by Kelly Creagh
Isobel jumped to her feet from where she’d perched to rest on the corner of the bottom bleacher. When she stood, though, her water bottle tumbled out of her lap and hit the floor with a thwack, inciting titters from Alyssa Wilkes and her posse of sidekicks.
Setting down the gigantic cartoon-size megaphone, Coach made a show of sighing, her round hip jutting to one side.
“Thirty minutes left before I’ve got parents in cars breathing down my neck to release you all, Lanley,” she said. “Let’s go already! We gotta get through these drills or basketball season’s going to be chock-full of claps and boring ground-level jumps. Hustle!”
Isobel left the water bottle behind on the floor as she jogged to the place where Stevie and Nikki waited for her along with her two spotters, Stephanie and Deja.
At the far end of the line, Isobel could hear Alyssa yawning loudly.
“That’s enough, Miss Wilkes,” Coach snapped. “Focus should be on the stunt at hand, not your next nap. Now let’s hit it, team. Remember, we’re going for a wave effect here, but our sidelines aren’t gonna give us a lot of room, so keep it tight. Don’t worry about the letter boards yet, Ashley. Leave them there for now, we’ll add those in when we get our timing down on the lifts. Starting with your group, Stevie, and on down the line. Clean and prep by the count of eight, then I’ll begin the count again. Group two, don’t forget that your flyer needs to be up two counts after Isobel. Group three, two counts after Carly, and so on. We all stay up for eight, then it’s the same count in reverse, with the pop cradle for our dismount. ” Coach raised the megaphone again. “Ready?”
Isobel didn’t bother offering so much as a glance in Alyssa’s direction, channeling her attention instead on the prep and load as Stevie and Nikki, her two stunt bases, squatted on either side of her. They held their hands out for her feet while her spotters sank down in front and back of her, ready to brace her during the lift.
After Nationals, Coach had been quick to rearrange the squad’s regular grouping. And it had come as no surprise to Isobel that Coach had chosen to separate her and Alyssa, taking care to place them as far apart as possible during any given formation. Considering how complex Coach Anne’s choreography tended to be, though, Isobel wasn’t sure how long the reprieve would last.
While Coach counted, her voice lilting up and down with every other number, Isobel placed one hand on each of her bases’ shoulders and pushed off from the floor, popping into the load.
“Five, six, seven, eight!”
On the last count, Isobel shot tall, rising high above the gymnasium floor. Keeping her knees locked, she mimed the action of flipping up her assigned H-for-“HAWKS” letter board.
Since they were taking the stunt in a wave pattern, Isobel and her group would have to hold their position the longest. While she waited for the count to restart and the wave to make its way back down the line, she tried to keep her mind on maintaining her balance without allowing her thoughts to circle back, yet again, to what she’d seen in the courtyard.
But that was almost more impossible than trying to convince herself that the moment hadn’t been real.
She’d seen him.
It had to have been real. At least as real as anything else that had been happening to her. As real as drawings that came to life in old books. As real as masked figures who could walk in and out of reality. Real as the monster that had appeared in her living room.
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Or, Isobel thought, her gaze drifting toward the clock that hung above the gymnasium’s open set of double doors, then again, maybe not.
On a normal day, practice ended between four thirty and four forty-five. By this time, they’d been working for well over an hour. And hadn’t Coach just reamed her out about how they had only thirty minutes left?
Why, then, did the time on the gym’s clock read five past three?
“—six, seven, eight!”
Isobel felt her bases dip her. She wobbled just before they popped her into the air. Her body, kicking into autopilot, prepared for the drop, but it was too late to gain full control.
Isobel floundered as she fell, landing slantways in the arms of her squad mates, who stumbled under her lopsided weight.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Coach yelled, abruptly stopping the count as Stevie and Nikki brought Isobel to her feet. “What happened?” she asked. Eyes bugging, she shook her shaggy head. Behind the barrier of her thick blue sweatband, Coach’s frizzy hair shook in spongy clumps.
“I sure hope it wasn’t my flyer that time,” she said when no one in the group spoke up to rat her out. But it would seem no one had to.
Walking over to Isobel, her tennis shoes squeaking, Coach leaned in. “I thought taking topples was so last year, Izzy,” she said.
Muffled snickers erupted from Alyssa and her entourage.
Isobel felt her face redden. She knew Coach hadn’t meant it as a jab, that she was just trying a tougher approach in order to get her focused. Still, her words stung.
“Okay!” Coach shouted. “Let’s try that again!”
“Izzy,” she heard Nikki hiss at her. “C’mon. ”
But Isobel had to turn back to glance at the clock one more time.
True, the hands weren’t spinning like they had been on the dashboard clock of Varen’s dreamworld car, but they weren’t moving the way they should either. They weren’t moving at all.
She had to wonder if it could be a sign that she was asleep right now, that all this was a dream. If she was in a dream, then that would explain why she had seen Varen in the courtyard. Maybe he had been trying to connect. Maybe he had to work his way into her awareness.
But the world around her, the people, the gym and the lighting, it all seemed so normal, so real.
