The Dreamway

by Lisa Papademetriou

  “Usually?”

  Anyway twitched his whiskers. “You saw how things change around here. My friend is at Ocean—that’s where we’re headed next. So let’s just get through this and on to the next stop.”

  “Okay.”

  They stared at each other for a moment.

  “Er . . .” Anyway said finally. “This is your dream. So I’m not really in charge here.”

  “Oh.”

  “Any ideas?”

  Stella looked around. “I think . . . I think I’m in Hansel and Gretel,” she admitted. “In a scene from a storybook in my world.”

  “Ah, well, that’s possible.” Anyway said.

  “I . . . think I should follow these pebbles . . .” Stella looked around. One lay to her left, and one lay to her right. There was no way to know which one had been put down first. “But . . . which way?”

  Anyway looked thoughtfully at the stone that had bopped him on the head.

  “Hey, whippersnappers!” screeched a tiny voice, and when she looked up, she saw something green wiggling on a branch. It was an inchworm, and a rather fat one at that. “Get off my lawn, or I’ll call my lawyer!”

  “What’s wrong with him?” Stella asked.

  “Meh.” Anyway shrugged. “Who knows? Dreams.” And he shook his head and chuckled.

  “I’ll sue you!” the inchworm bellowed. “I’ll sue you and I’ll sue everyone who has ever met you! I’ll sue this branch you’re standing on and I’ll sue the leaves for standing by and refusing to stop this injustice—”

  “Excuse me—”

  “Please do not interrupt, little girl, I’m preparing my case!”

  “But, um, we’re leaving.”

  “Not fast enough!” the inchworm complained. “Taking your time about it, aren’t you?” He gazed at her with yellow eyes that had no pupils. They were like solid marbles. “Well, it isn’t hard to take your measure.”

  “What?” Stella was very confused, which was not a feeling she liked. She was used to understanding things, and this dream was irritating her.

  “What? What?” he sneered in a high-pitched voice. “Pretty awake, aren’t you? For someone in a dream? Looking for something, are you?”

  “Pebbles,” Stella told him.

  “No, that’s not it.” The inchworm shook his head (which was rather like waving the entire top half of his body). “You need to find the Green Man.”

  “The Green Man?” Stella repeated.

  “He’s gobbled up what you’re looking for!” The inchworm looked into the distance just over her shoulder. “That direction!” Then he inched away. Stella supposed that he was trying to be haughty and that this was his version of storming off. But it takes a long time for an inchworm to get anywhere, and so she and Anyway rather awkwardly watched him until he was gone.

  “What do you think?” Anyway asked once the inchworm had disappeared into a small hole in the tree.

  “I guess we should go find the Green Man,” Stella said. Anyway nodded. “He said that direction—and there’s a pebble, so . . .” She hesitated. “But he said it had gobbled up what I was looking for—”

  “Well,” Anyway looked thoughtful, twirling his whiskers like a long moustache, “I’m sure that’s not as bad as it sounds.”

  The stream flowed over smooth stones beside a moss-covered riverbank. The water hissed and rushed, turning white in the places it swirled from stone to stone. Brooks are often said to be babblers, but Stella was beginning to suspect that this one was more of a gossip. It had heard some very scandalous things about the inchworm, and was more than delighted to tell Anyway all about it. At least, this was what Anyway explained to Stella as they walked along, collecting white pebbles. She couldn’t understand what the stream was saying and only heard Anyway’s side of the conversation, which was mostly composed of, “oh no” and “and then what happened?” and “go on.” The trees reached their long branches overhead, occasionally dripping yellow leaves, which floated in melancholy paths to the forest floor.

  The air was sweet and still smelled of cinnamon but of living earth, too, and the forest seemed composed of images from every story Stella had ever read. There was a thin circle of tiny blue mushrooms on frail stalks, like a fairy ring. There was a stand of birches with their paper-curling bark. And over there, far in the distance, Stella caught sight of colorful puffballs on long stems: truffula trees.

