Chapter 11
“So you…” I stop, unable to put my thoughts into words.
“Yeah,” he says, sensing what I can’t bring myself to say.
“Why…why didn’t you tell me? Like, when we were down by the river, why didn’t you say anything? Or since?”
He takes a deep breath. “One thing at a time, you know? Baby steps. I told you I have these little future flashes in my dreams sometimes, and you believed me. So, okay. Now I’m telling you this. I wanted to show you the journals at some point, and there’s never been a time I could have you over when no one else was home. And, I mean, come on. What was I supposed to say? ‘Guess what, Zip? I dreamed about you and now we’re here together’? That sounds like a total line.”
It does sound like a total line. I lower my eyes to the notebook in my lap, letting my fingers curl around the metal spiral. The notebook definitely seems beaten up enough to be a few months old, but…“How can I be sure…I mean, why should I believe…”
Kieran completes my thought for me since I can’t seem to finish my sentence. “Why should you believe I didn’t just write and draw all of these two days ago or something and plant them up here, right?”
I swallow hard, embarrassed at doubting him. “Yeah.”
“Keep reading,” he challenges.
Starting with a September entry, I read Kieran’s description of someone who sounds a lot like Brad Wallace talking to Kayla and him next to a glass door. He writes about a gravel path resembling the road to the boat launch. He details a wind chime with patterns of swirls and stars and suns that reminds me of a project my mom’s working on and would have been hanging in her art workshop the night the Laniers came over for dinner. Some of the events are out of order—he describes the wind chime a few weeks before the entry on meeting Brad, for example—but they’re all dated at least a month or more before they actually happened.
“Okay,” I tell him, looking up from the words on the page. “I guess it would have taken a lot of work for you to do all of this and plant it here.”
“Do you want to read any more?” he asks, his voice so eager I have to give in—on one condition.
“Yeah, but not anything too…you know…recent.”
He nods. “I know this is all freaking you out, but I wanted you to know that I’d seen you before we met. And I need you to understand it’s not like I walked into school on the first day looking for you. I mean, obviously there was a pattern to my dreams for a while, but nothing in those descriptions told me who you were or where you lived, so I had no idea you’d be here. Think about all the things on the first day of school I couldn’t control. I didn’t make my class schedule. I didn’t plan on passing out on your desk—”
“Or maybe you passed out because you recognized me and it freaked you out.”
His eyes narrow and he looks at the floor, as if entertaining my theory. “Could be. I guess it’s possible my subconscious recognized you first. Who knows how my brain works? I don’t think it completely hit me until we were talking in the infirmary that the girl I’d been dreaming about was you. So then I said all that crap about you looking familiar and wondering if you’d ever been to Asheville.”
“I thought you were just trying to be smooth,” I tease.
“Yeah—that’s me. Mr. Smooth.” Kieran rolls his eyes and digs around in the bottom of one of the boxes for another notebook. “Here,” he says, handing two new notebooks to me and I hand him the one I’m holding. “These are the first ones from this set.”
I start reading, and Kieran moves closer to rest his head on my shoulder, a gesture I tell myself is probably due more to exhaustion than affection, but I don’t really care. With him warm next to me, his hair rubbing against my neck, I begin exploring what was involuntarily going on in his mind two years ago: A drawing of someone who resembles Kayla in a tank top and shorts, getting a medal for something. Beautiful descriptions of mountains and forests which I’m assuming are places in North Carolina. Doodles of sunbursts, like the ones he’s always drawing in his notebooks at school. A shadowy sketch and description of a man in his late thirties. Shadow Man pops up several times, but each sketch is a little more clear than the previous one, and I notice with every subsequent appearance, he’s starting to look like Kieran—an older version of Kieran with a goatee.
“Hey, Kieran?” I start, but he doesn’t respond. His head is heavy on my shoulder, so I assume he’s fallen asleep. I poke an elbow into his side and he sits up, blinking.
“Yeah. I’m here. What?”
“This guy who keeps showing up?”
“You mean the Boogey Man,” he says, resting his head against the edge of the bed. “He’s a recurring dream. Or recurring nightmare, I guess.”
