by Dima Zales
She hugs me, and I hug back. If I don’t break any of her ribs, it’s not for lack of effort. “We don’t have time for it today,” I say when I – finally – let her go. “Let’s get you ready for your exam. We can talk about it tomorrow. Afterwards.” I gesture towards her Secret Santa gift, “We can do it over a couple of martinis. Fair enough?” I don’t even like martinis, but I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to drink my share of them tomorrow night.
She seems doubtful, but either I look much more resolute than I feel, or she doesn’t have the heart to argue with me, because after just a moment she gives in and agrees with my plan, such as it is.
As much as I had a mental block about physics, Beth has one with statistics. It’s frustrating to watch, because she’s this close to getting her mind around it. She just can’t make that last jump to the place where it all makes sense to her. About the only thing I can say for sure we’ve accomplished today is keeping my mind off of the nightmare. I didn’t describe it, so she doesn’t know how bad it was, and I don’t intend to tell her. At least, not until after she’s done with her exam, and then done celebrating being done with it.
Actually, I’m not giving her enough credit again. She probably already knows. She kept looking at my hand, and even though they’ve faded you can still see the bite marks. I think she knows exactly what I saw and what it means, but I’m simply not going to talk about it right now.
It’s dinnertime and we’ve been at it all day, except for a short break a couple of hours ago for her to get a snack and me to check in with Brian and see how his exam went. “I’m putting too much pressure on myself,” Beth says, stepping away from her desk with a defeated expression.
“You just figured that out now, Miss Psychology Honors Student?” I get up from the desk as well. “Remember what you told me the other night? Even if I failed the final, I’d still done enough to at least pass physics anyway? You realize the same goes for you.”
“I’m not taking physics,” she shoots back.
“You used to be funnier. Is that the best comeback you’ve got?” is my reply. “Come on, let’s get some food in you, maybe it’ll start to make sense with a full stomach.” Probably not, but anything’s worth a try at this point.
We meet up with Brian at dinner. Beth looks over at me, a question in her eyes, and I answer with a quick shake of my head. Brian doesn’t notice any of it. I don’t want to spoil dinner – well, spoil it any more than the cooks who made it already have – so we’re not talking about the nightmare now. Beth goes along with it, and we talk about how finals have been going, and Christmas plans, and a lot of other things that don’t seem all that important in comparison.
The three of us walk back from dinner together, and when we get to Brian’s dorm I tell Beth to go on ahead, and I’ll catch up with her. Brian and I go upstairs to his room, and my hand automatically goes to lock the door behind us but I catch myself.
I want to. I need to, frankly. But if I do, I won’t leave this room until morning and I promised Beth I’d stick with her as long as she wanted to keep going tonight. Now that I think about it, though, that’s not really such a good plan for either of us.
She is putting too much pressure on herself and if I leave it up to her, she’ll be up all night driving herself crazy. She’ll get no sleep and be worse off than when we started this morning. I’ve got a better idea. I pick up Brian’s phone and start dialing.
I call Beth’s boyfriend. He’s surprised to hear from me. “We’re having a statistics emergency. We’ve been having one all day,” I tell him. He’s not surprised to hear that. “We’re going to keep at it for a while longer, but I need you to come over and distract her. Can you do that?” He asks what I mean by “distract her,” and I say, “I’ll trust your judgment. Can you be over to us at nine or so? I’ll head over to my boyfriend’s room, and you’ll have her all to yourself.” Brian blushes a bit as I say it. Over the phone, Ron gladly agrees. “But no spending the night. She needs sleep. Distract her all you want, but only until midnight at the latest, OK?” He agrees; it’s a plan.
I realize that I didn’t even ask Brian; I just assumed he’d be fine with me coming over tonight. But looking over at him, it’s obvious that he’s not bothered by my failure to ask; he was hoping all along that I’d want to come over. I kiss him, much too quickly. “I’ll be back at nine,” I say, and I can see in his face that his answer is something along the lines of “I’ll be counting the minutes.”
