The pieces of wood started shaking again. Several books blasted upward and crashed into the ceiling.
“We’re out of time, Son. You have to go.”
But I didn’t want to go. There was something I had to say.
“Dad, I . . . I’m sorry I was such a jerk to you.” The memory of all my confrontations with him burned inside me. He’d spent his life trying to give me the best of everything so I could feel like a normal, everyday guy. And I had hated him for being so perfect.
“I didn’t mean to be that way—so argumentative and rebellious. I love you, Dad. I won’t be like that anymore, I swear to you . . .”
Tears were running down my cheeks.
“I know. I’ve always known.” My father saw that I was crying, but he said nothing. He was painfully aware of how little time we had left and he couldn’t waste it. “Your rebelliousness is completely natural. The important thing is that you are a good person, and you care about others.”
“Am I normal, Dad? I mean, since I’m your son . . .”
“You’re special, Son, and you’re going to do amazing things. Don’t ever forget that.”
I didn’t like those words at all; they sounded like a farewell. Another tremor shook the remains of the bookcase.
“I can’t hold them back any longer. You have to take the stick; that’s the only way we’ll be able to stop them and save your sisters and your mother.”
“Will I see you again, Dad?” My lips trembled as I asked the question.
“I’ve had more time with you than I was entitled to. I couldn’t ask for more than that. Your mother also knew this time would come, although perhaps not like this. She didn’t want you to know, or to feel different. Respect her decision, Son. And now . . . after all this . . . she’ll tell you I went on a business trip. And when she feels stronger, she’ll tell you I had an accident.”
More books shot up into the air. The wood made a crunching sound and, as it began to snap in several spots, splinters of wood started to fly.
“Get out of here! Now!”
“I won’t leave you here!”
“This is my destiny, Son. You have to wake up! Now!”
I couldn’t argue with him. The only thought going through my head was that I wasn’t going to lose my father. This could not be the last time I’d ever see him.
“I’ll take you out, too, with the stick!”
“That’s impossible, Son. It’s too much. You’ll die!”
“I’m stronger than you think.” I stood up and walked toward him. I had to support myself to keep from falling back to the floor, but I was convinced that taking things out of my dreams had nothing to do with physical strength, but rather with mental strength. The girls had more or less explained that to me when I’d asked them why the toys disappeared in my world. They’d told me this: you have to believe.
Well, I believed. I’d never been so clear about anything before.
I would carry my father out of the dream with me, even if I had to split my head open against a column to wake myself up.
“Get back! You can’t do anything to help!”
I didn’t listen to him. I continued walking toward him.
“Hold on, Dad!” I reached out my hand. I was so close . . .
The rubble that had been the bookshelf broke apart and four small hands reached out of the debris. They grabbed my father by the legs, digging their claw-like fingernails into his flesh.
He did not scream. But his gaze begged me to leave him there and go.
“It’s too late . . .”
“I can do it, Dad. Trust me!”
The twins’ nails were shredding his pants and his legs. As my father’s blood spilled out over the books, he tumbled into the debris.
He gathered enough strength to lift his head and look at me as he spoke. “Too dangerous . . . you could be trapped here instead of me. I can’t allow that . . .”
His hand disappeared into his pocket. When he brought it back out, he was clutching a pistol.
“No!” I screamed hysterically.
“Forgive me, my son . . .” He aimed the barrel at me. “I love you.”
And then he shot me.
EPILOGUE
I spent the following week tying up loose ends.
“My father is travelling to China,” I told Ivan, “to expand his company’s business there.”
It was what my mother had told me, just as my father had warned me she would. And I respected her decision to hide the terrible truth from me until she could come to terms with her loss. She explained away her sadness by attributing it to the pregnancy—”change in hormones”—so I nodded and hugged her, patting her ever-expanding belly and asking her questions about newborns. In essence, I was humoring her. But I was also throwing myself into concentrating on my future family to combat my own pain.
Ivan didn’t ask me about the dream. I think he was trying to forget about it, to chalk it up to a nightmare he’d lived through that couldn’t be explained. I was convinced that would be the conclusion he’d come to after the passing years blurred his memory of the two days he’d spent without a wink of sleep.
When I’d woken up—firmly clutching the stick—with the feeling that a bullet had opened a wide hole in my chest, Ivan was lying on top of me, trying to hold me down. I thought something had happened to him, but he was just sound asleep. So I’d tucked him in, covered him up and left.
He slept twenty-three hours straight—the same amount of time I’d spent thinking about my father and everything he’d taught me without my realizing it. The greatest lesson of all, the one I swore I’d never forget, was his love for and dedication to his family.
“So how’s your ankle?” asked Ivan.
“Getting better fast.” I had to use a crutch, but I could walk okay. The sprain hadn’t been too serious.
“Then you have no excuse for not shooting some pool with me. You owe me a game.”
My first instinct was to accept the challenge. Then I remembered why Ivan was bringing up the subject at that precise moment, right in front of the main doors of the school.