“Who is he?”
Kieran shrugs. “Never seen him in my waking life, so I call him the ‘Boogey Man.’ Plus, I’m always kind of creeped out when I wake up from a dream about him.”
“Well, don’t take this the wrong way, because I’m not trying to be weird or insulting or anything, but he sort of reminds me of you.”
He gives a little laugh. “Yeah. Dad’s theory is that I’ve got some anxiety about growing up or something, and so I’m dreaming this older version of myself and it freaks me out. And, I mean, Dad unscrambles people’s brains for a living, basically, so maybe he’s right. I don’t know.” Kieran hitches up his shoulders as if he’s not sure he believes his Dad’s interpretation of events before he changes the subject slightly. “I guess I get a preview of what I’d look like with a goatee, though. What do you think?”
He reaches for the notebook lying in my lap and holds the drawing up next to his face. The eyes may be a little further apart and the man’s a lot more muscular, but the sketch is essentially Kieran with a goatee, which sort of freaks me out.
“Doesn’t work for me,” I admit. “Promise you’ll never do that.”
He tosses the notebook to the floor and leans in until our foreheads touch, his mouth almost on mine. “Promise,” he whispers.
At a total loss as to what else to do in this situation, I close my eyes, ready to let nature take its course—whatever nature’s course might be. Kieran’s fingertips graze my cheek near my chin, and I shiver, the icy stabs of sensitivity shooting up my spine quickly giving way to a warmth that spreads throughout my body. I part my lips to let him in, bracing myself for the moment his tongue will slip into my mouth. With my body so tense and my heart pounding so loudly, I’m surprised I can feel or hear anything, but I can—just as Kieran’s forehead grows heavier on mine and his hand disappears from my face, the front door slams downstairs. My eyes flutter open to find his eyes closed, but not because he’s experiencing some moment of mad passionate love for me.
“Kieran, wake up,” I whisper, shaking his shoulder as footsteps get louder on the stairs. “Oh, God—come on…”
His eyes pop to full size and he sits up, staring at me for a second before looking away towards his open bedroom door. He reaches a hand up to his bed to pull himself off the floor, and he’s bending down to help me to my feet as Kayla, in her track sweats emblazoned with the Titusville Titan crouched in starter’s position, appears in the doorway.
“Hey, Zip,” she sings, leaning against the door frame as her mother comes up behind her. Carlie’s expression darkens on seeing Kieran and me together in his room, notebooks scattered around and the Boogey Man staring up at her from a few feet away. Kayla mouths “You are so dead,” to her brother.
“I invited Zip over for dinner,” Kieran explains, and then lies “I forgot no one was going to be here.”
Carlie shakes her head quickly as if she’s trying to pull herself together enough to be polite. “Well, of course Zip can stay,” she says, mostly to me. “Jim will be home in a while, and we were thinking about ordering pizza, so it won’t be anything special.”
“Pizza’s practically a gourmet meal in my house so…” I let my voice fade away. This whole situation is beyond uncomfortable,
and I can’t tell if Carlie’s mad or mildly surprised or some combination of both.
“Well, then,” she breathes in her wheezy voice. “Kayla—you should get in the shower. And, Kieran, please straighten up in here before you come downstairs.” Carlie’s looking down at the Boogey Man with a face stranded somewhere between fear and disgust as she makes her request to Kieran. Left without an assigned task, I bend to the floor and start putting notebooks away as Carlie disappears back downstairs.
“You don’t have to help me do this,” Kieran says as he crouches down over the remaining notebooks.
“I want to.”
Kayla, meanwhile, walks over and launches her body to the middle of Kieran’s bed, propping herself up on her elbows. “Busted with a girl in your room,” she comments. “Bet you get grounded for two months for this.”
“Bet I don’t,” he responds, which prompts Kayla to belt out a tiny laugh.
“Okay. Sure.”
Kieran stands and kicks one of the boxes back under his bed. “Mom and Dad never laid down ground rules about visitors.”
“There haven’t been any visitors before.”
He ignores her comment and says “Anyway, I’m turning eighteen in, like, five minutes.”
