Hunted

by Dean Murray

  I was torn on whether or not to keep my real face and body while I went looking for her. So far all of my encounters other than the most recent one with the Native American had been inside of someone else's dreams. I was pretty sure that I'd actually been in the wax lady's dreams when I ran into her, but there wasn't any guarantee that someone else couldn't find me while I was with Sheree. In the end, I shifted into as good of a match for Missy's tiny body and scowling, but beautiful, face as I could manage.

  I had no real idea how to find Sheree, but everything else in the dream world seemed to be based on visualizing what I wanted and willing it into existence. I took a deep breath and then started thinking about Sheree. The details were a struggle but I forced myself to create a clear picture in my mind of her smile, the way that her wavy brown hair perfectly framed her face, and the tiny frame that made her a perfect flyer.

  It felt like my mind was stretching, like it was being pushed right up to the edge of what I could handle and then slightly over that thin, pulsing line. It hurt, not necessarily in a bad way, but in a way that told me that if I pushed even harder that it could turn into the bad pain of a tear rather than the good pain of a stretch held slightly too long.

  I got the last bit of detail inside of my mind right and then pushed in the odd way that I'd done when I made the dirt and the grass conform to my will. I opened my eyes and found Sheree standing in front of me, perfect in every detail.

  We stood there for a couple of seconds, neither moving, and then I recovered enough from the effort of bringing her to me that I managed a smile.

  "Hi, Sheree."

  "Hello, Adri."

  I started to ask her what she'd been dreaming about before, but the words died in my throat. I looked back down at myself to confirm that I was still wearing Missy's body and found that I was. There wasn't any way for the real Sheree to have known that I was Adri instead of Missy. This wasn't Sheree, it was a construct that I'd created inside of my own dream just like I'd changed my shape and size. She was calling me by name because that was what my subconscious was expecting her to do.

  I idly thought about seeing how good of a conversation this Sheree would be able to maintain, but ultimately that was just a very convoluted, very odd way to talk to myself. I sent her away without really knowing what I'd done until after she was gone.

  I stopped for a minute to try and figure out how I'd made her disappear. My mind felt different now that she was gone, it was more…relaxed. I visualized a bench where there'd never before been a bench and then tested it to make sure it was up to my weight.

  As I sat down on it I realized what was different. I wasn't having to think about it, but some part of my mind was busy maintaining that bench. The closest parallel I could come up with was that a corner was knotted up from the strain of keeping my dream from switching back to whatever my subconscious actually wanted it to be.

  I stood back up and relaxed my mind, smiling as the bench vanished. Now that I knew what I was looking for it wasn't difficult at all to find the tiny bit of my mind that was maintaining the illusion that I was Missy rather than Adri.

  I could feel exhaustion starting to pull ever so slightly at me, but I had one more idea that I wanted to try before I let myself lapse into a more normal rest. I closed my eyes again and thought about Sheree again, but this time I focused more on how she made me feel.

  Sheree was the kindest, most non-judgmental person I knew and being around her was almost like being wrapped in a soft, fuzzy blanket of acceptance. I felt a smile tug at the corner of my lips as a sense of happiness rushed through me. The happier I felt the stronger the sense of her presence became.

  There was a kind of tightness in my skin, like maybe I was being pulled through a keyhole, and then the exhaustion that had been hovering at the edges of my being moved a little closer, dragging at the happiness that had been buoying me up.

  I opened my eyes and my jaw dropped when I found that my surroundings had changed. I wasn't outside of the school any more, I was inside someone else's bedroom.

  "Mom, please don't make me get up. It's a Saturday. Can I please just sleep in for once?"

  Sheree's voice sounded more tired than I'd ever heard out of her before now. The perky excitement that was normally part and parcel of interacting with her was gone, but it was still Sheree, she was just buried underneath her green comforter.

  I was pretty sure that I was in her dream this time. Things felt different, for one thing, and there were some things that didn't look right. Sheree's hands were enormous for one thing, which seemed to indicate that she was much more self-conscious than I ever would have guessed about that particular attribute. Just to be sure I tried to change the color of the walls in the room. I imagined the blues and greens switching over to yellow and then once I had that image fixed in my mind I pushed in an effort to enforce my will on our surroundings. There was a flicker of something on the wall closest to me, but it disappeared so quickly that Sheree didn't even notice the change.

  I definitely wasn't in my dream now. The level of effort I'd just put into that simple change would have more than sufficed if we'd still been in a construct that I'd made. Another wave of exhaustion crashed through me and I momentarily had to lean against the chair and desk behind me. I was going to have to be careful not to try and change anything

  "Are you tired, Sheree?"

  She looked up at me and nodded. "Yes, I'm exhausted. I was helping poor Adri try to learn stunts for what seemed like forever last…well, I'm not sure when it was. I was going to say last night, but that can't be the case if today is Saturday…"

  I didn't want Sheree to think that through too much. I figured I was much better off with her in her normal dream state than if she were experiencing some kind of lucid dream. I'd just found out how hard it was to change things around when in someone else's dream. It seemed like a really bad idea to let her or anyone else dictate what my environment did.