Who was it on TV who said “I love it when a plan comes together?” Was it Mr. T, maybe? He ought to see me…
I come back to our room and Beth isn’t at her desk; she’s sitting on her bed looking at last Friday’s edition of The Observer, the school newspaper. I was too caught up in – well, everything, I guess – to even glance at it at the time.
“Well, now we know what Dr. Walters was doing when you ran into him last week.” She tosses me the paper and I quickly read the short article.
“He resigned? That’s weird – you said he was on sabbatical, why would he do that?”
Beth shrugs. “The article doesn’t say. But it is weird, and it’s even weirder that I haven’t heard anything from anybody else in the department about it. Even Ray didn’t say anything about it, and he knows everybody’s business. I don’t know how everyone kept so quiet. They must have known he was leaving.” She looks a little put out by it, which I guess makes sense. He was her academic advisor, after all, and she liked the two classes she took with him.
“It’s a mystery, I guess,” I say. “I’m sure the dirt will come out soon enough, though. But in the meantime…”
Beth frowns, but she knows I’m right, and we have to get back to statistics. So back to studying we go. It’s slow and difficult; was I this bad before physics?
I don’t want to admit it, but yes, I guess I was. Still, by nine o’clock, I think we’ve made – well, not a breakthrough, but at least some progress. I feel pretty safe in saying she won’t completely bomb the exam, and maybe she can even scrape out a C.
Ron shows up right on time, and Beth is surprised for about two seconds, until she looks over to me and I can’t keep a straight face. She doesn’t even protest; she knows she’s crammed as much as she can and she needs to try and relax. “I’ll be going now,” I say. “Remember what I told you, Ron,” I remind him from the doorway. “At midnight the ball’s over. She turns back into a pumpkin and you get back into your carriage and go home.”
I close the door behind me, and I can hear Ron asking, “Wasn’t it the carriage that turned back into a pumpkin?” and Beth answering, “Who cares! Get over here,” and then I’m gone. I run down the stairs, through the lobby, across the quad over to Allen House and Brian’s waiting in the lobby there to let me in.
We go upstairs, and this time I do lock the door behind us. Before Brian can say a word my coat’s on the floor, I’ve kicked off my shoes, and I’m on him, shoving him down onto his bed. All I know is that I need him, need this, need to keep…
And then I feel the tears coming, suddenly, in a flood. Poor Brian doesn’t know what to think. I get off him, and he sits up, breathing raggedly. He puts his arm around me, looking at me with both confusion and concern in his eyes.
“I – I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me. I’ve never…” of course I have, but never quite like that. I don’t want to talk about it; I’ve been mostly keeping it locked away all day. But he knows.
“You had a nightmare,” he says very gently, his face only a couple of inches from mine. “Was it like the other one, where he was in the car?” I nod; that’s all I’m capable of at the moment. “You think it happened again for real.” That wasn’t a question; we both know exactly what happened. “And you haven’t told Beth, because she needed your help today, you’ve been carrying it around with nobody to tell.”
He pulls me very close, caresses my cheek. “You really are amazing,” he says after a long time, after I’ve stopped crying. “I wouldn�
��t be keeping it together half as well as you are. I don’t think anybody else would be.” The tears start flowing again at his words, and he doesn’t say anything more, he just holds me, and we stay that way until I fall asleep.
Sara’s in a dorm room, identical to her own except much neater, and with the two beds attached together to make one queen-sized bed out of two twins. There’s a man sitting on the bed, a short, sandy-haired man. Glenn, from upstairs. He’s reading a letter, and without seeing it, Sara knows it’s from the American Plastics Corporation, inviting him for a follow-up interview, offering to fly him out at their expense. There’s another letter, in a much thinner envelope on the desk, also from that company, addressed to his girlfriend, Julie. Glenn reads his letter over and over again, and then he looks over to his side of the desk, where there’s a receipt from Levine and Son Fine Jewelers. He stares for a while at the receipt, then retrieves Julie’s letter, takes his letter, and holds them as if to tear them both up…
…without warning, Sara finds herself somewhere else. It’s a bedroom. All it takes is a moment’s glance to know that it belongs to a teenaged boy, a high school boy. There’s a varsity letterman’s jacket draped over the back of a chair, a Remedial Algebra textbook on a desk, a poster of three bikini-clad models posing on motorcycles hanging on one wall, and dirty clothes piled halfway up the wall in the corner next to the closet. Loud music throbs through the walls; this is the biggest party of the year, Sara somehow knows.
