Dreamland Read Free

said. “You go to Fielding? I’m a transfer.” When she nodded, he said, “Maybe you know my cousin. Will Briggs?”
    Even thinking the name brought a foul taste to her mouth, like rotten gym socks and watery beer. Will Briggs was huge and dumb and mean; rumor was that his dad, who worked for the police department, had once cracked him over the head with a guitar, and he’d been screwed up ever since. Nobody liked Will Briggs, but he was good at football and his dad was a cop, which meant that no one messed with him either.
    Apparently he was the one who’d started calling Gollum Gollum in third grade, probably the only vaguely creative thing he’d ever done.
    â€œNo,” she lied. In Dea’s opinion, Will Briggs was radioactive material: anyone associated with him was contaminated.
    He was still smiling. “I thought everyone knew everybody around here.”
    â€œGuess not.” She squeezed Toby tightly, burying her nose in the soft scruff of his fur. Connor would get to school on Monday and hear from his cousin that she was Odor Donahue, friendless freak; then her new neighbor would turn suddenly unfriendly, and make excuses to avoid looking at her when they passed in the hall.
    It had happened to her like that in Illinois. The summer before freshman year, she’d spent two months hanging out with a girl, Rhoda, who’d lived down the block. They’d spent hours looking over Rhoda’s sister’s yearbook and giggling over cute upperclassmen. They’d shopped for their first-day-of-school outfits together. And then, as always, the rumors had spread: about Dea’s house, and the clocks; about how she and her momwere crazy. On the third day of school, Rhoda wouldn’t sit next to her at lunch. After that, she would make the sign of the cross when she saw Dea in the halls, like Dea was a vampire.
    In fact, Gollum was the only semi-friend Dea had had in years. And that was only because Gollum was weird. Good-weird, in Dea’s opinion, but definitely weird. Besides, Gollum couldn’t really be counted as a friend, since she knew hardly anything about who Dea really was—if she had, Dea was pretty sure even Gollum would go running.
    â€œI should get back,” she said, not looking at him.
    â€œSee you Monday,” he called after her.
    She didn’t bother responding. There was no point. She already knew how this whole thing would go.

TWO
    Dea was six years old the first time she ever walked a dream.
    It was an accident.
    They’d been living on the outskirts of Disney World then, in a large condo meant to look like a castle, with turrets on the roof and flags hanging above the doorway. Inside, however, it looked nothing like a castle. The carpeting was green and smelled like cat pee, and the elevators were always out of order.
    There was a central courtyard, basically a paved deck with a pool in the shape of a kidney bean, surrounded by sagging lawn chairs and straggly plants overspilling their planters. There was a tetherball pole, and a small outdoor pool house that held abunch of moldy umbrellas, an old bocce ball set, and a foosball table whose handles had been palmed smooth.
    Dea was sick a lot back then. She had an irregular heartbeat. Sometimes she couldn’t feel it at all, and she’d find herself gasping for breath. Other times, it raced so hard, she thought it might fly out of her mouth. It was as though her heart were tuned to the rhythm of a song she couldn’t hear.
    Her mom had forbidden her to swim—she wanted Dea to stay away from the pool entirely—and Dea was too weak to play tetherball. But she killed at foosball. When her mom was away at work, she spent hours playing both sides of the table, watching the ball spin between the plastic players.
    There was a girl, Mira, who lived in 7C. Like Dea, she was too sick to go to school. She had bad asthma and legs that were kind of collapsed, so she walked