He took a seat on my bed, crossing his legs and folding his hands together under his chin, never once taking his eyes off me. “How so, stranger?”
I shrugged, trying to come up with a justification that wouldn’t sound entirely creepy. I really didn’t plan on having to explain myself to him, and I was never much good at doing stuff like that on the spot. “You’re mysterious, for one thing. You’re someone I’ve never met before who’s had me puzzled for two weeks now, and this is technically the first time we’re even speaking.”
He laughed a bit to himself at what I said. “Sorry about the silence,” he apologized. Still beaming, he extended a hand to me politely. “I’m Danny.”
Immediately, I hesitated, wanting to take his hand, but not knowing just how the parameters of touching him worked. “I’d love to shake your hand, but last time our skin touched, it woke me up.”
“Oh, right,” he replied, dropping his hand limply back to his lap. “Well, I’m flattered you’re doing me for your project. You’re very talented.” I blushed, sheepishly thanking him for his compliment. “How long have you been into this kind of thing?”
“Since preschool macaroni art, I guess,” I chuckled nervously, wildly unused to someone taking an interest in me. Being the quiet girl had earned me a reputation as something of a social pariah, so it wasn’t often that people bothered with getting to know me. “The ways the mind can see the world through art has always fascinated me.”
“Definitely. I don’t paint, but I’m something of an artist as well.”
Without thinking, I blurted, “Right, your band.”
Danny’s head popped up, his face etched with a sudden skepticism. “Yeah. I didn’t realize you recognized me from that.”
“My best friend saw the sketch I did to make sure I got everything right for the painting, and she insisted we try to figure out who you were. We both bought your albums when we managed to track you down.” I laughed, like it was somehow going to erase my embarrassing little faux pas. “I’m so sorry; that sounds really creepy when I put it like that. Like I said, it was her idea.”
His looked was puzzled, his eyes still buried in mine. I thought I said something really wrong, until he finally let out a deep, soft chuckle. “I don’t know how I feel about that, but I was going to tell you about the band if I ever got to see you again, anyway, so I think all is forgiven.”
“I’m glad we do get to see each other again, though,” I told him. “I’ve been sort of hoping you’d show up in my dream again.”
“I believe you’re in my dream, thank you,” he beamed at me. “I was content with nothingness, and all of a sudden, I was here.”
“Uh, yeah, you were here, in my bedroom, so I think I win.”
He chuckled, holding his hands up in mock surrender. “Fair enough.” The two of us laughed together for a moment. “There has to be a point to this, though. I’m one of the people who believes that everything happens for a reason,” he continued, his eyes alight with passion. “We didn’t just happen to collide here. There are over seven billion people in the world, and I’m wondering why, out of all of them, I got paired up with you.”
Defensive by nature, I halted, amazingly unsure of myself all at once. The eternal pessimist in me took his comment with a negative connotation, and I recoiled back inside of myself. “I’m sorry it was me?” I suggested, trying to say without saying outwardly that his sentiment had been misconstrued.
But, seamlessly, his smile returned. “I’m not sorry, though.” When he spoke again after a brief pause, his tone matched his now somewhat grim expression. “You know, sometimes, I worry that people only see me and the guys in the band as objects rather than as people, like our only purpose is to entertain. It’s kind of nice to have someone around to get to know me outside of all of that, for whatever the reason is that fate decided to pair us up.”
“I think I kind of get what you mean,” I told him.” People at school sort of forget I’m a person, too. I’ve always been the weird artsy girl, and that makes my classmates not like me too much, I guess. I get pushed around for being sort of awkward, and I think people have kind of forgotten that there’s a real girl in the shell that they pick on.”
“Not cool,” he blurted casually. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with you.”
“Well, thank you for saying that,” I smiled pathetically at him, trying not to wallow in my self-pity if I had someone in front of me ready to commiserate. “People overlook that we’re also people; they use us for their entertainment and don’t look any further than that. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I sort of get what you mean, and I’m more than willing to overlook the rock star in favor of the person.”
As I’d become convinced he liked to do, Danny kept his warm eyes on me for what felt like an eternity without saying a word. I felt like he was looking past all of my masks and seeing me for who I was, and although I normally hated feeling raw and exposed, I kind of enjoyed it. “I think I’d like that a lot.” With a smirk, he shuffled so he was lying beside me in bed, and I turned so I could see him better. “And I promise to do the same for you, so why don’t you start us off on this whole seeing-the-person thing by telling me what’s got you down?”
My defenses rose, and I asked, “How do you know I’m down about something?”
“I’m a musician – I have to feed off the emotions of the people around me and adjust myself accordingly. If people don’t like a show or a song, I have to be able to pick up on that without them telling me outwardly about it so I can change something so they have a good time. Besides, you’re not as hard to read as you might think.”
It’d been a while since someone had taken interest in what was going on in my life, and I was unfamiliar with the things I was feeling. “It’s a little much to share in our first actual conversation,” I replied, hoping my words wouldn’t make him rescind his offer to listen. “You have your own stuff going on, anyway; you don’t need the weight of my world on your shoulders.”
