Some Faraway Place

by Lauren Shippen

  I don’t even know what I’m talking about anymore. It has been a very stressful day/week/year and you guys don’t need to hear about my personal drama. I’m going to go eat my weight in Ben & Jerry’s and watch Drag Race and pretend like my world didn’t get completely spun upside down last week.

  MARCH 1ST, 2017

  I wish I had kept this journal strictly about dreams and that I was writing in it now because today has been some awful dream and not real life. But I didn’t and I’m not and it’s not. This isn’t a nightmare that I’ve stumbled onto, it isn’t someone else’s head that I’m trapped in. It’s real life and it is total garbage.

  I knew it. I mean, no, not really, I didn’t KNOW know it, but I knew that it wasn’t going to be easy to tell anyone about Atypicals and my dreamdiving and just … everything. But I also knew that it wasn’t okay to keep dating Emily, get more serious with her, and NOT tell her about this stuff. I also just—I wanted to be myself with her! Like I hoped I could be with my family, like I was with Damien before he turned out to be a completely different person than I thought.

  I’ll admit, maybe I could have picked a better time and place to tell her. I should have taken her to the Common, re-created our first date, found a quiet spot where I could have told her privately, but she wouldn’t feel trapped or ambushed, could instead focus on asking me questions, giving me the benefit of the doubt. I should have made her feel safe. I should have bought her coffee so she could tear at the corners of the cardboard sleeve like she loves doing whenever she’s distracted or anxious.

  But hindsight is twenty-twenty. And I’m an idiot who decided to tell her while we were half-naked in bed together, completely vulnerable. In my head, being vulnerable was a great thing! I wanted to be totally open, honest, accessible to her. I realize now that maybe she would not have wanted to be fully vulnerable for that conversation. Finding out that there are people in the world with magical abilities is maybe not a revelation you want to have when you don’t have your clothes on.

  “Hey,” I started softly, brushing her hair back from her forehead as she lay in my arms. “I have something to tell you.”

  “Okay,” she said, snuggling in closer to me. She had this beautiful, gentle smile on her face, open and hopeful. Thinking about it now, I wonder … did she think I was going to tell her I love her? That would be the natural thing to assume. We’ve been dating for the past six months and whenever we’re together it feels really serious. Yeah, we’ve been seeing each other kind of sporadically because, well, my life is what it is, but we’re exclusive and … yeah, I do love her. I think. I want to let myself love her. It’s just … it feels like I don’t have room in my heart or my brain to be that open, especially when Emily doesn’t know the full, real me.

  So even though it seemed like she was expecting some kind of declaration I figured, hey, if this goes well, we’ll get to that! I still thought that it might go well! So I just barreled forward! Like a total idiot!

  “I have…” I started. “I have a kind of big secret.”

  She leaned back, propping herself on her elbow so she could look straight into my face, her curls falling back over her forehead.

  “Okay…” she said again, a small smile on her face, but I could hear the hesitation in her voice, could feel the pulse in her wrist, still draped over my stomach, pick up.

  “I’m…” I hadn’t planned this out at all, had only hazily imagined her big smile once she realized she was dating a superhuman. In that moment I was really wishing I had decided how I was going to explain Atypicals, even thinking that I should have talked to Aaron or my parents about it.

  “So, there are these people,” I said. “They’re called Atypicals.”

  “Atypicals,” she said, eyes narrowing.

  “Yeah,” I said. “And we’re … well, it’s a secret thing. Like, a whole secret group in humanity.”

  “What, like a secret coven of witches?” She smiled, her eyes going wide in mock-surprise.

  “No, not really,” I said, even though I knew she was making a joke. “It’s not … organized, really. It’s more like … okay, you know how a certain portion of the human population is gay?”

  “And thank goodness for that,” she said, smiling and then kissing me lightly on the cheek. I blushed and did my best to keep myself focused on the task at hand.

