Sleeper

by MacKenzie Cadenhead

  I sense her step away from my body. A moment later, metal clangs across the room.

  “Hey, wait a second,” Josh says. “You never said anything about this.”

  The panic may start as his, but it instantly becomes mine as an unseen hand shoves my head to the side and grabs a section of my hair at the nape of my neck.

  Internally, I cry out. Externally, I lay there, dumb and defenseless, my jugular served up on a platter. Gigi twists the hair around her fist, pulling it taught from the roots, and in one swift motion—

  Slice.

  My head releases as her hold on me disappears, along with a chunk of my hair.

  “Okay,” she says with all the perkiness of a bubblegum cheerleader. “We can go now.”

  Josh scrambles to my side and covers the shorter section underneath with the hair that remains on top. He turns my head forward and props it slightly with a pillow. My half sight fixes on the cracked grout again as the smell of clove blows over me. Then the door opens, and Josh and Gigi walk out.

  I don’t know how long I spend locked in my body, unable to move, unable to scream. I’m suspended between utter panic that I’ll never again feel my limbs or that Gigi will return for another (possibly literal) pound of flesh and yoga-breathing calm, chanting Dream Wes’s last words to me like a mantra—You will wake up in the morning. Even if my frozen body would allow it, I’m not sure if I should laugh or cry that my only comfort comes from a figment of my imagination. The Dexid’s frying my brain like those eggs on drugs, creating such real unrealities that some slightly insane part of me is beginning to wish the stuff with Wes and Grady was real and that this was the dream. Anything other than Gigi and Josh in my room. Anything not to be so terrified and alone.

  Eventually, I start to feel tiny sensations in my fingers and toes. Then tingling in my thighs and across my shoulders. By the time Ralphie enters in the morning, I’m able to blink my eyes, and I’ve regained feeling in most of my body.

  “Morning, Sleeping Beauty,” he says as he holds out a cup of water. “How’d you sleep?”

  I’m up on my feet and out of bed. I grab the water and gulp it down too fast. I double over as my body convulses in a coughing fit. My still sleepy legs cramp beneath the weight of what feels like a thousand needle pricks. I collapse back onto my cot.

  To say that Ralphie looks distressed is an understatement. But I honestly don’t care. What is his empathetic discomfort compared to my tale of spontaneous paralysis, middle-of-the-night assault, and body-snatching dreams so real that I wonder if they’ve actually occurred?

  My coughing fit dies down, and I open my mouth so that all the words can just tumble out, when the door to my room flies open, and a familiar, green-eyed boy dressed in plaid pajamas bursts in.

  “This is my bed!” Wes Nolan hollers as he stumbles across the room and collapses onto me.

  Before I can even twitch, his lips are at my ear. “Don’t tell them anything. Not the paralysis, not the dreams,” he whispers so only I can hear. “Meet me at the West Gate.”

  Even if I had the mental capacity to react, Ralphie’s on top of Wes and pulling him away from me in a flash. “What the hell, Josh?” he bellows at his nephew standing in the doorway.

  “He was already up when I opened the door, totally took me by surprise,” Josh pleads. “He’s delirious.”

  Ralphie shoves Wes into Josh. “Get him back to his room, and don’t you dare let this happen again.”

  Josh shoots me a totally BS apologetic look that I would have spat back in his face less than thirty seconds ago, but now I just ignore. After Wes’s whispered confession, I can do nothing but sit and watch, dumbfounded, as Josh ushers my literal dream guy into the hallway.

  Ralphie kneels beside my bed.

  “Sarah, I am so sorry,” he says, his voice sounding far away. “I promise everything will be under control by the time you come in tonight.”

  I blink twice, then shift my gaze to my tech who, despite his sincerity, will most surely have nothing under control. Not by tonight. Not ever. How can he repair a world that’s just fallen off its axis?

  “I need to go,” I say, my wits returning, my mind swimming.

