The rest of the campers raise their glasses in unison. “To Shell,” they say.
“We’re happy and proud to call you our brother.” Clay sips from his glass and the rest follow, filling Shell with an enormous sense of relief and acceptance.
“I don’t know what to say,” Shell says, taking a giant breath. He shakes his head, trying to formulate the words—the gratitude. If it weren’t for these campers, he doesn’t know where he’d be right now. They’re his family. They gave him a home and saved his life. If it wasn’t for them, he probably would have starved to death on the streets.
Lily leans over the table and kisses Shell’s cheek. “You’re so brave,” she whispers. “It was so hard to keep that from you all morning and last night.”
Brick shakes Shell’s hand. “I’m so glad you came to our camp. You’ve become a good friend to me.”
“And so have you,” Shell says, shaking Brick’s hand with a firm grip, sensing that Brick has more to say.
A moment later, Shell is interrupted as the rest of the campers line up to show Shell their approval as well. A couple of the elder women weep over the emotion of it all, including Rain, who huddles in closer to Mason.
“We’re proud of you,” Mason says.
Shell stands in respect to shake Mason’s hand. “Thank you for everything,” he says.
Mason smiles and nods, the glint in his pale blue eyes just a little bit brighter than usual. He scratches at his facial scruff, at the tuft of silvery hair to match the longish mane he’s got tied back with an elastic band. The happy couple leaves, enabling the remaining campers to relax a bit. Bottles of cider and containers of fruit cookies are brought out from the pantry. There’s cheering and kissing and hugging—everyone taking part in the celebration.
“I love you,” Lily says. She wraps her arms around Shell and kisses him full on the lips. But the moment is spoiled by his surprise—she loves him? He embraces her nonetheless, grateful for the affection, and glances over her shoulder at Clay, whose eyes appear to burn into the image of the two of them together like that.
I must have taken a wrong turn on my way to French class. It appears as though I’m in the basement of the science wing, where they do all the lab stuff. I take another turn, down a long, dark hallway—the walls and floor all concrete—and pull my schedule from my pocket. It clearly says that my French class is in Room 111, which is why I elected to come down here, but there’s no sign of anything—no doors or windows and not a living creature to speak of. It’s almost as if I’m between two buildings, in an underground tunnel maybe.
I walk quickly, the clunk of my shoes making an echoing sound. I’m hoping to get to the other wing before I’m late for class, but it seems the farther I get, the darker the tunnel becomes.
“Hello?” I call out, my voice echoing. I stop a moment, my heart pumping hard, and turn to look behind me. But it’s just as dark; I can barely see my hand in front of my face.
I turn back around. There’s a light of some sort at the very end of the tunnel—a bright, blazing whiteness that glows, like fireworks.
“Stacey,” whispers a female voice.
I move toward the light, toward her voice, squinting to try and see something, to try and make out any movement. A chill runs over my shoulders. I wrap my sweatshirt tightly around me, noticing how I can’t stop shaking, how everything smells like citrus.
“Stacey,” she whispers again.
“Who are you?” I ask.
Her shadow passes before the light, causing a flickering. “Come this way or you will pay.”
I move closer, wondering if she’s on the other side now, hoping it might be the way out.
“Come this way or you will pay,” she repeats.
She has a child’s voice, but I don’t recognize it. “Who are you?” I demand, confident that it isn’t Maura.
She appears before the light once more and I’m able to see her silhouette. She has long, flowing hair that blows back with the intensity of the glow. It appears as though she’s draped in a gown of some sort, and she’s carrying something—maybe a stick or a wand. It has long, star-like spikes that spout from the tip.
“I’m not coming any farther unless you tell me who you are,” I shout.
She reaches for something in her pocket. I think it’s a ball. She sets it on the ground and I hear it roll toward me—a low, pattering sound against the ground. As it gets closer, I notice that it’s making a trail of liquid. I reach down to stop the ball from rolling, but just as I do, it sinks into the rising stream, as though it’s sprung a leak.
“Why the frown? Scared to drown?”
“No!” I shriek from the mere toxicity of the word drown.
I go to step out of the water, but it’s all around me now, up to my ankles and getting deeper by the moment. I reach down into the water again, in search of the ball, hoping that if I pull it out, the water will stop. I think I feel it; there’s a round, rubbery object by my left calf. I go to pull it upward, but something grabs my wrists. I hear myself scream out. Water flows in harder, up to my knees now. Using all the strength in my legs, I pull upward. There’s a pair of the palest hands wrapped around my wrists. It’s the girl. She’s strong, almost stronger than me, and she wants to pull me under.
“No!” I scream out. My breath quickens. My legs shake. I twist and turn my wrists, trying to pry her away. I kick around under the water, but the weight of the rippling stream makes it difficult.
Taking a giant breath, I anchor my weight into my feet and thrust my arms upward. The girl’s grip on my wrists breaks and I see the water wave, a giant ripple that crashes against my thighs. There’s a glow of light that swims its way up the stream, beneath the water, back toward the source of light at the end of the tunnel.
“Who are you?” I shout out.