  Stella was not sure that she wanted to meet the Green Man, whoever he was. An ogre, perhaps. Or a leprechaun. Or, less likely but still frightening, a Martian. It was a dream, after all, wasn’t it? The Green Man could be anything. She only knew one thing about him, and that was that he had gobbled up something.

  None of this seemed promising.

  “Really?” Anyway said to the stream. “I don’t believe it!”

  “Now what’s the stream saying?” Stella asked.

  “It’s not fit for your ears!” Anyway whispered. “But that inchworm is really quite a rascal—oh!” This last syllable made Stella look up, and Anyway hissed, “There he is.”

  A large mass of moss-covered rock rose from the earth. Bushes and ivy grew thick across and at the top, having spread in such a way that it seemed to make long hair, two eyes, and a nose over an open, gaping mouth. Three white pebbles stood out like snow on a mountaintop as they led the way into the maw. The eyes gazed darkly at her.

  “It’s a cave,” Stella whispered. “The Green Man is a cave.”

  “Well,” Anyway said brightly, “I told you that gobbling thing probably wasn’t as bad as it sounded.”

  With a few steps, she passed through into the mouth of the Green Man. The walls glittered with gems, sparkling gently—a rock’s equivalent of a whisper. It was a sacred place, and Stella felt the rocks’ reverence. She thought they might, perhaps, be curious about her and what she was doing there. One of them twinkled, almost like a wink.

  “It’s so beautiful,” Stella said.

  Anyway shrugged. “They’re just rocks.”

  She took a few more steps, and her heart clunked. She was struck with the sudden fear that the mouth would close, trapping her inside. The moment she thought this, she wished she hadn’t, because the idea grew and grew until it became the only thought in her mind.

  But she did not have to journey far to find what she was looking for. Only a few steps in, reflecting the light that poured in from the mouth of the cave, was a smooth pool of water about the size of the rug in her room at home. Somehow, in the way we know things in dreams, she knew for certain that it was deep—very deep. It gleamed like silver, and as Stella drew near, she saw something floating near the center. It was a piece of paper. She knelt to look at it more closely. A piece of notebook paper . . . on it, she saw several lines in very familiar handwriting.

  She gasped. “It’s Cole’s! The darkness came for me,” she read the words on the scrap aloud.

  Anyway scrambled out of her pocket and down her arm, dropping to the cool floor of the cave. He stared for a moment and then looked up at her.

  “My brother was here,” Stella said, and she reached for the paper.

  “Wait, don’t!” Anyway shouted as a green hand burst out of the water and grabbed Stella by the wrist, yanking her forward, pulling her into the water, and down, down, down.

  Deep in the Dream

  The Darkness came for me

  With invisible claws,

  Pulled me down

  Until falling felt the same

  As standing still,

  And I had no breath to scream or cry

  Until . . .

  Stella fell to the floor with a crash. It took her a moment to understand the wood beneath her, the book digging into her rib cage.

  This was her room. Her room. Her mother was still on the bed, asleep on her side, her back to Stella.

  Stella put a hand to her head. What happened? she asked herself. She had read the beginning of Cole’s poem, and then it was like she fell into it. As if the poem had pulled h
er into the space between dreaming and being awake, and then all the way through.

  Stella rolled to her knees and pushed herself toward the lamp on her side table. She blinked in the sudden light.

  I was just dreaming, she told herself. The stillness of the quiet apartment was suddenly cut with her brother’s snore. She had often complained about it in the past, but now Stella felt comforted by the familiar sound. Cole is fine, she told herself. He’s dreaming too. Stella climbed beneath the comforter on her bed, tucking herself beneath it. She clicked off the lamp and lay there, staring up at the ceiling and listening to her mother’s steady breath. She was not sleepy, not even a little. Her heart pounded in her chest, shaking her whole body like an earthquake, or a rumbling train.

  The Library

  THE WALK TO SCHOOL THE next morning found Stella feeling like a cake that had been taken out of the oven just a few minutes too soon. After breakfast, her heart felt light and poufy, but as the morning wore on, her mood sank, and then settled into a gooey crater.

