Just Dreaming Read online

  “Yes, sure, Grayson.” Henry frowned mockingly. “And of course he forgave you, ages ago, for breaking into his house while he was asleep and punching his nose. Very nice of him.”

  Arthur was sitting not far away from us, right behind the teachers’ table, where Mr. Vanhagen was talking excitedly to Mrs. Cook, the headmistress, while Mrs. Lawrence, her eyes drooping, seemed about to lower her head into her soup bowl. Arthur was laughing at something that Gabriel had said, and showing his perfect teeth. There was no sign now of the injuries inflicted on him by Grayson; his face was as angelic as ever. He seemed relaxed and self-confident. I immediately regretted looking his way. The sight of him always made me furious all over again, and so did the fact that the others had no idea what kind of person was really sharing a table with them.

  “Well, he may still be angry with me,” Grayson conceded. “But he’s bright enough to know when he has to give up.” He energetically collected his assorted empty plates and dishes. “No one would give it another thought if you two would stop going through dream doors that shouldn’t really exist.” The doubtful expression on our faces obviously annoyed him because he looked away, but he added, thrusting out his chin defiantly, “Everything’s just fine.”

  The trusting part of me that liked a quiet life had finally fallen silent.

  “Sure, it’s fine and dandy.” My eyes flashed at Grayson. “Aside from a few minor details, like the fact that Arthur swore he’d get his revenge on us after he failed to murder my little sister. Or the fact that bloodthirsty Anabel has put her psychiatrist into some horrible kind of coma while she’s on the loose again. Or that your supersensible, morally impeccable ex-girlfriend slinks into your dreams by night. But like I said, those are only minor details. Everything is just fine.”

  “That’s not true.” Although I had mentioned only a fraction of our problems in my list, Grayson picked on only the comparatively harmless bit about his ex-girlfriend. “Even if it was really Emily that you two saw in the dream corridor, which isn’t likely, it will have been a one-off incident.” He slammed a used spoon down on the pile of dishes on his tray. “Never mind the fact that she’s guaranteed to take no interest in my dreams—she could never get past my new security precautions. Nor could you,” he added in a grim undertone.

  “Oh, is Frightful Freddy going to make people spell tapioca pudding backward?” I was about to ask, but I got no farther than Freddy because at that moment Mrs. Lawrence jumped up and climbed on the teachers’ table.

  And we were soon to discover that we’d been like people having a comfortable picnic on the crater of a volcano. They know the volcano could erupt any moment, but they keep saying how terribly dangerous it is, and arguing, and only when the earth shakes underneath them and lava shoots up do they realize that the situation is really serious. And that it’s too late to do anything to save themselves.

  Having knocked several glasses over, Mrs. Lawrence had attracted the attention of everyone present. Some of the teachers jumped up because their juice or water was dripping over their clothes. Mrs. Cook, with great presence of mind, picked up the vase of daffodils and got it to safety, and all the students sitting near us started whispering.

  Mrs. Lawrence was around forty, and with her finely drawn features, dark hair, and long, graceful neck, she reminded me of that French movie star with the long bangs—Sophie Someone. She liked to wear pale blouses, Chanel suits, and high-heeled shoes in which she could move amazingly fast. Her hair was pinned up in a style that was elegant but still looked casual, and she could glare at you quite sternly if you hadn’t done your French homework. In general, she looked the very image of the ideal French teacher, and we’d always felt as if Mrs. Cook hadn’t appointed her in the normal way but had hired her straight from a movie set.

  But that image had taken a bad knock now. Totally unfazed by the chaos around her, she stood on the teachers’ table surrounded by the used dishes and overturned glasses and flung out her arms in a dramatic gesture.

  At first I thought she might be going to make some kind of Dead Poets Society speech, quoting Walt Whitman, which would have been odd enough, anyway, since English poetry wasn’t her subject, but unfortunately I was wrong.

  “As you may know, because anyone could have read it in the blog of some little tart calling herself Secrecy, Giles Vanhagen here and I have been having an affair for the last two school years,” she announced in the clear voice that usually made her students tremble, and not only the younger ones. Mr. Vanhagen, who had just been trying to mop up the contents of the spilled glasses with a napkin, froze rigid, and all the color drained out of his face.

  You could have heard a pin drop in the cafeteria.

  “An affair,” repeated Mrs. Lawrence, turning the corners of her mouth down scornfully. “I hate that word. It makes everything so shabby, so petty and despicable, when it seemed to me so pure, wonderful, and sweet. I was so in love, so happy, and so sure that we had been made for each other.”

