Paola Santiago and the Forest of Nightmares

by Tehlor Kay Mejia

  What would the police (or the hospital, for that matter) do with a woman who was, technically, almost two hundred years old?

  Pao’s heart was hammering out of her chest. She was so frustrated with the state of the world, not to mention terrified about the condition Señora Mata was in. How were you supposed to get care for the people you loved when the “care” dispatched was equally likely to kill them or ruin their lives?

  And how long did Pao have to find out?

  She wished her mom were here, despite everything. But she couldn’t call her when she’d just trashed her bedroom. And Dante would lose his mind if he got here before Pao had a plan. So she opened her phone and selected a contact she hadn’t used in a long time, praying to the gods or the santos or whoever was listening that she’d get an answer.

  “Pao?” Emma’s voice on the other end was suspicious, and there was laughing in the background, like Pao was interrupting something cool and fun. “Did you call me on purpose?”

  “Yeah,” Pao said, her voice sounding shaky even to herself. “Hi. Um, I’m with Dante’s grandma and . . . something’s wrong. I . . . don’t know what to do?”

  Before Emma could answer, two things happened in quick succession. First, the door opened, revealing Dante, and second, the green paper dolls from Pao’s dream popped up around Señora Mata, bathing the tiny room in green light.

  “Pao?” Emma said through the phone speaker that Pao was now holding away from her head. “Pao, are you still there?”

  “WHAT HAPPENED TO HER?” Dante roared, seconds later.

  “I—” Pao said, frozen in the green glow. “I don’t . . . I didn’t mean . . .”

  “Pao?” Emma said, her voice tinny through the phone. “What’s happening now? What do you guys need?”

  “WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE, PAO?” Dante yelled, crossing the room in two steps to kneel beside his grandma. The moment he crossed their circle, the green figures disappeared.

  That’s one problem down, Pao thought.

  “We need . . .” she finally choked out to Emma. “We need to get her to the hospital, but we can’t call 911. We can’t bring the police, Emma. What do we do?”

  “Pao?” Emma said. “I need you to listen carefully, okay? I learned all about this in the Rainbow Rogues’ De-escalation-Not-Policing-for-Community-Justice lunchtime webinar.”

  “What?” Pao asked, panicked as Dante started shouting at his abuela to wake up. “What is that? What do we do?”

  “We need to call a private ambulance,” Emma said. “They’re not affiliated with the hospital or the police, okay?”

  “We can’t pay for a private ambulance!” Pao said, picturing the ten dollars in her pocket and knowing there was no way Dante had any more.

  “I’ll call for it, okay?” Emma asked instead. “Are you at Dante’s place? I’ll use my dad’s credit card—this definitely counts as an emergency, and it’s exactly the kind of thing I should be using my privilege for anyway!”

  Pao almost smirked at that—this girl had definitely taken the Rogues’ mission to heart—but the situation was too serious for humor. She reminded Emma of the street address, shouting to be heard over Dante’s repeated pleas for his abuela to wake up.

  “I’ll text when they’re on their way, okay?” Emma said. “It’s going to be all right, Pao.”

  “Thanks, Emma,” Pao said, really meaning it.

  “I’ll meet you guys at the hospital,” Emma said. “I mean, unless . . .”

  “No, yeah,” Pao said. “Of course, meet us.”

  “Okay,” Emma said, and Pao could hear her smiling. “Okay, I will.”

  They hung up, leaving Pao with a borderline-hysterical Dante and a still-unconscious Señora Mata.

  “Emma’s calling an ambulance,” Pao said, and Dante fell silent. “It’s a private one. No cops. She’s gonna pay for it with her dad’s card.”

  “What are you doing here?” Dante asked again, still looking down at his abuela. “And what were those green things I just saw? Pao, I told you she was—”

  “You didn’t tell me anything!” Pao interrupted, her temper flaring. “You didn’t tell me she was forgetting things, or that anything was wrong at all! You just shut me out, Dante. Why didn’t you let me help? Aren’t I supposed to be your—” There it was again, the word she couldn’t bring herself to say. “Friend?” she finished feebly.