  Her mother had gushed over the birthday gift Stella made her—it was a page-a-day calendar that had taken Stella weeks to put together. On each day was a quote about motherhood, or love, or the value of hugs, or something kind of borderline soppy like that. Stella had also marked all of the national holidays and family holidays (like Aunt Gertie’s birthday), and she had done it all with colored pencils and she had drawn little hearts and flowers on each page. It was a practical gift, which was important to Stella. Her mother would have loved anything—Stella and Cole often joked that they could probably give her a used tissue and she would go out and frame it—but Stella liked things to be useful.

  As predicted, her mother burst into tears, gave her a big hug, and flipped through the calendar until she came to the page for her anniversary, and then she cried even more.

  “Did—did Dad ever call back?” Stella asked.

  “Honey, he just called yesterday,” Tamara pointed out. Then she wiped her palms across her face and announced, “I’ll keep this forever.” Although she said the same thing every year, it was still gratifying, and that was what made Stella feel like a fluffy cake of happiness.

  Cole didn’t have a gift. “I wrote you a poem,” he said. His eyebrows drew together and he blinked, as if the kitchen light pained him. “But I can’t—I can’t find my notebook.”

  Stella flinched. It was as if Cole had said, “I can’t find my right leg.” Strangely, though, he didn’t seem that upset about it.

  “Are you okay?” Tamara leaned over and felt his forehead in the style of mothers everywhere.

  “I feel pretty bad,” Cole admitted. “Kinda . . . foggy.”

  “You don’t have a fever,” Tamara said. “I’ve got class this morning. I think you’d better go to school, but have the nurse call me if you feel worse, okay?”

  Cole’s dark, blank eyes blinked. He nodded.

  He hadn’t said another word as they walked to the subway. He looked absolutely green as they rode, but when Stella asked if he was okay, he snapped, “I’m fine.”

  But he wasn’t fine. Stella could feel waves of negative energy coming off him. It was like he was radioactive. And so, bit by bit, the air seeped out of her happiness cake.

  They climbed the stairs out of the subway and headed up the street. They turned a corner and started up a slow hill. This was one thing Stella appreciated about their school. It was uphill on the way there and downhill on the way home, when you were tired.

  Fog had settled on the city, and droplets of moisture collected on Stella’s lashes, making her eyes water. It was a spring day that looked comparatively warm according to the thermometer, but actually felt quite cold. The damp air settled over her, seeping through her insides, until a shiver took over to shake her up.

  They passed by a block of row houses—all ugly things, with metal awnings and exhausted-looking siding. On the next block, Angry Pete stood near his fence with a mug of what could, conceivably, be coffee. “Stop looking at me,” he muttered as they passed. “Just don’t look at me.”

  As usual, Stella edged closer to her brother, but she felt him stiffen beside her. “Shut up,” he snarled.

  “Cole!” Stella was shocked, but he didn’t pause in his stride, just stomped away, head bent forward, eyes on the ground. Cole hardly ever got mad, and when he did, it was always a surprise. This seemed to have come out of nowhere.

  Stella turned back, but Angry Pete didn’t notice. He just kept muttering to himself. He wore his usual sweatpants and heavy work boots. Stella noticed that his shoes had paint on them. It had never occurred to her before to wonder what he did for a living, but she supposed he was a house painter. She wondered if it was hard for him to find work. She wondered if he lived by himself. She wondered if he had trouble paying his rent.

  She wondered why he was so angry.

  Turning back to her brother, she saw that Cole had not stopped walking or even slowed down. It was a struggle to catch him, and it made her irritable. “What’s the matter with you?” she demanded.

  “I’m sick of people messing with me. I want to be more like Dad.” He glared over his shoulder and spat.

  “Dad?” Her father never snapped at anyone. “What are you talking about?”

  “Dad. Dad,” he repeated, as if maybe she was hard of hearing. “Used to live with us? Rolls around the desert in a Jeep with a rifle, looking for IEDs? Dad.”

