I ultimately decided on trying to capture the soft, gentle smile he’d offered me when we sat down at our table at The Bistro together, the light of it reaching up into his eyes and illuminating them with an indescribable brightness. He was a unique kind of beautiful, and something told me he knew it, which translated to a fun blend of both coyness and pride in his attitude and his expression. I kept all these things in mind, and before too long, he stared back up at me from the page on which I’d drawn him. Contented with his face, I began to give him his body, making sure to include that belt buckle of his, in case it meant something.
A figure stepped into my light as I polished the shadowing, and I was delighted to find that it was only Ellie, examining my work. I plucked my headphones from my ears so that I could properly hear her, and she asked with a smirk, “Who’s the eye-candy?”
As the rest of the kids began to leave the room, the school day officially over, I tried to divert my eyes, contemplating what to tell her. “I honestly don’t know,” I admitted as I began to pack up my belongings. “If I tell you what I know, you’ll think I’m nuts.”
Before I could put my sketchbook into my backpack, Ellie snatched it off my desk so she could pour over every detail. “Well, I’m already fairly sure of that, so try me.” She chuckled to herself, continuing to look over my sketch. “If there’s a new guy in your life, as your resident best friend, I’d love to know about it. We are high school girls, and high school girls gush about boys, and you’re not exactly the most flirtatious person I’ve ever known. I’d especially like to know if he has any friends who look similar to him, because,” she pointed to the sketch’s face, “Ellie likes. Ellie likes very much.”
I tugged my book out of her hands and closed it before putting it away. “What about Josh?’ I inquired, hoping to distract her. Josh Walker attended school in Corsica, the next district over, and had been Ellie’s boyfriend since we met him at the mall the summer before our freshman year. At first, I was jealous of their relationship, never having been in one myself, but it had since gone steeply downhill. He had not one pleasant quality about him, and Ellie admitted that she knew this to be true. I think she dated him more out of habit than out of feeling, because gritting her teeth through everything about him was somehow easier than starting fresh with someone else.
“Trying to distract me will not work.” Her grin and tone were both playful, and she nudged me on the arm, bracing herself against the chill as we made our way out of the building to begin our walk home. “Bringing up my loser boyfriend and hiding that sketch will not make me forget your mystery man.”
“Fine,” I heaved, nervous about diving in and explaining all of this weirdness to her, but she was my best friend, and if I couldn’t trust her, then who could I trust with my secrets?
Ellie stayed silent for a moment when I was finished so she could properly absorb all the odd details of what I’d told her. “I know your life is usually kind of rough, Ashley, but there are times I wish I were you,” she snickered. “You dreamed of a hot stranger courting you like a proper gentleman. I dreamed Josh and I got Chinese food, and ate it silently while we watched unfunny sitcom reruns from the 90s.” I rolled my eyes, aware that her love of veggie fried rice was probably one of the only things that outweighed her distaste for her boyfriend. “I’ve heard of stuff like that before, though. You’re asleep, but you still control everything – it’s called lucid dreaming. Sometimes people see other people, so maybe he is a real person and not just some steamy creation of your bored, lonely little mind.”
I replied as we turned down her street, “I have no clue. All I know about him is that he’s worn that DC belt buckle both times I saw him, and that I can’t get him out of my head.”
“Maybe the DC means something to him. Or, maybe he just really likes comic book heroes; you know how boys are.” I laughed as we paced up the stone walkway to her house. It was one of the few places that had served as a getaway when no part of me wanted to be at home, so she often let me go to her house to hang out when she didn’t have to be to work after school. She worked part-time in a cookie shop in the mall, and the days she had to be there were my least favorite, because it meant I had to go right home. “At least it’s a start. You can’t very well type, ‘hot guy I dreamed about’ into Google and expect it to come up with anything relevant.” Her eyes lit up in the way they did when she came up with an idea she planned to rope me into, whether I wanted to take part or not. “That’s it! Google knows, like, everything, so we might be able to find him!”
She threw herself down into the office chair in her bedroom as I nudged her oversized beanbag toward the desk so I could join her. I confessed as she brought her dated desktop computer to life, “This might all be for naught. Even if it’s real, it’s super crazy; I really should just try to forget about it.”
“Well, I, for one, will not rest until we’re sure,” she said without looking at me, pulling up her browser. Ellie began to mutter to herself as she searched the web for "DC" and scrolled through the results. “The District of Columbia, comic books, tourist things to do on your exciting visit to Our Nation’s Capitol, something in another language, and lottery numbers for Washington.” She turned back to me with a dejected expression, taking the loss surprisingly hard. “What else do you know about him?”
“Try ‘DC belt buckle’?” I almost asked more than suggested. “I mean, nothing ventured, nothing gained.”
With a slightly disapproving look, she typed in the phrase. A myriad of things returned, mostly online shops selling comic book merchandise, but nothing looked like what I was trying to find. She asked, “Something else?”
“There is nothing else, Ellie,” I moaned miserably, throwing myself back hard into the beanbag chair and letting myself slump downward. “He must not be real. I must have made him up.”