  “I don’t know if—”

  I give him a look that must say I mean business, because he falls uncharacteristically silent. I stand, and he watches as I head to the bathroom to shower and dress. When I look back at him, he smiles and says, “Okay, we’ll debrief tonight. And I promise: no more patients barging in on your beauty rest!”

  While Ralphie’s attempt at joviality is a testament to his kindness, it only highlights how utterly insufficient he is. It’s not that I’m just no longer in Kansas. The Emerald City has declared Technicolor war on my black-and-white life. And there’s only one person to see—the wizard, who’s waiting for me at the West Gate.

  Chapter Eleven

  The light drizzle that greets me as I leave the clinic gives way to thunderstorms and horizontal sheets of rain. Though I’ve made it to school on time this morning, the Quad is virtually empty. I pass a pair of girls huddled together under a Monet umbrella and clock a sprinter holding his backpack over his head. Other than them, no one’s around to note my suspicious dismissal of the closer main entrance in favor of the West Gate.

  Huddled inside the semiprotectiveness of a hooded parka, I jog around the perimeter of my school. As I round the science hall, my pulse quickens, and I pick up the pace, racing to the covered portico.

  Wes is waiting for me.

  I pull off my hood. I’m still dripping, streams of raindrops cascading down my face, but I don’t wipe them away. Instead, I hard-charge Wes, my finger jabbing the air that surrounds his chest. “What the hell is going on?” I blurt, my voice sharp and full of displaced anger.

  He says nothing, just holds out his palm—and a folded piece of paper. I snatch it from him and read.

  Ginger kid. Carnival dream. Chased by Burners through funhouse. Captured in maze of mirrors. Paralysis lockdown for at least two hours.

  I look from the paper to Wes, my hands shaking.

  “Same dream?” he asks steadily.

  All the intensity in my voice dissipates, leaving only a whisper. “You were trapped between two Burners in the fair games.”

  “I was hiding—”

  “In the dime pitch.”

  We watch each other, speechless, the beating rain on the roof only serving to highlight the silence. It’s one thing to quietly wonder if your reality has turned on its head, but it’s something else entirely to have your absurd suspicions confirmed. Suddenly, I’m tired. Exhausted. I slump against the building and slide down the damp concrete.

  “Is it possible? Are we really sharing the same dream?” I ask, staring at the wet ground.

  “Seems like it,” he replies and squats beside me.

  I sense his eyes heavy on me but can’t bring myself to look up at his face. “You’ve known…”

  “Since you mentioned Gigi and the deer.”

  His voice lacks any intonation that might give me a clue as to how he’s handling this glitch in the matrix. I, on the other hand, feel exposed, barely stitched together by my skin. His poise feels like a direct challenge.

  “And you didn’t think it was a good idea to mention it then?” I glare up at him. “Maybe we could have told someone, stopped this from happening.”

  Wes shakes his head. “Told them what? That we’re sharing the same consciousness when we sleep? That’s sure to keep us out of the mental asylum.”

  “But the techs, the doctors.”

  “Will think we’re nuts. And that’s if we’re lucky. If they actually did believe what we were saying?” He scoffs, the sound both cruel and condescending. “Best case scenario, they’d ask our parents’ permission before they started experimenting on us.” His hands clench in white-knuckled fists. “I, for one,
am done with that.”

  Despite his height and prowess, Wes suddenly looks small. He takes a deep breath, shakes out his hands, and runs his palms across his forehead. Then he says, barely loud enough for me to hear over the rain, “I didn’t say anything because I was afraid you’d tell.”

  He falls silent. It’s a considered quiet, the kind you don’t interrupt. So I wait. After a while, he looks at me and says, “I was eleven when I started acting out my dreams while I slept. My mother’s super religious and couldn’t handle life with the demon that was possessing her son. I’d smash all her plates at two in the morning or open all the windows in the middle of January because I dreamt I was a fireman evacuating a building. So my stepfather started sending me anywhere that would study me. By the time I was thirteen, I’d already been in a handful of studies at clinics across the country.” He takes a deep breath before adding, “It was trial number five that sent me into a coma.”

  “What?” I gasp.