“True, I owe you a game. I’ll beat you twice, just so you can learn a little from the master, but after class, okay? Remember what you told me?”
“No,” lied Ivan without trying to cover it. “Well, actually, I forgot.”
“You gave me crap about skipping classes. You wanted to study so you don’t end up without a job some day. And you were right. Let’s go inside.”
“Dude, let’s start that rule tomorrow. What’s one more day?”
“After that, we’ll wonder what’s two more days, and on and on. And you know full well why you don’t wanna go to class today.”
It was because of the math test. Besides the fact that Ivan wasn’t any good at math, he hadn’t been able to study with all that had happened.
“Sure I know,” he groused. “I’m just not up for failing that freakin’ test.”
“If you don’t show up, they’ll give you a zero.”
“I won’t do much better than that if I do show up.”
“You never know. Besides, whatever you get, it’ll be better than a zero.”
Ivan grumbled a few choice words about numbers, equations, and any other nouns associated with mathematics but finally gave in and went to class with me.
It hadn’t been easy for me not to accept his invitation to go play pool; it had taken every ounce of willpower I had, but I’d already caused him way too much trouble in the past. I was determined to follow my father’s example and take care of my family. And I’d always thought of Ivan as a brother.
One of the hardest lessons I’d learned from my father when I couldn’t save him was that you can’t get everything you want.
The soccer match reminded me of that. I had to watch it from the bench with my crutch between my knees. The beating they gave us was painful. And it wouldn’t have turned out much differently if I had played. We ended the season without having won a sing
le game. . . . and the score on this one: 0–5. The goalie spent the whole match spewing out the ugliest insults of his entire repertoire—which was rather extensive—and even threw in a few new ones I’d never heard before. That’s why I was so surprised by his comments at the end of the match.
“Next year we’ll win! We’ll be in first! So start training now, you wimps, or you’ll hear from me!”
His morale was unbreakable. He’d do well in the future, as long as his path kept him out of professional sports.
“How’d you do it?” Ivan asked, looking at me in astonishment.
“Me?” I replied innocently. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The math teacher looked at us. Ivan waited for her to turn away from us to whisper, “It had to have been you. I got a one-hundred percent! That’s impossible since I have trouble just dividing with decimals.”
“Maybe you’re better than you think. Didn’t I promise you you’d pass?”
“What did you get?”
“An eighty.” I slid my test off to the side so he couldn’t see it.
Actually, I’d gotten a twenty. Well, not really. He’d gotten a twenty, of course, but I’d swapped our tests when I’d snuck into the Math Witch’s office. It wasn’t easy climbing up that vine with my sprain, but I’d done it.
Ivan kept dogging me about it for a few days, but I never told him the truth. In the end, he figured the teacher had made a mistake grading it and forgot about it.
“You two are still talking during class?” The teacher pointed at us. “I suppose you’re having a marvelous time back there. But you, I don’t think you have any reason to laugh it up,” she said to me. I kept the comeback that immediately formed in my head to myself. “Here’s your paper.”
She dropped it on my desk in disgust. I’d spent a ton of insufferable hours in the library writing the fifty pages she’d demanded of me. I nervously looked over the first page just to see what she’d given me.
“That grade’s not right!” I shouted.
The teacher and the rest of the class turned toward me. Ivan leaned over to see the grade.
“I’m not surprised you think that,” she replied. “Averaged with your test it’s not so good. I wouldn’t like the grade, either.”
Before she turned around I could see her lips curving upward into a triumphant smile.
“The grade is unfair!” I stood up, deliberately shoving my chair back so it would make a loud, scraping noise.
She shook her head, still smiling. “It’s fair because I gave you the grade, and I’m the teacher—the one who grades the papers. Now sit down before I throw you out of class!”
“No! I’m going to dispute this! You gave me that grade because you have it in for me!”
All eyes and ears were on me following that outburst. I heard Ivan sigh next to me. The witch’s smile vanished.
“Get out of here! You will learn how to address your teachers! After school today I will be expecting you in the office where we will resolve this issue with the dean of students.”
“Accusing a teacher of manipulating a grade on a paper is a very serious thing,” said the dean of students. “You understand that, right?”
“Perfectly,” I answered.
Seated to his left was the math teacher, looking quite serious, her hands folded on the desk. To the right was the history teacher who was on the school’s advisory council.
“And you insist that your grade is due to the fact that your math teacher has it in for you,” continued the dean of students. I nodded. “You must understand that she is a professional with many years of teaching experience. Her appraisal of the paper might not coincide with yours. That is understandable.”
“There’s no way that grade is right.”
“You have a rather checkered history here. All the teachers agree you don’t take your studies seriously. I don’t think we should waste time on—”
Tedd, who’d looked as though he’d been sleeping up to that point, cleared his throat, straightened up in his chair, and grabbed onto the desk with both hands, knocking his cane on the floor.
