The Dreamers

by Karen Thompson Walker

  “Just stop touching it,” the mother says to the father. “Please.”

  After that, the father is quiet.

  Mei lingers in the hallway. She should introduce herself to these parents, that’s what her mother would say.

  But there is something unbearable about the way that man looks out the window, so like Mei’s own father would, and how he doesn’t seem to know where to put his hands. It is in the way he keeps touching his beard, the way he stands so silently in the corner of that room.

  Mei hurries back to her new room without speaking to them.

  * * *

  —

  Only Caleb is brave enough to approach Kara’s parents. Caleb, tall and skinny, brown hair and freckles. Caleb, the English major, a little more serious than the other boys.

  The girls watch him shake hands with Kara’s father. They watch the way he holds his Cubs cap at his side while he speaks to Kara’s mother. And the girls—every one of them—long to smooth his hair, which is sticking up on one side and sweaty from where the cap has been.

  The girls love him right then for talking to those parents. They love him for knowing what to do.

  Caleb helps the father carry the boxes out to the elevator, and any stranger who passes them might think they understand that scene—here is a father helping his son move out of a dorm.

  * * *

  —

  Amanda: two doors down from Kara’s room and the next girl to feel the symptoms. Dizziness, tiredness, a slowly spreading ache. Her roommate has woken up with it, too. They both look pale and feverish. Their eyes are a little red.

  “What if it’s contagious?” says Amanda from her bed. “What if we have what Kara had?”

  The other girls reassure them from the doorway, but they are too afraid to step inside the room.

  “I’m sure you’re fine,” says one of them, barely breathing. Amazing how swiftly adrenaline spreads through the body, how soon the hands begin to shake. “But maybe you guys should see a doctor. Just to be safe.”

  The floor soon swells with panic as the news travels from room to room: there are two sick girls among them. It has not occurred to anyone until then that Kara’s is a sickness that could spread.

  Phone calls are made. The dorm director arrives. The sick girls are driven to Student Health. It is hard for the others not to wonder if they will ever see those girls again.

  Hours pass.

  The light slowly changes through the windows, but not one of them pays any attention to the weather out there, all that sun and no rain, and the land one day deeper into drought.

  A gloom settles over the floor, and over one girl especially. She is known at home and at church as Rebecca, but here, for these past six weeks, as Becca or Becks or B.

  * * *

  —

  Rebecca: a tiny redhead in borrowed jeans, now detecting a slight ringing in her ears. She wants to ignore it. No one has mentioned a ringing.

  In the bathroom, she sets her glasses on the counter. She splashes water on her face. It’s probably nothing. She is nervous, that’s what this is. She is scared. But a dizziness is dawning in her head.

  She leans on one of the sinks. They are the old porcelain kind, cracked and yellowed, and she can still see the stains from when she held her head upside down over that same sink, while two girls dyed her hair a thrilling auburn that first week of school, and all the other girls stood around her, advising. It was new to her then, that belonging, the sounds of ten girls laughing in a small space.

  Rebecca has been to church only once so far, sneaking off the floor that first Sunday, ready to lie to anyone who asked. It’s just that never before has she felt loved so quickly and never before by these kinds of girls.

  These girls mixed her first drink. They’ve used their own rosy lipsticks on her inexperienced lips. These girls have plucked her eyebrows with their own tweezers and then shown her how to shape them herself. They’ve lent her their clothes and helped her buy a better bra, and she laughed right along with them, just the other day, when they discovered, all at once, that all their cycles were in synch.

  But now Rebecca begins to worry. The dizziness is settling over her like a fog. She waits for it to pass, but it does not pass. A wild thought is blooming in her mind: maybe she is being punished—punished for the way she’s been acting these weeks, skipping church and drinking so much, and lying to her parents about all of it.

  There is a whining of hinges behind her as the door swings open. Kara’s roommate, that quiet girl, walks into the bathroom. She holds a yellow towel under one arm, and a pink plastic bucket, inside of which a bottle of shampoo is rattling. She wears a sweatshirt and jeans, which is how she always arrives for a shower, Rebecca has noticed, instead of walking down the hall in a robe or a towel the way all the other girls do.

  Rebecca feels a sudden urge to perform a kindness. “Hey,” she says.

  The girl does not look her way, and Rebecca recognizes the habit as her own from earlier times, the surprise at being spoken to at all.

  “Hey,” says Rebecca again. “Sorry, but what was your name again?”

  The girl looks up this time. She is pretty, in a way, dark eyes and good skin. But she should wear her hair down—Rebecca knows that’s what the other girls would say—instead of tying it back all the time in that braid. And bangs, maybe. Bangs might make her look a little more fun.

  “It’s Mei,” says the girl.

  She sets her things down outside the shower stall farthest from Rebecca. She unravels her black braid with her fingers, but her hair holds the shape, crimped from roots to ends.

  “I’ve been meaning to tell you something,” says Rebecca.

  She’s been selfish lately. It’s true. You were supposed to give people whatever they needed, and she has given nothing at all to this poor girl. If he asks for your shirt, her father would say, you should give him your coat, too.