It’s silent for several seconds, but then I hear her breathe; it’s all around me. “I may look like a little girl to you, but I’m really a mother of a girl so blue. She needs your help, that’s no lie. And if you don’t, that boy will die.”
“Die?” I ask. “Who?”
“Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead,” she sings.
I wake up with a gasp. The phone is ringing. Amber is sitting beside me in bed. And I’m still breathing hard.
“Stacey,” Amber says, squeezing my hand. “Are you okay?”
I shake my head, trying to get a grip.
“Don’t freakin’ tell me,” Amber says. “Another nightmare?”
I nod.
“Holy freaking funk.” She pulls at her cherry-red pigtails in frustration. “Not again.” The phone is still ringing. Amber grabs it. “Hello?” She looks at me and shakes her head. “She can’t make it to the phone right now—she’s got a raging hangover.” Amber holds the phone away from her ear and gags a few times to make the excuse sound legit. “Not pretty,” she explains to the caller. “Can I take a message? I’ll have her call you when she’s done dry-heaving.” Amber winks at me, grabbing Janie’s grocery-labeling marker from atop the fridge. She writes the message across her palm, grimacing the whole time.
“I can’t believe you just did that,” I say, once she’s hung up.
“You have bigger flounder to fry, sweet pea.”
“Why? What’s up?”
“President’s office, that’s what.”
“Oh my god.” I look at the clock—it’s after four. “I missed the meeting.”
“What meeting?”
“It doesn’t even matter.” I take a deep breath, noticing how my legs still feel like they’re shaking.
“What doesn’t?” She plops back down beside me. “Stacey, what’s going on?”
“I don’t know. All I know is that I’m having nightmares again.”
“Yeah, but no visible spew.” Amber takes a moment to
inspect me. “No blood, no urine, no bodily excrement to speak of. A good sign, no?”
In the past several years, Amber’s seen me have several bouts of nightmares—recurring dreams that turned out to be premonitions warning me that something horrible was going to happen. Each time my body would have a physical side effect—impromptu bedwetting one time; projectile vomiting the next; nosebleeds, nine months later. Years before I’d met her, when my nightmares first started, they were accompanied by horrible crippling headaches. Eventually I realized that each reaction was my body’s way of forcing me to deal with my premonitions and, at the same time, lead me to the answers—to what I needed to do to stop the impending danger.
“Maybe it was just a random nightmare,” I say. “Maybe it wasn’t a premonition at all.” But why am I still shaking? And why do I feel so cold?
“Yeah. I mean, unless there’s a present in your pants that you’re not telling me about—” she slides a few inches away on the bed—“I wouldn’t worry about it.”
“You’re so gross.”
“Me? You’re the one with the present.”
“There is no present,” I snap, shifting a bit in my seat, just to be sure. “But I don’t know. It felt like a premonition. It was like she wanted me to join her, to be with her.”
“Who?”
I shake my head and swallow hard, pulling the bed covers around my shoulders to temper the chill. “She sounded young, like eight or nine, but then she said she was a mother of a girl so blue, a girl who needs help . . . or else some boy will die.”
“Slow down,” Amber says. “You dreamt about blue people? Are you sure they weren’t green and driving a flying saucer?”
“Be serious,” I say.
“I’m trying.”
I sigh. “I know; it doesn’t make sense and it certainly doesn’t help that she was speaking in rhyme.”
“Rhyme? Are you sure you didn’t maybe just take some of Janie’s funny dust before bed?”
“You know me better than that,” I say, thinking about my bottle of tranquilizers.
“I’m kidding, of course,” Amber says. “Did it sound at all like—”
“Maura?” I ask.
Amber nods.
I shake my head and look away.
Maura was the little girl I used to baby-sit five years ago. I ignored the premonitions I was having about her, telling myself that they were insignificant, that they were just a bad bout of dreams. The next thing I knew, Maura was missing; she’d been abducted, the victim of a pedophile. Shortly after, her body was found in an old, abandoned shed in the woods.
Three years later, I was having nightmares about Drea. I dreamt that she was going to be killed by a mysterious stalker. In the end, I was able to save Drea, but I wasn’t able to save Veronica Leeman, a classmate who got herself mixed up in the stalking. I found her body on the floor of our French classroom. She’d been hit over her head; there was a pool of blood surrounding her neck and shoulders. Sometimes when I close my eyes, I can still see her looking up at me, her piercing emerald-green eyes disappointed that I didn’t get there in time.
This past summer I lost Jacob, my one and only soul mate. I was so preoccupied trying to save Clara, a girl I’d just met, that I couldn’t save him. Shortly after I arrived at the cottage on Cape Cod, I started having nightmares about Clara—that she was going to drown, that her body would be washed up on the beach. I kept getting this tightness in my chest, nearly cutting off my breath. I chocked the feeling up to stress—to the pressure of trying to save Clara’s life. But I knew there was something more. I just wasn’t able to figure it out. I didn’t spend enough time listening to my body and what it was trying to tell me.
And now Jacob’s gone.
I close my eyes, remembering the stream of water running through my nightmare, wondering what it’s supposed to symbolize. And then it hits me.
“Stacey?” Amber asks. She rubs my back, the way Drea used to. “Are you okay?”
