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She gets in the car.
Starts the engine.
Pulls out of the parking space.
Cabel stands there, looking. Arms folded across his chest. His lips are concerned.
She leans over and rolls down the window. “Get in. You’ve missed the bus by now.”
His expression doesn’t change.
He doesn’t move.
She hesitates, one more minute.
He turns and starts walking toward home.
She watches him, sighs exasperatedly, and guns it. Her tires squeal around the corner. Idiot.
October 10, 2005, 4:57 a.m.
On a thin piece of paper in the cave of her own dream, Janie writes:
I keep to myself.
I have to.
Because of what I know about you.
And then she crumples it up, lights a match, and turns it into ash. The charcoaled remains shrivel up and the wind takes them down the street, across the yards. To his house. He steps on them as he saunters to catch the bus. The ash is softer than the crisp Halloween leaves that gather and huddle around the corners of his front step. Under the weight of his footstep, the ash disintegrates. The wind swallows it. Gone.
7:15 a.m.
Janie wakes up, running late for school. She blinks.
She has never had a dream before—not that she can remember.
She only has everyone else’s.
At least she can sleep during hers.
She gives her straight dirty-blond hair a lesson with a wet comb, brushes her teeth at top speed, shoves two dollars in the front pocket of her jeans, and grabs her backpack, searching wildly for her keys. They are on the kitchen table. She grabs them, saying good-bye to her nightgowned mother, who stands at the sink eating a Pop-Tart and looking aimlessly out the window.
“I’m late,” Janie says.
Her mother doesn’t respond.
Janie lets the door slam, but not angrily. Hurriedly. She climbs into the Nova and zooms to Fieldridge High School. She’s ten long strides from her English classroom when the bell rings, just like half the class. Sliding into her desk, the back seat in the row nearest the door, she mouses unnoticed through the class, except for a sleepy grin from Carrie. Janie stealthily finishes her math assignment as the teacher drones about the upcoming weekend senior trip to Stratford.
Cabel’s back is to her. She has an urge to touch his hair. If she could reach him, she might. But then she shakes her head at herself. She is very confused over her feelings about him. It’s more bizarre than flattering to know he dreams about her. Especially when he does it after being that horrid monster-man. She may even admit to being a little afraid of him.
And now she knows where he lives.
Just two blocks from her.
In a tiny house on Waverly Road.
“Your room assignments,” Mr. Purcell drones, waving fluorescent yellow papers like sun rays above his head before tossing handfuls at the first person in each row. “No changes allowed, so don’t even try.”
Janie looks up as titters and groans fill the room. The boy in front of her doesn’t turn around to hand her the paper. He tosses it over his shoulder. It floats, hovers, and slides off the slick laminate desk before Janie can grab it, whooshing and sticking under Cabel Strumheller’s shoe. He kicks it toward her without acknowledgment. His hair swings lightly around his shoulders.
The list places Janie in a room with three rich snobs from the ritzy Hill section of North Fieldridge: Melinda Jeffers, who hates her, Melinda’s friend Shay Wilder, who hates her by default, and the captain of the girls’ soccer team, Savannah Jackson, who pretends Janie doesn’t exist. She sighs inwardly. She’ll have to sleep on the bus on the way.
But she’s curious to know if, after all these years, Melinda still dreams about Carrie with ginormous boobs.
OH, CANADA
October 14, 2005, 3:30 a.m.
Janie meets Carrie under the black sky in Carrie’s driveway. They offer little greeting besides sleepy grins, and Janie climbs into the passenger seat of Carrie’s Tracer. They drive in silent darkness to school. Janie’s just glad she doesn’t have to drive at this hour.
They pass Cabel Strumheller when they get close to school. He’s walking. Carrie slows and stops, rolls down the window, and asks if he wants a ride, but he waves her off with a grin. “I’m almost there,” he says. Up ahead, the Greyhound bus gleams under the school’s parking lot lights.
Janie looks at Cabel. He catches her eye briefly and looks down. She feels like shit.
Cabel and Janie’s non-fight in the parking lot began a long series of non-fights. Not only do they not fight, they no longer speak.
But Janie sees him, kisses him, in his library dreams.
She also sees him, a raging maniac. A scarred-faced lunatic with knife-fingers, who repetitively stabs, slices, and beheads one middle-aged man, over and over and over again. She feels only slight relief that he doesn’t kill anyone else.
Not yet, anyway.
Not her, so far.
And every time he dreams it, the bell rings before Janie can figure out how to help him. Help him do what? Help him, how?
She has no idea. She has no power. Why do all these people ask her for help? She can’t do it.
Just.
Can’t.
Do it.
But she sure doesn’t get much done in study hall these days.
3:55 a.m.
The oversleepers, latecomers, and don’t-give-a-shitters have either arrived or been written off by the teacher chaperones. Carrie sits with Melinda, near the front.
Janie sits in the last row on the right, next to the window. As far away from everyone as she can get. She stows her overnight bag in the compartment above her seat. She is glad to note that the restroom is at the front of the bus. She twists the overhead TV monitor so its blue glow doesn’t blind her, and puts her seat back. It only goes a little way before it hits the back wall.
Before the bus is loaded, Janie is dozing.
4:35 a.m.
She is jarred awake by a splash of water in her face. She’s in a lake, fully clothed. She shivers. A boy named Kyle is yelling as he falls from the sky above her, over and over and over, until he finally lands in the water. But he can’t swim. Janie feels her fingers growing numb, and she kicks out with her feet, trying to stop it, trying to get out.
And then it’s done.
Janie blinks, and sits up, startled. A shadowy face appears above the seat in front of her. “What the fuck?” says Kyle. “Do you mind?”
“Sorry,” Janie whispers. Her heart races. The drowning dreams are the worst. Well, almost.