  “Yeah, because you’re always so helpful, Pao?” Dante said, laughing in a strangled sort of way. “Because this isn’t, like, entirely your fault to begin with, right?”

  Pao felt it then—something culminating between them. Something bigger than their relationship’s lack of definition. Something he’d been hanging on to for so long it was crystalizing, like carbon atoms in the earth’s crust forming diamonds.

  “What do you mean?” she asked, her own voice sounding far away. “How could this possibly be my—”

  “She was fine before that green mist stuff, and the candle flames changing colors, and that creepy voice!” Dante said, like the words were exploding from a place in his heart where he’d kept them locked up all these months. “She was fine until you were ‘the Dreamer’ and we had to go off on some quest, and now she doesn’t remember stuff, and she’s sick and she might be dying, and it’s all because of you!”

  Pao took a step backward to take him in—the tears gathered at the corners of his eyes, his face flushed with anger. This was what he’d been trying to tell her all the times he’d brushed her off this year.

  Dante, her best friend and maybe more, hated the part of her that still wanted to talk about Bruto and the Niños and the monsters and the void. He wanted to forget it all because he was losing his abuela and he blamed Pao for it. For everything.

  She’d thought it was just the paranormal stuff he wanted to forget. She’d never imagined he wanted to forget her, too.

  “I didn’t . . .” Pao began, trailing off, because what could she possibly say? That it wasn’t her fault? That as the Dreamer she hadn’t brought the mist and the monsters and the danger to their doorstep? That she hadn’t actively, in a room right below where they were standing now, wished for more of all those things to happen?

  “Abuela,” Dante was saying again. “Abuela, wake up, please.”

  Pao couldn’t even say she was sorry. She couldn’t say anything until the ambulance Emma had called pulled up, looking like any other ambulance. An EMT knocked on the door, and without any more fanfare or conversation or chances to explain, they were all headed to the hospital.

  The EMT asked questions as they went, and Pao answered them as best she could. Dante sat beside his grandma, silently holding her hand, letting Pao do the talking despite everything he’d said about not needing her.

  When the EMT asked what Señora Mata’s symptoms had been before she lost consciousness, Pao hesitated. She had so far avoided telling Dante how long she’d been at his apartment or why, but it seemed she couldn’t put it off any longer.

  “She was acting strange,” Pao said. “She thought I was my mom back when she was a teenager. She talked about a boy my mom used to date and how he was trouble. She was . . .” Pao steeled herself for Dante’s wrath. “She was going to give me a cooking lesson, but she was picking really weird ingredients and stuff.”

  “And then what happened?” the man asked.

  “She . . . seemed to realize where . . . or . . . when she was,” Pao said haltingly, wondering how to explain this without talking about her dreams, or the green shapes, or the real reason she’d been in apartment K. “After that, she got upset. She was talking nonsensically, like she was afraid. That’s when she fell, and I couldn’t wake her up.”

  This answer seemed to satisfy the EMT, who hooked up Señora Mata to an oxygen mask and several monitors, which Pao guessed were for blood pressure and heart rate.

  But Pao couldn’t help but notice that after her brief interview, the driver turned on the ambulance’s siren and significantly increased their speed
.

  She wanted to say something to Dante, to apologize, but he never met her eyes and Pao didn’t trust her voice, so she stayed quiet. It allowed her, at last, to reflect on the events of the morning and what they might mean.

  Was Señora Mata confused, her words the result of a natural disease? Or were they connected to Pao’s dreams of her father and everything supernatural that had happened to her last summer?

  Dante’s abuela had told Pao this mysterious he would never stop searching until he found her. That he would bring down the world before he let her slip away. That he was looking for an answer, and Pao needed to find it first.

  In that moment, Pao just knew Señora Mata had been talking about her dad. Somehow, he’d become aware of Pao’s trip into the rift last summer. And he had the answers she’d been searching for ever since.

  If she could find her father and get the answers she needed to cure Señora Mata at the same time, how could Pao do anything else but try?

