by Kit Alloway
Then she remembered: She had left the Dream. She was in the World.
Her heart thumped, causing an echoing throb in her bladder. The World. She had finally escaped and reached the World.
She recognized the bedroom she’d fallen asleep in. Someone had closed the window, and the room had grown cool. Mirren wished she had asked where the bathroom was before she’d fallen asleep, but perhaps this way was better. She’d have an excuse to walk around without an escort.
Suddenly the stranger’s bed felt safe and familiar, the house beyond it a vast and dangerous vista.
You’re in a house, she told herself. No doubt it’s similar to the houses on TV. There will be a kitchen, and a bathroom, and bedrooms.
She hoped there weren’t any dogs.
Summoning strength against the numerous pains and stiff muscles that protested her movement, she climbed out of the bed and approached the window. The anticipation she felt at looking through the glass was so intense, it felt almost like fear. After a minute spent wrestling with the lock, she knelt in front of the open window to press her face against the screen.
She closed her eyes and breathed deep.
The warm air that entered her lungs smelled faintly sweet, but also ruddy. She didn’t have names for the scents—one note was grainy and rich like velvet, another carried a sour smell like spinach. Ripe, gaudy florals; a faint chemical odor she imagined to be smog; even the metallic burn of the window screen. The air felt damp in her throat, and every time she inhaled she tasted something new. Crickets chirped charmingly—she recognized them from films—and tree leaves rustled one another as a slow breeze blew. Mirren opened her eyes and stared out at the branches and the moon passing behind them.
She felt dizzy from the wonder of it all.
But her bladder ached. She made herself stand up and go to the door; the window would still be open when she returned.
Although she didn’t remember changing her clothes, she now wore a T-shirt and too-short flannel pants. She hesitated at the door, unsure if this was an appropriate outfit to wear outside of the bedroom or if she should attempt to locate a robe.
The thought made her laugh. All those beautiful robes she had left behind, only to find herself in need of one here.
Her hand closed around the cold metal doorknob. Just a house, she reminded herself, but she had never been in any house besides her own.
Her mind was waking up, and it was full of warnings. It reminded her that she was trapped in the World with no way to get home, that her family likely thought she was dead, and that if anyone here found out who she was, they might very well have her executed. She had done a terrible job of blending in so far—she knew she had. She should have figured out how to open the Coke on her own, and her amnesia story was ludicrous, not to mention whatever had gone wrong with the handshake.
But she was pinching her thighs together as though trying to carry a dime between her knees, and she realized she couldn’t put off finding a bathroom any longer. With a resolute motion, she turned the knob and opened the door.
She’d thought everyone would be asleep, but someone was sitting on the living room couch watching television. When he heard the door open, he turned his head, and she recognized him as the guy who had squeezed her hand and then run. Haley, she remembered. Mirren hadn’t realized it was a unisex name.
The people on television were dancing in a club, and the colored lights wavered over the living room walls like aquarium lights. Mirren had always wanted to visit an aquarium. So many romantic scenes in films took place in them.
But Haley stood up and turned on a lamp missing its shade. Then he picked up a remote control and shut off the television, and after that they were just two people standing in a brightly lit room amid piles of dirty laundry.
Haley appeared younger than the teenage boys on television, less muscular, still a little gangly. His hairstyle looked less like sculpted bedhead than just bedhead, and she couldn’t tell if his green-and-yellow cardigan was fashionable or some sort of security blanket he wore at night. As she watched him, wishing she had something witty to say, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a small pad of paper and a Sharpie.
Should she walk away? Was their earlier mishap his way of telling her that he didn’t care to know her? He flipped pages on the pad as if looking for notes, but after reaching a blank page and staring at it for several seconds, he put the pad and pen down on the couch.
“Hey,” he said to Mirren. The word seemed to require a great deal of effort to pronounce.
Mirren smiled, because she knew the socially appropriate response to his greeting. “Hey,” she replied.
He thought some more. Then he said, “I know who you are.”
Her breath caught in her throat.
I must have given myself away the moment I opened my mouth. I have to get out of here.
“Is there a ladies’ room nearby?” she asked.
Haley wet his lips, looking confused. He pointed at a door next to an open laundry closet.
The bathroom was small and not very clean. It smelled of something both sour and musky that Mirren couldn’t identify. Throwing back the soap-streaked shower curtain, she saw what she was hoping for: a window.
A very small window.
I won’t fit through that, she admitted to herself. Her rapid breath grew frantic as she sat on the closed toilet lid. She was so scared, she couldn’t imagine removing a single article of clothing, let alone urinating.
I just got here; this can’t be my end already. What sort of destiny is that? They told me so many times that I wasn’t ready—why didn’t I listen? What was I thinking when I left home?
She had been thinking that she had been a prisoner all her life and that she didn’t intend to die a prisoner. She had been thinking that she was nineteen, the age of royal majority, and she needed to prove—to herself and her family—that she was worthy of being her parents’ daughter. She had been thinking that she couldn’t stand one more day in the Hidden Kingdom.
In retrospect, her behavior appeared very foolish and very immature.