  “He—” She never thought of her father that way. Not even once, the entire time he had been deployed. Not even when she saw pictures of him in his gear. Her father was an electrical engineer. He liked to cook lasagna. He would sit on the bed and read to her—he had a great reading voice. She could picture him at a desk, or at a pool, or on a roller coaster. But, even though he was a Marine reservist, she never pictured him as a soldier. Never. “That’s not Dad,” she said finally. What she meant was that it wasn’t the Dad part of him, just some other, separate part.

  “Yes, it is,” Cole answered. And then—so fast that she couldn’t be sure—she thought she saw him flicker.

  They walked the rest of the way in silence.

  By the time she was a block from Stringwood, Stella remembered something: today’s Spirit Day theme was the 1960s. Kids were dressed in bell-bottom jeans and flowered shirts, or T-shirts with peace signs. Some of them wore bandannas and little round-framed sunglasses. Stella sighed. She had on her regular clothes. At this point, her fluffy cake of happiness was basically a pancake. One that had been repeatedly run over by heavy machinery.

  As she sat in French, Stella glanced out the window. Bleu’s nest was there, but the bird was not. Stella knew that this didn’t mean anything—she didn’t see Bleu every single day—but his absence left her with the same unsettled feeling she’d had when she heard her father still hadn’t called. She tried not to look out at the gingko tree, which stood dripping and solitary beneath the gray sky. When the bell rang, Stella’s body automatically went to her locker, got her lunch bag, moved toward the cafeteria. But her mind was noticing strange things. A chip in the paint that looked like a mushroom, the flabby porridge color of the walls, the odd smell of rot that seemed as if it were coming from the back of her nostrils.

  “Are you okay?” Renee asked as she caught up to Stella in the hallway. The corridors were the usual crush and jumble of bodies trying to get to classes.

  “I’m fine,” Stella said. “Why?”

  “Um, because you’re walking the wrong way?” Renee asked. “Like, I have no idea what class you’re going to now, unless your next class is in the cafeteria.”

  Stella stopped and looked. Renee was right—her body had somehow skipped her next class and gone straight to lunch.

  “No offense, but you’ve been seriously spaced out today,” Renee told her.

  “I have?” Stella asked.

  Renee folded her arms across her chest. “Um, first, we said we were both going to wear peasant dresses, and instead, you’re wearing a T-shirt with a
cat on it.”

  “Well,” Stella said, looking down at her shirt, “it’s a cartoon cat.”

  “How is that from the 1960s? And then I told you that I have two cavities, and you were like, ‘That’s great; I’ve never been there.’” She twisted her lips to the side of her mouth. “I let it go because half the time I don’t listen to you, either, but now I’m starting to wonder.”

  “Half the time you don’t listen to me?”

  “Stella! I’m your best friend! I don’t have to listen to you all the time. Anyway, this isn’t about me—it’s about you and why you’re acting like you’re broadcasting via satellite. What’s up? And by the way, we’d better start moving, or we’ll be late.” Renee hitched her bag higher onto her shoulders and turned in the direction of the gym.

  “I just—I had this really weird dream last night,” Stella admitted. She felt still coated with the ugly scum that the dream had left on her.

  “Ohmygosh! Me, too!”

  “Really? I dreamed I was traveling through this subway system and I had to find my way out—”

  “That’s just like my dream!”

  “You’re kidding!” Stella gaped at her friend.

  “Yes!” Renee pushed her purple-framed glasses up farther onto her nose and looked very serious. “I dreamed I was stuck in a chocolate chip cookie and had to eat my way out.”

  “What? That’s not the same thing at all,” Stella replied.

  “Well, we were both trapped.” Renee was a little huffy.

  “That’s—that’s—” Well, Stella wasn’t sure what it was. She didn’t know how she could possibly communicate the way the Dreamway had made her feel, or how it had made her afraid for her brother. “Okay, you’re right,” she said finally. “They’re totally alike.”

  Renee squeezed Stella around the shoulders, reaching awkwardly to avoid her backpack. Then she stood firmly in front of Stella and looked at her closely. Her warm brown eyes were serious. She said, “I really do know what you mean, though. I’ve had that kind of dream. The kind where you wake up, and you think you’re still in it. And then, when you realize you aren’t, you’re just so grateful.”