  Rebecca goes on: “I wanted to tell you that you shouldn’t feel bad.”

  Mei looks suspicious.

  “About what?” she says.

  “There’s just no way you could have known she needed help,” says Rebecca.

  Mei bites her lip and turns away. She steps into the shower stall and disappears from Rebecca’s view.

  “It’s not my fault,” says Mei from inside, her voice echoing against the tile. She seems to be speaking carefully now, each word a fragile object, pulled from a high shelf. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “Right,” says Rebecca. “That’s what I’m trying to say.”

  But the conversation is drifting away from her. She is screwing it up.

  Mei closes the shower door behind her. There is the sound of the lock clicking into place. Through the gap beneath the door, Rebecca can see the sweatshirt and the jeans fall to the floor at Mei’s feet, her hands reaching down to hang them up, and then there is a squeaking of fixtures, a rattling of pipes, the rush of water pooling on tile.

  Rebecca tries to think of something else friendly to say through the door.

  But something is happening to her vision. There is a flashing at the corner of her eye. There is some sort of distortion in her sight, like a ripple on the surface of water. She begins to shiver.

  She tells no one, as if to speak the words aloud might make them more true, a kind of spell.

  She goes back to her room and lies down in her bed. She has the idea that she needs to relax. She closes her eyes. It is four in the afternoon. A Bible verse comes into her mind: You will not know the hour or the day.

  * * *

  —

  The first stage of sleep is the lightest, the brief letting go, like the skipping of a stone across water. This is the nodding of a head in a theater. This is the dropping of a book in bed.

  Rebecca falls quickly into that first layer. Ten more m
inutes. She sinks further, just beginning the deep dive. This is when a sudden dream floats through her: She is at church with her parents. A baby is being baptized. But something is wrong. It’s the minister’s voice—in the dream, his words are somehow out of synch with the movement of his lips. And the noise of the water splashing the baby’s forehead arrives a few seconds after the sight of it happening, like the pause between lightning and thunder. In the dream, Rebecca is the only one in the church who notices it.

  But then the dream is interrupted—a bright voice rings out in the hall. Rebecca opens her eyes.

  The voice that woke her is soon joined by other voices. Someone is laughing out there in the hall.

  When she opens her door, she finds the hallway crowded with kids. There they are, at the center of the group, the two sick girls, back from Student Health, their ponytails bobbing, their laughing white teeth. In their hands bulge two burritos and two Cokes.

  “I feel so stupid,” says one of them, still in her sweats, as kids begin to gather around them.

  “We both just have colds,” says her roommate.

  “Thank God,” says Rebecca. The relief comes to her like a drug. “Thank God you’re okay.” Rebecca, too, begins to feel better. The ringing in her ears, at least, has stopped. The dizziness is floating away.

  Whatever it is, they are fine. They are fine, the girls say, did you hear, they say, to anyone they pass in the hall. They are fine. They are fine. They are fine.

  * * *

  —

  After that, something shifts. The fear breaks like a fever, and that night, the third night, the girls and the boys crowd together into Amanda’s small room to get drunk, relief radiating from their cheeks.

  There is Kahlúa and milk for the girls, and bags and bags of ice, and beer and tequila, and peach-flavored wine. There’s the whir of the blender and the clinking of shot glasses and the music a little too loud.

  There is talk of doing something for Kara, a plaque on the building, maybe, or the planting of a tree. Yes, they say, a tree, they say, or even a little garden of her favorite flowers. They toast their short friendship with her, these six good weeks. She was so sweet, they all agree, maybe the sweetest one among them.

  They begin to get drunk, and there is no way around it: there is a giddiness in that room. They are young and they are healthy, and they have survived a terrible thing.

  In a high corner of the room, Rebecca feels calm and brave, her legs dangling from the top bunk. Somehow, Caleb is sitting beside her.

  “What a shitty day,” he says to her. He speaks softly—only she can hear.

  She nods. She is aware of the warmth of his leg beside hers, the tilt of his head near the ceiling.

  “It really was,” she says.

  She will try again tomorrow, she thinks through the buzz of the drinking, to make things right with Kara’s roommate—what was her name again? Mei? No one, she realizes then, with another ping of guilt, has thought to invite Mei into this room.

  Down below, the blender hums, a long clattering of ice.

  Try this, they all say to one another, again and again, plastic cups passing from person to person, every mouth taking a sip. Shot glasses are used and reused.

  The biology majors among them would someday come to learn this fact: certain parasites can bend the behavior of their hosts to serve their own purposes. If viruses could do it, here is how it would look: seventeen people crowded into one small room, seventeen pairs of lungs breathing the same air, seventeen mouths drinking from the same two shot glasses, again and again, for hours.

  Finally, the party ends. It ends the way their parties always do, with a knock on the door and the voice of the R.A., just three years older than they are, and skilled at not actually seeing any alcohol.

  “Okay, guys,” he says through the door. “That’s enough.”