Haley knocked softly on the bathroom door. “Mir—Nan? I—I don’t know what to call you. Are you okay?”
He didn’t sound like he was going to kill her. That was some comfort.
“Just a moment, please,” she called back.
Still shaking, she rose and faced herself in the mirror. Her red hair hadn’t been washed in days and hung in strands of rat’s nest. Her gray eyes were bloodshot, her lips nearly colorless, high spots of color dominated both cheeks, and various bruises, braces, and bandages covered her appendages.
What would Aunt Collena say if she could see me now?
The thought made her smile, and the sight of her own smile made her realize that she had not lost all of her dignity.
“Heed these words,” she whispered to her reflection. “You are the last member of a deposed monarchy, and you may never become queen of so much as a prom, and you have no idea how to act or speak or even shake hands. But you were raised to be a dream-walker queen and you are going to conduct yourself like one, even in the face of appalling circumstance. Now empty your bladder before you piss yourself with fear.”
Then she washed her face, combed her hair, brushed her teeth with someone else’s toothbrush, and forced herself to use the toilet.
Haley was sitting on the couch, knees pulled up to his chest, when she exited the bathroom. Mirren squared her shoulders beneath her borrowed T-shirt and sat at the other end of the couch.
“I apologize for making you wait,” she said. “I had to attend to a personal matter. But my attention is entirely yours now.”
Haley stared at her with hazel eyes as helpless and uncertain as a child’s. Despite his rumpled and—what was the word, “grungy”?—apparel, he had an attractive face with well-balanced features and fair skin that his sisters or girlfriends must have envied.
“If I may ask, how did you recognize me?”
He
wet his lips again, said nothing.
Either I am terrible at making conversation, Mirren thought, or else he’s even worse.
“You said you didn’t know what to call me. Mirren will be fine, when we’re alone. Naturally, I’d rather you didn’t disclose my identity to anyone else, but that’s your decision. In the meantime, I’d like to hear your demands.”
Haley blinked in alarm, then picked up his pad of paper and his Sharpie and began to write. As she waited, she recalled having once heard something about the odor of Sharpies. She wondered if it would be inappropriate to ask to smell his pen.
He tore the page out of the pad and held it out to her.
I just want to help you get home.
“Oh,” Mirren said. “Oh.” She closed her eyes briefly because there wasn’t a wall nearby for her to bang her head against.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, the words tumbling out. She felt trapped and stupid and rude. “I assumed that because you’re a dream walker—well, I shouldn’t have assumed that … I’m sorry. I assumed incorrectly.” She felt breathless. “May I open that window?”
Before he could reply, she stood up and pushed a floor-length curtain aside, only to discover that the glint of glass she had seen had come from a door and not a window.
A sliding glass door, she recalled. She pushed the handle sideways and one layer of glass slid alongside another, making a soft swish.
What an aptly named architectural element, she thought.
Then she inhaled, and all the scents she had tasted through the bedroom window returned—stronger, richer. She tilted her head back to lift her nose and stepped onto a porch that ran the length of the house. Until the warm air hit her bare arms, she hadn’t realized how cold she was.
Tilting her head back farther, she could see the stars. Real stars—living, burning stars that had reached across the galaxy to show themselves to her. They looked the same as the fake stars at home, and yet something made them indefinably beautiful and filled her with wonder.
“Dear God,” she whispered.
The door made its swoosh sound, and she turned to see Haley closing it behind him. For an instant she felt fearful again, but he gave her a very small, very meek smile, and she remembered his note.
She wanted so much to trust him, to have an ally in this huge World, to have a friend to … just to have a friend.
“I’ve never been outside before,” she admitted. “It’s…”
She wanted to say magical, but she was afraid of sounding stupid and childish. Instead, she turned her face back up to the brilliant sky. She almost thought she could feel the moonlight on her skin, light and lively and cool.
“There’s no sky where you live?” Haley asked.
“There is. I mean, there’s an imagined sky. An excellent likeness, I’ll admit. But when I look up at it, I don’t feel anything except that I’m looking at a very high ceiling. This feels … vast. Open.” Touching the wooden railing, she added, “Like I might even fall off the planet if I don’t hold on.”
Haley smiled, but when she caught him, he ducked his head.
“I’ve always been a little obsessed with gravity,” she admitted. “I used to spend hours dropping stones off a bridge where I live. When I was little, I thought that the reason the stones fell so fast was that the creek was where they belonged, that things meant to be together would draw each other. Birds got drawn up into the sky, plants reached for the sun, bodies fell to the ground when they died. It was all part of my distorted childhood theory of physics.” She laughed. “Actually, I sort of feel like that’s how I ended up here, that I was so meant to be here that I … attracted a path.”
Haley leaned against one of the columns that lined the porch. “The place you live…” His mouth twisted in a little frown. “It’s not in the World, is it?”
Mirren stared at him, confused as much by what he didn’t know as by what he did. “Should I know who you are?”
He smiled more easily this time. “No. I’m nobody. I just—sometimes when I touch someone, I see things. About them. I guess it’s … like a, a psychic thing.”
