But I could imagine what having someone like that would be like. I loved reading about partners in crime, about duos, about friends. Someone to watch your back and save you at the last second. That was what I wanted.
And then something magic happened: I watched a long shadow stretch and grow across my desk. I looked down under my desk at that shadow’s glossy black shoes, and I saw myself reflected in them. I looked up and saw a face I felt I already knew. I didn’t smile, but he did.
He doesn’t feel so tall now, but back then he felt like a giant. He was wearing a black suit and a clean white shirt. I felt like I’d seen his eyes before.
“You know, Sadie, I think we’re going to be the best of friends,” he said.
“How did you know my name?”
“I know everything about you. You’re the most fascinating person I’ve ever met.”
“Sadie!” the teacher snapped, and I realized I had been staring, mumbling to myself, totally zoned out in a daydream.
I felt all the potential in the world leaking out at the seams, and the whole universe going gray. When my person vanished, he took all the color with him back to where stories and dreams lived.
So that day in class when I closed my eyes I made a million wishes to no one. I wished for a person all my own, who would never leave me, who would understand. And when I opened my eyes, I imagined that the boy was there. I knew he was imaginary, but it didn’t matter.
“What is your name?” I asked, carefully keeping my face in the real world perfectly still. I didn’t move a muscle.
His mouth made a half-crooked smile that stretched into his eyes, across his face, and infected me. And for the first time in a long time, I really smiled.
“My name is George,” he said.
Nothing has been the same since.
“Cool,” Eleanor says when I’ve told her all that. “So cool.”
“I know,” I admit, because come on, how awesome is that image? I love living it, I love watching it, I even sometimes improve on it. The kids get meaner, my clothes get cuter, George gets more and more heroic.
In my heart of hearts, though, I know that’s not the first time George and I met. That’s just the first time he stayed.
I’d seen him once before. I had assembled him out of a disaster to save me. I don’t like remembering the real first time. But once I’m thinking about it, I can’t help it.
The sound of screeching tires. I am alone and then, above me, I see him.
I reach up into a sky full of stars, George’s white-gloved hand reaching down to me. Reaching up, up, our fingers touching—
“So it’s weird how easily you let him go,” Eleanor says. I shake off that other world.
“I didn’t let him go,” I say, confused.
“But you’ve been talking to Roberts. You’ve been cooperating. What do you think you’re doing?”
The scorn on her face cuts me. The pain is strangely grounding. My stomach turns, recoiling from the fact of it, like a wound I’ve opened up, stitches splitting.
I haven’t given him up yet, but I’ve given Roberts enough rope to hang me.
“You gave up pretty easily,” Eleanor says, shaking her head.
“It wasn’t easy at all. I’ve been here for almost a week.”
“I thought you were the kind they’d have to torture.” She runs her finger along the edge of one of her shark teeth. “Well, it doesn’t really matter. You’d already lost him anyway.”
Regret gnaws on my insides.
“What do you mean?”
“Have you been dreaming of George?”
“Of course not. It isn’t safe.”
“Right. Except, the thing is, even if you wanted to, I bet anything you couldn’t. Not now. I tried to warn you. They steal your dreams here.”
I roll my eyes.
“Metaphorically?”
“No. Literally.”
“They literally steal dreams. And how exactly is that possible?”
“Just try it,” Eleanor says. She raises her eyebrows in a challenge. “Try to go to George. Or bring him here…however you do it.”
“What? No, I can’t.”
“Come on! Don’t be shy.”
“No, I mean…it’s not like I can snap my fingers and do it.”
“So how do you do it?”
“I just…let my mind wander.”
“I want to see.”
I don’t like people to see, not when I’m really lost in George. I laugh, and I smile, and I move my hands and stuff. I move my lips without saying anything. But then I’ll get knocked out of the dream and I’ll be back in my room and so afraid that someone will catch me doing it.
I did get caught once back then. During recess, seventh grade, George and I were on an adventure. I thought I was being careful, but I must have been talking to myself. Some kids saw me.
“The crazy girl is talking to herself.”
“We should get a teacher.”
“No, she’s like…damaged. My mom told me so.”
“Yeah we’re supposed to be nice to her. Just leave her alone.”
That’s what they whispered about me. They didn’t think I heard them, but I did. “Don’t listen,” George told me. “You’re not damaged.” But it still hurt.
I told my mom about the kids making fun of me, thinking maybe I could just stay home forever. But all that happened was she called the school and I talked to a counselor. I didn’t tell Mom exactly why I had been talking to myself, I just said I’d been playing. The counselor asked a lot of questions about knowing the difference between real and pretend, about hearing voices, and seeing things. I didn’t even answer her after a while because I knew I was in trouble and I didn’t want to get in more trouble, so I just shut down and said nothing. People who seem nice can be trying to trick you.
So she referred me for special education testing. I heard her on the phone even though I was in the hall. I wanted to say I was sorry, and that I shouldn’t have said anything in the first place, and that I would be good and not weird anymore. George sat next to me in the office and told me to just stay quiet, it would all work out. I listened to him, and I didn’t let my mask slip once.