  Thinking about it later, it struck me as remarkable that in a room full of adolescents, who aren’t famous for the delicacy of their feelings, no one giggled, or laughed, or brought out a cell phone to record this astonishing moment. I saw nothing but shocked faces. And no one moved. You could bet that a teacher at that venerable institution, the Frognal Academy for Boys and Girls, had never before climbed up on a table. If people ever did go out of their minds here, you could be sure they did it in a very correct and proper way, behind closed doors.

  “I believed him when he swore he was going to leave his wife,” Mrs. Lawrence went on, pointing a shaky finger at Mr. Vanhagen, who was obviously wondering whether the better course of action would be to hide under the table or sprint for the exit.

  “But I should have known better!” Mrs. Lawrence turned on her heel, knocking another glass over. “Girls, are you listening? You must never trust men. All they want is to steal your heart and then tread it underfoot!” She looked around the cafeteria. “Would you like me to prove it?” she cried. “Would you like me to show you what he did to my heart?”

  That was undoubtedly a rhetorical question not expecting any answer, although a fervent no or a projectile accurately aimed at her head might have prevented the catastrophe that now took place. But we were all too stunned to do anything.

  Slowly, very slowly, Mrs. Lawrence unbuttoned her Chanel jacket and let it slide down over her shoulders to fall into Mr. Daniels’s plate of salad. Then she undid the buttons of her blouse one by one.

  “Look at this,” she cried as she did so. “I’ll show you where he tore the heart out of my breast.”

  I realized that I was holding my breath. We were all holding our breath. Two more buttons, and we’d see what color bra Mrs. Lawrence was wearing.

  Mrs. Cook was the only one who summoned up the strength to move. She cautiously put the vase of daffodils down on the floor and reached out her hand. “Christabel, my dear! Do please come down from that table.”

  Mrs. Lawrence stared at the headmistress, irritated. “But my heart,” she murmured. “I must show them my heart.”

  “Yes, I know,” said Mrs. Cook, and her voice trembled a little. “Come along, let’s go to my office.”

  “Where…?” Mrs. Lawrence lowered her hand and looked down at herself. The heel of her left shoe was parked in Mr. Vanhagen’s soup bowl, and when she took it out, pea soup dripped off it. “What happened? How did I…? Why…?” Her expression was one of pure horror now, and she began swaying slightly. Like someone awoken from deep sleep and not sure where they are.

  “It’s all right, Christabel,” Mrs. Cook reassured her. “You just have to get off this table. Andrew, could you give her a hand?” she asked Mr. Daniels.

  “Who … where…?” Mrs. Lawrence looked around the room in panic, her eyes disorientated as they wandered over our faces.

  A thought shot through my head—she looked just like my sister, Mia, when she had been sleepwalking, and understanding rose in me, along w
ith a bit of stomach acid. Mrs. Lawrence hadn’t just lost her mind; there was method in her madness. And it had been staged especially for us. Someone had manipulated Mrs. Lawrence like a puppet, in order to show us something.

  To show us he was far superior to us—and more than a little way ahead in the game as well.

  “This is a dream, isn’t it?” Mrs. Lawrence managed to say. “This must be a dream.”

  “Unfortunately not,” whispered a girl behind me, and I was sure that all of us in the place felt as sorry for the stammering, swaying woman as I did.

  All of us but one.

  While Mr. Daniels and Mr. Vanhagen, who was still white as a sheet, helped Mrs. Lawrence down from the table, and Mrs. Cook put her arm around her and led her out of the cafeteria, I slowly turned my head and looked at Arthur. He seemed to have been waiting for that because, for once, he held my gaze with his clear blue eyes. Held it until Henry and Grayson were staring at him too. Without a shadow of doubt, all three of us had come to the same conclusion.

  Arthur smiled. Not even triumphantly, but with a horrible kind of deep self-satisfaction.

  While all the students around recovered from their shocked rigidity and began streaming out of the room, Arthur gave us a little bow.

  “And that was only for a start, you guys,” he whispered as he passed us in the crush a split second later. “Try to improve on it if you can.”

  2

  HENRY WAS THE first to pull himself together. “Well, so much for the reformed version of Arthur.”

  “Shit” was all that Grayson said, burying his face in his hands.

  “How did he do that?” I asked, and the horror in my voice made me even more scared than I was already. “How could he manipulate Mrs. Lawrence in a dream, so that she’d climb on the table at lunchtime and set about wrecking her own life like that?” I was staring at the chaos around the teachers’ table.

  Henry shrugged his shoulders. “A particularly nasty kind of hypnosis, I guess. He only needed some personal thing of hers, and then he just had to find her door.”

