We Awaken
By Calista Lynne
Victoria Dinham doesn’t have much left to look forward to. Since her father died in a car accident, she lives only to fulfill her dream of being accepted into the Manhattan Dance Conservatory. But soon she finds another reason to look forward to dreams when she encounters an otherworldly girl named Ashlinn, who bears a message from Victoria’s comatose brother. Ashlinn is tasked with conjuring pleasant dreams for humans, and through the course of their nightly meetings in Victoria’s mind, the two become close. Ashlinn also helps Victoria understand asexuality and realize that she, too, is asexual.
But then Victoria needs Ashlinn’s aid outside the realm of dreams, and Ashlinn assumes human form to help Victoria make it to her dance audition. They take the opportunity to explore New York City, their feelings for each other, and the nature of their shared asexuality. But like any dream, it’s too good to last. Ashlinn must shrug off her human guise and resume her duties creating pleasant nighttime visions—or all of humanity will pay the price.
For Bruce Coville, Roald Dahl, and my parents. You were all there when it started.
Here’s to my parents, who are the finest this world has to offer. Thanks for the days in New York and for not judging my openness. A shout-out to Kelsi No, Tiffany Akridge, and Jessica Wyman, who made my words less of a disaster. And whoever is reading this, thank you as well.
One
MOTHER SAID there was no change in Reeves at the hospital.
Something must have happened at work for her to come home early enough to visit him, but to find out what would require discussion. I wasn’t in the mood to speak with a Magic 8 Ball: shake her up and get nothing but two-word answers. Not that I could blame the woman. When a single day puts your husband in a morgue and your son in a coma, it changes life from being a triple-time waltz to a demo session for hell.
That didn’t mean I couldn’t resent the emptiness. More family members were lost than those lying on their backs.
She told me about the visit over dinner. I nodded like it was news, then took my leave. The sound of nothing but forks against china was as unbearable as her vacant expression.
I ran down to the basement to stretch; the sting of being a well-practiced ballerina was liberating. When I turned eleven, my dad had installed a large mirror in the basement and a proper floor so I could practice at home instead of having to rely on the studio. It was a safe haven in my own house.
Looking into that mirror now proved even havens were no guarantee of protection.
Earlier that day I visited Dad. His gravestone was starting to lose its reflective sheen and the short, bristly grass no longer shied away from its edges. His soul was whittled down to a few clichéd words, long since memorized, that even he would have laughed at:
Forever in our hearts
Abe James Dinham
Too well loved to ever be forgotten
That was complete crap. Every other headstone in the place bore a similar sentiment yet was left weaponless against the forces of nature, even if they were just the mild New Jersey winters and summers.
Eventually the edges crumble off all our graves.
I wasn’t going to say everything else in the world melted away as I danced, but it allowed my thinking to become more mechanical. I stretched on the hardwood floors, now scuffed from hundreds of solo rehearsals, until my thighs burned so fiercely it was impossible to focus on anything other than the sensation.
Impossible to think about the shriveled remains of a greenhouse massacre I found every week on Dad’s grave from the blossoms I lined up each visit.
Impossible to think about the driver’s license under a year’s worth of thrown shoes and forgotten books at the back of my closet. Cars put my father six feet under; I didn’t need to add another to the road.
I laced my calloused feet into the stiff pointe shoes and warmed up. Straddle. Splits. Barre work. There wasn’t any need to think about them. It all led up to pirouettes, which I lost myself in until the room refused to stop spinning and my inverted toes were suicidal.
Lazy. That’s what I was. It was less than two weeks until my auditions with the Manhattan Dance Conservatory, and if I didn’t get in, I was screwed. Still, stewing over my fears seemed less painful than actually practicing my choreography. At least Mother had agreed to drive me to the city for the audition. That was one small blessing.
Eventually Mother tapped on the door and told me it was time to go to bed. I didn’t dare disagree.
That night, when the lights went out, my brain flashed on as it did so often in the past year. I ended up lying on my mattress watching the fluorescent numbers of the alarm clock, counting them down and focusing on the shapes of the lines turned sideways by my tilted head. I felt like I was floating or on the tipping point of dropping off into slumber.
Generally, when I dreamed, nightmares flickered behind my eyes; whether they sprang from perpetual nervousness or the demise of my family was up for grabs. That night something beautiful swirled through my mind instead. A beach.
Mist hovered over the ground, blocking my view of the sand that was undoubtedly below. This fog was so thick and milky it was as if I was in the middle of a cloud, with cirrus tendrils lapping onto the shore instead of waves. Every sound was subdued under the dove-gray skies and heavy air. Even the splashing waves seemed distant.
I was walking along barefoot, making sure to dig in my toes with each careful step, when a figure appeared in the distance, a small shadow that enlarged as we neared each other. I was soon able to make out the outline of a cloak, flowing around its wearer and fluttering like butterfly wings.
