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Celeste
There aretwo dreams set on perpetual pause in my subconscious, the Play button waiting to be pressed whenever my life hits a moment of upheaval and stress.
You think what’s happening right now is bad? That’s nothing. Remember this?
I am sixteen, waking on a Sunday morning to the sensation that someone is in my room. I startle up and see my mother in my doorway. She orders me out of bed. I’m past the age of obeying without at least a snarky comment, but that morning, I’m too sleepy to argue. I roll out of bed, and then, with the unreality of dreams, I’m already downstairs in the living room, where two uniformed officers wait.
“Where were you last night?” the female officer asks. In the dream, they are amorphous shapes, distinguishable only by a male and a female voice.
“Uh...” I blink. I’m still in the doorway. No one has asked me to come in and sit down.
“She was out with her friends.” Mom twists that last word, contempt dripping. “She got in after we’d gone to bed.”
No, I was back by ten. My parents had been in the living room with the neighbors. I try to say that, but the words won’t come. They don’t come because they won’t help. In the real version, I had argued. I’d pleaded with my mother to remember seeing or hearing me. If she hadn’t noticed me come in, she could have pretended. She did not.
“Tell us about your evening,” the female officer says. “You were out with friends between what hours? And what did you do?”
Nothing. I did nothing.
That was the problem, wasn’t it?
Someone laughs across the room. With a start, I turn to see my friends at our kitchen table, Starbucks cups in hand. I glance quickly at my mother and the officers, but they don’t see them.
I stare at the trio. Three girls whose names I no longer even remember, but they’d been so important to me then. My new friends, the popular clique who’d seen fit to admit me when Denny Lamar said I’d come back from summer “hot.”
Now they’re at my kitchen table, which isn’t my kitchen table at all. It’s our regular corner spot at Starbucks. They’re bored and shit-posting on a school message board about their current favorite voodoo doll, a girl named Jasmine Oleas. I wasn’t into it. By no means did I defend this poor girl. I just didn’t see the point in tormenting someone like Jasmine, whose only “crime” was being poor and bused into our school on a scholarship.
“Hey, you,” one of the girls says, waving across the room at me. “You’re in two of her classes. Are there any guys she likes?”
I should shake my head. I want to shake my head. Instead, I call over to them, saying, “Brad Moore.”
“Seriously? That geek?”
I shrug. “He’s nice to her.”
“Post something about Brad,” one says to the girl with the phone. “No, post it from Brad. About her.”
“No!” the third says. “Text Jasmine. Pretend to be him.”
Beside me, the female officer asks, “Do you know a girl named Jasmine Oleas?”
My friends keep chattering at the table. They’re asking Jasmine to meet Brad. She agrees, and they set up the meet on the old pier, the one where kids used to hang out until the cops blocked it off.
“Do you know a girl named Jasmine Oleas?” the officer asks again, in the same tone, as if on a loop.
“Sure, she’s in my algebra and chem classes. I don’t know her well, but she seems nice.”
The male officer turns to face the girls at the table, who keep chattering and texting. He speaks in droning recitation, as if he’s on a true-crime show. “At 11:14 last night, police received a call. A witness reported seeing a group of girls on the old pier. According to the witness, it seemed to be some kind of hazing ritual. Three or four girls tormenting another one. We responded to find the pier empty. Two hours later, Mrs. Oleas reported her daughter missing. Mrs. Oleas had gone into Jasmine’s room at midnight and found it empty. Calls to Jasmine’s phone went unanswered.” He pauses there, and I wait, unable to breathe. “At 5:11 a.m., we pulled Jasmine Oleas’s body from the water cove.”
In reality, I’d freaked out. In the dream, I stand motionless, as if on trial.
The male officer continues his TV-show recitation to my three friends, who are still giggling at the table. “Her mother says she was being bullied by four classmates. These four.” He points to the three girls at the table and then at me. “We found her cell phone, and we traced those calls to one young woman’s phone. We believe these four lured Jasmine to the pier by pretending to be a boy she liked.”
I open my mouth to protest that I wasn’t there. Nothing comes out.
The officer continues, “The coroner’s preliminary report says someone held Jasmine’s head underwater. These four girls lured her out there, and then killed her.”
The spell breaks. I spin on my mom. “I was in by ten. Tell them.”
