Dreamland

by Sarah Dessen

  “Sure,” I said, as an elderly woman with a walker bumped me out of the way to grab a cookie.

  “Go back in the kitchen and bring out another tray of these, would you? We’ve got some kids helping out back there. They can show you where they are.”

  “Okay.”

  “Wonderful,” she said, already having moved on to a group of older men who were struggling to open a container of juice. “Let me get that for you ... here you go! And help yourself to a cookie. We’ve got chocolate chip, lemon drop, pecan ...”

  As I walked through the open kitchen door, I saw the room was empty, save for a guy stacking cookies onto a big platter on the far countertop. The room was very bright, with fluorescent lights and clean, white floors and walls, and I found myself squinting as I crossed over to where he was standing. Outside, in the main room, I could still hear Wade talking; he was saying something about freedom of movement.

  “Excuse me,” I said, and I remember thinking there was something about this person that was familiar, even before he turned around, “I’m supposed to—”

  It was Rogerson. He wore jeans and a white T-shirt, his hair pulled back at his neck, and seeing him in such bright light was startling, and made him suddenly real. He didn’t seem surprised to see me at all, just leveling me with a look and smiling slightly.

  Outside, Wade was directing everyone to breathe and do a personal movement, something spontaneous. “You just might surprise yourself,” he said.

  Rogerson put a cookie on the tray. “Supposed to what?” he said, and there was that look again, half mocking me, and I felt woozy under all those lights, like I might fall down.

  “Get those,” I said, pointing to the tray, which he picked up and handed to me. I turned around and started for the door, feeling him watching me as I walked away.

  “Remember to breathe,” Wade was saying from the stage, his voice low and soothing.

  I turned around and Rogerson was still there. He raised his eyebrows.

  “So,” I said, “were you, like, not even going to call me?”

  He looked surprised. “I didn’t know your last name.”

  “You know where I live,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said, sticking his hands in his pockets. He ducked his head and a few dreadlocks slipped and fell over his forehead. Then he looked up and said, “I was working on that.”

  “Really.”

  “Yep,” he said, leaning back against the counter. There was something about the way he moved, slowly and deliberately, that drove me crazy. “Really.”

  I just shook my head and walked back out to the punch table, where my mother, exasperated, yanked the tray out of my hand, knocking a few pecan cookies to the floor. “Well, it’s about time,” she said as she put it on the table, and hands immediately began grabbing.

  But I was already turning back to the kitchen, walking through to find Rogerson standing just where I’d left him, as if he’d known I’d be back and was waiting for me.

  “Let it go,” Wade was saying, and I could still see him in my head, fingers touching, as I walked across that bright kitchen. “Open up your mind and find yourself there.”

  I stood in front of Rogerson and looked into his green eyes. He smiled at me.

  “I can’t believe you,” I said to him.

  “It’s the hair,” he explained.

  I shook my head. “What are you doing here, anyway?”

  He slid his hands around my waist, his fingers sliding up to touch my back just where I’d hurt it in pyramid duty the night before. “It’s a long story,” he said. “You really want to hear it?”

  And I didn’t at that moment, not really. Onstage behind me Wade was still talking, reminding me to breathe, breathe, open up and be free, and all the other nonsense words, so it was his voice I heard, and none of the others in my own head, as Rogerson leaned in and kissed me and I let go, closing my eyes and breathing all the way.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “Caitlin,” my mother said that night, as I waited for Rogerson to pick me up. “I’m just not sure about this.”

  I was standing at the top of the stairs, looking out the front window from which I could see the stoplight that led into Lakeview. With the leaves off the trees, I could see its colors clearly, and each time it turned green I held my breath and waited for him to slide into sight on the other side of our glass storm door.

  My father, in his chair, put down the paper and looked at me. “About what?” he said.

  My mother walked across the room and adjusted her newest Victorian doll, the Shopkeeper, a short, portly man carrying what looked like a sack of flour. “Caitlin met this boy today,” she began, smoothing her fingers over the doll’s shiny balding head, “and now she’s going out with him.”