Kieran’s reminder leaves Kayla unmoved. She kicks her feet up and down on the comforter and mumbles “So what?”
“I’m almost an adult is so what.”
“Yeah. An adult who needs to have somebody drive him everywhere. An adult who has one more year of high school left.”
I’m still on my knees, pretending to put notebooks back in the remaining box when all I’m really doing is shuffling them around so I have an excuse to be busy. Glancing up at Kieran, I see he’s mashing his lips together as if he’s trying to think of the perfect comeback to Kayla, but ultimately, he doesn’t say anything. Since I can’t stay on the floor forever, I finally stand up next to Kieran.
“Did he show you all his entries about my illustrious track career?” Kayla asks me.
“I read a few,” I admit.
An evil grin spreads across her face. “Tell me,” she starts, eyes on Kieran. “Did I medal today or not?”
Kieran shoves his hands in his back jeans pockets. “You did,” he answers quietly.
“Silver in the four by eight hundred,” Kayla confirms, kicking her feet again and shifting her gaze to me. “Amazing, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. Amazing,” I say, but my voice doesn’t sound too enthusiastic. I don’t know if I’m supposed to be excited about this apparent side effect of Kieran’s condition or not, so for right now, I think I’ll just be confused.
“I wish he would dream of something I actually want to find out ahead of time,” Kayla breathes. “Like test questions or whether or not somebody’s going to ask me to Prom.”
At her mention of Prom, I shoot Kayla a glare that I hope says Don’t even go there. She managed to wrangle out of me about a week ago my wish for Kieran to ask me, and I can only imagine what she’s been saying to him whenever I’m not around.
“Sorry, Kay,” Kieran begins, deadly serious. “All the dreams I have about Prom are of you in a pretty dress, and you’re sitting in the bleachers in the gym. Oh—and you’re all by yourself. It’s kind of sad actually, you being alone on Prom night.” He cracks a smile to let her know he’s kidding, and Kayla grabs a pillow and hurls it at him, striking him in the torso.
“You suck,” she says, the pillow falling to the Persian rug as Carlie’s voice floats up the stairs.
“Kayla Danielle! Why isn’t the shower running?”
Kayla groans and rolls toward the end of the bed, sitting up before she can fall off. “You two better get downstairs before Mom loses it,” she warns, standing. “I don’t see either one of you wearing purity rings.”
“Shut up, Kayla,” Kieran says as she flounces out of the room, while I kick at the carpet with the toe of my Chuck Taylor, a question lingering at the back of my mind. “What are you thinking?” he asks, because he’s known me long enough to be familiar with my behaviors when I’m upset.
“Your mom seemed kind of freaked out before.”
“It’s no big deal,” he insists. “You being here, I mean.”
“My being here isn’t what I’m talking about. She was looking at those notebooks like they were going to jump up off the floor and attack her.”
“Well, I’m sure the whole thing was weird for her—I’ve never had a girl in the house before, never showed my journals to anybody before.”
“She probably wishes you hadn’t shown the notebooks to me.”
“Well, too bad for her. Like I told Kayla, I’m almost eighteen, and I’m going to start making my own decisions about things.” He reaches out, grabbing my hands in his and stepping to me so he can lower his forehead to mine once again. “And I’ve decided you’re the only person I want knowing everything about me.”
Carlie’s voice drifts up the stairs before I shut my eyes. “Kieran? I need some help in the kitchen. Can you and Zip come down here, please?”
“I thought we were ordering pizza,” I whisper. “What does she need help with?”
“Getting a life,” he groans, moving away from me and tilting his head toward the door in a silent acknowledgement of the end of our alone time. We start for the hall, and he notes, “The women in my family have unfortunate timing, if nothing else.”
“Guess so.”
“And don’t worry about my mom being weird. She was probably just surprised you were here—that’s all. There’s nothing in those notebooks for her to freak out over.”
“Okay,” I say, walking into the hallway ahead of him. But as much as I want to believe Kieran’s theory that his mom isn’t worried about anything in his journals, I can’t help but wonder why Carlie seems more afraid of the Boogey Man in the daylight than Kieran is in his dreams.