  “Right.” I chuckled. “This is kind of like that. It’s a small portion but—”

  “An awesome one?” she teased.

  “Yeah,” I said, nodding enthusiastically, relieved she was on board so far.

  “Okay, so what are Atypicals?” she said.

  “People with supernatural abilities,” I said, diving straight in.

  “What?” She laughed.

  “Atypicals are people with supernatural abilities,” I said. “Like telepathy and pyrokinesis and super speed. And I’m one of them. My whole family is Atypical, actually.”

  She went still for a second, face scrunched up, before bursting into laughter.

  “Rose, what are you talking about?” she said, still smiling.

  “I’m a dreamdiver,” I explained. “And Aaron can read minds, my dad is telekinetic—” I tripped over the word but kept going. “—and my mom is psychic. It’s not as accurate as you might think though—she gets these random visions but she still has to figure out what they mean. All our abilities come with, like, major terms and conditions.”

  “Rose…” Emily wasn’t laughing anymore, her smile rapidly collapsing.

  “I’ve never told anyone that before.” I exhaled a huge sigh of relief, wrapping my arms tightly around Emily, so full of warmth and joy in that moment I barely knew what to do with it.

  That didn’t last long.

  Emily’s hands wrapped around my upper arms as she gently pushed me away, to look me in the eyes with a face lined with worry.

  “Rose, what are you talking about?” she asked. “Are you … are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m—” I leaned back to get a better look at her. Her eyebrows were tipped toward each other in a stressed V-shape, her eyes darting frantically around my face, like she was trying to take in an image she didn’t understand.

  “I’m fine, Em,” I insisted. “I’m—I’m great, actually. I’ve wanted to tell you for so long—”

  Suddenly, she was standing up, out of bed and putting on her clothes faster than I could blink, talking rapidly the whole time.

  “Rose, I don’t know what kind of weird prank you’re pulling on me,” she said, her cheeks growing red, “but you know how I feel about jokes meant to make other people feel stupid.”

  “Emily, I promise you, I’m not pulling a prank,” I said as I followed suit, not because I necessarily wanted to get out of bed but because it felt weird to stay while she was clearly having a hard time processing this stuff.

  “So you mean to tell me that there are, what, superhumans and no one knows about them?” she said, growing louder as she paced around her small dorm room. “How is that even possible?”

  “It’s not like The Avengers or anything,” I explained. “There aren’t superheroes or anything, at least not that I know of. Just people with—”

  “With abilities,” she finished.

  “Yeah.”

  She scoffed, stopping in her pacing and setting her hands on her hips.

  “I’m sorry, I just—” She sighed. “I know you’re not messing with me, because this would be such a weird joke but … I mean, come on.”

  She looked me dead in the eye.

  “… what?” I asked.

  “If you’re not joking and you’re … you know, feeling totally fine…”

  “I’m one hundred percent fine and one hundred percent serious,” I said. That made her sigh even more heavily.

  “Okay,” she said, crossing her arms. “Then prove it to me.”

  She was standing there, with crossed arms, an adorable small smile on her lips, challenging me to prove my abilities to her in the s
ame way she challenged me to race her, both of us with casts, on our second date. I felt reckless and brave and like I couldn’t possibly get hurt, not again, not with Emily by my side, so I did what I did then—without thinking, I barreled forward. By telling her every detail of every dream of hers that I’d been inside during the past three months. Like a COMPLETE buffoon.

  And as I talked—telling her about the fic she was imagining the first day we met about Steve and Bucky in the woods after Bucky’s fall (one of the few fics she let me read), the scary anxiety dreams she has about reading in front of her creative writing seminar, her sweet homesick dreams about making food with her abuela, the dreams that I haven’t even let myself think about too much where we’re both in our late twenties, in a warm, well-worn apartment, me making her dinner while she writes—her face started to fall. And fell and fell and fell.