  The Post-it Note with her father’s PO box address on it was burning a hole in her pocket. Her plan was already half-formed by the time they reached the hospital. She would go to Pine Glade—a place that sounded like a furniture polish more than a town, but that was beside the point. She would find her father, learn how to save Señora Mata, and get the answers she needed about the Niños. She would figure out a way to keep them all safe, for good.

  Pao looked at Dante, who hadn’t glanced up at her once since the ambulance took off, with a sinking feeling in her stomach. The feeling told her that, this time, she would have to do it alone.

  The Silver Springs hospital was on what Pao not-so-affectionately referred to as the “golf course side of town.”

  Which was really typical, she thought as the ambulance pulled into the bay and they prepared to unload Señora Mata.

  Pao trailed along behind the EMT and paramedics, feeling increasingly out of place as they got Señora Mata admitted and handed Dante a clipboard with an inch-thick stack of paperwork.

  “Are you both family?” asked a nurse (STACEY, Pao read on her name tag in a daze) as she started wheeling Señora Mata’s gurney toward the ICU.

  “Um,” Pao said in her smallest voice, turning to Dante.

  Without looking back, he said, “I am,” and walked through the door behind Stacey, leaving Pao alone in the hall.

  She paced up and down, trying to stay out of everyone’s way, torn between guilt and frustration. She wanted to sit down in a corner and cry. She wanted to barge in there and make Dante talk to her.

  Luckily, she didn’t have time to do either before Emma arrived.

  “Pao!” Emma ran toward her, her sandy-blond ponytail bouncing and purple streak bright under the fluorescent lights. She wore skinny jeans and a long-sleeved white T-shirt with rainbow sleeves. There was paint under her fingernails.

  When she reached Pao, they hugged as if it hadn’t been months since their worlds had drifted out of each other’s orbits. Pao was so relieved to see her, it was like an actual weight had lifted off her shoulders.

  “Are you okay?” Emma asked, real concern in her big blue eyes. “Where’s Dante and Señora Mata?”

  “In there,” Pao said, pointing to the double doors of the ICU. A lump in her throat made it hard to talk.

  “Oh, you didn’t have to wait for me!” Emma said, her cheeks turning pink. “Should we go in and see what we can do to help?”

  Pao wanted to say yes. To say anything. But instead, the lump in her throat grew, and she found she couldn’t hide how she felt from Emma. Not that she’d ever really been able to.

  “He . . .” Pao attempted, her eyes welling up. “He doesn’t want me in there. He says . . .” Tears spilled out of Pao’s eyes for the second time that day, and Emma stepped forward to embrace her again. “He says it’s my fault,” Pao said into her best friend’s shoulder. “That she’s sick because of me, because of . . .” She lowered her voice, stepping back to look around for eavesdroppers. “Because of what happened last summer.”

  Emma’s jaw clenched, and her eyes looked sad. “In that case, it’s my fault, isn’t it? I’m the one who got taken. . . .” She shook herself a little. “What happened to Señora Mata, anyway? She just collapsed?”

  Pao pulled Emma aside, into a little waiting alcove with faded red chairs and a table with a few out-of-date magazines on it. “Promise you’ll keep this a secret?” she asked.

  They had posed that question to each other so many times before. But that was back when they’d had no other girl friends to confide in. Now, when Emma’s answer really mattered, Pao waited for her to scoff at the childish request and make some cool comeback like Radical honesty is the only way to fight oppression or something.

  “Promise,” Emma said instead, and stuck out her pinkie.

  The gesture was so familiar it almost made Pao cry again, but she linked her pinkie with Emma’s anyway, and they twisted their hands around in their secret-keeping handshake. They’d invented it in the fourth grade, when Pao had revealed that Lily M. had a crush on Dalton Jenkins, even though she’d promised not to, because she just had to tell someone.

  As they finished up the handshake now (with an elbow bump and a round of breathless giggling), Pao wished their secrets were as simple as other people’s fourth-grade crushes. But it hadn’t been that way for a long time.

  At least, not since last summer.

