by Lucy Keating
Despite knowing he is totally full of it, I still blush when I nod.
“What do you care?” Max interjects.
“Okay.” Celeste jumps in, taking Max’s hand and giving him a tug. “I know you guys can’t stand each other, but you’re particularly grouchy today. Let’s go grab a bagel, you big baby.”
Max relents, but he gets up slowly, still frowning at us.
“So how about that ride?” Oliver asks me again.
“I’d love to,” I say emphatically. He offers his hand like he is escorting me onto a horse-drawn carriage, and hoists me onto the Segway. As we speed off into the metaphorical sunset, I glance past Oliver’s flying blond curls to see Max walking away with Celeste, his face turned back and looking right at me.
SEPTEMBER 13th
“Are you ready?” Max asks. I am perched on a foam boogie board, surfer style, at the top of Nan’s twirling staircase, while Max holds on to my arms to keep me upright. I look down ahead of me and notice that this time, the staircase actually does seem to extend all the way to infinity.
“This seems less than safe,” I observe.
“It’s gonna be great,” Max says. “And I’ll be right behind you, I promise. And what’s the worst that can happen?”
“I don’t know, that I go somersaulting down instead, thereby breaking every bone in my body?” I say.
“On what?” Max asks then, and when I go to point out the obvious liabilities, I notice the walls of the staircase, even the stairs themselves, are made of sofa cushions. All colors and fabrics, deep salmons and pea greens and midnight blues. The worst falling on this staircase would probably do is put me immediately to sleep.
“I see your point,” I say.
“So?” Max asks again.
I break into a slow smile. “Well, what are you waiting for?”
Max grins, kisses me on the cheek, and gives me a big push. Down I go, swishing along the cushion steps like I’m snowboarding. It’s bouncy and smooth and way too fun. I start to notice I’m passing photographs, and when I look more closely, the staircase has become the central gallery at the Guggenheim in New York, which swivels like a corkscrew.
“Max?” I cry out.
“WAAAAHOOOOOOOO!” I hear Max yell as he comes zipping along after me. He looks like he’s about to pass me but instead sticks an arm out, pulling my board up to his. And then we’re sharing one, his arms wrapped around me tightly, as priceless artwork whizzes by.
When we come zipping onto the bottom floor, Nan is sitting in a chair in a red Chanel suit and a large gardening hat, holding a racing flag. She swishes it down.
“You win,” she says in her normal tempered enthusiasm.
“Against who?” I ask.
In response, Nan just points, and coming down behind us on their own boogie boards are Dean Hammer and Roberta. Roberta picks up speed, and just as she is about to pass Dean Hammer, she gives him a swift push with one arm and he topples over.
“Hey!” Dean Hammer calls out. Roberta just chuckles to herself.
Max puts a gold medal around my shoulders, smiling broadly. “Nice work,” he says, his eyes twinkling. But something is off. When I look closer, I see they aren’t his normal, indecipherable gray green. They’re bright blue like Oliver’s.
“Max?” I ask. “Are you okay?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?” he asks.
“Your eyes—” I start to say. And when I look closely at them again, they are a deep purple this time. But then they flash to sea green again. “Never mind.” I shake my head.
4
Beep-Beep-Honk, Toot-Toot-Whistle
THE CEILING OF my new bedroom is covered in maps. Subway routes, nautical charts, world geography. It’s obvious that from a very young age, my mother was desperate to get out. By the time the nauseating tri-tone alarm of my iPhone erupts through my bedsheets, I’m already awake and staring at a patch of the solar system in the far right corner, thinking about last night’s dream. I could swear it’s actually twinkling, but it must be a trick of the light coming through the window. Mornings used to be my favorite time of day. Those spare moments when I was able to hold on to Max. I could close my eyes and actually imagine his face right next to mine. Exactly what he looked like, the way it felt to be near him. Because no matter what happened when I was awake, Max was always my constant when I slept. Until now. Because now his eyes were turning purple.