  “And remember Thanksgiving?” I continued, piling on information like an IDIOT. “The weird moment with my brother at the beginning? He accidentally read your mind.”

  She took a shaky inhale and I rushed to explain.

  “It really was an accident, he’s usually good at controlling it,” I explained.

  All the color had drained from her face, her arms uncrossed and hanging limply at her sides, making her look like a strange mannequin version of herself.

  I eventually noticed that I had stopped talking and that she hadn’t started. We’d been standing in silence for nearly a minute, just standing on opposite ends of her tiny room.

  “Emily.” I breathed, taking a small step toward her. She immediately backed up, her hands going up defensively in front of her, and my heart shattered.

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “No, you—how—why—”

  “Emily, I know that all sounded bad,” I tried, even though I really hadn’t known that until that very moment.

  “Sounded bad?” she said. “You—you’ve been inside my head. Without my permission. Without me knowing. That’s—”

  She sounded so disgusted, so betrayed. We both just stood there, ten feet apart, crying and barely looking at each other.

  “And your brother—oh my god—” Realization dawned on her face. “Your dad! I’m not crazy, at Thanksgiving, he really did move something with his mind.”

  “I’m so sorry.” I sniffed. “I never meant to—I couldn’t control it for so long and then I just—I wanted to feel closer to you—”

  “That’s why you were asking about my abuela, why you asked me to show you how to make pozole, because you saw me, with her, in my dream—”

  “You seemed so sad after we woke up and I thought if you talked about her, if we cooked the food she taught you … I don’t know, I thought it would make you miss her less. Or that it would feel good to share that with me—”

  “It did feel good, Rose,” she cried. “I want to share that kind of stuff with you. But it has to be my choice.”

  “I know—”

  “I think you should leave,” she said, crossing her arms again, closing herself off to me.

  “Em,” I whispered. “Please—”

  “I just—I need some space, okay?”

  “Okay.” I nodded. I hadn’t respected her boundaries up until now, so I had to get this right. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  “Don’t,” she said.

  “Oh.”

  “Rose, wait—”

  I spun around, hope beating against my chest.

  “Here.” She stretched out her arm. “I think you should have this.”

  The shell necklace was sitting in her palm.

  “After all,” she said, “you basically pulled it out of a dream, right?”

  “Em—”

  “Just go.”

  So I took the necklace and I left. I got on the bus, my ears ringing, and walked into the house and up to my room like a zombie, not paying attention to any of the calls from the kitchen from my family asking if that was me.

  GOD, I really was falling in love with Emily. And I had this idea in my head that I wasn’t allowed to, not fully, until I told her the truth. But what a lie that was. My heart wasn’t listening to my head and I fell just the same.

  I can smell dinner from downstairs but I’m going straight to the dreamworld.

  LATER

  It’s the middle of the night, but I want to put the dream I was just in in amber and hold it up to the light and look at it forever.

  It was Aaron’s dream, I knew that right away from the dusty, sun-soaked edges of it, the way the backyard smells in the summer. Warm, humid air mixed with the sawdust from my dad’s personal projects that he would do in the shed he built on the other end the yard, projects he would sometimes let Aaron and me help with, never letting us use the saw, but giving us goggles and gloves just so we could pretend we were part of it. That’s what Aaron’s dreams—the non-nightmare ones—feel like, always, no matter what they’re about.

  Except this one was about building stuff with our dad. But Aaron was himself, as he is now, not little kid Aaron. He and my dad were in the yard, putting together what looked like a doghouse, which was eventually confirmed by the CUTEST dog in the world loping into the scene. I hung back, sitting on our back porch, just watching them laugh and smile. Aaron hadn’t noticed I was here and I didn’t want to disturb him. He was happy. My dad was happy.

