Dedicated dreaming, not that I’ve tried it since I became of age, is the ability to control your dreams. If it’s a true dream, you can turn it, make it into what you want. You can even ask the dream questions and it’ll answer you.
Essentially, dedicated dreaming is about talking to your own subconscious and having it answer.
So I can see the logic of his suggestion. If I can control the dream, then my subconscious is trying to tell me something. If I can’t, then there’s a good chance something else is going on.
Mom sighs. “Now I’m finally beginning to understand how all the mundanes feel.”
By mundanes, she means the non-magical. I don’t ask her what she means—I know Mom, and I know she makes comments like this as a set up for some angry comment.
But Willard Pruitt doesn’t know Mom at all, so he asks her what she means.
She glares at him. “This all sounds like mumbo-jumbo. It’s a colossal waste of time and—”
“Mom,” I say.
He’s leaning back, startled at the vehemence in her tone.
“—a waste of money and if we hadn’t already paid you—”
“Mom!”
“—we wouldn’t be.”
“Which is why,” he says as he stands up, “I always ask for up front payment. It doesn’t take a precog to know that sometimes customers don’t want to hear what you have to say.”
He nods at me, and I see warmth in his eyes.
“Good luck,” he says softly. “The future is dark on this topic. I hope your dream is wrong, but if it’s right, I know you will do the best you possibly can.”
Note he doesn’t say I would do the right thing. Or even that I would do the heroic thing. Only that I would do my best.
Which I’m already trying to do.
Mom’s still yelling at him as he heads for the door. I stay and clean the kitchen, feeling unsettled by the encounter. Not because Mom is angry—she always gets angry when she feels like we spent money we don’t have—but because, really, Willard Pruitt has no idea if my dreams predict the future or not.
He only has what we have—an idea that they don’t, and a fear that they might.
I’d be back to square one if it weren’t for two things: he actually believes (like I do) that J. Rutherford is a threat; and I can try dedicated dreaming.
When I finish cleaning my mess, I go upstairs and log onto our household computer. I read all I can find on dedicated dreaming, and there’s not a lot, at least from the magical perspective.
What there is is all about ritual, the kinda stuff I usually scoff at.
But I need to know, so I go through all the goofy rituals from the scented oil bath to the vanilla candles to the overturned mirrors and the quiet bedroom. I’m prepared to have the dreams of my life.
And of course, I don’t dream at all.
***
Until Sunday night, the night before my suspension ends. I was right about one thing; nothing happened while I was away. School lunch is normal, and nothing, not even threats, make the news. I monitor the MySpace pages of everyone I can think of, and don’t even see rumors.
Which both relieves me and terrifies me. It leads me to believe I’m onto something when in fact, I might just be delusional.
Certainly the fact that I can’t even dedicated dream makes me wonder if I have much magic at all. According to the websites, dedicated dreaming is one of those basic spells everyone can perform after a certain age.
Everyone but me, apparently.
So I don’t go through the stupid dedicated dreaming rituals at all on Sunday and I actually fall asleep on the couch, watching some Monster Truck Rally thing.
One minute I’m watching giant trucks drive over other giant trucks, and the next I’m back in the cafeteria, holding onto my silver tray with its lonely little piece of pizza. Kids are sitting at various tables, talking, and Mrs. McGuillicuty—the cafeteria supervisor—is telling me about this luscious lemon pie she makes, and I’m pretty convinced none of that happened before, but I’m not sure I’m making the changes.
So I consciously chose to set down my tray (and its delectable piece of pizza) and I turn around long before J. Rutherford comes into the cafeteria.
In fact, I’m beginning to think he’s not going to when he does, his father’s black robes flapping around him. J. Rutherford raises that deadly finger and then he stops. He stares at me.
I stare at him and realize how stupid he looks, all in black like a TV magician, with one finger pointed and this frown of concentration on his face. He’s conjuring up how to do the spell, that’s what he’s doing.
And no one can stop him.
Except…
I wave a finger at Mrs. McGuillicuty’s asbestos gloves, the ones she keeps behind the counter for removing things like pizza from the double-hot ovens. I command those gloves to cover J. Rutherford’s hands and not to come off until he leaves the cafeteria, and gives up his dream of killing people.
