Sleeper

by MacKenzie Cadenhead

  My stomach falls into my feet. Grady is a straight-A student, a member of Mensa, and a drug kingpin. Unlike his brother, Grady can’t expect an athletic scholarship to college, so he came up with a different way to ensure he could afford the Ivy of his choice. Tessa heard that he chooses which drugs to sell to whom based on the side effects. He likes selling Meat anything with hair loss in the fine print, while a hot girl looking to get high is guaranteed the added benefit of an increased sex drive. But to whom do you sell the drug with a side effect of possession?

  “What new product?” I demand.

  Grady grins. “I thought you were on the straight and narrow, Miss Reyes.” He glances over at Wes. “Guess I had you pegged wrong. But listen, if you’re really interested, I wouldn’t start out with this stuff. A little too potent for a newbie such as yourself. I’d suggest something more—”

  “What’s the drug, Grady?” I ask again, my impatience straining my voice.

  He shrugs, enjoying his bit of power. “It’s not on the street yet. I really can’t say.”

  “Tell her,” Wes growls and moves to tower over the smaller boy.

  Determining that an ass-kicking isn’t worth the cover-up, Grady spills. “It’s called Dexidnipam,” he says with a sigh. “But I don’t plan on selling it. The guy I got it from didn’t own up to the fact that it’s not FDA-approved yet, so the side effects aren’t all in. And judging from my not so little fall,” he says, wincing as he touches his forehead, “I’d say there are some serious kinks in the system.”

  “Who gave it to you?” I ask.

  “Now, Sarah, as I’ve said, this really isn’t the high for you. If you want me to sell you something, you’re going to have to let me recommend it.”

  “Who?” I roar as I dig my nails into my own scalp and tug on my hair.

  For the first time, Grady looks legitimately nervous. I watch him weigh the pros and cons of revealing his source to this clearly unhinged lunatic. “Fine,” he says finally. “It’s not like I’ll be doing business with him again. You probably know him too. He went here. Do you remember Josh Mowrey?”

  Without a word, I turn from Grady and Wes and walk away.

  Chapter Twelve

  Using Wes’s jiggle and jerk technique, I throw open the door to the school hallway and march inside. The bell for homeroom rings, and soon, I’m swimming upstream against wave after wave of my classmates. Wes catches up to me and walks silently at my side. Though I’m not ready to talk to him, his secret service–esque presence feels like the only thing standing between me and a total mental meltdown.

  He keeps pace, following me wherever I lead. Thing is, I have no specific destination. I just want to lose myself in the sea of students surrounding me. But instead of blending into the masses, I feel totally on display, like I’m wearing a scarlet letter that reveals all my secrets and condemns me for them. Is it paranoia, or is every third person I pass looking at me? My chest tightens as my heartbeat jackhammers. Only this time, I’ve trapped myself. Is there any way out of this madness? After a while of aimless wandering, Wes pulls me into an empty classroom.

  “Tell me what happened in the dream with Grady,” he demands once we’re alone.

  I’ve thought of a half dozen rationalizations for what I experienced, but I know every one of them is wrong. Finally, I say the only thing I’m sure is true. “I fell into him.”

  Wes doesn’t run screaming. Instead, he says, “That’s pretty much exactly what it looked like to me. When you went to catch him, both your bodies went into spasm. It didn’t last long. The seizure was over before I could even reach out to you. But when it stopped, you two were, well, linked. Your body”—he searches for the right word—“attached to his. It sounds crazy, I know, but it looked like you were suctioned to him.”

  “What doesn’t sound crazy?” I say. I know exactly what he means. “Except it wasn’t like an embrace.”

  “No,” he agrees. “Your body outlined his, from head to toe, hand to hand.”

  “Like Peter Pan’s shadow.”

  “Exactly,” he says with an excitement that makes me queasy. “What did it feel like?”

  “I didn’t feel as though any part of me was separate from him at all,” I answer, just letting the words come. “I was inside him. But I wasn’t in the dream anymore. I was in his room. Wes,” I say. I look at him desperately. “I was in control.”