  * * *

  —

  They drift, then, out into the hall, the fluorescent lights buzzing from the ceiling, as they sway toward their rooms, one by one, or two by two.

  Rebecca is floating alone toward her room, a few steps behind the other girls, when she feels someone’s breath in her ear.

  “Come on,” says Caleb. He takes her hand in his.

  How surprising it is, the sudden intertwining of his fingers with hers, and the smell of him near her, his gum and his soap, the flat clear joy of getting picked.

  “We can talk in here,” says Caleb. He pushes open the fire door, and leads her into the stairwell.

  The door swings shut behind them and slices away the light and the noise of the other kids, leaving just the two of them there, in the dark and the quiet, a boy and a girl sitting side by side on the same cold stair.

  The other girls think Caleb is too skinny, but to Rebecca, he is tall and lean. There is something intelligent in the sharpness of his features, a kind of efficiency, like good design.

  She waits for him to speak.

  From his pocket, Caleb produces a bag of M&M’s.

  “Want some?” he says.

  The stairwell is so quiet that even the crinkling of the bag of M&M’s seems to echo against the walls. He pours some into her hand.

  They sit this way for a while, not talking. She isn’t sure how to do this. She can hear the crunch of M&M’s against his teeth.

  “I feel so bad that I didn’t talk to her parents,” she says, finally. “I didn’t know what to say to them.”

  Caleb tosses an M&M down the center of the stairwell. Ten floors down, a satisfying ping.

  “People never know what to say,” he says.

  She has heard a rumor that Caleb’s brother died when he was young.

  They talk awhile longer, drunk and dreamy. She can feel the Kahlúa in her head, a pleasant drifting. Everything around her, the dim lights and the rusted railings and the faraway sound of something dripping—all of it seems suffused with meaning, as if the whole night has been transformed already into memory.

  There are things she wants to talk about, to tell him about all the rules she lived by back home, about no movies and no makeup and not going to regular school, about learning algebra with her brothers at a kitchen table, while her mother struggled with the home-school guides and her father tried and failed to start an orphanage. But she says none of these things in that stairwell. Instead, she leans silently against Caleb’s shoulder, as if she can communicate her thoughts through different channels, like the warmth of her arm against his.

  Caleb keeps dropping M&M’s down the stairwell, as if they’re sitting at the edge of a real well, wishing on stones.

  “People don’t know what to say,” says Caleb, “because there’s nothing you can say.” She feels a telescoping into his past. “There’s nothing to be said.”

  Already, she can hear her older self telling this story one day, years into the future, the terrible thing that happened when she was young, that girl Kara in the dorm, the second month of freshman year, her first glancing disaster. The whole event is racing away toward the past.

  As they watch the last M&M fall through the air, they bump heads. When they look up, faces close and shadowed, they begin to laugh. Caleb touches her hair. It’s happening. A kiss. His mouth tastes like chocolate. Their teeth touch; she never knows if she’s doing it right. His hands rest on her hips. His fingers skim the skin of her waist, and she can feel him shaking slightly as he touches her, his nervousness more endearing than confidence. And this seems like a beginning, this here, the start of everything. She is warm with a furious hope, the elation available only to the very young.

  * * *

  —

  The girls sleep late, heads hurting from Kahlúa. They wake, one by one, to pee or for water, or to swallow the Advil they keep beside their beds or only to pull the curtains shut against the morning light, squinting in the sunshine of yet one more cloudless
day.

  Then they climb back into their beds.

  Soon, they are dreaming the vivid dreams of shallow sleep.

  It is around noon, the girls later agree, that something extraordinary happens: their dreams begin to follow a similar plot, to swirl around the same subject, one distinct sound. All at once, the girls dream that someone, somewhere, is screaming.

  It takes a few seconds for their eyes to open, for the noise to coalesce into a story: someone really is screaming.

  In the hall, the girls find Caleb—in boxers, no shirt. They can see his ribs rising and falling beneath his skin as he shouts out into the hall. It is possible that none of these girls have ever seen true panic on a boy’s face before.

  It’s Rebecca, he is saying. He is motioning toward his bed, where her curly red hair is spread out on his pillow. It’s Rebecca, he says again, something is wrong with Rebecca.

  4.

  What a terrible thing going on at the college—this is the way the people of Santa Lora talk about it in the aisles of the hardware store and the supermarket, or as they walk their dogs in the woods. Have you heard what’s happening at the college? they say to their neighbors over fences, and in the bleachers at the high school, as if the college were an island apart from the town, its gates impenetrable, even by germs.

  A sleeping sickness. That’s what the local reporters are calling it. One girl is dead, another unconscious, both from the same dorm floor.

  * * *

  —

  There is a drought fanning out all across California. No rain in ninety days, and they are behind already from the year before. No one has ever seen the lake in Santa Lora sit so low or the sandbars rising in the middle like dunes, the old docks standing dry, fifty feet from the water’s edge.

  It’s the worst drought in a hundred years. Or longer, some say. Five hundred, maybe, or more.