  I shuddered slightly at the thought of just how unpredictable it could be to experience someone else's dream. You would never know which physical laws were going to be working at any given time.

  Sheree misinterpreted my shudder and frowned at me. "I don't understand why you hate Adri so much. It's not like she made Janessa take those drugs. The whole thing was unfortunate, but it's hardly Adri's fault that things ended up going that badly for Janessa."

  "I don't care about Janessa, I just don't like Adri."

  I got another frown, but it looked like this was just par for the course when it came to Sheree's interactions with Missy. So far, she didn't seem to think anything was out of the ordinary.

  "You're not going to lose your spot as a flyer, Missy. I know—we can practice right now if you want."

  I opened my mouth to tell her no, but something made me stop. I had only vague memories of the dreams where I'd learned the routines that had gotten me on the squad. It seemed like I'd watched for the longest time and then Cindi or Sheree had invited me to join them. It had worked for that, maybe it could work when it came to learning to fly as well.

  "Okay, let's practice. You'll have to hurry though, I don't have long. It's a good thing that we're already at the school."

  We weren't actually at the school when I said it, but I'd been acting on a hunch. My saying that we were at school nudged Sheree's subconscious into putting us there. We were standing on the football field with no breeze and a clear blue sky above us.

  "Hmm, we're going to need more than just us if we are going to do this, Missy."

  "Ah, look, there's Jackson and Cindi."

  I pointed behind her as I said it and once again that caused her subconscious to do exactly what I wanted her to do. Jackson and Cindi appeared as she turned around to look for them, and Sheree didn't seem to think it was odd that they were wearing the exact same clothes as they'd been wearing when we'd practiced earlier that day, and she didn't seem to notice the fact that they were rendered like some kind of low-resolution computer painting. A
pparently her mind wasn't up to holding much if any more in the way of detail than mine was.

  "Oh, this is perfect. Hi, guys, would you be willing to help Missy?"

  We all got the preliminaries out of the way and then we got down to business. I'd hoped that it would be easier to practice in the dream, but I hadn't expected it to be as easy as it turned out to be. In the real world I'd spent the entire time scared that I was going to get seriously hurt. In the dream, I just figured that any sprains or breaks wouldn't still be a problem when I woke up, so I relaxed and let Jackson and the others throw me to their hearts' content.

  Everything from basket tosses on down went smoothly. I didn't start out perfect obviously, but Sheree just kept telling me what I was doing wrong and I kept making slight adjustments to my technique until she started telling me I had it.

  The thing that was most surprising of all was that I actually started enjoying all of the different stunts. The feeling of soaring through the air, the centrifugal forces as I did a backflip, it was all much more fun than I'd expected it to be.

  I thanked Sheree profusely after what felt like a couple more hours of practice, which caused her to look at me oddly. Apparently gratitude wasn't one of Missy's strengths. As I let Sheree's dream dissolve away from me I realized that I could really get to like this whole dream traveling gig. I could practice with Sheree or one of the other girls pretty much whenever I wanted to without it getting in the way of studies or any of my other waking activities.

  I even liked interacting with Sheree better in the dream world than in the real world. Don't get me wrong, Sheree was super nice in both places and I felt a little bad at having fooled her by making her think I was Missy, but there was something addictive about being able to interact with people completely on your terms.

  Chapter 12

  It turned out that there actually were some consequences to dream traveling. By that, I mean negative consequences. I already knew that dream traveling used up calories, but that came down decidedly on the benefit side of things.

  I was the most tired I could remember being in months by the time morning finally rolled around. After finishing my impromptu practice session with Sheree I'd slept the sleep of the dead. I didn't remember any more dreams, normal or otherwise, almost as though I'd dreamed myself out and hadn't been capable of dreaming after that.

  I hit the snooze button two more times than normal before finally stumbling down out of my bed. Mom and Dad were both gone already, apparently both trying to get ahead with their respective projects before they left on their mini vacation. I hadn't expected that, but it wasn't entirely a surprise. What did shock me was the fact that Cindi was gone too by the time I stumbled out of the shower.

  She hadn't said anything during the minute or two when we saw each other before I went into the bathroom, so I hadn't realized I was going to be walking to school by myself. It was surprising just how different it felt to leave the house without Cindi by my side. We'd been walking to school together each morning since middle school and I honestly couldn't remember a day where I hadn't talked to her before sitting down in my homeroom class.

  I spent the first hour or so of school worried that Cindi had overheard Dad and me talking. There wasn't anything I could do to make things better if she had been listening to us, but that didn't stop me from wondering how bad things were going to be when she finally exploded. Just trying to keep up with the lectures when all I wanted to do was lay my head down on my desk and sleep took nearly all of my mental resources.

  I finally caught up with Cindi at lunch, but even then it was just because I happened to see her head outside with her salad just as I was headed into the cafeteria. I grabbed a big serving of greasy yellow French fries and a slice of pizza and then headed outside to see if I could find her.

  She was sitting outside, back against the school, staring off into the distance as she ate her salad. It was maybe the only time I'd ever seen her eat by herself in the last year.

  "Can I join you?"