  And so, Pao told Emma everything. About her dreams of her dad, the problems between her and Dante, Señora Mata’s strange behavior, and her mom’s awful boyfriend with his backpack full of blue clothes. The destruction in her mom’s room. Her dad’s PO box. And finally, the scene in Dante’s kitchen when it had all come together and Pao’s harebrained theory about what it all meant.

  By the end, Emma’s eyes were as round as quarters. “So the green things from your dream were really there?” she asked, as if she were confirming it for herself, not like she didn’t believe Pao. “And you think your dad will know how to wake her up?”

  Pao nodded fervently. “I mean, there are too many clues for it to be coincidence,” she said. “The dreams, the address . . . And Señora Mata seemed the most lucid when I said my dad’s name. She knew him when they were younger, I think. Just another thing my mom lied about . . .”

  Emma chewed her lip, the familiar furrow between her eyebrows revealing that she was thinking hard. “But Oregon is really far away, Pao,” she said. “And don’t you think your mom’s gonna be furious when she finds out you trashed her room? She’ll probably ground you for the rest of middle school.”

  All true, Pao thought, collapsing into a chair and burying her face in her hands. “I know,” she said, the words muffled by her palms. “But I have to try, don’t I?”

  “Okay, let’s think this through,” Emma said, sitting beside Pao. “Maybe we hang out here for a bit, make sure Señora Mata’s really out because of magic dream stuff and not because of, like, an actual human thing?”

  Pao looked at her blankly, trying to pull herself back from the crazed planning stage her brain had already entered.

  “You know, humans?” Emma asked, a mischievous smirk playing around her mouth. “We get things like the flu, broken toes, the desire to wear Native headdresses to Coachella, and other unfortunate maladies?”

  “I don’t think a broken toe did this to Dante’s abuela,” Pao deadpanned. “Or a headdress, either. Wait, unless it was haunted! Do you think maybe the good-luck bonnet she wears to bingo—”

  “Let’s just . . .” Emma said, gently but firmly, taking Pao by the elbow and steering her back into the hallway. “Let’s go in there and see how she’s doing. If it’s not a normal illness or a . . . haunted bingo bonnet, we’ll go from there, okay?”

  Pao knew, no matter how much she dreaded confronting Dante, she had no choice but to follow.

  In the hospital room, two doctors stood over Señora Mata—a very tall balding man, and a very short man with a ponytail—both talking rapidly in low voices.<
br />
  They look exactly like Pinky and the Brain, Pao thought, these two laboratory mice from a cartoon she’d watched on fuzzy cable when she was little. Brain was a little evil genius, and Pinky was his dopey, much taller counterpart.

  The thought made Pao laugh inwardly . . . until she caught sight of Dante.

  He sat in a chair against the wall, the paperwork in his lap, looking bleary-eyed and despondent.

  Pao had been vacillating between anger and guilt since they’d gotten into the ambulance, but in this room, guilt took over with full force. He and his abuela both looked so small and helpless. And they were alone, Pao realized, with whatever the consequences of this were going to be. The hospital bills, the rehab . . . She stopped herself before she could consider anything worse.

  She would fix this, if it was possibly within her power to do so. Even if she couldn’t promise it to Dante right now, she would promise it to herself.

  Emma approached Dante and put a hand on his shoulder. “You okay?” she asked as Pao skulked against the door feeling awful and restless and ready to bolt before he could yell at her anymore.

  “Excuse me, it’s family only in here,” Pinky said.

  “We’re her grandkids,” Emma said smoothly, staring down the doctor like her father had donated this wing of the hospital. Which, technically, he probably could have. “We’re his cousins.”

  Pao nodded her agreement, not trusting her voice as the doctor looked back and forth between the three of them.

  “My mom married a reeeeally white guy,” Emma said by way of explanation, adding this adorable shrug that Pao knew no authority figure could resist.

  “Well, I certainly wasn’t . . .”

  “No one was saying that you . . .”

  “How’s she doing?” Emma cut through the doctors’ hemming and hawing and sent them back to Señora Mata’s bedside. “My dad is out of town, but he’ll be calling soon for an update, so I want details.”