Dreamland

by Sarah Dessen

  “Come on,” she whispered. “Talk to me.”

  I wanted to. But the words just wouldn’t come. And when I hung up, she didn’t call back.

  The next day, when I pulled up to Corinna’s after school, the front door was open. As soon as I stepped into the living room, I could hear them.

  “I just don’t understand why you took the money out,” Corinna was saying. “This was, like, our last chance with them.”

  “It’ll be all right,” I heard Dave say. “Calm down. We’ll get the money. ”

  “How? Tell me.”

  “I told you I know that guy at the auto shop. He said to come in anytime, he’d hire me. I’ll go tomorrow. It’s no big deal.”

  Corinna sighed, loudly, and I heard her bracelets jingle. I stepped back out on the porch, easing the door shut behind me. Mingus, lying next to the rocking chair, closed his eyes as I leaned over to scratch his ears.

  “They needed the rent today, David,” Corinna said. “The check bounced last week.”

  “I thought we had it covered.”

  “We would have if you hadn’t taken the money out,” she said, exasperated. “I mean, we’ve talked about this. More than once.”

  “I told you, Corinna,” Dave said, and now he sounded irritated, “I needed it. Okay?”

  “Just like you needed the power bill money. And the money I set aside for Mingus to go to the vet.” Corinna strode into the living room, snatched her cigarettes off the table, and then walked back through the swinging door to the kitchen. “David, I’m working my butt off in this crappy job for that money. There’s no way I can do more than I’m already doing. And we’ll never get to California if we don’t start—”

  “Oh, man,” Dave said. “Don’t bring that California shit up again.”

  “Well, if you could just find a way to bring in some money we could save up enough—”

  “I knew it,” Dave said angrily, his voice rising. Mingus lifted his head. “It always comes back to me. I can’t keep a job, I can’t bring home the money you need for La-La Land. Well, Corinna, I’m sorry I’m such a failure to you. I guess your mom was right, huh?”

  “David, no,” Corinna said, and her voice sounded choked. “It’s just that we’d do better if you could just—”

  “You don’t seem to have any trouble smoking the pot I get for you,” Dave went on. I felt uncomfortable: I’d never heard him yell before. “You take that with no problem. But you want me to go work at the Fast Fare for six bucks an hour before taxes just so you can take the damn dog to the vet?”

  “I don’t want us to have to struggle so much,” Corinna said, and now I could tell she was crying. I remembered how they’d looked that day in the kitchen, dancing around the dog bowl, how happy she’d been. So in love, like I imagined Cass was. Like I wanted to be.

  “Well, I’m sorry I can’t give you everything you want,” Dave said, and I could tell he was coming closer even before he pushed the kitchen door open with a bang. I tried to step out of sight but he saw me, stopping suddenly in front of the TV. “Oh—hey, Caitlin.”

  “Hi,” I said, as Mingus wagged his tail beside me, thumping against the porch. “I was just—”

  Corinna stepped out of the kitchen, her arms crossed against her chest. Her face was streaked with tears and she wouldn’t look at me. “Caitlin,” she said, tucking her hair behind her ear, “this isn’t a good time, okay?”

  They were both just standing there, and I suddenly felt stupid and helpless, like I didn’t belong anywhere. “Yeah,” I said. “Sure. I’ll just, um, see you later.”

  I turned around and started down the steps, and Mingus followed me across the yard. He ran behind my car all the way down the bumpy dirt road, stopping to sit by the mailbox, as if he knew he couldn’t go any farther. After I turned onto the highway I looked back and could barely make him out in the settling dust, watching me as I left him behind.

  There were some times—when things got bad—that I saw something flash across Rogerson’s face, like he couldn’t believe what he’d done. Like he’d just woken up and found himself standing over me, fist still clenched, looking down in disbelief at the place on my shoulder /arm/stomach/back/leg where he’d just hit me. I wondered if he was thinking of his father, and the marks he’d left behind. And even as I felt the spot with my own fingers, knowing already what the bruise would look like, I felt sorry for him, like for that one second he was just as scared as I was. It was so strange. Sorry for him.