The American flag, suspended against the far wall, hung where it always had. Two basketball goals extended down on metal armatures from the walls at opposite ends of the wide room. Glancing up, Isobel could even see a small blue balloon from the last pep rally still lodged between the steel rafters.
Then again, she reminded herself, this was exactly what made dreams so tricky. Because no matter what, if you were in one, a dream always seemed real.
“Hey,” Stevie called to her. “Let’s go. Coach is heading back this way. ”
“Coming,” Isobel mumbled, but she stayed put.
This was how all the other dreams began, always with her at cheer practice.
Could she really have dreamed the events of an entire day, though? Or was that how it always went, and she just forgot about all that later, after she woke up?
Isobel watched the double doors, waiting a moment longer for Varen to appear and settle the internal tug-of-war between her reasoning and instinct. But the doorway remained empty. Above it, the clock’s face stayed frozen.
Maybe she wasn’t dreaming. Maybe the clock was just stalled because the battery had run down over winter break. But if she couldn’t be certain by looking at a clock, then how else could she tell?
Coach drew closer, and Isobel swiveled to face her stunt crew.
As Coach passed them, Isobel recalled something else Reynolds had once told her.
That if she could wake up in her dream, if she could realize she was in one, then, to some extent, she could control the things that happened.
How else had she been able to make the door appear in the floor at the Grim Facade just when she’d needed it most?
One thing was certain. If she was asleep right now and dreaming, then that had to mean she would be able to do things she couldn’t in waking life. Or at least, something she’d never tried before.
Isobel pivoted away from her stunt group to face the gym’s wide-open floor. It shone as though greased by a thin layer of oil. In the center of the floor, the embossed head of Henry the Hawk scowled at her with one angry yellow eye, as though warning her not to even think about it.
That was just it, though. If this was a dream, then she shouldn’t have to think about it.
She just had to do it.
“Izzy,” Coach said. “Hello. We’re starting!”
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Ignoring her, Isobel broke forward in a sprint.
“Lanley!”
Isobel lifted her arms. Bending forward, using her gained momentum, she launched into a round-off.
The world blurred, becoming a mesh of light and streaking colors.
Catapulting into a midair Arabian, knees tucked in, she became weightless. Then bam, her feet met the bare floor, ankles jarring from the impact on the hard, mat-free surface.
But like a windup toy set into motion, there would be no stopping.
A millisecond later and she’d completed the second round-off, pulled through the hands-free whip, and finished the back handspring, air whistling in her ears.
Her feet slammed the ground and she pushed off for the last time, hard as she could. Clutching her arms in tight, she launched upward, recognizing somewhere in the back of her mind that this was the longest pass she’d ever attempted.
The air greeted her, holding her like a stray leaf in its nonexistent grasp as she twisted once, twi—
The ground rushed toward her, as fast as the grille of a speeding semi. She completed the rotation and her heels connected with the floor, but like a spinning plate, the gym floor whizzed out from beneath her.
She heard a collection of gasps and gave her own strangled cry, which the floor pounded out of her as it slammed her back hard, like the palm of a giant’s hand.
Isobel lay motionless, her muscles going slack.
There was a moment of silence as she stared up at the rows of piercing lights high, high above. She focused again on the lone blue balloon, and it helped to steady her swirling vision. Then her ears began to ring, the blood rushing through her skull loud enough that she didn’t hear the sound of stampeding sneakers until a moment before several members of the squad converged on her.
Through the circle of stunned faces, Coach’s appeared at her right, chili-pepper red and blotchy with anger. Lacking only the smoking nostrils, she looked like a dragon, puffed up and prepared to heave fire.
Isobel struggled to sit up, her entire body humming with a mixture of adrenaline and humiliation.
Even though she felt no immediate pain, she knew better than to think it wasn’t coming. It would. Later. Tonight. Worse in the morning.
“Lanley,” Coach grunted. The low, rattling way her voice shook reminded Isobel of the sound a pot top makes when the water inside begins to boil. “You hurt?”
“N-no?” she managed to croak. Her voice sounded small and far away in her still-ringing ears. She felt suddenly tiny herself, too, as though she were a gnat in a room full of elephants.
“Then get your ass up off the floor and out of my gym. The rest of you, back to your positions. ”
With that, Coach whirled away.
Isobel’s squad mates turned to follow, not a one of them wanting to draw attention to themselves and risk unleashing Coach’s scarcely contained wrath by speaking to Isobel or offering to help her up. Even Stevie and Nikki jogged back to their places, though Isobel liked to think that Stevie might have lingered for half a second.
Slowly, achingly, Isobel brought herself back to her feet. As she hurried to gather her bag, somewhere from her retreating squad mates she heard Alyssa’s stifled laughter and the whispered word “loser. ”
No, Isobel thought as her head began to pound.
This was definitely not a dream.
SHE GOT DRESSED IN THE girls’ locker room, thankful for the solitude.
Out in the gym, she could hear Stephanie calling the names of various stretches as she led the rest of the squad through cooldown, and Isobel was glad no one had been sent in to retrieve her.
No matter how she spun it, there was no way she’d be able to explain her actions.
She knew how it must have looked: like she was trying to give Coach the showdown after being corrected in front of everyone; like she was a huge brat who had something to prove.