  “Experimental drug called Sonambulum. I was unconscious for two hundred and seventy-eight days.” He laughs humorlessly. “Ironically, my body didn’t move once when I was in that coma, but I remember it.”

  “You were awake?” I ask.

  He shakes his head. “Not exactly. Sometimes, I felt aware that people were around me, but I could never make contact with them. Never touch them or speak to them.”

  I think of the temporary locked-in syndrome I’d experienced the night before and shudder. “Was it like with the Burners?” I ask.

  “No,” he says definitively. “I’d take the Burners any day to this. At least I know that ends. The coma was just a void. I was alone, with only the occasional hint of other people around.” His mouth tightens into a frown. “Do you know what it’s like to be alone? I don’t mean lonely but actually without anyone?”

  I look down at the pavement.

  “It sucks, like, for real,” he says. “So when I woke up, I did everything I could to not be alone ever again. I tried to have a good relationship with my parents, to do well in school, whatever it took.”

  This part of the story I know all too well. Equilibrium is only ever tenuous for our kind. I regard the angsty loner before me and ask, “And how’d that work out for you?”

  Wes smiles. “For about two months, I was okay. Then one night, I woke up standing over the stove, gas burners on high, flames out. One week later, I was enrolled in a boarding school that just happened to be a mile away from a sleep clinic where I’d get to spend the night whenever the doctors wanted.”

  “So all the schools you went to?”

  “I’d get myself kicked out, hoping dear old stepdad would run out of trials to sign me up for. But he’d always find another school willing to take his money—and another clinic nearby.”

  “Wes, I am so sorry.”

  He winces. “I’m not looking for pity. I’m just trying to get you to understand why we can’t tell anyone what’s going on. I’ve been experimented on for a lot of my life. I lost the better part of a year because of some crap drug that never should have been given to anyone, let alone a kid, and I’m still being forced into trials. Now I’ve finally found a drug that works, and I’ve got no intention of missing out on it.”

  “Works?” I ask. “Last night, I was paralyzed after some crazy weird, really realistic stuff happened in my dream—a dream I shared with another person. I don’t think I’d classify that as the definition of success.”

  Wes cocks an eyebrow. “Crazy weird bad or crazy weird not-actually-so-terrible?”

  I stare at him. Is he really ignoring the insane revelation of our shared unconsciousness so he can flirt?

  “I’ll grant you the Burner part sucks,” he continues. “But the rest?” He reaches his hand out to tuck a loose strand of hair behind my ear. I’m transported to our near kiss at the funhouse, and I blush. “Tell me it wasn’t nice to have someone in your corner for once. To not be so utterly alone. Tell me we didn’t have a good time.”

  “Maybe,” I offer as I try and fail to suppress a smile. The wind picks up, and chilly rain sprays onto my face, providing the cold shower I need. “But this isn’t normal,” I declare. “We aren’t meant to be in each other’s dreams.”

  “Yeah, well, we aren’t meant to be acting out our dreams when we sleep either. But we do.” He positions himself in front of me and takes my hands in his. “I thought I was alone, Sarah. That no one in the world would ever understand what I was going through. But now there’s you. There’s two of us.” His eyes flicker. “We were made different, and we’ve been punished for it our whole lives, haven’t we? How old were you the first time you physically hurt your parents after you crawled into their bed? How long did it take to figure out they were actually afraid of you?”

  His light touch hardens, and he twists my wrists to face up. “When did you start applying makeup to cover the bruises that your restraints left behind? Did you hate summer and short sleeves? Were you relieved every October when your sweatshirts could help you hide the truth?”

  I pull my hands back and massage them, trying to rub out the memory we clearly share.

  “I don’t mean to upset you,” he says, his voice tight, a forced calm. “I just want you to really think this through. I mean, what if you actually embraced the Dexid? What if you allowed the positive to outweigh the negative? You’ve earned that choice, haven’t you? I think I have. I think we both have.”

  “But does it work?” I ask again. “I’m not trying to be difficult, Wes. I mean, yeah, we’ve been through a lot and finally—”

  “Finally, our bodies are staying still through the night,” he interrupts.