My parents came to the school the next day and talked to someone and I didn’t get tested and everything went back to normal.
I never got caught again.
But then, this is Eleanor.
She is staring at me expectantly.
“I don’t know if I can do it if you’re watching,” I tell her.
“So I’ll hide over here. You won’t even notice me. Don’t worry…I’ll make sure no one sees you. You can have a nice little supervised visit with George,” she says. “If you can find him, that is.”
The thought is appealing: sitting with him for a while where I can see him. Asking him how I’m doing, if my ruse is working, and hearing him tell me that it’s all going according to plan.
Without George, I feel like I can’t think. Without my daydreams I feel slow and stupid and gray. I know what he would say, of course, but sometimes he surprises me. And with George, even if I know it already, to actually feel it is such a relief.
“And you’ll tell me if anyone’s coming?” I ask.
“You can trust me.”
“Liar,” I say, hoping it will sound brave and interesting. She winks at me, then settles in out of my line of sight.
I pretend she isn’t there.
I let my eyes go loose on the real world.
I let my thoughts wander to George.
And I wait.
…I keep waiting.
The lines in the linoleum stay put, and the whir of machines and the air-conditioning do not evolve into grander stories.
Sometimes it takes a little more. A Portkey: one talisma
n of a story to get there in an instant. I think of George’s gun in my hand, his white gloves, the camellias he gave me in Rio. I stand there holding each of these, locked solidly on my side of reality. And still no George.
I feel a little panicky. Sometimes I can set up the story by thinking my way up to it. “Once upon a time, there was a wizard named George who discovered that he was a prince.” Or “The spy sat on the kitchen floor of the safe house stitching up his wounds.” But when I walk to the door of my many fantasies, I find them all bricked up and barred.
The clock counts its seconds, and they pile up into minutes. Fifteen minutes. And all I can think of is the floor and the time.
Finally I do something I have never had to do. I try to conjure George.
I imagine his hair, charcoal and unruly. His pale skin like a Greek statue robbed of garish color by time. That suit: the Tom Ford O’Connor in effortless black. And his eyes. Blue as the sea after a storm, like Eleanor said. Where is Eleanor? Still watching. I force myself not to think of her before my conjured George starts to fall apart.
I look him over: it isn’t right. This isn’t George. This is a sad, half-formed thing, thin as a dream. He feels like a paper doll where once there was a boy. This is thinking of George. This isn’t being with him. I abandon the golem and let it fall to dust.
“I can’t do it,” I say finally. “I don’t understand.”
“I told you,” Eleanor says, emerging and glancing around the room. She looks at the tray from breakfast, gazes into the water, pokes the crusty dish. She examines a little cup that was once full of painkillers and looks at me knowingly.
“What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I—”
“Shhh. It’s okay. You have to stay calm. They’ve already taken him from you.”
“What?”
“I knew you weren’t safe. I knew they’d do to you what they did to me.”
“What did they do to you?”
“I can’t go back. My spirits are gone. Yours are too.”
“No…,” I say, horror rising sour in my throat. “No, that’s not true. It’s just that I didn’t want to daydream while I was here, in case I got caught.”
“Trust me, you can’t anymore. They’ve already poisoned you. Soon it will be too late. Soon he’ll be gone forever.”
Forever? my mind echoes. It empties me of other thoughts.
No.
Never. I can’t accept that.
When the curtain comes up on all of our daydreams, George is always right there to take a bow and start over again. George never really dies. How would that even be possible? I’ve asked him before and he never gives me a straight answer. But what happens to a thought when you are not thinking it?
He’s not written down anywhere, not even in this journal. So, if I stopped thinking of him altogether, if I made myself forget, then he would really be gone. Thoughts are nothing if they go unremembered. They’re electricity. But I think of George all the time, so his spark is never out, and he never dies. He is living lightning in my brain. We can die a thousand deaths in dreams and start over the next day.
But if I ever forget and let someone put out that spark…then he’d vanish. He’d never have existed, because there’d be no trace of him left.
“What can I do?” I ask. Eleanor shakes her head.
She wraps her arms around me and for the first time since I arrived, I really cry. I cry the way I used to in my room when it seemed like the world was ending and I felt so alone, before I lost even the energy to cry.
“How far are you willing to go?” she asks. And though I don’t say it out loud, I know she has a secret that she wants to give up. A spy can sense these things. She knows something. She has already determined how far will get her home to her spirits. And I will have to make her tell me, whatever the cost, to get home to mine.
* * *
Roberts is here but I’m not listening to her because I am panicked over George. So good to see you wheeling yourself around these days. Isn’t there anything you want to tell me? Blah, blah, blah, blah, such great progress. I hear her like elevator music under my blinding panic. I keep saying the shortest thing possible because I really want to tell her to leave.