“In my opinion,” he said, picking up his cane, “we’ve got nothing to lose if we listen to the boy’s side of the story.”
“You yourself have complained about his attitude,” the dean of students pointed out.
“Just because he may be a bit of a slacker doesn’t mean he’s not right in this instance,” Tedd reasoned. I was surprised he was trying to help me. “I’m sure my colleague would not wish to deny a student the opportunity to defend himself.”
The math teacher nodded. The dean of students reluctantly came back around to the topic at hand but looked like he wanted to get it over with as quickly as possible because he had somewhere else to be.
“We can ask another teacher to evaluate the paper, but I’d like you to reconsider your accusation.”
“No way.”
“I don’t think another teacher’s intervention is necessary,” said the math teacher.
“I agree,” I said. “You didn’t even read it.”
The witch shook her head in disgust. “This is the first page of the paper,” she said, holding it up. “By just reading a couple of paragraphs it was clear you copied straight from the book we have here in the library. I gave you five percent for the effort it took to write fifty pages by hand. You don’t deserve a better grade.”
“I agree with that last statement.”
The dean of students looked at me in shock. “So you’re saying a five percent is the most you deserve but yet you still contend she graded you low because she has it in for you?”
“Yes. The paper deserves a zero.”
They all exchanged a look I loved.
“Do you mind explaining that to me?”
“If you open the paper to page twenty-two you’ll be able to see for yourselves.” I waited patiently while they did so. The dean began to read, and a few moments later his eyebrows went up so high I thought they were going to collide with his hairline. Then I boldly declared, “From that point forward you will note that I have copied one of the most famous adventures of Spiderman ever. There are better ones, for sure, but I especially like this one because—”
“That’s enough!” the dean of students interrupted. “Now is not the time for more of your nonsense.”
Trying to defend herself, the teacher exclaimed, “I stopped reading after ten pages because it was clear he’d copied everything. It wasn’t worth—”
“You can’t prove that. I would argue that if I’d begun with Spiderman on page three, the result would have been the same. What’s indisputable is that you didn’t read the whole thing before deciding my grade.”
I donned a smile that imitated the one she’d painted on during class.
You definitely can’t have everything.
I flunked math. My exam grade had been abysmally low and they didn’t let me do the paper over because I’d been so disrespectful to the teacher all year, had accumulated a ton of unexcused absences, and hadn’t done my homework on plenty of occasions . . . plus a host of other reasons. They made me write some horribly boring papers about dead mathematicians over the summer, and I still had a long way to go before my reputation would improve significantly.
I don’t know what consequences my confrontation with my math teacher had on her—certainly nothing serious. She’d probably gotten a firm reprimand, at the most. But I felt really good. I’d taught that witch a lesson and had gotten Ivan a passing grade.
As for Claudia, well, I found out that she in fact was dating Hugo, the tennis whiz, just like Ivan had said. Still, I hadn’t given up on her. I couldn’t forget her, and I didn’t want to, especially without a fight.
I’d give her a little time to forget the whole mess with the twins and the nightmares with which they’d tormented her. Then I’d get her, one way or another, even though for the moment I had no idea how I’d do that. What I knew for sure was that she would continue
to play a starring role in my dreams.
The twins’ stick had no special properties as far as I could tell. It couldn’t even function as a cane—except maybe for a dwarf—since it was ridiculously short.
It laid around my room for a few days until I got tired of it and took it out to the street to throw it in the garbage can. On the way to the curb I tried to twirl it with one hand the way the twins did but kept dropping it. The last time I dropped it, it rolled across the sidewalk and into the street and landed against the tire of a car that was parked near the driveway to my house.
It was a black car with a kind of rounded roof—sort of looked like a gigantic egg that was painted black.
The driver’s side opened and a cane emerged and tapped the ground several times. Then the hunched-over body of Tedd, my history teacher, his white-haired ponytail hanging down over his right shoulder, began to emerge.
“Mind helping me, boy?”
I walked over to him and held out my right arm so he could grab on to me for support—assuming that was the assistance he was asking me for—and wondering the entire time what Tedd was doing at my house. Looking ill-tempered, the old man shook his head just a few inches from my arm.
“Are you here to give me a surprise test?”
He failed to see the humor in my question.
“What are you waiting for? Are you going to give me a hand or not?” I touched his hand since he didn’t seem to see mine. “What are you doing, boy?”
“I . . . I thought you needed help getting out of the car.”
“And what gave you that idea?”
I took a step back. “You asked for my help. I—”
“With the car,” he cut in. “Come on, get in the other side.”
Tedd never ceased to confound me.
“I don’t know what I can do for you. I don’t know anything about cars. I don’t even know how to drive.”
“You don’t need to. We have to fix it. Now get in.”
He closed the door and I stood there on the sidewalk, debating whether or not I should get in a car with an old, blind man behind the wheel. Finally, I obeyed.
Get Out of My Dreams Page 20