Sleeper

by MacKenzie Cadenhead

  “You know, I never should have bothered with you. From the first day of peewees, my mother told me to steer clear.” She nods manically. “Oh yeah, she’d heard about you. Every parent had. Creepy little Sarah Reyes who didn’t have a daddy and couldn’t have sleepovers. They knew something was up but obviously not the full extent, otherwise this,” she says, wagging her pointer finger between us, “you and me, never would have happened. But you were good with a stick, so I gave you a chance.” She begins to run her fingers through her hair but stops when she remembers it’s almost all gone. In a flash, Gigi’s lecture loses its language as rage tightens her features, and her hands shoot forward. She shoves me backward, knocking the wind out of me before I have the slightest chance to defend myself.

  “Gigi, wait,” Amber says as Kiara puts her hand on her captain’s shoulder. Gigi knocks it off, and her lieutenants stand down. She pins me to a locker. Her face is inches from mine.

  “I made your crappy life tolerable,” she yells. “I pretended you weren’t a total weirdo. What a mistake that was. I bet Jamie’s accident last year wasn’t even an accident at all. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was you who actually broke his nose.”

  I flinch. Without intending to, Gigi’s delivered a serious blow below the belt. And she sees it. Her ranting instantly quells, and her face lights up like she’s just been accepted to Amherst. “Oh my God. You totally did it. He covered for you. You didn’t just do this to me—you did it to Jamie too!” She cackles like a mean-girl Wicked Witch of the West as she loosens her grip. “Did you blame it on your sleep? Was that your bullshit defense then too?”

  I turn my head, but Gigi grabs my chin and yanks my face to meet hers. In the background, Kiara and Amber look at each other, uncomfortable and unsure. “How do you do it?” she demands. “How do you get away with everything? Why do I get detention for showing everyone the freak show you really are and you get…people watching you sleep? Tell me, Sarah, tell me, or I will make you pay in ways you can’t even imagine.”

  “How?” I hiss. “By defacing me in all your pictures of us?”

  Her face lifts in triumph. “I knew it!” she cries. “You were in my room last night.”

  I drop my eyes. Crap.

  Gigi smiles, savoring this bit of power at last. “You think you’re so special. Well, I’ve got news for you. They call every reject ‘special’ now. It’s just a pretty way of saying you do not belong, you are not normal. And I’m going to make sure that everyone finally knows it.

  “Amber,” she barks. “Record this.”

  Gigi’s frightened lap dog fumbles with her phone and begins videoing my confession.

  “Tell me how, Sarah,” Gigi says in the contrived whimpering tone of a wounded innocent. “How did you get into my room last night? How did you keep me still while you violated me? I was supposed to be safe in my bed, safe while I slept.”

  She was supposed to be safe in her bed? Safe while she slept? I don’t know if it’s imagining the audience that’ll be suckered into believing this shift in her persona or the sheer hypocrisy of her accusations after what she and Josh did to me at the clinic just two nights before, but I’m done. Wes is right. Gigi is no innocent. Any guilt I have about what happened last night vanishes. I might not be a victim, but neither is she. I lean forward and speak so only she can hear. “Not your room. I didn’t break into your room. But that was a nice kitchen. Did the water ever boil?”

  Gigi drops her hand like I’m on fire and stumbles backward. Kiara moves toward me but doesn’t come between us, confused by Gigi’s sudden retreat.

  I take a step forward. “You didn’t think you were alone in that big empty house, did you?” I whisper. “There was something else there too. Wasn’t there? Something in the shadows. It’s waiting for you. Watching you. Coming for you.”

  Gigi’s eyes are unblinking and wide. For a moment, I feel strength in this small victory. I’m a fool not to realize it will be short-lived.

  With no preamble, my tormented tormentor screams and charges at me full force. Grabbing my hair by the roots, she slams my head back against the locker door. I try to lift my arms to protect my aching skull, but Gigi is relentless. Once again, I’m trapped, unable to defend my body as my brain scrambles, valiantly but fruitlessly, to help. All I can do is watch through blurred vision as she wraps her middle and pointer fingers around the bottom of my hoop earring and tears it out.