  The boy who’s been unflappable until now jerks back. “What? What do you mean? You could move him? Like, his real body? In his actual room?”

  “Yes,” I say with confidence. I passed incomprehensible one possession and two shared dreams ago. Why deny the facts anymore? “I wasn’t very good at it. It took a lot of concentration to move him, and in the end, he had a seizure or something, and I was thrown out of him, back into the dream.”

  Wes is silent. It’s my turn to leave him speechless now.

  “This is because of the Dexid too, isn’t it?” I state more than ask.

  He nods. “It has to be. I was on it. You were on it. And we now know Grady was on it too. Just think of when we first saw him in the station. He was different from the other commuters. He looked buzzed, weaving in and out of his line.”

  “Like Mr. Houston from the night before,” I add, an imagined lightbulb turning on above my head.

  “Who?”

  “The old guy you wanted to follow off the train the first night I was on Dexid. I recognized him from the clinic. He’s in the same trial as we are. So he was on the Dexid too.” I frown. “But he didn’t react like we did. He looked more like Grady.”

  “Does he have RBD?”

  I shake my head. “Sleepwalker.”

  “Then that’s got to be it,” Wes says, his nodding picking up speed. “The old guy isn’t like us. He’s like Grady, like any regular person. Something about the Dexid makes anyone taking it able to interact while we’re all asleep. But while their reaction to the Dexid is passive and they can be possessed, ours puts us in the driver’s seat.” Wes whistles as he sits back on a desk. “Holy shit, Sarah. Do you know what this means?”

  “Yeah,” I say and throw open the door. “Totally not normal.”

  I push my way back into the hallway horde, ducking my head as I start for my locker. I walk fast, weaving through the kids surrounding me, barely registering it when I sideswipe a book bag or ricochet off a water fountain. Wes catches up to me as the crowds thin and my classmates enter their homerooms for roll call. I don’t stop moving.

  As we near my locker, student council VP Trisha Goldmark begins the daily announcements over the school’s PA system. I’m not paying much attention to what she’s saying, absorbed as I am in the revelations of the morning (and it isn’t even nine o’clock). Still, it’s impossible to totally ignore her super peppy delivery, which is only one of the reasons why I notice when she hands the mic to someone else.

  “Thanks, Trisha,” Gigi says. My stomach flips. “I know I’m supposed to do the athletic announcements this morning, but there’s something more important I need to talk to our classmates about.” Her voice breaks, and she takes a moment to clear her throat. “There is a dangerous predator among us,” she declares. “And she needs to be put away. I was her first victim, so some might say I’m biased. But you don’t have to take my word for it. Take hers.”

  Suddenly, Gigi’s voice is replaced with mine.

  “I’m a freak. A nightmare,” a prerecorded version of me says. I sound small, whimpering, pathetic. “I should be chained up for what I did to you. At all times—not just at night. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. No one does.” A choked sob reverberates off the metal-lockered walls. “They’ve never been able to figure it out. They probably never will. I’m a monster. I don’t deserve your forgiveness, and I don’t expect it. I deserve horrible things. Horrible, horrible—”

  The recording of me shuts off, an
d the shuffling of bodies can be heard over the loudspeaker. It’s followed by a sharp burst of feedback. Then silence.

  I teeter slightly and reach out my hand to steady myself against the wall. Wes catches me. I feel his body, taught and strong, a pillar. I accept his strength, but I can’t look at him. This is simply too much. Not only am I the star of some supernatural teen drama, but the boy I’m either infected with or crushing on (or both) has just heard the moment I hit rock bottom.

  The recording is the final voice mail I left for Gigi after the slumber party. I remember crying that night, not only because of what I was and what I’d done, but also because I’d been rejected by someone who I so wanted to understand me. No matter how much I intellectually understood her well-earned stance, it had been devastating to realize I was not going to be forgiven. If only I’d known how much worse things would get.

  “Thanks,” I manage as I force myself to take one step, then another, and continue, head bent, down the hallway. As I turn the corner, my focus is firmly on my feet, which is why I don’t see what’s happening at my locker until I’m almost in front of it.

