The Girl Who Could Not Dream Read Free

Sophie loved the bookshop. It was a labyrinth of ceiling-high bookshelves that were crammed with new and used books. It smelled of warm dust and fresh cupcakes. The cupcakes were baked every morning by their newest neighbor, a woman who had always dreamed of owning a bakery, and were sold from trays by the cash register. The shop had a bay window with a window seat where you could sit, read a book, and eat your cupcake. It also had three or four red velvet chairs with worn upholstery, tucked between the shelves. After closing, Sophie would intercept the unsold cupcakes on their way to the trash, and she and Monster would curl up on one of the red chairs. She’d eat one cupcake, and Monster would inhale ten. Monster had a sweet tooth, or several.
    One of their favorite games was for Sophie to stand at the bay window (shades down so no one could see in) and toss cupcakes across the bookstore. Monster would run, leap, and catch them in midair. This often led to cascades of books crashing to the ground. Luckily, with his six tentacles, Monster was also skilled at restocking shelves.
    But even better than the bookshop with its cupcakes and overflowing bookshelves was the basement. Hidden from ordinary customers was her parents’ secret shop, the Dream Shop.
    This was where her parents bought and sold dreams.
    Sophie loved the Dream Shop more than any place in the world. Dozens of shelves lined the walls, each filled with bottles, sorted by the type of dream they held. There were beach dreams and outer-space dreams and falling-through-empty-air dreams, lost-loved-ones dreams and first-love dreams, ordinary-life dreams and late-for-the-bus dreams, and of course, monster dreams. Each dream was stored in a bottle and labeled with a number and date, and every dream was tracked in a massive leather-bound ledger where her parents recorded notes on the dream’s contents, as well as details of every transaction with every supplier and buyer.
    Her parents bought the dreams in their raw form, caught in a web of threads called a dreamcatcher. Sophie’s whole family (minus Monster) made dreamcatchers. Dad would purchase bendable wood to make the circle frame. Mom would weave spiderweb-like patterns inside. Sophie would decorate them with crystals and beads and feathers. They then hung them in the windows of the bookstore, filling the entire bay window with sparkles. They’d become the bookstore’s gimmick. Buy a book, get a dreamcatcher. Buy a cupcake, get a dreamcatcher. Want an extra? Fine, it’s yours. But if it becomes worn, if the strings fray or sag, return it and take a new one. Often enough, these same dreamcatchers came back, either brought in by the customer or “found” by a supplier.
    Her parents then took the raw dreams and put them into the distiller, a complex contraption of intertwining glass tubes, valves, and levers that sat on a table at one end of the workroom. The distiller extracted dreams from dreamcatchers, transforming them into liquid, which would drip into bottles. Sophie had never used the distiller on her own, but she had watched her parents countless times and practiced (without an actual dream) when they weren’t looking. She hoped that someday her parents would let her use it for real. She’d tried pleading, crying, begging, demanding, and simply asking, but they always said, “When you’re older.” They had been saying that for pretty much all of the nearly twelve years of Sophie’s life. For now, her daily chore was to dust the distiller. It was boring, but even without ever having worked the distiller herself, she knew it was important to avoid specks of dust in the dreams. Producing a clear dream was a tricky process.
    On the opposite side of the room, beneath the stairs, was the somnium. Also made of glass tubes, the somnium was a dream viewer. If you poured a liquid dream into the funnel at the top, the dream would appear in the bulge of glass in