I nod and wipe at my eyes, my heart rapping hard inside my chest. “It’s Jacob.”
“What’s Jacob?”
“My nightmares . . . the water . . .”
“What water?”
“There was water in my dream. Maybe it’s supposed to represent the ocean. Maybe there’s something Jacob wants me to know.”
“Stacey,” Amber says, taking my hands. “Listen to yourself. I mean, I know you’ve been through a lot, but you’re starting to sound like a loon.”
“You don’t understand,” I say, snatching my hands away. “I haven’t dreamt in months.”
“And?”
“And, now that I am, maybe I’ll dream about Jacob.”
“I think you’re overanalyzing this,” Amber says. “You know as well as I do that not all dreams are premonitions. I mean, I have nightmares all the time—about getting warts on my ass, about going to class dressed in my mother’s granny-panties—but it’s not like those things would ever happen.”
“I can’t believe you’re saying this—after everything I’ve been through. My dreams are real.”
“I didn’t say they weren’t.”
“Then what? If there’s a chance that I can be with Jacob again—even in my dreams—I’ll take it. Can’t you understand that?”
“Sure, but don’t you think if this were truly about Jacob, the dreams would be all squishy and romantic? Not about some pale-ass death-girl who chants in twisted rhyme about some blue girl. I mean, I hate to sound like a mega-beeatch or anything, but just because you dream about water, it doesn’t mean that you’re dreaming about Jacob.”
I take a giant breath. “It’s not just about the water,” I say. “What about the boy?”
“What boy?”
“I told you.” I sigh. “The boy who might die if I don’t help the girl-so-blue. What if that boy is Jacob?”
“Stacey, honey—Jacob’s already dead. I know you don’t want to hear that or deal with it or whatever, but he is.”
“Believe whatever you want,” I snap, “but I think the mere fact that I’m dreaming again is a good thing . . . a hopeful thing.”
“I guess,” Amber says, propping herself up on her elbows, looking at me like I’m a giant puzzle.
I reach into the fridge for something cold, wet, and fizzy, forgetting for a second that its contents are labeled and spoken for. I slam the door shut and collapse back in bed, trying to put Amber’s doubt out of my head, trying instead to trust my instincts.
Amber makes a deal with me: if I agree to go straighten things out with Mr. President, she’ll agree to treat me to a chocodile sundae at Ice Cream Coma downtown—a fair deal, especially considering that the tuna sandwich Amber brought back for me from the cafeteria last night is now warm and fuzzy. Not to mention that I really would like to get all this president business straightened out. Suddenly the idea of going back home, having to face a much-disappointed mother who never even had the opportunity to go to college, let alone to do so on a free ride, isn’t so appealing.
I phone the president’s secretary back and she gets all snippy with me, telling me that Dr. Wallace waited over a half-hour for my arrival before heading off to a meeting, for which he ended up late—on my account, of course. I try to slip in an apology, but she’s talking so fast, going through his jam-packed schedule, reiterating how busy Dr. Wallace is, how he doesn’t have time to wait around and meet with tardy students. Finally she finds me another open slot, apparently squeezing me in before his meeting with the college provost.
“Can you be here in an hour?” she asks.
I grunt out an affirmative, hang up, and then dial in to get my phone messages. I have four of them—one from my mother, one from Drea, another from Chad, and one from the Student Activities Director, announcing the week’s worth of on-campus festivities. I dele
te Mr. Student Activities’ voice right away and focus on the others. Drea and I have been best friends since our freshman year of high school. She and Chad, her on-again-now-off-again boyfriend, my ex-boyfriend, went off to Payton College this past September, over four hundred miles away. They both want me to call them back, but it doesn’t sound like it’s anything big. Ever since Jacob’s disappearance, they’ve made it a habit to call me every couple days to see how I’m doing—to be sure I’m still breathing, more likely. My mother wants me to call her back as well. Unfortunately, they’ll all have to wait.
I head over to the main campus to search for his office. Standing in front of the student center, facing the tall iron clock, as Amber suggested, I take a deep breath and look down at my campus map. The place is absolutely huge, like Hillcrest Prep times twenty. There are buildings scattered all about—ivy-covered brick ones, a couple bulky glass ones, tall ones, short ones, and a bunch of cobblestone revivals in between. Amber’s marked a giant red X over the quad area, and drawn a winding line that leads me to Ketcher Hall. It appears as though my most direct route involves walking up three brick pathways, crossing one duck pond, going across one footbridge, and cutting through two playing fields. I sigh at just the thought of it. If I start now, I should be able to get there in just under an hour and, hopefully, I won’t turn into a Popsicle along the way—it’s got to be at least ten below with the wind.
“Are you lost?” I look up from the map. There’s a guy standing there. He’s dressed from hat to hiking boot in Gap-like attire—weathered baseball cap, artfully faded teal-blue sweatshirt under an equally faded charcoal pea coat, and khaki cargo pants.
“What?” I ask, even though I clearly heard him.
“You look a little lost. Are you a freshman?” He adjusts his cap, his short, gelled-up brown hair sticking out just a bit on the sides.
“Is it that obvious?”