Paola Santiago and the Forest of Nightmares

by Tehlor Kay Mejia

  “I’m going to the bathroom,” Pao said, standing up abruptly.

  No one stopped her.

  At least this nightmare is nearly over, she thought.

  By now, she should have known better than to think things like that.

  In the ladies’ room (gendered bathrooms, how archaic), Pao skulked against the wall waiting for a frazzled woman to herd three sauce-smeared little kids into the largest stall. The other stall was out of order.

  Maybe if Pao stayed in here long enough, her mom and Aaron would forget about her. She could live here, in the Pizza Pete’s bathroom. Get all fifteen top scores on Ghost Hunter 3 at night when no one was around.

  She took an environmentally irresponsible amount of paper towels from the dispenser and began to daub her shirt again. It was already tie-dyed, so maybe the weird splotches would just blend right in? Old Mom never would have noticed. New Mom probably had opinions about children with stained shirts.

  The woman finally emerged from the stall, looking much worse for wear as she took out sanitary wipes and cleaned the squirming kids from head to toe.

  Pao knew her mom was probably getting impatient, but she just wanted some time alone. To steel herself for the last few minutes with Aaron. And to get rid of the feeling inside her that something weird was about to go down.

  “Sorry,” the mom said when one of the kids blew a raspberry at Pao.

  “It’s fine.” Pao smiled. A more genuine one than she’d managed for Aaron.

  “Never have kids if you prefer going to the bathroom alone,” the mom said, but she tucked in the little boy’s shirt and smoothed down the baby’s hair, kissing the oldest one on the cheek before ushering them back outside.

  Moms have it rough, Pao thought. And given that she’d seen (in the crazed eyes of La Llorona) arguably the worst one in history, Pao was reminded that she should be more patient with her own.

  That is, if she could get her away from Aaron long enough to try.

  Now walk out of here with a smile, Pao told herself. She would try harder with her mom, even after this awful bonding experience. She would not, even if it would be really funny, crack a joke about how sometimes, in chemistry, a bond between three elements was so unstable it caused an explosion, or a deadly poison. . . .

  Seriously, she wouldn’t.

  Despite Pao’s resolution, the long walk home with her mother was uncomfortably silent.

  Aaron had ridden his bike back to wherever he lived after the world’s most awkward good-bye. Pao knew her mom hadn’t forgotten her subpar performance at the pizza place. She was probably brewing a lecture like a strong cup of tea.

  The Riverside Palace loomed ahead. The moment they walked through the apartment door, their tense silence would blow up into something too big to control. Pao stopped her mom under the broken streetlamp and looked up at her.

  “If it’s another snarky comment, Paola, I just don’t know if I can—”

  Pao cut her off by hugging her tight. They were almost the same height now, and Pao’s forehead rested against her mom’s cheek.

  “I’m sorry, Mom,” she said, humiliated to feel tears pricking her eyes. “It just feels like everything’s different since I got . . . lost.” To Maria, Pao’s life-changing ghost hunt last summer had been a simple case of getting lost in the wilderness around the Gila River while looking for her friend. Señora Mata, Dante’s grandma, was the one who’d advised Pao not to tell her mom the whole truth.

  Pao stepped out of the hug and noticed that the lines around her mom’s eyes looked softer than before.

  Pao sighed, stretching for something genuine she could say to her mom in this moment. “I just . . . don’t want things to change so fast,” she said finally. And despite its lack of ghosts or void beasts, that really was the truth.

  “Mi amor.” Her mom sighed and pushed the too-long bangs off Pao’s forehead. “We can’t stop the world from changing. But this?” She gestured between the two of them. “This is forever. No matter what else is different, this will always be the same.”

  Pao nodded, not trusting her voice, not knowing if she could even trust the sentiment, but vowing to try. Yes, her adventure last summer had been amazing, and maybe she was having a hard time fitting back in to this life, but it was the only life she had. She would have to make the best of it. She remembered what she’d learned in the throat of the rift about forgiveness.

  “I love you, Mom,” Pao said.