  By the last weekend in March, preparations for my mother and Boo’s annual Fool’s Party were in full swing. They’d been throwing it since before I could remember, to celebrate the day that Boo and Stewart had moved in next door way back before I was even born. What had begun as an intimate, chips-and-dip, cheese-and-crackers sort of event had swelled with each year to include all of my parents’ and Boo and Stewart’s friends, as well as most of the neighborhood. The mix of academic types and yoga-instructing New Agers guaranteed that the party, which always seemed to fall on the first warm weekend of spring, would be interesting.

  For a full week before, my mother and Boo were in serious cooking mode. Our freezer and fridge were packed with cheese balls and baklava, shrimp waiting to be peeled, bags upon bags of sliced cucumbers and radishes shaped like rosebuds. My mother handled the meat eaters, while Boo and Stewart made marinated tofu, tempeh salad, vegetarian gumbo, and vegan cookies (which tasted thick and dry, like eating straw). The food was politely segregated, ever since the episode a few years ago when one of Stewart’s friends, a Buddhist vegan, accidentally mistook a crab puff for a wheat-free biscuit. There was a huge scene and no crab had crossed our threshold since.

  If my mother had been distracted before, the party took whatever was left of her attention. She was like a whirling dervish, zooming around the house with a dustrag in one hand and a bowl of seven-layer dip in the other, while my father busied himself fixing up the yard and scraping the grill to prepare to make shish kebabs. It had always been Cass’s and my job to stay out of the way and not eat any of the things made for the party in the days before, though she was an expert at picking a shrimp or snarking some dip without my mother noticing. The night of the party we collected coats, snuck a glass or two of champagne, and camped out in Cass’s room, which had the best view of the backyard. From there we’d smuggle in food and take bets on the exact time my mother and Boo would get tipsy enough to start singing show tunes, accompanied by Stewart on his ukulele. We were never off by very much.

  This year, I didn’t even want to go to the party. I just concentrated on staying out of the way, dodging my mother as she vacuumed beneath my feet or asked me to taste the new and improved batch of her famous spinach-artichoke dip. I just drifted through the house, my sleeves pulled tight, concentrating on becoming more and more invisible, fading to nothing. I knew that soon I could slip away and no one would notice—if they’d even known I was there to begin with.

  The Thursday before the party, Rogerson and I were at McDonald’s for lunch. It was beautiful out, finally warm, and I’d made it to meet him at the turnaround early. A good day.

  He had the hood popped on the BMW and I was sitting on the curb, my history book open in my lap, when I caught a whiff of the first spring breeze: the smell of pollen, and grass, and sunshine. I took a sip of my milkshake and looked up at Rogerson, just as that same breeze ruffled back his hair. He glanced up, smelling it too. Then he looked at me, lifting his chin, and smiled.

  “Hey, Rogerson,” I said, as he ducked his head back under the hood.

  “Yeah.”

  I glanced down at my book, then looked back at him, lifting a hand to block out the sun so I could see him clearly. “How long’s an eon?”

  As he took a minute to answer, I thought back to how amazed I’d been, at the beginning of all of this, by how much he knew. Back then he was just a brilliant, good-looking boy who liked me and made me feel special. We could have gone anywhere from there.

  Bu
t as I looked at my reflection in the chrome of the bumper in front of me, I saw myself as I was, now: skinny, long baggy shirt pulled tight over my wrists, jeans, and sunglasses. Fingers smelly from smoking, the topography of bruises across my skin and bones like a road map of all that had happened, every mile of the journey.

  “An eon,” Rogerson repeated, lifting his head up and looking at me again. There were moments when my heart ached for him: I loved him so much. It was strange. “A billion years,” he said. “Right?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “You’re right.”

  He nodded, then let the hood fall gently shut. I closed my eyes as the breeze blew through again, smelling like summer.