Isobel slammed her locker shut, her face flaring hot with renewed mortification.
How could she have done something so stupid?
And to top it all off, Alyssa had witnessed everything firsthand. She must be throwing herself a little squee session inside that pigtailed, baby’s-rattle head of hers, loading her verbal gun with clever little jabs to send Isobel’s way when they passed each other in the hall tomorrow.
Worst of all, Isobel couldn’t be sure if she could still count herself as a member of the squad at all. Coach hadn’t formally kicked her off, but still, Isobel had broken her number one rule to never (ever) throw a pass without mats or someone spotting. Not to mention that the pass itself had been an illegal one, since twists greater than one rotation were always forbidden. Not that Isobel had been able to accomplish the full double ending anyway.
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But since she had tried, she could now officially consider herself resigned to cheerleader limbo, where she would have to wait until Coach either summoned her for judgment or clipped her wings for good.
Whatever the case, Isobel sincerely doubted a cheer-format apology would do any good at resurrecting her standing this time.
In one fell swoop, she’d managed to jeopardize everything. Now the one thing she’d been so desperate to avoid, a phone call home, seemed inevitable.
How was she going to explain this to her dad? It would be the last straw; she knew it. If Coach called him, which she might be doing right that very second, he’d cancel the Baltimore trip for sure.
What had she been thinking?
Isobel grabbed her coat, shouldered her gym bag, and pushed her way out of the locker room, eager to evacuate before Coach dismissed everyone else.
Then, glancing up, she was suddenly reminded of exactly what she’d been thinking, since once again, she found herself questioning if she really could be awake.
Because the thin, pale person hobbling into the boys’ locker room on a pair of crutches could not possibly be who she thought it was.
15
Haunted
As the door to the boys’ locker room began to shut behind Brad, Isobel broke into a fast walk. She hurried down the corridor and stopped to catch the metal handle. Pulling it open again, she slipped silently inside, keeping her back pressed to the door as it eased into the jamb.
At first, she didn’t see anyone. But the metal click and squeak of a locker being opened told her he was close by.
Setting her coat and gym bag to one side, she stole forward, past a U-shaped section of blue lockers. Straight ahead, she noticed her reflection in a narrow full-length mirror affixed to the wall at the end of the aisle. It hung right next to a door that she knew must lead into the showers.
Isobel crept farther down the aisle, toward the sound of clanking and rustling, then stopped when she caught sight of him within the next alcove.
He stood with his back to her, scrounging in one of the blue metal cabinets.
BORGAN it read on the front of the door, which was open toward her, obscuring his head. Below his last name, the number twenty-one, his jersey number, stood out in bold yellow.
When he began pulling things out, padding and gear, Isobel thought that maybe she shouldn’t have been so quick to follow him in. It now felt as though she was intruding on some private rite, his time to detach.
She wondered if she should say something or make some kind of a noise to let him know she was there. Or should she just retrace her steps and duck out again?
Seeing him like this, so different, so changed, made it difficult for her to do anything but stare.
His once thick arms, corded with strong muscles that used to strain against the sleeves of his shirts, now looked more like thin tree branche
s poking out of the cuffs of his retro tee. He had on a baggy pair of crisp and new-looking dark-wash jeans, the left pant leg of which had been rolled up over a Trenton blue midthigh-to-ankle cast.
He worked at a slow pace, as if he were a robot teaching itself how to move.
A blue-and-gold jersey hit the floor while he tossed a plain white T-shirt onto the duffel bag that sat on the bench behind him.
Isobel’s gaze traveled down the length of his shrunken form, stopping to take in the thick cast coating his leg. There were no squiggly lines of black Sharpie where friends or teammates might have signed their names. Only clean, hardened bandages molded to the shape of his thigh, knee, and calf.
He stood with his weight on his right leg, his crutches propped against a pair of lockers at his side.
Whenever he began to teeter one way or the other, he would stop and place a hand against the wall of metal doors to catch himself.
Isobel fidgeted. She opened her mouth, then let it shut again. It felt wrong to stand and gawk without saying something, but what could she say?
She hesitated, then cleared her throat.
The sound made him pause, though he didn’t startle. Not until he turned his head.
When their eyes met, his body jarred as though shocked by a jolt of electricity. He stumbled backward, the lockers banging and clattering as he tumbled into them.
Isobel took a step toward him. “Sorry! I—”
“No!” He threw up a hand, palm out, fingers splayed.
His fear made her pull back.
“I—I didn’t mean to,” she stuttered, aiming a thumb over her shoulder. “I mean, I saw you—but I wasn’t—I just thought I’d—”
She realized she was babbling, so she stopped and took in a deep breath.
With no more meaningless words pouring out of her, Isobel found herself with nothing left to do but gape.
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His face, drawn, worn, and full of fright, seemed so altered from the face she remembered. His features, now gaunt and haunted-looking, no longer held their sharp and chiseled all-American boyishness. His eyes, too, had lost that piercing blue-diamond luster that could cut as much as convince. Along with the former beach-tan hue of his skin, their color had since faded, dulled to a slate-metal tone that reminded Isobel of steel bars.