  I cry out, and Gigi lets me fall to the ground. I steady my upper body on my right arm as my free hand clutches at my bleeding lobe. The sticky warmth of blood trickles through my fingers, and I watch it drip onto the tile beneath me.

  Kiara and Amber just stand there, gaping. Though they haven’t added to the blows, Amber’s phone is still recording, and neither has tried to help.

  Gigi towers over me, shaking, breathing hard, spent. My stomach clenches. Then she kneels beside my bloody ear and, her voice trembling, whispers, “Stay away from me, you freak.” She turns and leaves me crying as Kiara and Amber follow her out.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Wes doesn’t say much after his initial horrified reaction to my bandaged ear. And I’m too shell-shocked to speak. So we walk in relative silence back to my house.

  Our first time alone together in my room isn’t exactly how I pictured it. Wes perches on my windowsill, staring out at the sunny day that now seems to be mocking us. I lean against the doorframe at the entrance. Even though it’s my space, something about Wes’s demeanor, contemplating so deeply, utterly lost in his own thoughts, makes me feel as though I should wait for an invitation.

  “High school sucks,” he says finally, still staring out the window. “And I should know. I’ve been to enough different ones to be considered an expert.”

  I relax a bit and move to the edge of my bed.

  “Do you remember who you were last week?” he asks.

  “Uh, Sarah?” I venture.

  “No. You were Gigi.”

  My body jerks back as if I’ve been slapped. I begin to protest, but he holds up a hand to silence me. “The first time I saw you wasn’t in a dream. It was a week before at school, when I was doing my paperwork for enrollment. You were strutting down the halls like you owned them. Smiling at everyone you passed, then laughing at whatever remark Gigi made as soon as they were out of earshot.” He shakes his head. “I’m sorry to say it, but in some ways, you were even worse. Because you know what it’s like to be imperfect. Imperfect in a way that trumps any unibrow or lisp.”

  “Well, if I’m so terrible,” I say, “why are you hanging out with me?” Though my words are accusatory, it strikes me that I could just as easily be challenging myself as him. It’s not like I don’t get exactly what he’s talking about. In the past few days, I’ve experienced what it’s like to be on the receiving end of Gigi’s ire, and my own culpability in her past cruelties toward others has been creeping on me bad. I’ve been so afraid of slipping from my rung on the high school social ladder that I’ve allowed for too much bad behavior, and it makes me sick. But hearing Wes say it is way worse. Guilt and rage collide inside of me, and I clutch my stomach.

  “I’m hanging out with you,” Wes says, “because you’re not that girl anymore. You’ve fallen from your pedestal, but you’re still standing. You’re not knocking innocent people down to build yourself back up, but you’re not being a total pushover either. You, Sarah Reyes, are a force of nature.” A half grin lightens his face. “And if you start using those powers for good—that’s the kind of girl I can get behind.”

  “Thanks, I guess.” Though my mumbled retort gives nothing away, inside, I’m relieved to be forgiven by someone, and I thrill at this vision of the new me.

  “Tell me something,” he says as he leans forward. “How’d it feel seeing Gigi knocked down a peg today?”

  “It didn’t feel great.” I pout, pointing at my ear.

  “Fa
ir enough,” he says. “But what she did to you is how you know she’s scared. Tell me you don’t believe that she’ll think twice before messing with someone else.”

  I allow a slight smile. Wes’s own grin grows.

  “I think you did good,” he says and tips an invisible hat. I continue to thaw. “I’d even say you made up for a few of those ignored victims of Gigi MacDonald’s too.” He places his hands behind his head and leans against the window frame. Surveying my room, he nods. “But what if we could do better?”

  “Meaning?”

  “Way I see it, we’ve got two great tastes that taste great together: our awesome new abilities that we’ve just scratched the surface of and a duty to do something about the hell that is our high school existence. So why not use the one to work out the other?”

  “I still don’t follow,” I say.

