That Place (which still no one will tell me the actual name of!!!!!) sounds like the coolest.
JANUARY 3RD, 2017
Looks like I won’t be doing any group. Talk therapy is still really important, I guess, because I’ve got, like, four therapy sessions every single day, but they won’t be putting me with any other Atypicals. At all. Owen explained it to me when I got here yesterday, sitting me down in the same room we’d met in the first time—that windowless, spa-like room, with soft lighting and squishy pillows. It made me feel a little less freaked out about being back to be sitting in a familiar room, looking at a familiar face. That feeling didn’t really last once he started talking though.
“So, Rose,” he started, his voice gentle, “tell me what’s going on.”
“Um…” I swallowed. “Didn’t Dr. Bright fill you in? I thought I was supposed to do everything through her now, so we had a session last week—”
“Yes, yes, she did,” he said. “And her notes, as always, were extremely thorough.” He smiled a bit at that, like he admired good note-taking.
“But I want to hear it from you.” He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his eyes warm and inviting behind his wire-frame glasses.
“Oh, well, um,” I fumbled, not sure where to begin. I decided it was best to just … rip off the Band-Aid. “I’ve been sleeping … a lot.”
“Define ‘a lot,’” he said.
“Like … most days?” His mouth twisted, in disappointment or sadness, I couldn’t tell. “I haven’t been—I mean, it hasn’t been random. Not really.”
“You mean, you haven’t been falling asleep without meaning to?” he asked and that’s when I noticed that he didn’t have any kind of notebook open, no pen taking notes on my file. It’s like he was asking because he cared.
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I’ve been choosing it.”
“And you’ve been dreamdiving?” he asked.
“Yeah.” I nodded, feeling embarrassed by the answer. But why should I be? That was what they had taught me to do—all I’d focused on my first time here was controlling my ability enough to mitigate the narcoleptic symptoms and I’d done that. But I didn’t say that to Agent Green, instead asking a question that had been bothering me since my last appointment with Dr. Bright, the one that had confirmed that I needed to come back here.
“Dr. Bright didn’t think it was a good idea for me to come back here,” I told him. “She agreed that I need help, but she didn’t seem to like the idea of me doing another program at the AM.”
“What did she suggest instead?” Owen asked, leaning back in his chair. His normally open face shuttered a bit, turning into a carefully neutral mask. That was the second time mentioning Dr. Bright had caused some sort of reaction. I still don’t really understand what her relationship to the AM is, but I’m getting curious.
“More frequent therapy sessions,” I said. “More diligence on my part—meditating more, journaling again.”
“You haven’t been journaling?” he asked, looking like a kicked puppy. It almost made me want to reach into my bag and show him that I’d brought this notebook. But I didn’t want him to see how few pages I’d used since he last laid eyes on it.
“Not as much,” I said. “It was always meant to help me track stuff so I could control things better. I don’t know why I would have to keep it up now that I’m where I’m at.”
“It’s not just about your ability, Rose,” he said. “Dr. Loving said that it was helping you process a lot of different things in your life—she seemed to think it was very beneficial to you, based on what you told her about it during your last stay. I would imagine there are still things worth writing down, especially with what’s happening with your father—”
“So what’s the plan this time around?” I asked bluntly. I like Owen, but I was not ready to have that conversation with him. He seemed to understand that, letting me steer the conversation away from the difficult things.
“Well, similar to before,” he said, opening up my file for the first time. He didn’t seem to actually read it, instead scanning his eyes over it like he just needed something to do. “You’ll do therapy, physical checkups, dreamdiving sessions, but no group—”
“Thank god,” I mumbled.
“I hear it wasn’t your favorite last time,” he said, giving me a small smile.
“Yeah, not really my thing,” I admitted.
“That’s perfectly okay,” he said. “We’re not focused on how your ability interacts with other people anyway. In fact, at first, we’re going to ask you not to dreamdive at all. And, ideally, not even dream. Get your body used to normal sleep again.”