  Tessa’s there, ripping little pieces of paper off the cold gray metal, grunting as she swipes at a large object stuck to the locker door. When she sees me, she stops and runs toward me, desperate to turn my body away. “Sarah, let’s just leave. There’s no reason to go over there.”

  I push her aside and look. Though I’ve no doubt she’s made a valiant effort to spare me the cruelty that awaits, Tessa’s barely made a dent in the collage of incriminating photos that creates a mosaic wreath around my locker. The pictures are the ones Gigi took of me at the sleep clinic: vegetative, covered in electrodes, hair gooped in gel. I feel sick. But the nausea isn’t just because of the photos. It’s also due to seeing myself, hung in effigy at the center of the circle.

  Glued to my locker is a doll’s four-poster bed, pink and frilly. A Barbie lies atop the covers, her arms and legs spread wide, each one chained to one of the four posts of the bed. Her doll hair has been cut off, and in its place is dark human hair, glued to the plastic doll scalp. I can’t stop my hand from reaching for where that same dark hair was once attached to my own head. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Wes watching me. He lifts his hand to his mouth and closes it in a tight fist as he understands.

  He walks to the locker and rips the toy bed off in a single strongman move. Tessa resumes ripping the pictures down. I just stare, watching them as they work, though not really seeing at all.

  The sound of a text alert on my cell brings me back. Tessa’s phone has buzzed too, and, true to form, she’s on her screen before I’ve even pulled my phone from my pocket.

  “Sarah, don’t…” is all I hear her say before my eyes fix on my own screen and one of Gigi’s photos of me from the clinic.

  Two girls exit a nearby bathroom, laughing about something on their cells. One of them is Kiara. When she sees me, her face lights up. She lifts her phone, points, and clicks. Tessa’s on her in a flash, demanding she delete the photo and generally reading her the riot act, but Kiara ignores her. That’s when I realize the picture wasn’t just texted to me but to the entire IHS student body.

  Wes, who’s finished disposing of the photos, stands beside me. He asks, “Now have you suffered enough?”

  I look directly at him for the first time since we left the classroom. If its pity or maudlin empathy I fear seeing, I needn’t have worried. His eyes are hard. Though it’s been at most ten minutes since our conversation at the West Gate, it’s been a rather eventful period of time. “You saw Grady’s forehead?” I ask.

  “I did,” he says.

  “And you think I was really in him? In control of his body?”

  He nods.

  “Because we were both on Dexid? That you and I can actually control people if they’re on it too?”

  “Yes.”

  I swallow, figuratively choking down my hesitations and fears, before asking the question that I know will change everything. “Do you think we can do it again?”

  The hint of a smile twists the corner of Wes’s mouth. “I do,” he says. Then he adds, “And if we double the dose, we might have better control than you did with Grady, maybe even be able to stay inside longer before seizing out. So get two pills tonight.”

  “Sure,” I say absently, my mind working hard to process so many things. “But how do we get…” I take a deep breath before saying her name. “How do we get Gigi to take the Dexid?”

  Wes puts his hand on my cheek and looks at me. My darting eyes come to rest on his.

  “I’ll handle it,” he says. His voice is soft, comforting. You’d never know he just offered to drug a girl so I could mess her up.

  “Then I’ll see you at the train station tonight.”

  I turn, not waiting for a reply. I walk down the hall and out of the building before I can second-guess this choice.

  That night at the clinic, I’m quiet as Ralphie hooks me up. I fake dropping the first Dexid pill so he’ll get me another. Then I down both in one quick gulp.

  When I open my eyes in Grand Central, Wes is waiting for me, and a sleeping, Dexid-dosed Gigi sways along the platform of track 29.

  As I follow her onto the train, I acknowledge to myself that there’s a line, I’m about to cross it, and I’m cool with that. Besides, I may be a vengeful, dream-invading, puppet-master head case, but for the first time ever, I’m not alone.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “Pasta. She’s making pasta?” Wes slumps against the polished granite countertop of the HGTV-approved, Stepford kitchen, looking totally over it. Who can blame him? Here we are, brimming with rage, prepped for vengeance, expecting nothing less than Thunderdome, and Gigi’s dream is a total yawn.