The door opens, and a girl who, except for her long blonde hair might be Sara, is pulling someone into the room. Before she gets a good look at who it is, Sara already knows it’s Brian. The girl, not-Sara, is wearing a too-tight Central North High School t-shirt and a too-short skirt, and she pulls Brian over to the unmade bed, pushes him down onto it.
Sara knows that this isn’t a fantasy, this is something that happened, something Brian hasn’t yet told her about. As Sara watches, the girl who isn’t her is all over Brian, and at first he appears fully involved in the proceedings, but Sara catches his eye wander over to the jacket hanging on the chair. The girl tries to recapture his attention, and almost succeeds, but Brian keeps coming back to the jacket, and Sara can feel the fear coming off of him, and something more, too. She hears a voice, but it isn’t coming from anyone in the scene; it’s just in her head, and it says: I’m glad this didn’t happen. I’m glad I waited for you…
My eyes open and I feel Brian all around me, his face is only an inch or two from mine. I’m still processing what I just saw.
“That was two years ago,” he says, and he’s blushing redder than I’ve ever seen him. He begins to tell me about it, but he doesn’t have to. I know the whole story. How, though? How could I possibly know it?
“She was somebody’s girlfriend, they had a fight, she was drunk, she grabbed you…” I feel like I’m describing one of my own memories instead of one of his.
He scoots back a bit from me. “She didn’t actually look like you. My brain must have mashed some things together. But otherwise it happened like you saw. You’re right. Her boyfriend was on the football team. A linebacker. Nasty temper. I remember thinking if he ever found out he’d rip my head off,” he says, spilling the words out, and then I pick up the story. I’m not at all sure where my words are coming from.
“She was just being spiteful towards him, she didn’t even know you…”
“No,” Brian shakes his head. “Not really. I was just the first guy she saw who wasn’t a complete mutant or too drunk to walk three steps in a straight line, and that was good enough,” he says. Even though it’s two years later I’m angry on his behalf. He deserved better than that.
“You didn’t have a girlfriend, and you just went along.” How do I know that? Not just the fact, but the feelings?
“If it wasn’t for her boyfriend, if I wasn’t afraid of getting killed when it got around, because it would have, right? It was high school, it totally would have. If not for that, I probably would have done it. Just to – just to have done it, to know what it was like.”
I know exactly what he means. I start to tell him my version of a very similar story, but I catch myself. This is his story to tell and I have to let him, if he wants to finish it. “What you saw, that was pretty much how it went, but you didn’t see the end,” he says
I didn’t see it, but as he says the words, the rest of the story is somehow in my memory anyway. I remember it as though I’d been there. Not just in a dream, but actually in that room two years ago. It’s enough to say that nothing happened and the girl was far too drunk to remember, let alone tell anyone, what hadn’t happened and why.
It explains so much, about his nerves, about how hesitant he was our first time together. But how do I know it?
It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that I’ll never say a word about it to him, or to anyone. “Don’t,” I whisper, putting my finger to his lips. I don’t need to hear it, and he doesn’t need to say it aloud. “It’s enough that you trust me to want to tell me.”
He looks both relieved and pained at the same time. I understand completely. I know what he’s afraid of right now, and I would feel exactly the same. But he doesn’t have to be afraid. I run my hand through his hair, and I hold his eyes with mine, not wavering an inch. “It wouldn’t matter anyway. It wouldn’t change how I feel about you, or what I see when I look at you. The only thing I’ll take away from it is that I heard you say that you’re glad you waited for me.” I pull him to me, and I kiss him, and I go right on kissing him. Finally, much later, I tell him, “I’m glad, too.”