  “That’s a long time,” he said, and I opened my eyes, remembering how he’d stood in the doorway of that party, all those months ago, lifting his chin in that same way and calling to me. Come on, he’d said. Come on.

  A billion years. It was long enough to learn a lot about someone.

  “Yeah,” I said, as the breeze blew over us both, sweet and fresh and so brand-new under a perfect blue sky. He was smiling at me, and for some reason it almost broke my heart. “It is.”

  On the Friday before the Fool’s Party, my mother came into my room and sat on the bed with a bag in her lap from Belk’s department store. Then, she took a deep breath.

  I was lying on my bed, still a little stoned from the bowl Rogerson and I had smoked on the way home from school.

  “Honey,” she said, scooting a little closer, “I’ve been worried about you.”

  Instantly, even in my detached state, my interior alarms started to flash. Cover, cover, cover. Set the play, keep the defense going. Run and shoot.

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  “Caitlin,” she said, cocking her head to the side. “There are some things a mother can’t help but notice.” She crossed her legs, her panty hose rubbing against my elbow. She still dressed like the perfect housewife, in nice skirts, flats, and lipstick at all times. She was like one of her dolls: delicate, lovely, and somewhat dated.

  “I’m okay,” I said. “Really.”

  She sighed again, and I wondered if this was how it would all end. That maybe she wasn’t as blind as I’d thought and had been watching me as closely as she scanned that TV screen each day for a glimpse of her other lost daughter. April Fool, on me. Surprise.

  “I’m concerned,” she said, and I realized I was holding my own breath, bracing myself for what was coming next. Maybe I would tell her everything, roll up my sleeves and jeans to detail each bruise and blemish. Crumple into her arms and cry as hard as I did that day she rescued me from the park, holding me tight against her as she ran block after block. Swim up through that water, higher and higher, and burst out to grab her arm before I drowned.

  I looked up into her face, my own heart aching. Maybe this was it. Maybe she could save me.

  “I’m concerned,” she repeated, “that you seem to have completely abandoned primary colors.”

  “What?” I said.

  “Primary colors,” she repeated. “Caitlin, all you ever wear now is black. An occasional red or white, but that’s it. You know how nice you always looked in blue.”

  I still do, I thought. Look here, on the back of my wrist, those two spots the size of fingertips. Or here, at the base of my back: That’s blue, too. “Mom,” I said.

  “Well, I just think with a face as pretty as yours color can only make you look better. Black washes you out, honey. Color adds. Color enhances. ”

  I looked up into her face, but she didn’t seem to see me, even as I pleaded that she would.

  “So, with that in mind,” she went on briskly, “I saw this dress today and I just had to buy it for you for the party tomorrow night. Look at this!” She opened the Belk’s bag, pulling out a short white dress with a swooshy skirt, covered with a green ivylike print. It was the kind of dress you wore with bare legs and bare arms, white strappy sandals and your hair loose and long. “What do you think?”

  I rubbed the fabric between my fingers: It was smooth and stretchy. A summer dress, like so many others in my closet I wouldn’t wear this year.

  “It’s beautiful,” I said, and looked up at my mother, with her hair in its little flip, her pearls, her pumps with the scuffs on the heel. I looked at her hard, right in her eyes, and dared her in that one second to see something else in me. Not the bruises, which I could hide well, or the shame, which I hid better. But something else at the very heart of me that she should have seen from miles and miles away.

  And my mother looked right back, blinked happily, and then patted my leg, standing up. “Good, good,” she said, smiling down at me. “I just wanted you to have something bright and cheerful to wear.”

  “I know,” I said. “Thank you.”

  When she left I locked the door behind her and stood up, sliding off my jeans and shirt and pulling the dress over my head. It was beautiful: The summer before, it would have looked great on me. But now my legs and arms seemed thin and spindly, marked here and there by blue-black or black-yellow bruises in different phases of healing, scrapes and spots where the skin had been twisted and yanked that someone else wouldn’t notice but I could not miss.