“He’s just got a taste for something with commercial initials; this isn’t hopeless.” Ellie never liked to give up before she was absolutely certain she’d exhausted every possible lead. It applied to everything she did – homework, personal achievements, and, apparently, even finding my stranger. “Give me something else, woman. Anything at all is better than nothing.”
We tried everything I could think of, which included pairing the initials with Julian’s restaurant, the color of his eyes, and I even convinced her to check obituaries. Still, though, he remained an enigma, and I was losing hope fast.
“If I see him in my dreams again, I’ll just have to ask him who the hell he is,” I conceded, my tone as dim as my prospects of finding him on my own. “It looks pretty pointless until then.”
“Well, I’m not stopping just because you’ve become a Negative Nancy about all of this. Keep trying. There has to be something you’re missing,” she encouraged. My only retort, growing tired of the fruitless endeavor, was a deep sigh. “Does he have any tattoos or piercings, anything that would make him stand out?” I shook my head, not recalling anything of the sort. “The belt he wears the buckle on, is that just as distinctive?”
I shot up and lurched toward her, a smile on my face, life breathed back into my sense of hope. “It had letters on it!”
“Letters have a sneaky tendency to make up words sometimes, so think hard.”
I had barely registered them when he turned to go get the paper so he could silently ask me to dance with him that night we were at The Bistro. Slowly, I made myself focus. “I think it might have said, ‘disappear’.”
Ellie turned to me again, her expression a bit perplexed. “What’s that all about?”
Shrugging and unbothered by her expression, I could only smile. She’d been trying to find out everything I knew, so she had no real right to be choosy about what I could remember. “I don’t know, but try it.” I smirked, eating up the chance to use her words against her. “You said you wouldn’t give up until we ran out of leads, and this looks to me like another lead.” Unable to fight me, she silently faced her computer again and typed in the phrase �
�DC disappear”, sifting through the results it came back with.
I felt every single muscle in my body go completely rigid when she opened the third website on the list of links, and a banner appeared across the top of the page. It was a photo of five guys, all about the same age yet all completely distinct, and the one in the middle looked precisely like the stranger.
Ellie made the connection at the same time I did, and she reached for my school bag to fish out my sketchbook, flipping to the page with my drawing and holding it up to the screen. Side by side, their semblance was impossible to deny. “Ashley, that looks exactly like this kid.”
“It does,” I admitted, trying to contain myself, lest it be a strange coincidence.
She scrolled down the page, coming to a section of five individual photos, each with a name at the bottom, and she read them all aloud to me. She paused for a second before the final member of the quintet, turning to me with a proud, devilish smile. “This one says, ‘Click here to read more about Danny Chatman’. Danny Chatman – DC!”
Without waiting for my reaction, she clicked the link. A large, full-size photo of the stranger wearing the same smirk he had on in my drawing loaded on the screen.
“Oh my god,” I uttered, staring in wild disbelief as Ellie took the liberty of scrolling through the information on the page as I tried to process everything. He was real, an actual human being who existed someplace in the world. The elation of knowing that overshadowed the task of trying to find him, for the moment.
“Dude,” my friend uttered to me, voice teeming with excitement, “the blog this is on is for Tragic Magic, his band that is apparently starting to get some serious attention.” She turned to me again. “Your dude is not only hot, but he’s also a rock star. I’ve got clean panties in my top dresser drawer that you can borrow until you get home, if you need to change yours.”
I kicked her chair playfully, what she implied sinking in, and she laughed at herself. “If he’s in a band, try to find their music, then. I want to check it out.”
She typed the bands name into the search bar, now that we were confident we had found him for real, clicking the first link that it came up with, leading us to a video. The website announced that it had been put online only a month and a half ago, and had already racked up hundreds of thousands of hits. The song that played was a blend of pop rock and lighthearted indie music, and while it was a bit more upbeat than I usually preferred, I found myself enjoying it, subconsciously tapping my foot with the beat.
If there remained any doubt in my mind that Danny Chatman, the singer of Tragic Magic, was my stranger, I felt it vanish immediately when Ellie brought up the next video in the playlist they had set up on their account for easy access. Stage lights glinted brightly off the DC belt buckle I had become so familiar with, and “Disappear” – the title of the song and the album from which it came – stretched all the way around the blackened leather of the belt he’d worn it with.
When the playlist was finished entirely, Ellie and I turned to one another, smiling from ear to ear. It was perfectly obvious to us in that moment that we had solved the mystery through enough laborious, crazy Google searches. Danny Chatman was a real person, and I had some sort of inexplicable connection to him.
The only things left to figure out were how he ended up in my dreams, and if he would ever make his way there again.
Chapter Five
The music bellowed from my clock/radio, filling my room with atmosphere as I stood before my easel the following night. Ellie was at work, my father wasn’t home, and Mum was feeling well enough to be in the kitchen baking, giving me ample time to work on my project for Mr. Protoccelli’s portrait assignment.