  She looked up at me and nodded. "Sure. Those jeans look good on you by the way."

  I was wearing the clothes that Mom had bought me. I'd actually forgotten that I'd put them on this morning, but I suspected that she'd commented on them less out of an effort to be polite and more as a way of covertly bringing up what had happened last night.

  "Thanks. I almost didn't wear them, but I didn't want to borrow any of your stuff without asking and without your belt none of my other pants would have stayed up."

  Cindi's nod was oddly noncommittal. "You should be careful, Adri. You have to watch what you're eating if you want to stay this skinny. Just because you're stressed out and unhappy doesn't mean you can just eat whatever. I know it's a temptation, it's hard for me too."

  I looked down at my pizza and fries and nodded. She was right, at least she would have been right if I'd been normal. I debated telling her about my dreams, but now didn't seem like the right time. Things had been better between us lately, but if I was going to tell her something that crazy then I wanted to be certain that she would believe me. As things stood right now she was just as likely to think that I was making it all up as some kind of play for attention.

  "I'll be careful, Cindi. Thanks for the warning. I think I'll be okay for today though. Yesterday took a lot out of me. It wasn't even just the exertion from trying to stunt, I was all tensed up and nervous the entire time too, which also burned up calories."

  I wasn't sure I wanted to dive right into Mom and Dad's fight, so I cast about for something else to talk about.

  "Did you take your test yet?"

  "Yeah, I had it second hour."

  "How did you do?"

  Even as I asked, I realized that the answer wasn't going to be good, not given how little time she'd had to study for it and how terrible last night had been.

  "I'm pretty sure that I failed it. I didn't even know what he was talking about with about half of the questions."

  "I'm so sorry, Cindi. This is my fault. I never should have agreed to practicing last night."

  She shrugged. "One test probably won't drag down my grade too much. I can probably still get a 'B' out of the class. Maybe Mr. Cruthers will even let me do some extra credit work."

  She hadn't disagreed with me, which meant that she did think her bad grade was my fault. A tiny part of me wanted to tell her that she was a big girl, that she could have told the rest of us when our impromptu practice ran long, but I stomped on the impulse and tried again.

  "I'm sorry about the way things went down when we got home last night. I tried to leave you alone because that was what I thought you wanted. I'm sorry if that was the wrong way to have handled it."

  "It's fine. Look, I've got a test next week that I should probably get started studying for. I'll see you at practice."

  **

  I went through the rest of my classes in a haze of misery. I'd joined the cheerleading squad mostly because of Cindi. The idea had been that both of us being on the squad would bring us closer together. The reality was that things were tenser now than they'd been for weeks.

  I was so deep in thought that Jackson had been walking next to me for several seconds before I realized it was him.

  "You okay, Adri?"

  "Yeah, sorry. I…well, it was just a rough night after the four of us got done yesterday."

  He gave me a surprisingly understanding smile. "I'm sorry to hear that. If there's something I can do to help make things better just let me know."

  "Thanks, I don't think that there is, but I appreciate the thought."

  We were nearly to my last classroom and all of a sudden I realized that he hadn't just happened to run into me, he'd purposefully come and found me.

  "Not that I'm complaining or anything, but why are you following me around?"

  Jackson shrugged. "It's probably nothing, but I made a promise to those three lowlifes yesterday. I figured that if they were going to try anything they'd probably do it in about the same
place, which means either before or after your last class."

  A rush of warmth and happiness moved from the tips of my toes up through the top of my head. Jackson was acting like it was no big deal, but no guy, other than my dad, had ever made that kind of effort on my behalf.

  "Thanks, Jackson. I appreciate it. I appreciate it a lot actually."

  "Don't worry about it. I'll be here a few seconds after school gets out and we can go to the locker rooms together."

  I practically floated over to my assigned seat. I'd actually been considering quitting the team in an effort to make things better between Cindi and me, but there was no way I was going to do that right now. I finally had an iron-clad reason to spend time with Jackson; I wasn't just going to throw that away, not without a lot more in the way of proof that quitting would make things better with Cindi, and not until I'd had a chance to get to know him better.

  I went slower than usual when it came to gathering up my books, and when I stood up from my desk and turned back to the door Jackson was waiting for me just as promised. We walked back to my locker and then over to his more or less in silence, but it was the companionable kind of silence that you usually only find between people who've known each other for a really long time.

  Half of the team had arranged their schedules so that they had their PE class last. It was actually kind of smart because it meant that they just changed into their practice clothes once and then didn't have to worry about getting sweaty and going back to their other classes.

  It was hard to be sure around all of the other girls who were changing back into their street clothes, but it seemed like there weren't as many cheerleaders in the locker room as normal. I slipped on some of Cindi's old clothes that she'd gifted me when I joined the team and then put all of the rest of my things in my duffle bag.

  It was actually a good thing that I didn't have PE this semester. Cindi's clothes more or less fit now that I was skinnier, but some of the stuff she'd given me was from a year or two ago when she was a little shorter than she was even now. I was pretty sure that the shorts and tank top I was wearing now weren't quite in keeping with the school regulations. Miss Winters wouldn't mind, but Coach Bellor would.