  “I love you, too, mija.”

  They walked the rest of the way home with their arms around each other’s shoulders, tripping and laughing through the parking lot. At the base of the stairs, they ran into Dante, who was just getting home.

  “Hey, Dante!” said her mom. “We missed you at pizza tonight!”

  Dante’s eyes darted to Pao’s, and she raised her eyebrows in the universal signal for please lie to this adult.

  “Uh, yeah, Ms. Santiago. Sorry. Soccer practice, you know.”

  Pao looked at her shoes, avoiding his eyes.

  “Well, I’ll give you two a minute, hmm?”

  “Uh, I have a lot of . . . homework,” Pao said, but her mom had already slipped through the door of apartment C and closed it behind her.

  “You know I hate to miss a pizza party,” Dante said, not quite meeting her eyes and not sounding sorry to have missed it at all.

  Pao felt her face heating up. “Just sparing you,” she said. “Bonding time with Mom’s new boyfriend.” She said the word like it was something gross before she remembered who she was standing in front of.

  Not that they’d ever used words like that, which were too embarrassing even to utter.

  Cheek-kissing and hand-holding were one thing when your life was on the line, but in the hallways of middle school, physical displays of affection were something infinitely different. And Pao wasn’t at all sure she hadn’t liked things better before, when they were just friends.

  But she couldn’t say that to Dante.

  “I didn’t know your mom got a boyfriend,” he said, his gaze falling to the ground.

  “Yeah, sorry. She just kind of . . . dropped it on me. I figured dinner would be awkward enough without turning it into some kind of—” Pao stopped herself before she could say double date, but Dante’s face turned red like he had heard it anyway.

  Pao knew she should talk to him. Tell him about Aaron the Awful and her dream about her dad. The old Pao-and-Dante would have discussed it all. But things weren’t the same between them these days.

  As if to illustrate the point, the now Pao-and-Dante shuffled their feet, looking anywhere but at each other. Did he know things were different, too? Pao wondered. He had to.

  When they’d started school again, Pao had been sure their friendship was unshakable. It had survived for years, after all, and gotten them through their confusing, terrifying, out-of-this-world shared experience. Pao was convinced they’d always fit into each other’s lives as effortlessly as they had in the cactus field.

  It was just seventh grade. There was no way it could be harder to navigate than a magical rift filled with supernatural monsters and a bloodthirsty all-powerful ghost, Pao figured.

  She’d figured wrong. It wasn’t just hard—it was impossible.

  One day, shortly after her mom had started letting her out of the house again, Pao had asked Dante if she could come over to his place after school like she had a thousand times before. Dante had turned red and said, “Not today,” in a totally uncharacteristic way. Pao had let it slide. Maybe he was feeling weird about things being different, too, she figured. Eventually they’d talk about it. They always did.

  But then she couldn’t help bringing up that she wanted to ask his abuela about being a Niña de la Luz (a shocking confession Señora Mata made after Pao and Dante had returned victorious from the rift). He’d shut her down swiftly, saying the last thing his abuela needed was a million questions about something that had happened to her a long time ago.

  He’d left
Pao out front, totally bewildered, and slammed the door.

  They didn’t talk for three days after that. A new record.

  And even when they’d started walking to school together again, the tension was still there. Dante rolled his eyes and glanced around furtively whenever Pao mentioned the Niños, or the rift, or anything about last summer. It was like he wanted to just forget about it. Like he was embarrassed about the whole thing. Embarrassed about being with her.

  He hadn’t invited her inside since, and the few times she had seen him coming home with his abuela, he’d rushed his grandmother through the door to avoid Pao.

  So tonight, in front of apartment C, aware of just how long this awkward pause had been, Pao asked, “How was soccer?” in a falsely bright voice instead of telling him what was really going on, because she couldn’t stand to put any more distance between them.

  Unfortunately, she said it at the same time Señora Mata opened the door.

  “Alberto?” she asked, her voice a little shaky. “Where have you been? I thought you were coming home with the milk hours ago!”

