Dream Student (Dream Series book 1)

by J.J. DiBenedetto

  “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 i
t 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.”

  Beth finally, if somewhat reluctantly, accepts that as an answer and drops the subject. She then pours us each another drink. We’re both feeling it now, and it hits us at the same time that we’ve been doing this on empty stomachs. We really ought to know better.

  ***

  It’s ten-thirty, and the impromptu party we started is going strong. We moved down the hall from our room to the little study area in the corner between Melanie Vondreau’s corner room and Tishy Mccall’s large single. We brought the remainder of Beth’s gin and the vermouth. Jackie popped her head in and contributed a couple of bags of potato chips. Tishy had half a bottle of rum. Melanie had a bottle of peach Schnapps and three cans of orange juice. Her roommate Marcia Goldstein stuck her head in, surveyed the scene, ran out, and came back ten minutes later with several bottles of ginger ale and three boxes of microwaveable mini bagel pizzas.

  Then Jane and Jessica heard us from all the way over on the opposite corner of the floor, and they immediately went upstairs to bring Mark and Allan down, along with two bottles of vodka, another bottle of rum, some instant margarita mix and a blender.

  By now, I think nearly everyone in the dorm has at least dropped in and had a drink or two. We had to open the door to the little balcony that adjoins the study area to cool things off, with so many people packed in and warming the hallway up. I’ve lost track of how much I’ve had to drink, which I don’t think has happened since sometime freshman year. I’m not sure how I’m still on my feet at this point. But, you know what? This is exactly what I needed tonight.

  ***

  I need aspirin. And then I need to vomit. And then I need to die. That might not be the right order.

  This is why I haven’t gotten drunk like that since freshman year. It was a great party. Everyone was there. Unfortunately for everyone, if the sounds I hear from the bathroom are any indication they all feel pretty much the same as I do. Beth certainly does; “death warmed over” would be about ten steps up from how she looks right now. I don’t even want to imagine how I look.

  I–very slowly–walk to the bathroom. I keep my eyes closed as much because I don’t want to see my reflection as because the light is so painful. I stick my head in the sink, turn on the cold water and splash my face.

  At some point later, I cup my hand under the tap and try to drink a mouthful of water. It takes several tries before I can manage it. I’m not sure how I keep the water down. It seems like this task takes a good half hour.

  I go back to my room, find my aspirin, open it, get three pills out. It seems like this also takes a good half hour. I take the aspirin, and thankfully they go down. Maybe they’ll even stay down. I slowly, carefully sit back on my bed and, an inch at a time, I get myself lying flat on
my back.

  I can hear the wind blowing against the window. There’s a small part of my brain that knows it’s just a light breeze, gently rattling the screen. But what I’m hearing right now is hurricane-force winds slamming against the window, shaking the entire building right to the foundation.

  What did I tell myself last night? We really ought to know better.

  ***

  I’m at Lardner, one zombie among a table full of them. The day was a complete loss. I didn’t get out of bed until an hour ago. I talked briefly to Brian, who spent last night studying and then went to bed at ten o’clock. He doesn’t feel like the living dead today; he was able to spend a productive day preparing for his last final on Monday. In my defense, if I had a final on Monday, I’m pretty sure–even with how I’ve been feeling–I wouldn’t have let go like I did last night. But I don’t have a final on Monday, so there.

  Even with the lost day, I’m fine, schoolwork-wise. I do still have to finish my portfolio of lab reports for Advanced Organic Chemistry, but I got a lot done yesterday waiting for Beth to get out of her exam. All I’ve got left to do now is an hour or two of work, a quick proofread, and then print the whole thing out. I ought to be functional enough by tomorrow to do that.

  As for Beth, she’s here, in about the same condition I’m in, halfheartedly pushing her food around her plate just like everyone else is. She’s got an early flight home tomorrow, back to Cincinnati. She already asked me to make her get to bed by nine o’clock, and somehow I don’t think she’s going to be fighting me on that.

  When we’re done not eating, a group of us walk back to the dorm together. I think we’ve all got the same thought–if we walked back alone, we might slip and fall and not be able to get up and then we’d die of exposure. Beth is hanging onto my arm, which is probably a mistake because I don’t feel any steadier than she does. But we make it back to Carson House in one piece, we don’t lose anybody.

  As I collapse onto the couch in the lounge, I feel stupidly proud of myself for surviving the trip to the dining hall and back, as though I’ve just returned from an expedition to climb Mount Everest or something. I’m not the only one; Mark Bainbridge plops down next to me, laughs weakly, and says “Does anybody else feel like they’ve been to Antarctica and back?”