“How exactly is that going to happen?” I asked. After that horrible fight with my dad, I wanted to show him that I could fix myself without coming here. I wanted to make things better with him. But anytime I fell asleep, I just couldn’t not dreamdive. And every time I would get swept up in the wonders of the dreamworld and not notice the time passing and … well. Here I am. I wasn’t sure I even could sleep without dreaming anymore.
“You’ll be put in a room that’s specially treated to … limit Atypical abilities,” he said, hesitating slightly. “And given sleeping pills that should help you sleep without diving.
“I know, I know, it sounds scary,” he added, seeing my face. “But I promise you, it won’t hurt you at all. And you’ll most likely only be in that room for the first week.”
“And then what?” I asked.
“And then we’ll put you in the same room you stayed in the first time you were here,” he said, before softening his voice and leaning forward again. “Rose, we don’t want to take your ability away from you, or make you feel bad for using it—”
“Really? Because it feels like that’s exactly what I’m here for—”
“We just want you to use it safely,” he said, unfazed by my combativeness. “Your ability is a part of you, a beautiful part, but you can’t sleep your whole life away.”
“You get that from Dr. Bright?” I scoffed, and he flinched, which was a bit surprising. I hadn’t meant that as an insult.
“Yes, well, Joan is a very smart woman,” he said and I immediately clocked the first-name usage. There’s a story there and if I were allowed to walk in anyone’s dreams right now, I bet I could find out.
But for now, I’m in the “detox” phase of things, I guess.
I had my first dreamless sleep last night and it was … fine. I was able to sleep and I didn’t dreamdive. I even woke up at a reasonable hour.
Maybe this won’t be so hard after all.
January 3rd, 2017
Dear Mark,
Finally the truth. Dr. B. and Sam brought me here—not you. I knew it. You wouldn’t betray me, not like that.
In other revelations, Wadsworth definitely does think I’m a criminal.
Attempted kidnapping, actual kidnapping, breaking into a private facility, stalking, harassment, credit card fraud, and “oh yes, you haven’t paid your taxes in, well, ever.” Her smile feels like it could rebreak my ribs.
That was the list she rattled off. She’s smart and knows way more than she should, but seems like the body that’s buried in the Santa Monica Mountains is still buried. Murder—accessory to murder, I should say who am I kidding I know the truth of what I—has stayed off my rap sheet. Though now that I’ve written it down within the halls of the AM, maybe it won’t stay a secret. I don’t know. I probably shouldn’t be writing so many letters to you while high on morphine.
I never told you any of that. About Isaiah and the Unusuals and what we did. What I did. I’m trying to
I think you would have liked Neon.
I like Neon. I loved Neon. Indah too. Marley, in his own way, but I never really saw him like that. Like something I wanted to get closer to, to touch. But Neon and Indah … enough distance from that time and a whole lot of what your therapist sister would call “self-reflection” has made me accept the stark truth, that I have, in f
act, been in love before. And I so thoroughly ruined it. I keep ruining things. And I’ll just keep I’m hard to understand, hard to love, hard to forgive. Everything in my life has been so fucking hard.
I think you’d roll your eyes at that. I know that Neon would have. She’d roll her eyes and call me an emo white boy before lighting a cigarette. I’ve been thinking about her so much the past few months. I understand her better now, understand why she was so upset when I used her power to do what I did. I sure as shit didn’t relish you using my power and I like you. I’m not sure Neon ever liked me. Not really. Not honestly. Not without me making her.
But I’ve been thinking about her, and how she’d hate this place. How she’d want to burn the whole thing down.
I still don’t know if Isaiah was Atypical. Whatever he was, he was dangerous. I’m glad he’s in the ground. And, somehow, despite absolutely everything, I really don’t want to join him.
JANUARY 7TH, 2017
I feel like I want to crawl out of my own skin.