“I wouldn’t have offered if I wasn’t sincere,” he told me, trying to formulate his replies around my long-standing, self-constructed walls. “It’s almost time I get up, anyway – it’s the first day of tour, and I have a flight to catch. But I think I know how to find you now, so I’ll come back tomorrow, and you can tell me everything you feel comfortable telling me then, because it won’t be our first conversation anymore.”
“Fine,” I sighed. “I guess I’ll tell you everything tomorrow, then.”
“Not even everything, if you don’t want to do that; telling me anything would be nice. All I know about you is that you like making art. I don’t even know who you are.”
It was then that my alarm began to go off once again, this time with the music that I was used to. I told him with a playful smile as the world began to blur around us, though he remained perfectly in focus, “See you tomorrow, then.”
The next time I blinked, he was gone.
As I climbed out of bed, my canvas caught my eye, and Danny sat there like he’d never left at all, juxtaposed against the plain white background I’d almost forgotten about. After our dream, though, I had all of the pieces I needed to quickly finish the painting before I got dressed for school, opting to put off my shower until afterwards in the name of finalizing my piece. Grabbing for a few tubes of paint, I set to work on smearing them into the blank space around him.
Before long, I took a step back to admire the allegorical background I had given my new confidant. While he remained perfectly in focus, all of his edges crisp and precise, I’d done the background up in a blurry mess, the way things were when the dreams began to fade. Danny was at the center of all of the madness, and with him so crystal clear, you didn’t pay any mind to anything else happening around him.
I smirked at the painting, giving in and letting myself pretend he was still there. If nothing else, seeing him again that night was a wonderful reassurance that I’d gotten his enticingly coy, soothing grin down
just right.
Chapter Six
If I dropped out of high school and just sold paintings for a living, I think I’d do okay for myself. I wouldn’t be rich, probably, but I’d keep myself alive. Maybe I could run away to a big city and be one of those people that sits in parks or public spaces, makes art before the eyes of the passers-by, and sells it to them. They’d get the highly sought after indie cred of hanging an unknown painter’s pieces in their overpriced, big city apartments, and I’d get to eat for the day.
The thought of living day to day, hoping I’d be able to get by, was way more appealing to me than sitting in art class, surrounded by people I’d long regarded as utterly brain-dead. Since I began to rescind into myself back in middle school when everything started with my parents, most people in my grade had cast me out. Most of them just sort of ignored me, but the higher-ups on the social food chain sometimes liked to pick at me for sport. Sometimes, I wondered what it would be like to be one of them. What would it be like to party on weekends, to talk to cute boys and giggle about it later with my girls, to be with other people just because I could? What would it be like to make fun of people like me?
“Ashley?” Mr. Protoccelli asked. He was tall and stout, and balding too soon in his early thirties. He buzzed off what was left of his hair in an attempt to hide how much he was losing, and it somehow made him look even more like a tragic art cliché. He’d dreamed of being a sculptor, but since this isn’t the renaissance and they’re not really hiring in that field nowadays, he opted to become a high school teacher. This way, he could at least get his hands dirty with the things that he loved, so he could still dabble in his passions without letting reality bog him down too much. He smiled at me, wiggling the tongue depressor with my name on it, pulled from the cup of them that he used to decide who was presenting in random order. “You’re up.”
It was almost the weekend, and I was almost home free for a few days, so the thought of presenting to my terminally bored classmates felt wildly unappealing. Besides, having people watching me, noticing my every move did nothing but make me anxious. There was no simple way for me to say, “This is Danny Chatman and he visits me in my sleep sometimes and it makes me happy,” without sounding like a lunatic, but I had only come to realize that once I finished the project. I should have just painted my mother, like I originally planned; she’d have been easier to explain.
But, I’d made my bed, and it was time to find the least awkward way to lie in it. As I made my way to the front of the room and set my canvas on the easel we used to display our work, my classmates flickered their eyes from me to the piece and back to me again. Painted Danny wasn’t going to tell them anything about who he was – that was a job he had left to me.
“Uh,” I stammered, trying to make words come out and failing miserably. “As you can see, I like painting my portraits, and I did one of Danny Chatman.”
Knowing well by now how poorly I did with public speaking, Protoccelli threw me a bone to try to coax something out of me. “Could you explain who he is?”
“He’s the singer of some band my sister listens to,” the kid who sat behind me blurted. His name was Ben Oaks, and he was one of the school’s social elite who found joy in his day-to-day life in trying to rob me of mine. He and his power posse were in the class as an easy elective and barely managed to care about it at all. His dull eyes locked onto me, challenging me before his words did. “I just want to know why Ashley chose him.” He kicked his feet up onto his group’s table and grabbed the hand of the girl next to him – Jenna, his dunderheaded girlfriend – and she stared at him with vacant puppy eyes. “You know this will be good.”
Protoccelli also knew that I didn’t really get along with my classmates, so he spoke again, trying his best to help me out. “Well, now that Ben has so kindly told us who he is, why don’t you tell us why you went with him for your subject?”