It’s been two weeks since we arrived in Boston, and now seeing Max—in dreams or reality—is basically torture. Last night he may have been the carefree guy I loved, but I am pretty sure when I get to school today, it will be another story.
Max has always been the guy who takes care of me. Who puts me first. Last year I kept dreaming we were in Thailand, riding elephants, floating in long-tail boats on crystal-blue waves, watching sunsets from the beach. It was perfect and beautiful and carefree, except for when it was time to eat: Max taste-tested everything for me, trying to detect any trace of peanuts, because I have a nut allergy that I’m careless about even when I’m awake. I sighed dramatically every time, but on the inside, he made me feel loved and safe. But now I feel awful. Seeing him each day while he treats me like I don’t exist. Watching him with someone new as though I never existed in the first place.
I scramble to turn off the alarm and throw myself back down on the bed in resignation, causing all the pillows to fluff around my head. I beat them down angrily with my fist, then hop out of bed, pull on a gray sweatshirt, and stare at myself in the mirror of my mother’s vanity table. My caramel-colored hair is sticking out in so many directions you’d think I went through a car wash in a convertible, and my eyes are bright and intense, sitting somewhere between green and honey colored in the morning light.
“You really have to get over this,” I say.
“Are you up, Bug?” I hear my father’s deep, pre-coffee voice call on his way to the kitchen. “I know you’re up. I can hear you talking to yourself again.”
I run a brush through my wild strands and trot down the three flights of stairs to the kitchen. I find my dad seated at the large chef’s prep table, just opening the New York Times.
“Good morning,” I say, leaning down to give him a peck on the cheek, then crouching under the table to do the same to Jerry’s fat face. Jerry barely blinks as my lips graze his furry wrinkled skin.
The coffeemaker pops and gurgles in the corner, and I walk toward it, breathing in the delicious smell.
“Sleep okay?” my father asks without looking up from the Opinions page.
I turn around slowly from the counter to face him. “Why do you ask?”
“Bags under your eyes, an unhealthy attention to the French roast,” he says simply. “When our REM cycle is disrupted—”
“Thanks, Dr. Rowe,” I say. “I know how it works.”
My father glances up at me from behind his glasses. “Irritability is another sign of sleep deprivation, for the record,” he mutters.
As soon as the coffeemaker beeps, I fill his favorite grad school mug and slide it across the table to him in apology, waiting until he takes a sip as a signal that he forgives me. Then, after filling my own, I slump down at the table, facing him. He’s wearing his old flannel robe over navy pajamas and the same worn penny loafers he’s had for as long as I can remember. He’s obviously worn this costume outside to get the paper. Meaning he’s been seen. By people. I wince, and I watch as he flips through the paper, mumbling to himself as he skims, reaching up to stroke his beard when he comes across an article of interest. I know all of his habits, his idiosyncrasies. I understand things about my father he doesn’t even realize, and probably wishes I don’t. Like how he still misses my mother.
“Do you think I’m going to like it here?” I ask finally. “I mean, eventually?”
“Where? Boston?” my father answers, clearly fixated on something in the Science section.
I tilt my head to the side. “No, Cuba. Wait.” I throw my hands up to my face in mock h
orror. “Where are we?”
“Very funny,” he says, folding the paper and looking at me directly for the first time. Then he switches to a topic he finds more interesting. “Odd you’re having trouble sleeping again.”
“What do you mean?” I ask. “I’ve always had the best dreams.”
“Now you do,” my dad says. “But after your mom left …” He stops for a second.
“Dad …” I say. I’m starting to feel a little noodly again.
“You had nightmares that you were lost. You’d wake up hysterical and I’d have to hold you until you fell asleep again. Until I found CDD.”
“CDD?” I ask. Why does that sound so familiar? My coffee hasn’t kicked in, but it’s on the tip of my tongue.
“Center for Dream Discovery,” my dad says. “You don’t remember? Dr. Petermann?”
I stare at him a long moment, and then it clicks. “Wait, these?” I run to and from the front hall and dump the postcards on the kitchen table.
