Bart dragged himself from the shadow of the coaster, his fingers scraping raw against the concrete. His legs twisted at wrong angles and the teeth in his gaping mouth were broken and sharp. His moans sounded sickly and desperate.
I didn’t hear Sarah come up behind me. One minute I was facing my former friend alone and the next she was there, a metal stanchion gripped in her hands and the sound of rage on her lips. She swung it at Bart, slamming it against him with a sickening crunch.
It was so unexpected I didn’t know what to say. She brought the stanchion down again and again, screaming as the heavy bottom of it cut into Bart’s head.
Wylie leapt next to her and pulled her away but she fought against him. Ultimately she ended up kneeling on the ground, panting and heaving, with Wylie towering behind her, holding her arms behind her back.
She looked up at me and I couldn’t hide my horror. Bart had been our friend. Not too long ago he’d told us lewd jokes and thwapped me on the back of the head when I got distracted.
Now he was nothing. In the span of darkness everything had changed.
Wylie dragged Sarah back to standing and as a group we ran for the gates. It was easy to find his car in the lot, and the first thing Sarah did was lock the doors once we huddled inside. When the engine turned over, the radio began blasting music and that was the hardest part, remembering that things had been normal once and never would be again.
Wylie reached to mute the volume and Sarah snaked her hand behind the seat, looking for mine. We drove for Vista, each of us trapped in our own mind, wondering what we could cling to and what we’d have to jettison in this new and terrible world.
And then Sarah began to laugh. I don’t know what prompted it, but it was perhaps the most beautiful sound I could have imagined. I joined in and so did Wylie, and we drove down the road, all of us practically crying from the force of our laughter.
We almost felt free.
Jon Skovron
There’s Nowhere Else
Monday, February 1, 8:15 p.m.
Usually I get the dreams when Mom’s working the night shift at the hospital and Bill’s between demolition jobs and has been drinking a lot. He passes out on the couch and starts to snore. God, he snores so loud. I can hear it all the way up in my room with the door closed. The only way I get any sleep is by putting on my headphones and turning up my music. I don’t know why it’s easier to fall asleep to loud music than Bill’s snoring, but it is.
Those are the nights I have the dreams. They feel different from regular dreams. Mostly because I’m never me; I’m always someone else. Well, not even that really, because I don’t do anything. I just watch through someone else’s eyes while they live their regular lives. Sometimes it’s someone cool, like a cop busting a drug dealer or a NASCAR driver in a race. And sometimes it’s someone boring, like a guy sitting in an office, typing numbers into a spreadsheet all day.
When I first started to get the dreams, I didn’t think about it much. Everybody has weird dreams. They don’t mean anything. But last night, I was an old lady in a hospital bed. The smell was disgusting, all chemicals and BO. I couldn’t get up because I could hardly breathe. My hands were twisted so bad I couldn’t even lift a book. I had a tube attached to my wrinkly old stomach and piss was draining into a bag at the other end. My whole dream was just sitting there for hours watching game shows.
This morning when I woke up, I had this feeling that something about these dreams wasn’t normal. I started to get worried. Like maybe something was wrong with my brain.
I decided to ask Ms. Randall, my English teacher, about it. She’s my favorite teacher, and not just because she’s hot. She knows I read a lot, so she lets me borrow books from her personal collection. But she doesn’t make a big deal about it in front of the other students. I appreciate that. She also has a nice voice, especially when she’s reading plays in class. Like for instance, we were reading The Importance of Being Earnest, and when she read Cecily, she did the English accent, and I closed my eyes and it was like I was right there in the story.
Anyway, I had her for the last class of the day and she was packing up to go home, putting papers into her laptop bag, getting her coat on, all that.
“Ms. Randall,” I said, “can I ask you a kinda personal question?”
“That depends on if it’s polite or not, Sebastian,” she said. She’s from Cleveland and she has this funny way of saying words with long As in them. All up in her nose. Makes her sound real sharp.
“It’s polite,” I said. “At least, I think it is. I wanted to ask, do you ever have dreams where you’re somebody else?”
“Sebastian, I think we all sometimes dream of being someone better. Or maybe somewhere better.”
“No, I mean, like real dreams,” I said. “And not necessarily about being someone better. Just somebody else.”
She looked at me for a moment and pursed her lips, like she had to think carefully about what she wanted to say next. Finally, she said, “You enjoy those fantasy books I lend you, don’t you?”
“Sure,” I said. “I know it’s not great literature or anything. It’s just escapism.”
“You say it like it’s a bad thing. Like that makes it less important, less useful. But sometimes, it’s the only thing that can keep you sane. There’s nothing wrong with dreaming of another life. Especially if things aren’t so great at home.”
“Right . . .” I was getting the feeling like we weren’t exactly talking about the same thing.
“If you need anything,” she said, “someone to talk to about . . . things at home, my door is always open.”
“Okay, Ms. Randall. Thanks. I really appreciate that.”
As I walked out of the classroom, I wondered if maybe I didn’t explain myself right. Or maybe I had just asked the wrong person.
Max is one of those big, red-faced guys who get pissed off real easy. But at least he hangs out with me. I can’t be real picky. I’m not the most popular kid in school. Anyway, we were shooting some hoops in his driveway after school, and I asked him if he’d ever had dreams about being other people.
“Sabe,” he said and shook his head. “You’re the weirdest guy I know.”
“Yeah,” I said. I couldn’t really argue. I was the weirdest guy I knew, too. “So I guess that’s a no, then?”
“Damn right I ain’t never had no dream about being an old lady,” Max said. Then he punched me in the shoulder. “Now take your shot.”
I shot the ball and bricked it.
“You suck,” he said as we watched the ball go rolling into his patchy crabgrass yard. “Now, go get it.”
So tonight is one of those nights. Mom is working late, something that seems to happen more and more these days. And Bill is downstairs with the TV so loud it almost drowns out his snoring. Almost. I went down there to turn the TV off, and he woke up and yelled at me to turn it back on. So I did. But about a minute after I was back upstairs I could hear him snoring again.
I probably should have been doing my homework, but I couldn’t really concentrate, so I ended up just putting on my headphones and picking up the paperback Ms. Randall gave me a few days ago. It’s one of those thousand-page monsters with lots of warriors hacking each other to pieces and hooking up with babes in chain-mail bikinis. I never get tired of those kinds of stories.
I wonder if I’ll have the dreams. And if I do, will it be someone cool? I hope so. Something to look forward to, anyway.