The gloves soar across the caf just as he turns toward Jane Bauer, the kid he burned alive in the first dream. And as the fire jets out of his finger, the gloves slide on, interrupting the flow. Jane’s clothes light on fire, the boys around her put it out, and those evil security guards—the ones that took me to Principal Prison—cart J. Rutherford away.
Then I wake up.
The TV’s playing some Japanese game show, the point of which seems to be to make everyone fall so that their back bends into an unnatural position. Mom’s covered me with a blanket, but she hasn’t sent me to bed.
And my heart is pounding.
Okay. That had to be dedicated dreaming since I set down my tray and actually stopped J. Rutherford with domestic magic. That couldn’t happen in real life.
I push off the blanket and go into the kitchen, my domain. There I drink some water, wipe off my sweaty face, and lean against the counter for a while.
It’s done. The whole dream thing is over.
At least, I hope it is.
Especially as I head for school that morning.
And walk into the cafeteria at lunch.
***
Of course, stupid me, I decide to have pizza to celebrate. I’ve been dreaming of pizza for a week now, and I deserve some. I mention that to Mrs. McGuillicuty as I’m getting my slice. She pulls off her asbestos gloves to serve it to me, fresh and bubbly, looking better than I even dreamed it would.
Then she tells me about this lemon pie she’s making, and the hair rises on the back of my neck.
I turn just as J. Rutherford comes into the caf. Only he’s not wearing his dad’s robes and he’s being trailed by those evil security guards. They’re not quite touching the backs of his arms.
He comes directly at me. I snap my fingers, and instantly, I’m holding those asbestos gloves instead of my cafeteria tray.
He sees that move and he smiles. Then he blinks hard. Against tears.
Tears again from J. Rutherford Wisenhauer the Third. What the heck is this all about?
He crowds so close to me that I wedge my back against the railing around the steam tables.
“I just had to tell you,” he says, “I’ve turned myself in.”
He says it real soft, so no one else can hear, except maybe those guards.
My mouth is dry.
“The gloves got me,” he says. “Good move. Made me realize that not all magic is about power. And some day, we’re going to tell that to my dad.”
Before I can even say, “Huh?” he heads out of the cafeteria again. Next thing I know it’s all over the school that J. Rutherford Wisenhauer the Third has voluntarily committed himself to some treatment facility for suicidal kids. Suicidal magical kids.
Seems he’d been dreaming about dying for a week or more because (rumor has it) he can’t stand living with Number Two and Number Two’s expectations.
Only I know different. Maybe he’s been dreaming of suicide, but only after he takes out part of the school.
Because he was
sending me the dreams.
Me, the person he beat up so bad I went to the hospital.
Me, the person with such small magic that no one pays attention to it.
Me, the person who used that small magic to stop him once before.
The whole thing is a big scandal—the kind the tabloids love: J. Rutherford The Second’s namesake is so miserable he’s thinking of suicide. What’s really happening in that mansion on the hill? Rumors of black magic, Satanism—and all that stuff the mundanes are afraid of.
When really, Mom thinks it was just the same stuff that mundanes deal with. A depressed kid, a distant and demanding father, an alcoholic mother (yep, that came out too). The kid decides he’s going to go out, but in a way that’ll destroy his father forever.
It’s not enough to kill Number Two, after all. J. Rutherford has to demolish everything Number Two stands for.
Only some spark in J. Rutherford’s subconscious, some little teeny part of himself, maybe the part that started all that self-loathing in the first place, knows it’s wrong. So it sends out feelers to the one person who actually knows J. Rutherford for who he really is.
Lucky me.
J. Rutherford’ll be in his mental health facility for the next five years or so. His father’s not on TV any more, and the mansion’s up for sale.
I’ve been accepted to the magical version of Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, and Mom, she vacillates between being really proud of me and wondering what she’ll do when she no longer has a resident chief cook and bottlewasher.
And I try not to do much dreaming. Sleep dreaming, that is. I’m up a little later than I used to be and I drink a lot more caffeine.
Mr. Marx says it’s a natural reaction to all I’ve been through. Mom thinks I should get past it because dreaming’s a normal part of life.
But I just don’t want the responsibility. Or the angst over the life-and-death philosophical questions.
I’d rather just spend my life cooking—and not mopping up someone else’s spilled red wine.
First published in Witch High, edited by Denise Little, Daw Books, 2008.
SS Domestic Magic (v5.0) Page 3