  Wes clasps his hands together. “It’s a widely accepted fact that high school is the worst, right? Either you’re just finding a way to survive it before moving onto college and a better life, or it’s the pinnacle of your existence, and once you graduate, nothing lives up to your big win at regionals or your Beyoncé hair at prom.

  “But what if it didn’t have to be like that? What if there was something between kissing the class ring and getting drenched in pig’s blood? What if you could walk into school like you owned the place without having to make everyone else feel like they couldn’t make rent? We could do that, Sarah. We could bring down the monarchy and let the people eat cake.”

  “How?” I laugh. “By terrorizing them in their sleep?”

  “Yes,” he says, and the utter lack of humor in his voice shuts me right up.

  “No. Come on,” I manage finally. “Even if what I did to Gigi last night scared her, she was also way more antagonistic than I’ve seen her to date.”

  “If it starts to become clear that bad behavior has consequence, things will change,” he says. “Don’t those two stooges of hers deserve a little payback? From what I hear, you’re not the only one they’ve messed with.”

  I can’t deny that Wes has a point. While there’s absolutely no arguing that Kiara’s a rotten egg, Amber actually feels like the worst of the two. And it’s not just because, unlike Kiara, Amber and I were actually friends. While I know I’ve been guilty of turning a blind eye to many of Gigi’s bad deeds, Amber has consistently participated. She’s like a demented Marcy to Gigi’s Peppermint Patty, all “yes, sirs” with no questions asked. Is she that terrified of a life outside of Gigi’s inner circle? Of returning to those lonely middle school weekends? Probably. But I’m sick of fear justifying cruelty. Just because dating Pete temporarily pacifies the ghost of thirteen-year-old Acne Amber doesn’t mean she isn’t responsible for the damage she leaves in her wake. I imagine Amber being forced to deal with the repercussions of her actions, and I smile.

  Wes kneels before me. “We’ve got some serious stuff going on with what we can do in dreams, and we need to keep learning how to control it. So why not here? Why not be all that we can be while making our high school a better place?”

  I stop smiling and pull away slightly. “You realize that you’re talking about experimenting on our classmates?”

  “Only the shitty ones,” he clarifies.

  “Oh, well then,” I say with a snort. “Seriously, this coming from you, Patient Zero?”

  He frowns. “That’s not fair, Sarah. One well-deserved karmic nightmare is not the same as being child labor for Big Pharma.”

  I flush as he goes on.

  “But if you want to go there, okay. The history of scientific breakthrough is full of questionable labs. Would you deny the results just because you’re queasy about the means?”

  “Uh, ya, Herr Doctor.” I salute.

  “Nice. Go for the Nazi reference,” he says, rolling his eyes. “How about something less obvious. You know, we have the vaccine for tuberculosis because two prison inmates in Colorado were the first human test subjects. They got released for their trouble. Seems like a fair trade to me. And what about the cute and fuzzy animals getting injected with cancer while we keep poisoning our bodies, because soon enough, thanks to Fluffy the rabbit, we’ll be able to cure all the self-inflicted damage? I don’t hear anyone refusing chemo because of that.

  “Not to mention if it weren’t for all the testing that’s been done on me, we wouldn’t finally have the one drug that keeps our bodies still at night. I might not be thrilled to have been the rat, but that’s all the more reason I should get to enjoy where I am now.” He rests his hands on my knees. “And I’m not complaining about having found you because of it either.”

  I look away, not ready to give in yet but already feeling myself pulled in his direction.

  “I’m not talking about doing any real damage,” he says softly. “I’m just suggesting that we take advantage of some teachable moments with the tools at our disposal. On balance, I’d say there’s less harm in that than there is in leaving Gigi and the like to continue their reign of destruction unchecked. Especially now that we know we can do something about it.” He places his fingers on my chin and turns my face to meet his. “You know what they say about great power, right? Don’t you think it’s our responsibility?”