My dad picks one up and makes a face. “I can’t believe your grandmother saved these.”
“Dad, can you please tell me what you are talking about?” I ask. “I have no recollection of this place. I’m going to feel like I’ve had a lobotomy if you don’t explain.”
My dad pours another cup for both of us. “As I said, after your mother left, you started having nightmares. You were only six. I think you felt vulnerable. It got so bad that you were barely sleeping. I was barely sleeping. So a colleague of mine at Harvard recommended a sleep study on brain mapping.” He pauses. “Is this ringing any bells, Alice?”
“Um, only of a bad science fiction movie,” I say, transfixed. “Go on.”
“Not science fiction, just science.” Dad gets very touchy about the difference. “As you know, much of the brain is still a mystery. But one advance we’ve made is in the monitoring of brain activity—what sections of the brain light up when we see or feel different things. Some scientists figured out that if they monitored brain activity during dreaming, then had subjects relay the stories afterward, they could actually—at a very rudimentary level—put those stories together.”
“So basically you turned me into one of the monkeys in Madeleine’s lab.”
“I wish you would call her Mom,” my dad corrects me, and I don’t have the heart to tell him that at a certain point, Mom just didn’t feel right anymore. “But you’re not wrong.”
Monkeys are why my parents met. Apes, actually. People are always mixing up monkeys and apes, when they are in fact two different species. Madeleine was at Harvard, studying the evolution of language. All beings have ways of communicating, of expressing themselves, but not all beings use language, which has grammatical rules. Madeleine wanted to figure out how it all came to be, why some do and others don’t. She worshipped Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey, the young women who ran around the African jungle in the seventies documenting gorillas.
So she spent most of her days with a cumbersome boom box playing repeated sound patterns to apes in a lab. Beep-beep-honk, toot-toot-whistle. A-A-B, A-A-B. Madeleine believed that if she changed the pattern all of a sudden from A-A-B to A-B-B (beep-honk-honk, toot-whistle-whistle) and the ape noticed, it would mean they had noticed a pattern in the first place. She was a real geek about it; she couldn’t get enough. She went to this lecture on how language is mapped in the brain, and that’s where she met my dad, who was actually giving the lecture at the ripe age of twenty-eight. They stayed behind talking for hours, and were basically never apart again.
Until they had me. And six years after that, Madeleine’s research grant in Uganda came through and she went alone, and never came back. Now she lives in Madagascar with Javier. Javier is a research student half her age from Barcelona. She says they are just friends, but I have seen pictures of Javier, who I Googled on the internet, and I say otherwise. Not that I ever tell her this, since we only communicate about six times a year.
“Anyway,” my dad is saying, “a couple of Saturdays a month at CDD and suddenly you were sleeping like a baby. You were happier. An odd group of people over there, but they were passionate about what they did for you guys.”
“You guys?” I ask. “There were others?” I am staring down at the balloons on the birthday card. I feel like my mind is full of puzzle pieces and I’m trying to put them all together without being able to use my hands.
“Sure,” my dad says. “You know how studies work, Alice.”
“Does CDD still exist?” I ask.
“Well, someone is still sending you those postcards, aren’t they?” he says, going back to his paper.
I stand up quickly, feeling awake for the first time all morning and more hopeful than I’ve felt in days. I go to hustle back upstairs and change, but jerk my foot back when it touches the first step. I could’ve sworn it just sank right in, like a couch cushion. I stare at the step for a moment. It looks normal, like, you know, a step. I take a deep breath, then gently press my toe against it, followed by a few gentle prods. Nothing. The same wooden step as ever, covered in blue carpet.
Apparently the French roast is taking a long time to kick in this morning.
5
Law & Order: Special Cookie Unit
THE THING IS, I can’t possibly be expected to go through the school year like this. Longing for a guy I feel, deep down, that I truly know, who in reality acts like I don’t exist. I might as well be the main character in some stalker movie on Lifetime. I imagine the trailer in my head. In a world where nothing makes sense, how far will she go for the boy of her dreams—LITERALLY?