No woman in reality could ever possess such grace. That’s how I realized it had to be a dream. Her skin was barely lighter than the dark of night and a hood was pulled so far over her head it was impossible to make out whether she had any hair. The whites of her eyes stood out greatly in contrast to her skin, matching the intense purity of the lace parasol hanging over her right arm. Her clothing was iridescent and looked almost like oil as it reflected cloudy rainbows with her movements. Whatever mystical material it was composed of was also utilized in the creation of the long dress she wore, which dragged along behind her but failed to leave a trail in the sand. We were close, barely two feet apart, when she began to speak.
“You are Victoria Lindy Dinham.”
It was not spoken as a question, but silence began unfurling between us, so I responded with an affirmative and she nodded pleasantly.
“Your brother wants me to thank you. This is from him.” Her voice reminded me of the calm after a thunderstorm. She reached into her cloak and fiddled around as if trying to find something, then removed a single white carnation and held it out.
“My brother?” I asked incredulously, too taken aback to reach for the flower.
She looked a bit unsure with her arm still outstretched.
“Yes. He wanted to thank you for the stories and inform you that he’s found a new kingdom.”
Sleepless, nightmare-ridden nights that sent our prepubescent selves running to my closet, nicknamed The Kingdom, to read stories lurched into my memory. Those days were as dead as my father and reliving them didn’t make things any easier.
Her patience seemed to be wearing thin. Either that or her arm was growing tired, so she took the flower and tucked it behind my ear.
“The stories,” I began, ready to cross-examine some answers out of whoever this was, “How do you know about The Kingdom? Who are you?”
“Oh, I’m just a friend. A friend of your brother’s, that is, although I have met you before. Admittedly, not as often as I’d like, but that’s how it goes.”
Was she kidding me? I finally get a dream with neither car accidents nor hospitals, and the
star of it is a delusional stalker. Figures.
“I’m not taking that as an answer. Seriously, who are you?” I looked around at the unreal situation. Even asleep I knew there was no way to communicate with Reeves and decided just to cut to the chase.
Remembering something I had read once, I said, “This is a dream, correct? It’s impossible to dream of someone you’ve never seen, and I know for a fact I’ve never met you before.”
Endearing giggles slipped past her closed lips. “You’re clever. I like you. How do you know you’ve never seen me before? Dreams are filled with random passersby you hardly even noticed on the street. You have a lifetime of unnoticed faces to work with.”
“No, I’d remember you. I’ve never seen someone so perfect in all my life.”
That wasn’t a compliment; it was a fact. The girl looked like she could’ve walked off a cover for some sort of intergalactic edition of Cosmopolitan magazine. Her face lit up like a fireworks display.
“I’ll take your word for it. If you must know, my name is Ashlinn and I create dreams. Your brother is happy and did, in fact, send me. That’s all I’ll disclose for now.”
I nodded as if this was a perfectly normal thing to hear in everyday conversation, but my confusion was Titan-like in its enormity. She spoke of my brother as if he weren’t comatose, but out there interacting. Living. Now, I may not have seen the car accident firsthand, but I knew the damage it had done wasn’t easily reversible.
“I want proof,” I said, like the star of some B action movie.
She raised an eyebrow at me and swung a foot in front of her, creating crescent moons in the sand.
“Proof? If that flower isn’t proof enough once you awaken, then how about this: I know more about The Kingdom than what his message gave me to work with. The sandman, huh?”
My eyes grew so wide I might as well have been an animated princess. Ashlinn saw I wasn’t going to be able to form sentences any time soon and threw in another comment.
“I must say I am flattered, especially considering you are the one so interested.”
The waves were starting to sound even farther away than they had before, and she looked up at me.
“You’re going to wake up soon. It has been nice meeting you. An absolute pleasure, even.”
She nodded and turned to start walking off again, much in the way she had come, but before the fog could envelop her I reached out, shouting, “Wait!”
With my hand around her wrist, which felt almost insubstantial in my grasp, she turned back to me and lifted a questioning eyebrow.
“Let me see you again. Please.”
At the time there was no good reason to have said it; the whole thing was completely impulsive, but looking back I could at least pretend I stopped her because she was my only connection to Reeves. I wanted so badly to believe there was a way to communicate with him. My brother was gone forever in my eyes, and if the amount of machinery they had hooked him up to couldn’t bring him back, I was doubtful anything could get through, yet she delivered words he might have once thought. Even the hope of such a miracle was better than nothing.
She started shaking her head “no,” and I released her wrist dejectedly, but then she sighed in frustration and growled.
“Fine. I’ll see you tomorrow night as long as you try to tell yourself what just happened was only a dream, and the next one will coincidentally feature the same girl.”
Before I could nod, the sand rushed away toward the direction of the ocean like an hourglass tilted sideways.
As the alarm clock screeched on my bedside table, I remembered having dreamed but was too exhausted to try and recall it completely at the moment. Only two thoughts swirled through my head: there was a girl in a magic cloak I had to see again, and nothing was more important than actually managing to get to sleep that night.
As I tumbled out of bed to begin preparing for the day, something fell from my head to the floor in front of me. I reached down blindly to pick it up, then turned on the lights.
A white carnation. Creamy petals that dented with a touch and a stem that could be marred by fingernails. Real.