It’s now been five days since I last dreamdived. I slept quite a bit the first two days I was here—it was weird to go to bed at a normal hour and sleep without dreaming, but I’ll admit, it was actually kind of nice. To fall asleep slowly and then, in the blink of an eye, be awake and have it be the next day. With the help of the sleeping pills they’ve given me, my body has readjusted to a regular schedule. Now I’m just … a normal person again. They’re going to start letting me dive again soon, but for now, I’m just going from doctor’s appointment to therapy to doctor’s appointment to yoga to therapy to meals to yoga on a constant loop. It’s simultaneously kind of relaxing and completely mind-numbing.
So. I’ve started wandering around the facility.
It’s ENORMOUS. I didn’t realize how enormous until I started to explore it, finding it far twistier and more confusing to navigate than I would have expected from the big, open-air lobby.
It’s half a dozen stories, a big steel-and-glass monstrosity, with these strange little elements of old-school New England, like the stone floors and musty library smell. I wasn’t able to access large swaths of the building—private rooms and most of the medical wing—but as I wandered down a hallway on the sixth floor, I saw there were also a bunch of private offices and conference rooms, most unoccupied as the doctors and such went about their day. As I passed one open doorway, I heard a familiar voice.
“Rose!”
Mags, the cute receptionist, came bounding out of a room that, from looking over her shoulder, seemed to be some kind of employee lounge. She had that big, beautiful smile on her face, but she also looked deeply, deeply confused.
“What are you doing up here?” she asked.
“Just wandering around,” I said, shrugging. “I had some free time and nothing to do so…”
“So you’ve decided to go exploring where you shouldn’t?” She folded her arms across her chest and fixed me with a stare that reminded me of my mom. Which … seeing that face on a girl I think is cute? Full body shudder.
“No—what—I wasn’t—I’m not snooping or anything,” I rushed to explain and Mags laughed.
“I’m totally messing with you!” she said. “I mean, yeah, patients aren’t really supposed to be up here unless they’ve got an appointment, but it’s not like it’s forbidden or anything.”
“Really? Because it honestly feels like I’m Belle and a talking candelabra is going to pop out from around a corner and tell me to never go into the west wing.”
She laughed again.
“Yeah, that’s very fair.” She chuckled. “Come on, let’s keep walking.”
And so we did. Mags walked me around the rest of the floor, and back down to my room, telling me about the AM all the while. I think she meant it when she said it was okay for me to be up there, but I also think she walked with me to keep an eye on me, make sure I wasn’t sticking my nose where it didn’t belong. Because as it turns out, the AM has a lot of things going on that not even employees know about.
“Experiments?” I asked as Mags finished telling me about all the different things they did in this building. “What do you mean by experiments?”
“I mean, I’m not a scientist,” she said lightly. “But I think it’s mostly building off of the research they’re already doing with patients. We know a lot about Atypicals—a lot more than we did even a decade ago—but we’re still so secret to everyone, you know?”
I nodded.
“So regular, state-sponsored experiments are hard to pull off,” she continued. “But we need to focus on Atypical healthcare. A lot of problems can be handled by regular doctors—broken bones for instance,” she added, looking knowingly at me.
“Right.” I blushed, looking down at my arm. You would never know that anything had ever been wrong with it.
“But for anything that intertwines with an Atypical ability … like, take a shapeshifter, for instance.”
“You get a lot of those around here?” I asked, thinking of Marco.
“A fair few,” she said simply, like that’s not extremely fucking cool. “If a shapeshifter gets a broken bone, that’s something a regular doctor isn’t going to be able to handle.”
“Because a shapeshifter could affect their own bones?” I asked.
“A really in-control and powerful one could, absolutely,” she said. “It’s all about the way a person’s ability affects their biology and vice versa. It’s all intertwined and most of modern medicine has been focused on non-Atypical humans so it just kind of … ignores that.”
“So an Atypical could need different treatment than a non-Atypical for the same thing…” I thought aloud.
“Exactly,” she said. “After all, your unplanned trips into unconsciousness needed to be addressed differently than they would be in a non-Atypical patient.”
“Oh yeah, I guess that’s true,” I said. We had arrived back at the patient dormitories and Mags had started her “oh look, what a convenient surprise” routine that was clearly meant to get me back in my room, but I was barely listening, my mind moving a million miles a minute.