I could so easily have made something up. I could have just said I liked the band and I just decided to paint their singer. I could have pretended I just found him to be uniquely attractive. None of it would have been a lie, and any of it would have been better than what my anxious brain went with. With the scrutiny of my classmates and the pressure of trying to fend off Ben and his clique, I cracked under the leaden weight of the spotlight and started talking before I could register my words. “I keep having these dreams about him, and in those dreams, he and I are really relaxed. Everything is good while we’re asleep, and I like how it all makes me feel. He’s something solid in my crazy, whirlwind, fluid kind of world, and he’s just what I needed to start feeling okay again.”
Once it was out of my mouth, the entire room remained silent, until Ben started to crack up, and then it spread like wildfire. Within moments, it had swept across the room like a plague, and every single one of my classmates was snickering at my social flub. I could feel myself turning every shade of red, the heat of embarrassment extending from the crown of my head and down to the ends of my toes. As badly as I wanted to reach back into the atmosphere, pull my unfiltered feelings back into myself, and lock them safely inside again, I couldn’t.
Usually, when I manage to humiliate myself, I feel like I’ve grown roots that extend to the core of the earth, planting me firmly in place, unable to escape the ridicule. However, that day, something was different – my entire body felt light and airy, like I was at risk of floating away. Thus, without thinking too much about it and desperate to get away from everyone, I grabbed my canvas and school bag and let the drifting commence, going as fast and far as my feet would take me.
They carried me out the door of the classroom, down the main stairwell of the school, past the woman at the greeter’s desk yelling for me to come back, through the double-doors at the front of the building, and out onto the sidewalk. From there, the world was a blur of streets and faces until the pavement gave way to dirt, which soon transitioned to grass. When I finally caught my bearings and stopped to catch my breath and try to calm down, I had run all the way to the meadow, my routine hiding spot when hiding was all I wanted to do.
Exhausted from sprinting, not much of a runner under normal circumstances, I dropped my stuff into the grass and let my tired body follow. I shut my eyes and did my best to try and relax, to come down off the accidental high of fight or flight. Sure, I’d have to face them all again on Monday, but that was a problem for me to figure out later. In that moment, I was safe and carefree.
When I went to roll over onto my back, my eyes shot open when I expected to hit the ground, but instead hit something almost as solid, vibrant warmth shooting through the impact site. “Careful how you move right now,” a familiar voice said to me, lighting my kindred spirit ablaze. “I don’t know how much we can or can’t touch each other, and your back is against the part of my arm that my t-shirt isn’t covering.”
I stared at Danny for a second, unaware that I’d fallen asleep in my exhaustion. He was in a seated position, looking not at me but rather into the distance, searching the tree line for nothing in particular. His expression was neutral, his demeanor calm.
He turned to look down at me after a moment, waiting for me to say something. “You look funny upside down,” I told him bluntly, hoping he wouldn’t remember that I’d agreed to talk to him about my life the next time we spoke, “and I think you have something in your nose.”
It was like he could read my mind, though, tune right into my motives. “Well, tell me something about yourself, and I’ll see to it that that changes.”
But I wouldn’t go down without a fight. “You first. Hop to it.”
He fumbled around with his free hand, finding a dead leaf in the grass beside himself. He raised it to his face and blew, the loud echo of it filling our somewhat vast expanse of nothing, and once he was finished, he folded the leaf and tossed it away before looking back down to me expectantly. “Your turn – tell me about yourself, big or small. Anything is a start; literally just your name would be more than I already know about you.
”
I sighed, nervous, somehow, to tell him anything about myself. “We can start there, then. My name is Ashley Dawson.”
Danny locked his eyes onto mine, calm expression unchanged for what felt like forever. Finally, he said with a brisk smile, “I don’t know if I’m annoyed that you took me literally, or happy that you gave me anything at all.”
I stared intently at the different sort of angle I had of him from my spot at his side, the dull sunlight shining on him in an almost heavenly way. “I’d go with happy,” I told him. “Don’t give me any sort of way out of a conversation, because I will take it.”
“That’s one question I had,” he said, moving his eyes away again, his interest in the trees rekindled. “Is it me that makes you not trust me? My feelings won’t be hurt, but I just want to know if it’s something I said or did.”
Coming to terms with the fact that he’d probably not do much looking at me if I remained where I was, leaning on him at an awkward, sideways angle, I sat up so he could readjust, and he looked me in the eyes once more. “It sounds like a cliché from a terrible movie,” I smirked, “but it’s really not you at all, I promise. How standoffish I am is all on me.”
He was silent for just a second before beginning to snicker. “I mean, you’re the one who said it was a bad cliché, not me.”
“I always thought it was a line bitchy girls use to get out of relationships scot-free, but it’s true,” I replied, trying to talk my way out of the hole I was beginning to dig for myself. “It’s a little you, and a little me.”
His eyebrows knitted, and the pretty smile on his face smoothed out into an air of seriousness. “Well, is there something I can do to make it so it’s not a little me?”
“Don’t be a person,” I suggested sarcastically with a blasé shrug. “I have a bad history with those.”
Danny scrunched his face in contemplation before looking to me once again. “If I told you that I’m actually an alien, and that this person suit and the band and everything is just a clever disguise, would you buy it, or are we too far into whatever this is now for me to backpedal like that?”
Lucid Page 4