  The light changed again, this time to red. I looked at my watch: quarter of seven. He’d said seven, but I’d been ready since five-thirty.

  “Who is he?” my father asked.

  “Rogerson Biscoe’s son,” she said, dropping her hand from the Shopkeeper and reaching to move the milk pitcher in the tiny tea set sitting on the end table.

  “The one that was the standout point guard, or the other one?” my father said.

  I watched as the light dropped from red to green again.

  “The other one,” my mother said quietly.

  “Oh,” my father replied.

  I didn’t even bother to turn around and defend him, or me. When my mother had seen me in the kitchen with Rogerson, she asked me how I knew him and I said from school. It turned out his “long story” for being at Senior Days started with some kind of misdemeanor and ended with community service, which led to lemon cookies and punch and me. Obviously Kelly Brandt’s hunch about Rogerson had been correct.

  My parents also knew his parents: His mother was Bobbi Biscoe, a local realtor with big blond hair whose face appeared, it seemed, on practically every residential For Sale sign in town. She was always giving the thumbs-up, her head cocked confidently to one side. She was also in Junior League. Rogerson Senior was the head of a local pharmaceutical corporation and golfed at the same country club as my father. And older brother Peyton, after leading Perkins Day to the state championships the year before, was in his freshman year at the university. Normally, this would have been enough for them to approve of anyone. But Rogerson apparently had a lot of “long stories,” some of which he’d shared with me when he drove me home from the Senior Center that afternoon.

  He said, when I asked, that he went to Perkins Day, the elite prep school on the other side of town, where he was a fifth-year senior; he’d “taken some time off,” apparently because of “some problems with administration.” He didn’t elaborate.

  His family lived in the Arbors, a development of luxury homes based around a golf course: Their house was on the edge of the ninth hole. Rogerson lived in the pool house, where he could come and go as he liked. He was back in school, working part-time at a garage that fixed foreign cars, and working off his community service volunteering at the Senior Center on snack detail. Sure, he may have “had some problems,” but he seemed to be on the right track now. I wasn’t worried, even if my mother was.

  Now she walked across the room, brow furrowed, and moved the County Squire doll closer to the magazine rack. “I just think ...” she began in her light, passive-aggressive way, then trailed off, waiting for someone to take the bait.

  “What?” my father said, folding the paper and laying it on the end table beside him.

  “You had a very long day today,” she said to me, still bustling around. “I’m worried you might be tired.”

  “I’m not,” I said. “I’m fine.”

  “You have that big game on Monday afternoon,” she added, reaching to smooth the skirt of the Ladies’ Choir Soloist, whose mouth was posed in a wide, creepy kind of O, mid-note. “Not to mention Homecoming on Friday. I wouldn’t be surprised if you had some extra practices this week.”

  “Mom, it’s only Saturday,�
� I said, as the light dropped to green again, through the trees.

  “Well, I’m just saying,” she said, glancing at my father before crossing the room to sit on the couch, her hand already reaching out to slide a row of glass thimbles there a bit to the right, “that I don’t think this is a good idea.” The last two words she said in a clipped, even voice, her eyes on my father, waiting for his response.

  Bingo. He looked up, at her, then at me. “Caitlin,” he said, as the light turned red again. “Maybe this isn’t the best night for you to go out.”

  “It’s Saturday night,” I protested, turning away from the light to look at him. “Dad, come on. I did school stuff all day. It’s the weekend.”

  “You have a math test on Monday, too,” my mother added in a low voice, picking up one of the thimbles and examining it. I felt an itchy uncomfortableness climb up the back of my neck, hating that she was this involved in my life, knowing my cheerleading schedule, my classes, my every move, as if we were somehow one person. This was the way she’d been with Cass, so proudly taping every schedule to the fridge. I’d always thought Cass liked it: I’d almost envied her. Now, I wasn’t so sure.