What if the AM hadn’t explored things fully with my dad’s diagnosis? As far as our parents told us, the doctors had just said, “Hey, dude, you’ve got Alzheimer’s, it sucks, and the telekinesis might make it worse, but we don’t know why, you’ve got somewhere between two and ten years, good luck bro,” but how much did they really consider how his ability factors into it? Is it just that it might make things worse? Could it make things better? I mean, if they’ve got rooms here that suppress Atypical abilities, surely they can untangle someone’s power from a disease that’s killing them. Right?
JANUARY 9TH, 2017
I’ve just finished moving all my stuff from the intense cinder-block Atypical-ability-dampening room to another, slightly more airy cinder-block room. Despite what Owen had said, I’m not in exactly the same room as I was the first time, but they’re all basically identical, so it shouldn’t really matter. Except I’m all the way at the end of the hall, right next to the stairwell, in the weird, old, stone part of the building and …
OKAY I’M A LITTLE SCARED. Ugh.
I get scared talking to girls, or before math tests, or when Chef comes into the kitchen with steam coming out of her ears, but I don’t usually get scared by “spooky” stuff. A musty, windowless room in some corner of some old hospital would maybe freak a lot of people out but it shouldn’t bother me.
Except, I’m going dreamdiving for the first time in a week tonight and I don’t know what to expect. We’re starting actual trials tomorrow, like we did the first time, where I’ll put myself to sleep in the presence of doctors and try to walk into their heads. I think they’re going to be waking me up every couple of minutes, training me to understand how long five minutes in the real world feels in the dream time. That was what Owen had said.
“They’ve done this with a lot of other dreamdivers?” I asked after he explained the scope of the tests, leading me do
wn and around the halls of the medical wing, where all the sleep test rooms are. This is how we’ve done most of our talks the past few days—I sit still with Dr. Loving in therapy and walk circles around the facility with Owen. I find walking around with Owen a lot more productive.
“Yep,” he said, sounding almost proud. “Believe it or not, you’re not the first person who has had such a good time in the dreamworld that you haven’t wanted to spend any time in the real world.”
I looked up at him to see that he was smiling, lightly teasing me.
“Ha, yeah,” I chuckled. “I guess that’s not too surprising.”
“I should think not,” he said. “I mean, goodness, if I had the ability to go into dreams … it sounds wonderful.”
“Not super on-message with the whole ‘giving a girl addicted to dreamdiving a pep talk’ thing,” I teased back.
“Oh, gosh, of course,” Owen rushed to say. “I didn’t mean—”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I get it. I really do.”
We walked in silence for a while, my shoulder practically brushing his elbow, that’s how tall he is. Or how short I am, I guess.
“It won’t be any different than the tests you did the last time you were here,” he continued eventually, “not really. This past week has been all about reminding you what it’s like to sleep dreamlessly, so your body recognizes healthy, normal sleep.”
“My body was already getting healthy, normal sleep,” I said. “Granted, it was getting a lot more of that than it should have—”
“It’s true, your body is still able to get the necessary rest when you’re dreamdiving,” Owen said, “but we don’t yet know much about dreamdiving’s effect on the brain.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“That’s probably a question best left for the doctors,” he said.
Hence: scared. Spooky stone hallways and creepy lab tests … nothing at the AM has felt like a horror show, but I worry that the slasher version of it might somehow creep its way into my dreams. I don’t really know who else is around in the facility at the moment, and who might be reachable to me in my sleep, so it’s possible I’ll just be stuck in my own head with my own thoughts. And I know that I can create new ones, that if things start to turn to a nightmare, I can turn every killer clown into a funny one (though, to be honest, all clowns are terrifying), but I’m feeling … rusty. Seven days and nights is not enough to forget how to do something—I didn’t roller skate for all of freshman year and hopped back no problem in sophomore—but dreamdiving is tumultuous and unexpected at the best of times. That’s one of the things I love about it, but I … I’m scared of what might be waiting for me there. What might have been neglected the past week that’s just waiting in the shadows for me.
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