A psychic thing?
“Oh,” she said. She had no idea what an appropriate response to such a declaration might be. Nor was she entirely certain whether or not to think him crazy.
“S’okay,” Haley told her in a tiny voice, his smile fled. “You don’t have to believe me.”
“No, no, I don’t mean to—I mean, I—I’m sure you’re telling the truth.”
According to your own distorted version of reality.
She felt guilty as soon as the thought crossed her mind. How was Haley’s belief that he was psychic any less reasonable than her own belief that she had somehow manifested a way to join the World because it was where she belonged?
Bewildered, she fought the urge to tug on her right earlobe, a gesture her aunt Collena had often said made her look ten years old. “I’m so sorry—apparently I’m awful at conversation.”
Haley chuckled. “I’m the one who writes notes.”
“Is that what you do when you’re nervous? I should try it.”
“Here.” He extracted his steno pad and Sharpie and held them out to her.
Mirren laughed. “I’ll let you know when I need them.” She looked up at the moon again, taking another deep breath. “So, what did you see when you shook my hand?” she asked.
“I saw … You were holding a jewelry box. It had a fancy star on the lid, and inside was all this jewelry, with like red-orange stones. You and a younger girl put them on, and then you danced around in long nightgowns. Like you were at a party, or a…”
“A ball,” Mirren finished, her voice flat. “Dear God, you are psychic.”
Haley shrugged.
“I remember that night. Katia and I—Katia, she’s my cousin, but we were raised like sisters—we got all the royal jewels out and put them on, and we listened to the waltz from Eugene Onegin over and over and acted out the ball scene from Anna Karenina.” Mirren peered at Haley as if she might find the explanation of his ability somewhere on his face. “My aunt and uncle told exactly one person besides me about Katia. No one else knows she was ever born.”
Haley shrugged again.
“You’re right, too, that we’ve never lived in the World. We call the place the Hidden Kingdom, but it’s really just a pocket universe, which is sort of like—”
“I know what they are.”
A pocket universe was a section of the Dream cut off from the rest and formed into its own miniature universe.
“Really?”
He nodded but didn’t explain, so Mirren continued. “After my parents were killed, my aunt and uncle took me to the Hidden Kingdom to keep me safe. I’ve lived there my whole life.” She tried not to sound bitter. “They thought they were protecting me by keeping me there. They wouldn’t even tell me how to leave; I had to find my own way. Truthfully, I’m not sure if they ever would have let me go.”
Despite the heat, chill bumps rose on her arms.
“So,” Haley said carefully, “you don’t need my help getting home?”
They looked at each other and smiled. “No, I don’t need help getting home. I’ve been dreaming of the World for so many years; now that I’m here, nobody’s sending me back. I can just be me here—nobody’s niece, no queen-in-training. I can go to college and swim in the ocean and eat fast food. And I can dance at a real ball. This is where I’m meant to be.”
“Gravity,” Haley agreed.
“Exactly! And…” She swallowed. “I could have real friends.”
She didn’t know if she was being presumptuous or not. To her relief, Haley turned so that he stood beside her, facing the lawn, and said in a timid voice, “You can have all the friends you want.”
Filled with impetuous delight, she said, “My name is Amyrischka Heloysia Solei Rousellario. But please call me Mirren.”
He ducked his head, but this time Mirren knew that meant he was smiling. “Haelipto Kri
smon Mozeiush Micharainosa. But everyone just calls me Haley.”
Mirren wondered if the gravity that had drawn her to the World had drawn her to Haley as well. If so, she was grateful to gravity. She was so happy, in fact, that she turned and hugged Haley.
The hug seemed to catch him off guard, and Mirren immediately realized her mistake.
“Oh, I shouldn’t have done that,” Mirren said. “Did I make you see things again?”
“No,” Haley said softly. He managed to raise his face long enough to emphasize the point. “No.”
“I’m just so excited,” she said by way of apology.
Haley nodded. With his hand, he gestured to the World beyond the balcony. “You should be.”
Four
Josh loved waking up next to Will, but less so when the thing that woke her up was Haley letting himself into Will’s bedroom unannounced.
“Um, hi,” Josh said. She rubbed her eyes and poked at Will, who was sprawled out in bed beside her. “Will, wake up. Haley brought us doughnuts.”
“Huh?” Will’s eyes flipped open, then scanned the room. “Wait—there are no doughnuts! You little liar!”
Josh laughed and inserted herself between his arm and side. She supposed she should be more polite or demure or whatever—dream-walker culture was painfully prudish—but instead she nestled her head against Will’s chest and closed her eyes again.
“What time is it?” he asked.
“Quarter of still-too-early,” Josh told him. “Haley, what’s up?”
“I need to tell you something,” Haley said. “It’s bad.”
Skippy, Josh thought. “It’s too early to hear bad news.”
“No, it’s not,” Will said. He propped a pillow against the headboard and sat up, causing Josh to slump awkwardly against his side. “Go ahead, Haley.”
Josh grumbled to no avail. She knew that in the future, Will would be one of those psychiatrists who was available to his patients no matter the hour.