  Alberto? Pao wondered. Dante whispered something to his abuela and sent her inside, closing the door behind her. Who was Alberto? And hadn’t Dante just said he was coming home from soccer practice?

  “Pao, I gotta go,” Dante said, his face flushing just as it had when she’d asked to come inside a few months ago. That sent the gears in Pao’s brain whirring and spinning—a welcome distraction from all the moping she’d been doing lately.

  “Dante,” Pao said as he looked sullenly at the ground, “are you okay? Is she . . . ?”

  “She’s fine,” he snapped. “We’re both fine. I’m just busy, and I don’t have time to examine all of Bruto’s paranormal features with you or whatever, okay?”

  Pao suddenly went from being curious to feeling like she was about to cry. She’d known that she and Dante weren’t on the same page right now, but he’d never insulted her before. Not in a serious way, at least.

  “Sorry,” he said when she didn’t reply. But he didn’t really sound sorry. “I just have a lot going on, okay?”

  “Yeah,” Pao said, getting angry now that the near-tears feeling had passed. “Fine. Me too. I’m gonna go home and do something horribly embarrassing like take pictures of Bruto’s toenails. Don’t worry, I won’t tell your cool friends about it.”

  “Pao . . .” Dante said, rubbing a hand over his face. “It isn’t like that.”

  But it was. Pao had known it for a long time. And if he didn’t want her help, she wasn’t going to keep trying to be his friend. Or his . . . girl-you-kissed-once-on-the-cheek-and-sometimes-held-hands-with-when-you-were-scared, either.

  “Good night, Dante,” she said in as dignified a way as she could muster, and went inside before he could reply.

  There was only so much becoming a better person she could be expected to accomplish in one night.

  Pao’s resolve to better herself lasted almost twelve hours.

  Nine of which she spent dreaming again.

  In one of the dreams, she was surrounded by pine trees with eyes that glowed green like the monsters that had come out of the rift last summer. Those eyes followed Pao as she walked down the path that had taken her to her father before.

  Only this time, he wasn’t where he was supposed to be.

  Instead, Dante’s abuela was there, pacing back and forth like she was looking for something she’d dropped in the road. “Alberto?” she asked, shuffling along in her house shoes. “Alberto, ¿dónde estás? What are you doing all the way out here? Did you chase that cat again? You know he always comes back. . . .”

  “Señora Mata?” Pao asked tentatively, approaching her slowly. “Can I help you find something?”

  “Maria!” Señora Mata said, looking up sharply at Pao. “I told you not to go running around with that Beto. He’ll get you into trouble! And now you’re coming home so late. . . .”

  Beto, Pao thought. Where had she heard that name before?

  “Señora?” Pao said, brushing aside the half-formed memory. “It’s me, Paola, from next door. . . .”

  “Oh, you can’t fool me, Maria,” said Señora Mata. “I know you don’t want me to mother you, but somebody has to.”

  Maria? Pao thought, at a loss for what to say next. Did she mean Pao’s mom? But the two of them hadn’t met until Pao was four, when she and her mom had moved into the Riverside Palace . . . right?

  “Okay, señora,” Pao said, aware that the old woman was still waiting for an answer. “I’ll stay away from Beto. You’re right.”

  Señora Mata smiled, but her eyes appeared vacant, looking through Pao instead of at her. “Bueno, bueno,” she said. But even as she spoke, the smile melted off her face, replaced with a gradually dawning look of horror.

  “Are you okay?” Pao asked, glancing around for the source of Señora Mata’s fear. The wind whipped the evergreens into a frenzy. Their green eyes darted this way and that, and Pao heard the trees chattering to one another, though their words were indecipherable in the hiss of brushing needles.

  “He calls,” Señora Mata said, her voice hoarse. Her eyes were focused on Pao’s face now, their dreaminess gone. “Paola, he calls to you.”

  “Who calls?” Pao asked, her heart in her throat, even though she knew this was just a dream. “What’s going on?”

  “You must go,” Señora Mata said. “Or he will topple the world to find you.”