The soundtrack to my evening was Tragic Magic, teasing me wonderfully with memory. As Danny brought life to my bedroom, I brought him to life on my canvas, painting the finishing touches of his outfit before I promised to set myself to work on figuring out something for a background, lest I leave him as a body floating in blank space.
Danny. The name felt so strange in my mouth, almost wrong. Calling him by his actual name felt so personal, like I was beginning to forge some attachment to him. He hadn’t shown up again since the night at The Bistro, which led me to believe that I was merely engrossed in a long, bizarre fantasy, and my only souvenirs were a couple of (really good) albums. Maybe I had seen him someplace without realizing it, someplace online since his band was somewhat close to what I listen to, and had crafted him into my dreams when I subconsciously didn’t want to be lonely. It made a lot more sense than the working theory that I had some bizarre, cosmic connection to a musician from Philadelphia I wasn’t at all familiar with until he was sleeping next to me in a field.
“Knock-knock,” I barely heard over the music as I took a step back, trying to decide what I wanted to do for Danny’s background. I tore my eyes away and turned toward the door, where Mum stood with a gentle smile and a plate of chocolate chip cookies. “Roger isn’t home and I wanted somethin’ sweet.” I couldn’t help but to notice her noticing my project as she let herself into the room and passed me the fresh, warm treats. Taking a seat at the foot of my bed, she motioned to my painting. “That for your art project?” I nodded, munching on my much-appreciated snack. “Who is that?”
Smirking, I announced, “The guy singing right now.”
Mum liked to stay in the loop, living her life a bit vicariously through me. Her family was all still back in England, staying there when she moved to New York with my father, and her cancer had forced her to quit her job a few years back. A social life was a little hard to keep up when you’re constantly tired from eradiating your body in the hopes it’ll keep you alive. “What band is this? I don’t think I’ve heard you listen to them before. Your birthday is less than two months away, Love, so give me some ideas.”
For a moment, I contemplated telling her everything, but opted for the more minute details. Mum already worried enough about my well-being; I didn’t need her thinking I’d fallen off my rocker. “I must have seen the singer someplace and had a dream about him the other night, so I sketched him up for my project, and Ellie saw it yesterday at school. We did a little research and found the band. We’re both all about these guys right now.”
She looked at me like I’d gone insane, my attempt to keep her somewhat in the dark clearly in vain. “And what’s so special about him?”
“The dreams are what’s special,” I told her, trailing off momentarily to try to find the right words. “I remember it so vividly. Him and I were just slow-dancing together, and it was so peaceful, and any sense of relief is kind of special to me nowadays.”
Mum sat still and searched my eyes, looking for something within them that I couldn’t quite pick out. Finally, she smiled again. “Well, it’s a little weird, Love, but if you’re happy, I’m not goin’ to stop you in the long run, but I will have to stop you for tonight. It’s gettin’ to be late, so you should be headin’ to bed soon, yeah?”
As much as I wanted to continue to delve into my fantasy and soak in as much as I could, she had a point about the time, because my alarm would be going off at 6:15 no matter when I went to bed. I found myself almost anticipating bedtime since the dream at The Bistro, haunted by the bittersweet possibility of maybe getting to see Danny. I didn’t know whether he’d ever show up again, but the only way to figure it out was to sleep.
I offered Mum a goodnight hug and shut the door behind her as she made her way back downstairs. Quickly, I silenced my music, readied for bed, and tucked my paints away for the night, swearing to finish the background of the painting before I left for school in the morning. For what felt like an eternity, I lay there staring at the inside of my eyelids, begging for sleep.
And that was when the incessant beeping started.
Alarmed at the sudden noise, I bolted upright. It sounded an awful lot like our fire alarm, and if I could avoid dying, I’d like to. Instead of the flames and smoke I somewhat expected, I took notice of a person
in my bedroom, their back to me, facing my easel. The number on my clock flashed 12:47 in angry red, and I realized that it was the source of the horrific noise. It’d been so long since I’d used the clock’s default alarm that I’d forgotten what it sounded like, immediately reminded of why I purposely left my school alarm set for one of my favorite songs instead.
“Sorry,” the person said to me, looking over my painting without turning to face me. “I couldn’t think of another way to wake you up.”
I rubbed my eyes groggily. “Who are you? What are you doing?”
As soon as he turned around, my sleepiness was washed away as I felt something wonderful erupt inside of me. It was as though my canvas had ejected its subject into my bedroom, and Danny stood before me as a real human being. He smirked at me the same way he was in the painting, and he hitched his thumb over his shoulder back toward it. “It looks like you already know who I am.”
“I, uh,” I stammered, tripping over my words entirely. I hadn’t exactly planned for him to see my painting, sure that it would be amazingly weird if a random girl in a dream was obsessively smearing his likeness onto canvas. “I have to do a project for art class to show off what I know about portraits.”
At the same time his lips parted to give way to a smile, his eyebrows sunk together. “And I intrigue you enough to make the cut over everyone else you know?”
“You do,” I replied, my tone like I was entrapped in a daydream – or in a normal dream – or in an in-dream dream – whatever it was that I was experiencing with him.
Lucid Page 3