So obviously I have to do something about it, which brings me here, to the Bennett cafeteria. Actually, Bennett doesn’t have a cafeteria. It has a dining hall. Floor-to-ceiling windows, long oak tables, and massive chandeliers. There are vegetarian options, vegan options, and gluten-free options. There is a waffle maker at breakfast, a panini press at lunch, and more kinds of cereal than you’d find in a General Mills factory. What’s even more uncanny is the fact they serve dinner. So you can head to class and sports afterward and then grab a bite before hitting the library all night. If that’s your kind of thing. A SOUND BODY IS A SOUND MIND! a sign above the bagel station proclaims. But right now I’m not even hungry. Right now I’m only here on business.
The phone call I received from Sophie during free period is what really set me in motion.
“I Googled him!” she proudly announced when I answered the phone.
“Who?” I asked.
“Who do you think?” she said. “Dreamboy, obviously. We couldn’t do it before, because we only had spare defining characteristics: name, age, height, and … hot. But now we know so much more! Last name, hometown, even high school!”
“And what did you find?” I asked, my heartbeat picking up a little bit. Sophie was a total genius.
“Not much, I’m afraid,” she said, her tone going flat. “At least nothing that links him to you. He’s gone to Bennett since kindergarten, he’s a scholar-athlete, captain of the soccer team—a pretty big deal for a junior, by the way—and he spent the spring of his sophomore year in Costa Rica—some kind of student travel program. Impressive.”
“Glad you’re so fond of him,” I muttered.
“Could you lose the attitude, please?” Sophie said. “I just went full-on Nancy Drew for your butt.”
“Sorry, Soph, you know I appreciate it. I’m just disappointed. I’m dying to figure out how I know him. Especially since despite all my best efforts, he’s made it pretty clear I’m nothing more than some new girl who showed up in his psychology class.”
“You’re getting closer,” Sophie said. “Don’t lose hope. Now if you’ll excuse me, Miss Tassioni is giving me the evil eye.”
“Where are you?” I asked, chuckling.
“As a matter of fact, I am in the first row of English class,” she said. Then in response to a voice in the background, her tone turned slightly hostile. “Okay! God! The world didn’t begin and end with Jane Auste
n, you know.” Followed by a click. I put my phone back in my bag with a sad smile and tried to ignore the ache in the pit of my stomach. Sophie was bold and unapologetic. But she was also as loyal as they came. I missed her too much to even think about.
And as much as I appreciated her help, it had gotten me nowhere. So I’ve been looking for Max all day, and I’ve finally tracked him down at dinner. And currently Dreamboy is picking up a plate and moving toward the food line, and my mission today is to see what he eats. Because if I can figure out if he shares the same likes and dislikes as Dream Max—a hatred of cilantro, a love of hamburgers, ambivalence about sweets in general—I’ll know I’m actually dreaming of a real person … and then maybe I can figure out why. Maybe I can figure out what all this has to do with this mystery place CDD and what to do about it.
“Mmmm!” I say with way too much enthusiasm, coming up next to Max in line and reading the menu. “Brazilian Night.” My old school had two kinds of food. Edible and inedible. This place is silly.
Max just nods as he places some steak on his plate and doesn’t look up.
I tap my fingers on my tray nervously and scoot it along the line, feeling relieved when I come to the fried plantains. Here it is. My “in.” Once when I was little, my dad had to go away to a conference and left me in the care of a Brazilian lady who lived in the apartment downstairs. I’d felt pretty great about it at the time and planned to watch all the television my eyeballs could stand before they melted into their sockets. But Beatriz was surprisingly strict, and to make matters worse, every night she cooked plantains and spiced ground beef. I’d smile as I chewed, then spit it into my napkin and feed it to Jerry under the table when she wasn’t looking.
I went to sleep at night feeling an intense hunger and impossible loneliness for my dad.