And then we show each other how glad we both really are.
I wake up in Brian’s bed, in his arms, and right at this moment the nightmare seems very far away. I know it won’t last, but I’m going to enjoy this as long as I can. Still, I can’t help thinking about the other dreams I saw last night. I know I keep saying this, but I don’t want to know everyone’s secrets. I don’t want to see what they’re preoccupied with or afraid of.
It’s one thing with Brian; he knows, even though he’s unconscious, that I’m there. He opened himself up to me last night in a way that’s just mind-boggling. And I think that he could probably kick me out of his dreams, if he wanted to. I don’t have any reason to believe that, but I know it just the same.
Everyone else, though, they don’t know I’m there. I saw Glenn last night, and he’s afraid he’ll get a job and Julie won’t. I saw her a couple of nights ago, and it was the same in reverse. It’s all very “Gift of the Magi” and it really is sort of touching. And honestly, I probably could have guessed they were both worried about that without seeing their dreams. But it’s still not my business, and I don’t have any right to know it. It isn’t fair to them, even though I have no intention of saying a word about it to anybody.
There’s got to be something I can do about the dreams. I tell Brian what I’m thinking, and he doesn’t have an answer. I guess I could start sleeping with a tin-foil hat, like the crazy people who believe in UFOs and mind-control beams or whatever. I’m sure my brother would be able to tell me all about that. If I had the slightest confidence it would work, I would do it, no matter how ridiculous I’d look. But of course I don’t.
Neither of us have any better ideas all morning. We don’t even leave the room until lunch. After a quick and totally unsatisfactory meal, Brian heads over to the library and I go back to Carson House. It’s a quarter after twelve as I’m heading in the front door and Beth, completely in a world of her own, plows right into me, knocking me right on my behind.
She starts to curse me for getting in her way, before she realizes who she’s yelling at. She grins in a very embarrassed way and helps me up. “I’m sorry, I was…”
“Yeah, I know,” I answer. I hug her. “Good luck!” I tell her, and give her as serious a stare as I can manage. “You’re going to be fine.”
She shakes her head, but I keep on staring. “Listen to me. If you can’t trust yourself, trust me. I say
you’re going to be fine. OK?” She hugs me back, hard. “I’ll take that as a yes.”
She lets me go, and hops down the two steps to the sidewalk. “Make sure you’re here when I get back. We’ll be opening that gin,” she reminds me, and she’s off.
Beth is as good as her word. It’s five o’clock when she gets back from her exam and the bar is immediately open. She passed; she’s sure of that. “It really did start to make sense,” she says. “You got me through it,” she says, clinking her glass to mine.
We’re on to our third round before we get around to my nightmare. I read the story in the newspaper earlier today and I already knew everything in it, except the girl’s name: Katie Barnett. Knowing her name makes it much, much worse.
I don’t really want to talk about it but Beth wants to know and I guess I do need to tell it. It’s definitely easier after a couple of very strong drinks. Beth is properly horrified, and she doesn’t have any better ideas than Brian or I did about what I ought to do. I’m sure the martinis aren’t helping us think clearly; it might be easier to talk about all this, but it certainly isn’t more productive.
She lets me off the hook, finally, but she’s still curious if I saw anybody else’s dreams the last couple of nights. I flatly refuse to discuss it. She plays the “best friend” card, but I’m not having it. “I already told you way more than I should have the last time,” I say.
“But we don’t keep secrets!” she protests.
No, we don’t. She’s right. But, “They’re not my secrets. If it was somebody else this was happening to, say it was Jane down the hall, would you want her telling Jessica what she saw in your head?”
She considers that. “No,” she answers halfheartedly. “I guess not.”
Thank God.
God – that’s it. Maybe she’ll understand it better that way. “Think of me like a priest taking confession. I can’t tell anybody except God, right? 100% confidential.”