Finally she does and I wheel myself to the door and wait for the shark to arrive. I know she will come back as soon as the hallway clears. I watch. In the one still moment between parents and meds and checks and balloons, slippery as a villain, Eleanor makes her way down the hall to me. She’s like George: unpredictable in a predictable way.
She’s surprised to see me at the door.
“Are you going somewhere?” she asks. She sounds almost worried.
“No, I’m waiting for you.”
“Good. Don’t listen to what anyone out there says. They’re all against us.”
“Listen, I need to talk to you. About dreams.”
She smiles a toothy smile under the toothy smile of her shark hood. “So you believe me now. See, I was a dreamer too. That’s what they said about me. Well, now I’m a schizo paranoid manic depressive whatever. But I used to live in a dream.”
“Can I ask you something?” I say.
“Anything your heart desires. I speak only the truth.”
“When you hallucinate, do you feel like you’re hallucinating?”
“Is this about George?”
“Yes.”
“You said he’s not a hallucination.”
“But can something become a hallucination?”
“Sure. I don’t know. Why? Do you want him to be?”
I nod. “I have to see him. And I can’t get to him.”
“They poisoned you.”
“I know. I believe you.” I point to my untouched dinner.
Eleanor hesitates. For the first time, I see doubt in her eyes.
“What is it?” I ask.
“There is one way I know….”
“How? Eleanor, I miss him. I need to see him.”
“What a nice hallucination.”
“He’s not always nice.”
“Hot.”
“He gets angry sometimes,” I confess. “I don’t know how that’s possible. I don’t know what that means.”
“My parents never get angry. It’s because they don’t care,” she says.
I can remember the last time my parents really fought. That’s what caused the crash. They were fighting because—
I shake my head and the thoughts evaporate.
“Does your boyfriend get angry?” I ask.
“Sure. We had one fight where he broke my finger. Then I put him through a window and that was the end of that.”
I can imagine her in a beautiful dorm room, the way I imagine dorm rooms in boarding schools must look. Him stealing into her room and the fight they had. The way Eleanor smiles makes it so clear how much she loves him. The whole story of her life is in that smile. She looks at her hand like she loves the memory of it, how he fell out the window with a shocked little yelp.
“Imagination is a form of control,” Eleanor says. “I read that in a book once. Fantasy is control and that’s what makes it so satisfying.”
“Sure. But it’s only pretend.”
“Don’t you ever wonder if this isn’t the real world? If this one is the dream?”
“Don’t say that.” I shiver and she laughs like crazy.
“Why, because you believe me?”
“No, because it makes me sad because it isn’t true.”
She cuddles up next to me. Her hair is ticklish.
“Do you trust me?”
“No.”
“Well, nothing risked, nothing gained.”
She hunts around in her shark costume, zipping and unzipping pockets, digging deep into hidden layers. She reaches into the depths of her disguise and withdraws her fis
t, clenched tight. She holds it out to me.
I put my hand beneath hers. A tiny, nearly weightless thing drops into my palm. I look at it glinting there.
It is a razor wrapped safely in plastic.
“Some people call it cutting,” she says, her eyes still on the blade. “But cutting is such a dirty word. I prefer to think of it as enlightenment.”
My heart sinks. I look at her arms, with all their raised scars. Nausea wraps its dirty fingers around my stomach and climbs up my throat. Time slips off the clock and Eleanor becomes a series of slides, like in health class when they tell you not to do drugs. Slide one: just say no. Slide two: here’s what happens if you don’t.
I can’t tell which slide we are on.
“Eleanor, I can’t.”
“It won’t hurt. Not really. You just make the tiniest line. Do it when you’re alone, somewhere no one can see. If they catch you they won’t understand. If you want to get past the real, focused in like you’ve never been before, so thoroughly that you can see past the mundane and into that place we both know…this is how I get there. This is my door.”
This is completely insane. I’m not one of “those girls.” I don’t hurt myself, make myself throw up, cut myself. Those girls belong in here, in psych wards. That’s not me.
I hesitate. She runs her finger along the lines of her arm, looking sad and a little ashamed. She says: “I just need to feel something sometimes, you know?”
I bite my lip, terror climbing my spine and telling me not to listen. But I can’t help it, because I understand exactly what she means. And then I think of George and I don’t care anymore.
I know it’s stupid, and I know it’s dangerous, but none of that matters because I just want to feel something.
I know what’s coming for me. I’ll go to Truman State, like everyone I’m in high school with. I’ll have an okay job. I’ll be someone’s okay mom. I’ll be Henry’s okay wife if he doesn’t get tired of me when Brother Raja takes off. I’ll be okay. Everyone has always been okay.
And I want to be okay. But I also want to be with George. Because no matter what I do in my real life, it’ll never be magical like it is with him. Because where does magic live in this world except in dreams? How many movies and how many books have I lost myself in, just to get away from one more day of silence and math homework and matching socks? The magic is in making something feel real for a moment. Because nothing in my life ever feels real.
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