  “Okay,” Pao said. “I’ll go, but who—”

  “Bueno, Maria,” said Señora Mata, straightening up again. The wind in the trees died down, and the eyes stopped their frantic darting. “Por favor, come over for cooking lessons next week. You know you’ll never get married si no puedes cocinar.”

  Pao’s heart was still pounding out of her chest, but Señora Mata’s eyes were vacant again as she drew her crocheted shawl around herself and went trundling off into the dense trees.

  “Alberto?” she called. “Alberto, we need to get home before it’s dark! Leave that gatita tontita alone!”

  And then she was gone.

  Pao was alone on the road, the trees calm, and ahead of her was a silhouette. Her father’s.

  Come to me, Paola. . . . His voice seemed to echo from the trees all around. Come to me.

  “How?” Pao asked, inching her foot toward him, waiting for the crack in the earth to form between them again.

  Instead, glowing green figures sprouted from the ground and unfolded like paper dolls. They encircled Pao and started rotating around her in some kind of weird ghostly dance. The glare they created hurt her eyes.

  “Dad, help!” Pao screamed, no longer able to see his outline. “Help me!”

  The figures spun faster still until the forest—and the road at her feet—disappeared, and there was nothing left but green light.

  Pao awoke, sweating again, even though it was December.

  The green shapes from her dream had followed her.

  She jumped out of bed, swatting at them, a scream lodged in her throat.

  But they were already fading. Soon their round little paper-doll heads were the only things left, floating around Pao. She watched them disappear one by one.

  Had they ever really been there at all? Pao wondered, sinking back onto her bed. She had probably just been experiencing a hypnopompic hallucination, she told herself, remembering the term from her days of child sleep testing, her heart rate slowing as she retreated back into the comfortable world of science.

  Even on her best days, Pao wasn’t a morning person, and this morning was far from her best. The image of her father was still so close, like she could reach out and touch him. And Señora Mata? She’d said Alberto again in Pao’s dream, just like she’d said outside the apartment last night. But Pao’s dad was César.

  Before the events of last summer, Pao might have drawn the logical conclusion that she’d been thinking of her father more often lately because her mom had a new boyfriend. And her subconsciou
s had conjured Señora Mata because of Pao’s interaction with Dante last night.

  But these days, Pao knew that her dreams weren’t always just dreams. In fact, it was Señora Mata who had called Pao “the Dreamer” last summer. Ondina—La Llorona’s youngest ghostly daughter—had accessed Pao’s consciousness through her dreams to draw her into her mother’s supernatural realm.

  But Ondina was gone now. Her spirit had been freed, and La Llorona and her glass palace had been destroyed. The rift was closed for good, and (aside from Bruto) there were no more monsters in Silver Springs.

  Then again . . .

  Pao remembered the trees from her dream. Pine. There were no pine trees in this part of Arizona. Could these new dreams be coming from a different rift? And did they actually have something to do with her dad?

  Or maybe you’re just reading way too much into this because you’re bored with your life and mad about your new rent-a-dad, said the practical part of Pao’s brain. She groaned. It was only seven thirty a.m., way too early to be this conflicted. After the night she’d had, Pao had expected to sleep in until at least ten.

  She rolled over with a huff, pulling her faded purple comforter over her head and closing her eyes against the winter sunlight coming in through her window. At the foot of her bed, Bruto whined once at her theatrics, then resumed his hell-beast snoring.

  If only she could get a little more sleep . . .

  That’s when the giggling started in the kitchen, followed by the unignorable grinding of the blender.

  Pao flung herself out of bed with a loud ugh, startling her chupacabra puppy. She stomped into the hallway with him trotting at her heels, the ridges on his back standing up straight in alarm. She was sure she was doing every single thing on her mom’s list of forbidden behaviors at once.

  In the hallway mirror, she saw that pieces of her too-long bangs were sticking up at odd angles. She also noticed a massive backpack casting its shadow across the floor of her mom’s bedroom. So Aaron was here. He hadn’t spent the night, had he? No, Maria wouldn’t go that far. Not without talking to Pao first, at least. She hoped.