  “At least Grady had the good manners to give us something interesting to look at,” Wes gripes. “This is just…pathetic.” He dismisses Gigi with a wave, but aside from her Dexid-induced swaying, she stands more or less still in front of a top-of-the-line six-burner stove, watching a pot of water boil. It’s so dull, I almost feel bad for her.

  Almost.

  “Give her a chance,” I say. “There’s still time for a boiling bunny to make an appearance.”

  Wes snorts and nods a concession. “Her dream doesn’t really matter anyway. We’re not here to observe.”

  A knot tightens in my stomach.

  “Yeah, but it’d be so much easier to do this if she was euthanizing puppies.”

  He straightens and wags a finger at me. “Don’t you wimp out on me, Reyes,” he says in an only slightly more playful than aggressive manner. He slides over to Gigi and stands close behind her, careful not to touch. “We agreed to take our super powers out for a test drive in a beat-up old jalopy so it wouldn’t matter if we crashed it.” His eyes give Gigi a once-over. “Here’s the car. You’ve got the keys. What’s the holdup?”

  I let out a sigh.

  “Eeh—” he says, like the buzzer at the end of a countdown clock. “Time’s up.”

  And before I can blink, he jumps into Gigi’s body.

  The second he makes contact with her skin, he is part of her, pressing into her, the front of his body becoming one with the back of hers. Gigi stands at the stove, eyes glazed, mouth slack, arms outstretched, wrists limp. And Wes is sewn on. He is the master pulling the puppet’s strings.

  They walk backward.

  Stop.

  Turn left.

  The extra Dexid we took must be working, because he has way more control of Gigi than I did of Grady. And while I, like every other normal person, am not a particular fan of mimes, this performance is riveting. Standing over something that’s invisible to me, Wes uses Gigi’s hands to travel over a flat surface, rifling through something that I cannot imagine but that clearly has a powerful effect on him. Gigi’s features tighten. Her hands ball into fists. Agitated, Wes scans
invisible walls, stopping at different spots to get a closer look at items that cause his jaw, or rather, Gigi’s jaw, to clench. He paces the room and roughly runs her fingers through her hair. He’s trying to make sense of something entirely unknown to me, and it’s making me feel like I’ve shown up late for a test.

  A full-moon howl coming from just outside Gigi’s dream house steals my attention. The Burners have found us. I look out the kitchen window to where two hulking silhouettes peer in at me, their heavy, putrid breath fogging the glass. I should be terrified, and for a moment, I am. But once the initial shock of the Burners’ presence wears off, I’m more worried than anything else. What if they come before Wes is finished with Gigi? What if I don’t get my turn?

  I move on instinct, first jogging then running full-out until I slam into Gigi and Wes.

  Then…

  Whoosh.

  Pop.

  I blink my eyes until they adjust to the dark of Gigi’s bedroom, a place I know so well. I sit up to find that I’m already on the floor, and Wes is gone. Did he seize out? Or did I push him out of Gigi’s body when I jumped in? Opposite me is a queen-size, pretty-in-pink bed, replete with satin tufted headboard and five-hundred-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets. Beside it is the framed poster of M.C. Escher’s Relativity that was a souvenir from a trip we took to the Metropolitan Museum of Art just last fall. I stare at the picture, a reminder of happier times, and my shoulders slump.

  It was her favorite piece, she’d said, because in it, the laws of physics didn’t apply. There were no rules and no limits, two things Gigi was always trying to break. I’d told her that that was exactly why it freaked me out. So on our way out of the museum, she took me to the gift shop and bought us each a print. When she handed me mine, she said, “For when you get lost. Now we both have a map.”

  I laugh in Gigi’s voice as I remember the conversation. Then my head begins to ache. What am I doing here? How can things have gotten to this awful place? Yes, Gigi’s got a serious mean streak, but she’s also the girl who once sat for hours with a freshman whose error cost us the game. Instead of blaming the girl, she told her stories about her own losses, building her back up so she could take the field with us the next day. Gigi’s not a bad person. She’s my friend.