  My father picked his paper up again, unfolding it to the sports page. “Be home by curfew,” he said, into a picture of the university football coach lifting his hands in victory. “And study tomorrow. Right?”

  My mother, on the couch, turned and looked out the window, but she couldn’t see the stoplight, turning from yellow to red again.

  “Right,” I said. “Okay.”

  Rogerson showed up exactly at seven, pulling to a stop at the end of our walkway. Our hall clock was chiming as I stepped outside. I didn’t look back to see if my mother was watching as I started down the walk: I wanted this to be all mine, not part of any schedule or plan she could claim as her own. I wondered if Cass had felt the same way when she’d slipped out the door on that August morning and started toward a car idling there, waiting, for her.

  “Hi,” I said as I got into the car, shutting the door behind me.

  “Hey,” Rogerson said. Then he put the car in gear, turned around in the McLeans’ driveway, and headed to the highway and the light I’d been watching all night. It was solid green as we coasted under it, and I looked over at Rogerson, wondering what he thought of me. He was in a brown sweater, jeans, and old scuffed loafers, a cigarette poking out of one side of his mouth. He didn’t talk to me, and I couldn’t think of a single thing to start a conversation that wouldn’t sound even stupider if I said it aloud.

  After a few minutes he said he had an “errand to run” and had to “drop by some place for a second.” This someplace turned out to be a huge house in the Arbors, at the end of a cul-de-sac. There were about fifty cars parked along the street, but Rogerson pulled right up in the driveway.

  “Come on,” he said, getting out of the car, and I followed him. I didn’t know what exactly I’d been expecting. Nothing had been normal about our relationship so far, so it wasn’t like I’d been looking forward to a movie, pizza, and sipping one Coke with two straws, like I’d be doing with Mike Evans. Still, I had expected something. I just didn’t know what it was.

  When I stepped inside the house, I knew I’d walked into a Perkins Day party. Everyone looked like they’d just that instant jumped out of a J. Crew catalog, all crewnecks and cashmere and straight, white teeth.

  “This way,” Rogerson said, leading me past a trickling indoor fountain by the front door. He seemed to know his way around, and as we passed a group of girls sitting drinking wine coolers by the fountain, they all stared at me, with the same kind of slit-eyed look I always saw women give Rina. That was new.

  “Hey, Rogerson,” some girl said as we passed, and Rogerson nodded his head but didn’t say hello.

  “Who was that?” I asked, just to say something, as we walked through the living room where the carpet felt thick and spongy beneath my feet. There was a loud quarters game going in the next room at the dining room table, which was long, seating at least twenty people. I watched as a quarter bounced down its length, missing the glass by a mile, and everyone booed.

  “Nobody,” he said, walking up to a closed door off the living room and knocking twice before pushing it open. It was a study, with deep wood walls and red carpet, a huge desk sitting in front of several built-in shelves, each of which was crowded with trophies, framed pictures, and diplomas. There was a tall blond guy sitting at the desk, a lighter in his hand, about to light a bowl. A girl with red curly hair wearing ripped jeans and a Perkins Day sweatshirt was sitting on the desk blotter, smoking a cigarette, a huge cut-glass ashtray balanced on one leg.

  “Rogerson,” the blond guy said, setting the bowl down beside one of those miniature Zen gardens with the rocks and sand, and standing up. “Been waiting on you.”

  “Yeah, well,” Rogerson said. “I’m here now.”

  “Good,” the guy said. He had that classic All-American look, blond, blue-eyed, tall, creamy skin. “What you got for me?”

  Rogerson reached into his pocket and pulled out a bag of pot, then held it up and shook it, evening out its contents. I don’t know why this surprised me, but it did: He was serving cookies at Senior Days for “something,” but I’d imagined parking tickets or ten miles over the speed limit. He put the bag on the desk and slid it across to the blond guy, who picked it up and examined it, flicking the small green buds with his finger through the plastic.