It made me seven minutes late running out the door in the direction of my high school because of how long I spent trying to ensure its existence.
And if the bloom just happened to find its way into my bag there was no need to mention such a thing.
Two
NO LAST day of school had ever felt so unimportant. The classes all passed in a daze of teachers showing irrelevant movies as my fellow students ignored each other in favor of trying not to pass out from heat exhaustion. Apparently most towns have high schools with functioning air-conditioning units. Yeah, I have never lived in one of those towns. With little else to occupy my mind throughout the classes, snippets of the dream began returning to me. Sand and sound and Her.
Ashlinn, that was her name. And there was something about Reeves. I tried to sort through these wisps of information with my forehead pressed against a desk, and found myself reaching into my bag to fiddle with the carnation, which was faring quite well in such a noxious environment.
The Kingdom.
Her comments, the absolute proof, resonated through my memory. It was such a casual reference but no one other than Reeves could possibly know. Whenever he couldn’t sleep, or we wanted to hide from everything, he’d drag me in there. That closet was a universe of its own. It was always difficult to shut the doors from the inside, but we’d manage, and with flashlights propped up or dangling from clothes hangers, I’d read. There was a book of fables illustrated by someone who might as well have never even seen a pen, let alone known how to use one, and on nights Reeves awoke from nightmares I’d read him….
Damn.
I’d read him the story of the sandman.
No one mentioned when I groaned against the desk. What the hell had become of my life? I must admit, if Ashlinn was the sandman she beat every expectation. Due to the unimaginative illustrations of whoever-the-heck, I had always pictured the dude to be short and bearded. Maybe a bit pudgy. Definitely creepy. I’d take this version any day.
Like the alarm clock that pulled me away from her, school bells rang, and I exited the rooms without even bidding farewell to the teachers. Only two semesters and forty minutes left of high school with two short breaks for summers, and then it would be (hopefully) off to Manhattan.
But before any of that, I’d have to be social for a period.
I walked into class, giving a silent farewell to the poster of a cat saying “Accrochez-vous,” and sat next to Ellie, who greeted me by groaning, “It’s so hot I could tongue-kiss an air-conditioning unit. Not that we ever have any air-conditioning that actually works.”
Like a swooning maiden, she had an arm flung across her forehead beneath her platinum white hair, which stood up in sweaty spikes. Her fashion sense could best be described as Burlesque Greaser, a fact she was probably lamenting, considering how pleather was never famed for its cooling properties.
Madame Velsh put on the second half of some French cartoon called Astérix, which everyone in the class ignored as she stressed over entering all of our grades into the computer, a system the old woman never really understood. My friend shifted next to me, uncomfortable in the heat.
“I found a tattoo parlor. I’m gonna call them up the next time my parents are out and schedule the first appointment to make my design. Sure you don’t wanna come?” Ellie spoke with her eyes closed, languidly stretched out beneath the desk, but there was no doubt the inquiry was for me, judging by how many times she had asked similar things in the past month alone.
“You don’t need me there,” I told her. “What design are you planning to get?”
“The Jersey Devil,” she informed me with a smile in her voice.
Well, that was unexpected.
“Why?”
“He’s gonna be my protector when I go off to college. When I was little, I thought he lived right outside my window, but I wasn’t
frightened. He watched out for me, scared away the real monsters. So maybe having him on my thigh forever will keep away more than some werewolves.”
“I’m not sure if anything is gonna scare away drunken frat boys.”
She snorted and went back to fake napping.
We didn’t talk about college often. Generally schoolwork was an unsafe topic around Ellie, not because she hated it but because she was a genius. Her grades were so good she felt guilty for not having to try too hard. She had several reputations with varying cliques and clubs throughout the school, and the only friends who might have had any idea of her brilliance were those gained in AP government and chemistry. The rest of the school remained in blissful ignorance of the fact she was in those classes at all, and the only reason I was privy to this knowledge was because of how close we were. Well, used to be. Before the accident.
At the end of class, she leaned over my desk.
“Hey, it’s the last day of school. Why don’t you let me drive you home in The Hovercraft?”
Another fact about Ellie is that she lovingly referred to her old green Dodge as The Hovercraft. The car had been passed down through two older brothers and her father before them, and once when she was younger, one brother in particular said that by the time she got her license everyone else would be floating up to school in a hovercraft. She would still be stuck in their piece of crap car. She believed every word and was petrified of how much everyone would mock her for rolling around on wheels while they flew. When the last brother in the parade of those before her passed over the keys, she gave the car its current moniker in spite of his prediction, and it stuck. That was of her own doing, though.
I really didn’t feel like walking. It was warmer than the heart of Saint Nick out there and driving cut transportation time. I could definitely do with the extra minutes to think about last night and the reason why there was a white flower wedged between the pages of my English notebook, so I accepted her offer. Ellie looked painfully surprised. We walked out of class together, and I almost forgot we barely spoke anymore, not since last year, and made a show of not having to stop at our lockers. In fact, she leaned against them as we walked, dragging her backpack along so everyone could hear the click of the zipper against each lock.
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