  “Yes, but at what cost?” I think of Gigi’s middle-of-the-night visit for the first time since Wes and I began our dream deconstruction, and my hand goes to the shorter patch of hair hidden underneath. To be that vulnerable, to have no way to protect my sleeping body. Is this an acceptable risk? I prepare to tell him about the nightmare he didn’t witness, but his temper turns out to be quicker than my confession.

  “Jesus, Sarah,” he snaps. He pushes back on his heels and crosses his arms. “Nothing’s perfect, but isn’t this close? Yeah, you might have some messed-up dreams, but they’re not reality. Reality is your body won’t freak out while you sleep. Don’t you understand? This is the best we’re ever going to get.” He eyes me through narrowed slits. “Or maybe I’ve got you all wrong. Maybe things haven’t been as tough on you as I’d assumed.”

  A tingling fury explodes across my body. It’s one thing to listen to him bemoan his inarguably crappy childhood, but I’ll be damned if Wes is going to accuse mine of being perfect. “I get that the Dexid stills our bodies,” I say. “And believe me, that is not something I’d trade lightly. But it also puts your brain in mine or the other way around or something else totally nuts, and that is way screwed up! Not to mention there are monsters—monsters—that paralyze us if they catch us. So you ask what I want? I just want to be normal! That’s all I’ve ever wanted. Isn’t that what you want?”

  “No,” he says. “I want you.”

  Like that, my anger evaporates, and I pray I don’t burn from the heat consuming my flesh.

  “I’ve always been on my own,” he says. “Not just in the coma, but always, everywhere. Until you showed up at the clearing in the woods. You found me, Sarah. For the first time, I was not alone.”

  This time, Wes blushes. “I gave up on normal a long time ago. I’ll take the company and be happy for it. The Burner thing sucks, royally. And I don’t know what to do other than get better at dodging them or look for a way to get rid of them. But that one minus, big as it is, feels like nothing compared to all the fascinating stuff that comes with this.” He moves closer again, returning to my personal space, and rests his hands on the cool pavement on either side of my legs. His dazzling green eyes sparkle even in the gray absence of sunshine. “So let�
��s keep it to ourselves. At least for a little while. This could be the adventure of our lives.”

  He lowers his forehead until it meets mine. Leaning on me, as if for support, this strong, brave, larger-than-life person who’s taken up my plight against Gigi, who’s guided me through our impossibly shared unconsciousness, closes his eyes and whispers, “Please.”

  I breathe him in. Wes’s vulnerability makes me feel strong, despite my fears. Maybe he’s right. What’s a fleeting nightmare in exchange for the freedom of a consequence-free consciousness? Could I handle a brief lock-up for a life sentence of peaceful sleep?

  “I want to,” I say, matching the intimate whisper of his plea. “But I’m scared.”

  “I’ll protect you,” he says.

  I feel the heat of his breath on my lips as his mouth moves closer to mine, and I’m lost, desire replacing fear almost completely. I open my mouth to swallow his, when the sound of a toppling garbage can kills the moment.

  “Uhhh, whoops. Sorry,” a clipped, nasal voice says.

  Wes and I break away instantly, as if we’ve been caught doing something way more intimate. I smooth my hair as he adjusts his jacket.

  “Hey, Sarah and guy who isn’t Jamie,” a runty red head says.

  “Grady,” I reply, rolling my eyes and waving Meat Butchowski’s little brother away like a gnat.

  Then the world stops for the second time that morning. The dream from the night before hits me like a sucker punch. The train, the carnival, the bedroom, the computer.

  The computer. Grady’s reflection in the computer.

  I lurch at Grady, grabbing him by the arm, and twist him to face me.

  “Easy there,” he says, pulling his arm back. “Seems like you’re already spoken for.” His free hand adjusts his glasses, which are taped together at the bridge. A decent-size bandage covers his left temple.

  “What happened to your head?” I ask.

  Grady frowns. “Let’s just say I was testing out a new product and had a close encounter with the edge of my desk.”