  “How much?” he said.

  “Seventy-five,” Rogerson told him. “And a pinch for me.”

  The guy nodded. “Okay,” he said. Then he looked at the redheaded girl, who stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray and hopped off the desk, reaching into her back pocket for a wad of money, which she handed to him. He counted a few bills off, folded them, and slid them across the desk to Rogerson, who counted them quickly himself before sliding them into his own pocket.

  The guy sat back down, opened the Baggie, and started to pack the bowl.

  The redheaded girl looked at me, smiled, and said, “I’m Lauren.”

  “Caitlin,” I said. “Hi.”

  “Rogerson’s so polite,” she said sarcastically, reaching out to poke him with her finger. As I looked more closely at the pictures on the shelves I could see she was in several of them: one in a soccer uniform with a ball in her lap, another in a long white dress, sitting on a green stretch of grass, her arms full of roses. “Isn’t he?”

  “Sorry,” Rogerson said. “This is Caitlin. Caitlin, Lauren and Walter.”

  “Hi,” Walter said to me, and I realized suddenly I recognized him from the Perkins football team, which had creamed us three weeks earlier at home.

  Lauren lit another cigarette, blowing smoke toward the picture of her holding the roses, while Walter packed the bowl and handed it to Rogerson, a lighter balanced on top of it. He took a hit and handed it to me.

  “No, thanks,” I said.

  “You sure?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  He shrugged. “She’s a cheerleader,” he explained to Lauren as he handed her the bowl. She took a big hit and promptly started coughing, her face turning red. “She’s got a reputation to protect.”

  “And she’s going out with you?” Lauren said, between hacks.

  “I know,” Rogerson said. “Must be the hair.”

  “Must be,” Lauren said, picking up her pack of cigarettes and shaking one out into her hand. “‘Cause we know it’s not your charm.”

  “Ha,” Rogerson said, his expression flat.

  “Ha, ha,” she said, and smiled at me. I smiled back, still not quite sure I was in on the joke.

  Later, after we’d left and gotten back into the car, I said, “So Walter plays for the football team, right? How long have you known him?”

  He looked at me and half-smiled, then reached to shake a cigarette out of the pack wedged under the visor. “You know,” he said thoughtfully, “you ask a lot of questions.”

  “I do not,” I sa
id indignantly. I didn’t even know why he bothered to ask me out. It was like I wasn’t even there. “You, like, haven’t even talked to me since you picked me up.”

  “Talked?” he said. The lighter popped out with a click and he reached forward to grab it.

  “Yes.”

  He pressed the lighter to the cigarette. “Okay, then. What do you want to talk about?”

  “I ... I don’t know,” I said. “I mean it’s not like I want sparkling conversation....”

  He raised his eyebrows at me, replacing the lighter. There was something so striking about him. Even the smallest gesture or expression seemed important.

  “But,” I added, getting back to the point, “I just wondered why you asked me out tonight, if you didn’t really want me here. That’s all.”

  He thought about this. “You want to know why I asked you out?”

  “Well,” I said, rethinking that. Now I wasn’t so sure I wanted the answer to that particular question. “Not necessarily.”

  He put out the cigarette in the ashtray, then turned a bit so he was facing me. “Do you want me to take you home?”

  I looked back at the house. It was huge, the windows all lit up, shapes and bodies moving back and forth across the yellow light inside. Every other Saturday night I’d been at a party just like this with Rina, in another part of town, playing quarters and waiting for something to happen.

  “No,” I said. “I’m fine.”

  “All right then,” he said easily, starting up the engine. “I’ve gotta go by one more place, but that’s it. Okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Okay.” And he put his hand on my leg, his fingers spread across my knee, as he put the car in gear and drove us away.

  The next place was a trailer, out in the country. We crossed over Topper Lake, past the radio towers and several cow pastures before finally turning onto a dirt road so riddled with potholes we slowed to a crawl navigating them.