  I stood in front of my mirror and turned slowly, watching the skirt twirl up and fall around my knees. I wanted to be a girl that could wear a dress like this. Instead, the girl in the mirror looked back at me, and I hardly recognized her. She was just some strange girl who’d tumbled off a pyramid, falling into a dream, and now waited, in a beautiful dress, like some princess in a forgotten fairy tale, for someone to come save her.

  That night, my parents, Boo and Stewart and I all went outside to help put up the tent my father had rented for the party. The rental place always offered to set it up for a fee, but my father insisted we could do it ourselves. After the year before, when my mother had been reduced to tears and Stewart had been clocked in the head with a pole, rendering him temporarily unconscious, my father had broken down and recruited a few fraternity brothers who were on thin ice for hazing infractions to help us.

  It was just dusk and we were all standing around with poles and bindings, waiting for my father—who was already grumbling under his breath—to get things started.

  “All right, Buckley, I need you over here,” he shouted, and one of the brothers nodded and crossed in front of us diagonally, dragging the tent behind him. “And Charles, get that end piece and stand right across from him.”

  “Jack, should I put on the back light?” my mother called out.

  “No, no,” he said, irritated, even though now it was almost too dark for us to see each other. We all stood there, silently, waiting for orders. “Caitlin, go stand directly across from Buckley. And Margaret, you get five feet down from her.”

  “Okay!” my mother called out cheerfully, looping her arm in mine as we walked across the grass together. “I’m so excited about the party,” she said, squeezing my shoulder. “Aren’t you?”

  “Sure,” I said. There was something nice, actually, about being there in the falling darkness with my family’s voices all around me. It was the same time of night Cass and I had always played tag and kickball, running across yards and over fences until we were called in to dinner, smelling of sweat, our knees muddy and grass-stained.

  “Stewart!” my father yelled.

  “Yes,” Stewart said cheerfully from right behind him.

  My father jumped, startled, and then smoothed down his hair over his small bald spot, calming himself. “I need you,” he said slowly, “about one foot down from where you are.”

  “One foot,” Stewart said in his soft voice, measuring it carefully with one step. Boo, to his right, scooted down a few feet and planted herself, already onto my father’s system.

  “Okay,” my father said, after distributing stakes and bindings to all of us. “Now what we’re going to do is plant this center stake, and then connect all of the bindings to it, therefore raising the tent.”

  “So
unds good!” my mother, the cheerleader, said.

  “Ouch! Christ!” someone said loudly.

  “Buckley!” my father said.

  “Something bit me,” Buckley protested, and we could hear a few slapping noises. “It was big, too.”

  “Oh, my goodness,” my mother said. “I’m sure I have some bug stuff inside. Let me just—”

  “We’re raising the tent now!” my father bellowed, and we all snapped to attention, taking a few steps back as the white material of the tent lifted up, higher and higher, stirring up a breeze underneath it.

  “Shit!” someone said again.

  “Buckley,” my father bellowed. “One more outburst—”

  “No, sorry,” Boo said apologetically. “That was me. Something is biting over here.”

  “I told you,” Buckley said.

  “Shut up, you wimp,” Charles, his frat brother, said. “Big baby.”

  “Pay attention to the tent, people,” my father said sternly. “This is not a joking matter.”

  So we all concentrated, or tried to, until Stewart said thoughtfully, “This reminds me very much of a film I saw recently on Amish barn raising. Did anyone else see that program?”

  “I did,” Buckley called out.

  “Did you?” Stewart said. “Because what I found really fascinating, other than just the craftmanship, was—”

  “Uh, actually,” Buckley said sheepishly, “I was, um, kidding. I didn’t see it.”

  “The tent!” my father said again, as he moved around tying the bindings while we all tried to be serious.

  “What I found most fascinating, anyway,” Stewart continued, “was the sense of community these people found in a common task. Strangers working together. It’s a rare thing these days, you know?”