  I was so outside of it and I didn’t know how I would possibly get in. Before I could get up and walk toward them, the dream changed and suddenly the porch was the edge of a cliff and Aaron and my dad were sitting on a cloud hanging over a broad canyon beneath us. It was breathtakingly beautiful, a thing out of my brain, of my own creation, unbelievably real and yet something more than real. Like being inside a magical world or a beautifully painted picture book. And Aaron and my dad paid absolutely no attention to it. They just kept laughing and smiling and working on the doghouse, the puppy running happy circles around them, kicking up the cloud into perfect wisps that went unappreciated.

  I was sat atop my own, perfect kingdom, surveying its beauty, unable to bridge the gap between the edge of the canyon and the circumference of the cloud. A sad and lonely king with an infinite kingdom and no subjects.

  Writing about it isn’t like being in it. When I woke up I had such a sense of joy and peace, but now that I’ve written all that out … it wasn’t as perfect as I thought. Maybe dreams aren’t meant to be examined too closely.

  MARCH 3RD, 2017

  I just keep doing everything wrong. My family, Damien, Dr. Bright, Emily, everything.

  I slept from about eight thirty last night until eleven this morning, with that small break in the middle of the night when I woke up from Aaron’s dream, and for the first time in a long time, I actually woke up kind of groggy. I guess my body had become unused to sleeping for fifteen hours in the past two months. I was also hungry as hell, so my first stop was the kitchen, where I found Aaron on his laptop, typing frantically.

  “Nice of you to show your face, Rosie,” he said, not looking up from his computer.

  “What are you doing down here?” I asked. Aaron normally worked on his desktop in his room. Something about RAM and gigabytes and blah blah blah. My computer was for memes, YouTube cooking videos, and Serious Eats.

  “My computer’s on the fritz, I’m picking up a part later today—I can drop you at work if you want,” he added, looking up at me while holding the coffeepot, which I was sad to discover was empty.

  “All the coffee’s gone,” he said.

  “Yeah, thanks, that’s really helpful,” I said, going into the fridge for some juice instead.

  “So … ride?” he asked, tapping away.

  “Um, yeah, thanks,” I said. “My shift doesn’t start until four though.”

  “That’s okay, the store is open until six.”

  I just nodded as I poured myself some OJ. Suddenly the typing stopped and I looked up to see Aaron staring at me intensely.

  “What,” I snapped.

  “You were in
my dream last night, weren’t you?” he asked, like it had just occurred to him. Maybe it had.

  “What?”

  “Don’t play dumb, Rosie, you’re bad at it,” he said, snapping his laptop shut.

  “Thanks.” I rolled my eyes, even if there was a little part of me that was actually complimented by that weird backward insult.

  “I thought we talked about this.” He sighed, sounding WAY too much like our dad in that moment.

  “Look, can we just … not? Today? Please?” I tried to make it sound casual, like I was just over everything, totally cool and aloof, but my voice cracked on the last word and Aaron stood up, coming to stand on the other side of the kitchen counter from me.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, leaning on the island to look right at me.

  “What, you’ve decided you’re gonna be an older brother today?”

  “Damn, Rose,” he said, leaning back. And yeah, that was harsh. Boy, do I wish it was the worst thing I had said to him in this conversation!

  “Sorry,” I sighed, even though I didn’t really sound it. “I just—”

  I took a deep breath and Aaron leaned back in, clearly understanding that this was actually serious.

  “I told Emily,” I said finally.

  “Oh,” he said. “About your ability?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And…?” He winced, like he was bracing for impact. God, I hate when he’s right.

  “Well, I don’t have a girlfriend anymore,” I snapped, turning back to the cabinets to try and throw some food together in an effort to distract myself. I wasn’t even hungry anymore, my empty stomach replaced with twisting knots.

  “Oh jeez, Rosie, I’m so sorry,” he said and, to his credit, he sounded genuine. “What happened?”

  “What do you mean, what happened?” I asked, cracking eggs against the counter and throwing them into a bowl. I didn’t particularly feel like eating scrambled eggs but I sure as hell felt like cracking and scrambling something.