  He inserts his body between my legs so that my thighs hug his rib cage. “You’ve been denying a part of yourself in order to avoid being laughed at, or worse. And now that the ‘or worse’ has happened, are you going to run away and hide? Sarah,” he says hotly, his face inching closer to mine. “Tell me you won’t go back to being that half person. Tell me you’re ready to be exactly who you are, all of you. Tell me you’re strong enough to do this. Make it up to everyone you ever let feel the way you’ve felt this past week. Be the girl I know you really are.”

  His hands creep up my legs, coil around my waist, and land on my back. Our positions equalize our heights, and his mouth moves forward until it’s nearly touching mine.

  Then he waits.

  A hungry little grin curls the corners of my mouth. For the first time since I can remember, I’m not being seen as some disorder that needs to be fixed but as someone special with infinite potential. What if the brave new version of me that Wes sees so clearly is the girl who’s been here all along? I’ve been tracing her in every acceptable avenue available to me—school, dating, sports—but I’ve been too scared to follow the unbeaten path that every molecule in my body has been begging to forge. Until now.

  A moan of affirmation escapes my lips as they press against Wes’s, and then I’m dragging him down the rabbit hole with me, no longer lost, but exploring, in search of our very own Wonderland. Every kiss, every touch serves as our covenant this afternoon. I will no longer be the girl who’s ashamed. I’ll embrace my power and use it to do better, to be better.

  Of course, better is a subjective term. Just like one person’s dream is another one’s nightmare.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The rest of the week is a flurry of possession and punishment. While I’m tasked with getting my hands on Grady’s supply, Wes takes care of dosing our marks. When I ask my new boyfriend-slash-accomplice how he intends to slip our victims the Dexid, he darkly jokes that the only thing he learned from those tony boarding school jerks was how to slip a girl a roofie undetected. Then he tells me not to worry about it and distracts me with inappropriate touching, which is fine by me. Truth is, though I should care how he does it, I don’t. For the first time in ages, I’m all in with a full house, and I want to win.

  The little tease of spring weather has been replaced by yet another cold front and gray skies. I jog in place to keep warm as I wait for Grady outside his sixth period gym class. Ever since I’ve known him, the genius with zero athletic ability has found a way to avoid any sort of P. E. participation. Rumor is he’s got a deal with a kid in the attendance office that, in exchange for some hard-to-trace substances, Grady only needs to be presen
t for roll call at the start of class and then he can go on his merry way. It sounds like an urban legend, but the more deeply I entrench myself in shady doings and unbelievable truths, the easier it is to believe anything about anybody.

  Three minutes after the bell rings, Grady exits the athletic center and walks in my direction. “Where’s Heathcliff?” he asks as he approaches. “Trolling the moors?”

  “Wes is not that moody,” I say with a chuckle. “We were having an off day when you saw us. Sorry I was a little intense about the Dexid and Josh.”

  Grady shrugs. “Eh, you’re usually pretty okay.”

  “Thanks,” I say. “But I think you might be in the minority with that opinion.”

  Grady raises his eyebrows. “I don’t judge friends, Sarah,” he says.

  And I feel like a royal schmuck. While I don’t know Grady super well, he was around a lot when I was dating Jamie, as we often hung out at Meat’s house. Unlike every other male jock at IHS—including Meat—Jamie has always been nice to Grady. So by association, I guess I’m okay in his book too. And while I’ve certainly never been mean to him, neither have I done enough by half to deserve his kindness. I kiss him on the cheek and smile as his skin flushes orange to match his hair.

  He pulls a small vial with about a dozen little gold pills in it from his pocket. But as I reach for it, he snatches it back. “Before I hand this over, are you really sure you want it? I’ve told you I don’t know the full range of side effects. And what I’ve personally experienced wasn’t so nice.”

  “Trust me,” I say. “I know what I’m doing.”

  He grimaces. “If I had a nickel for every time I heard someone say that…”

  “You still wouldn’t have as much money as you do from selling drugs,” I say. I slap a wad of cash into his empty hand and take the bottle of pills from the other. “I appreciate the concern, Grady. I truly do. But I promise I’ll be fine.”