there was really a problem. “There’s time to study. Come on, let’s go shoot some pool to take your mind off things. It’ll do you good. Trust me.”

  “No way. I’m gonna flunk.”

  “What about me? If I get caught my dad will make me change schools again. But I’m not gonna let that get to me.”

  “You can afford that luxury. I can’t.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “About grades. I have to get good grades or I can’t go to college.”

  Ivan was really acting weird.

  “Well, you’ve certainly become Mr. Responsibility.”

  “Because I don’t have a choice. I’m not rich like you. I have to worry about my future.”

  That comment seemed out of character. Ivan had never allowed the subject of money to get between us and it bothered me that he was resentful of my family’s money. It would have made me really angry if I hadn’t been so surprised.

  “You think I’m aspiring to follow in my father’s footsteps? Rotting away in some office counting money? I can’t believe you think that of me after all this time.”

  “I know all about your contempt for money. You never pass up an opportunity to mention it—but that’s because you have it. That’s why you’re so rebellious. You can do all the stupid shit you want because you have your future all sewn up. You’ll never want for anything; your father will take care of everything. And even though you may not like it, it’s the only life you know; it’s a part of you. But me? I can’t keep skipping classes.”

  We both stood there, completely silent for a few seconds. Then Ivan looked at me with one of the most serious expressions I’d ever seen on his face and added, “Actions have consequences. Don’t ever forget it.”

  That declaration left me completely paralyzed. I felt like I’d had the wind knocked out of me. It was the same thing the dark-haired twin had said and, later, my father. Now it had come out of the mouth of my best friend.

  In a flash, the topic of our studies and futures was wiped from my mind.

  “Wait a minute.” I grabbed Ivan’s arm before he could go back to class. “Why did you say that?”

  “Because it’s the truth.”

  “Yes, I know. But why did you use those words exactly—the ones about consequences—and not something else?”

  “How should I know?” He shook my hand off his arm. “What does it matter what words I used?”

  It mattered. A lot. This couldn’t be another coincidence. I stood there with my mouth hanging open as Ivan went into class. Then I went in, too, having given up on the idea of going by myself to play pool. I sat down next to Ivan but we didn’t speak. He was in a really strange mood and the reason had to have something to do with the twins or he wouldn’t have used those words—the same words as my fathe
r.

  I was incapable of concentrating during my classes the rest of the morning. Ivan was acting distant and seemed hellbent on paying attention in spite of the fact that he looked like he was about to collapse on the spot. No matter how much I turned it over in my head I couldn’t figure out what was happening, or what it all had to do with my dreams and my family, but it didn’t seem prudent to press the issue with him to try to find out. So I went off by myself at lunchtime without waiting for him to join me like I usually did.

  Lost in thought, I wandered aimlessly through the school grounds until a sound caught my attention. When I looked up I could hardly believe my eyes. The black parrot, the one I’d brought out of my dream, was right there, flapping around several feet above my head. It was flying in circles just as it had in my dream when I was standing in front of the silvery wall of the city with the floating buildings. I felt more anger than surprise, knowing that I’d be following that stupid black bird like some puppet on a string again, with no idea why. It was frustrating to feel—no, to know—that someone was playing me. But I couldn’t kid myself. I wanted to know the truth and I wasn’t ever going to discover it just by racking my own brain.

  The parrot led me to a remote area of the grounds, behind the main building of the school where there were almost no students. It flew along gracefully now, staying just ahead of me, then it turned a corner of the building and disappeared. When I came around the corner, I couldn’t see it anywhere. But it didn’t take me long to understand what it had wanted to show me.

  I was standing between the building that housed the infirmary and the main building; the same place where I’d been the day before when I’d gone in to be checked over after the incident between the soccer ball and my head. The clay pot where I’d planted the seed was still there, naturally. What wasn’t so natural was that a vine had sprouted—during the night, I supposed—and had crept up the side of the building, snaking its way along the bricks, all the way up to the roof. My jaw dropped in amazement as I walked up to it. It was identical to the one that had covered Big Ben, albeit a bit shorter, but other than that there was no difference. I touched it to verify it was real. It was. And it seemed strong enough to hold my weight. The branches covered the wall but went around the spaces where the windows were. It was as if the glass repelled it. There was one exception to this, however. On the third floor, one small branch had crept into a corner of a window. It was hard for me to make it out since I wasn’t wearing my glasses, but I was pretty sure that was the window to the math teacher’s office. So, maybe that was why she’d complained that her window wasn’t closing right. The witch would no doubt waste no time fixing the problem by cutting the branch. In fact, she would probably end up telling the groundskeeper to hack out the whole plant. Someone would surely have noticed it being that it had sprouted up overnight, not to mention that it was the only plant of its kind in the whole schoolyard.