  “Easy as pie,” agreed Grayson ironically.

  “But why poor Mrs. Lawrence? What…” I stopped for a moment because Emily’s brother, Sam, was just pushing past our table on his way out of the cafeteria. Since all the fuss about Mr. Snuggles, the topiary peacock, he would mutter quietly, “You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” whenever he passed me, and recently he’d taken to saying the same thing to Grayson, but today he seemed too upset to think of that. I waited until he was out of earshot, and then I asked again, “Why Mrs. Lawrence? What has she ever done to Arthur?”

  “Nothing, as far as I know.” Grayson was as baffled as I was. “Arthur gave up French two years ago.”

  “I don’t suppose it was anything personal,” said Henry. Unlike Grayson, he didn’t seem upset, but strangely animated. “He probably picked on Mrs. Lawrence just by chance, to show what he could do. To show us what he could do.” He looked at his watch. “Come on, Grayson, we have to be in class discussing futurist cubism in Russian avant-garde art with Mrs. Zabrinski.”

  Sighing heavily, Grayson reached for his jacket. “Hell, I still have goose bumps all over. I’d never have expected to feel so scared of Arthur. But right now it seems to me like all the other villains in the world are still in kindergarten by comparison.”

  “Look at it in a positive light.” Henry gave Grayson an encouraging slap on the shoulder. “At least we know now why he’s been keeping so quiet these last few weeks. He’s worked out how to dominate the world.”

  Although that last bit was obviously meant as a joke, neither Grayson nor I could laugh at it.

  “If Arthur can manipulate people in their sleep so that they’ll do what he wants in real life, then world domination isn’t such a far-fetched idea,” I murmured. “And we can’t even warn anyone—or we’d end up in a psychiatric hospital faster than you can say dream doors.”

  “Yes, well.” Henry gave a wry grin. “It’s just a shame we’re the only ones who can stop him.”

  “Although we don’t have any idea how,” I added quietly.

  “But … but we must do something.” For a few seconds, Grayson looked utterly determined. “Let’s all three of us meet at our place after practice tonight. We need to make a plan.” As he put his jacket on, however, something seemed to occur to him, and the determination vanished from his expression again and gave way to sheer desperation. “That bastard! He really has picked one hell of a time. How are we supposed to save the world and pass our final exams at the same time?”

  Henry laughed briefly. “At least he has the same problem himself. I don’t think that Arthur is about to fail his exams for the sake of world domination.”

  I just hoped he was right about that. Although of course you don’t necessarily need A levels if you plan to dominate the world.

  In the two classes after lunch, no one was talking about anything but Mrs. Lawrence’s nervous breakdown and her near striptease act. Apparently Mrs. Cook had driven her straight to a hospital, and she probably wouldn’t be out again in a hurry. Mr. Vanhagen wasn’t teaching that afternoon either. Maybe he’d also had a nervous breakdown, as my friend Persephone suspected. Or maybe he’d gone home to his wife and was looking for a new job. You didn’t know whom to feel sorrier for.

  By the time I set off for home with my little sister, Mia, the story had spread to the lower school students. Of course Mia wanted to know the details. “Is it true that she was wallowing in pea soup and left a slimy trail all over the school building?” she asked as soon as we’d left the schoolyard.

  I was about to answer her, when someone put an arm around me from behind. Automatically, I put both hands up.

  “Leave out the kung fu, please. It’s only me!” Henry strolled along beside us. He still seemed to be in an inappropriately good mood, but I could just have been misinterpreting it. “Hi, Mia!” he said. “Nice hairdo.”

  “Lottie calls it the Empress’s Nest.” Mia put her hand to the braids pinned up on top of her head. “Liv and I call it the Empress’s Compost Heap.”

  “Very useful if you don’t know where to hide your boiled egg from breakfast,” said Henry, taking his arm off my shoulder and reaching for my hand instead. “Okay if I come part of the way with you? Why aren’t you on the bus, come to think of it?”

  “Because it’s such a lovely sunny day.” Mia was staring at our entwined hands and frowning. Before she could ask anything embarrassing (like “Are you two an item again or not? And if not, why are you holding hands?”), I added hastily, “And because there’s always a boy from Mia’s class on the bus who calls her Princess Silver Hair. His name is Gil Walker, and he writes her love letters. In his own rhyming poetry.”

  “How ghastly.” Henry laughed, and I forced myself not to look at the crinkles at the corners of his mouth and think of what it felt like to kiss them.

  “You’re dead right.” Luckily, Mia let that distract her. “At last, someone who doesn’t think it’s sweet and touching. Lottie, Mom, and Liv have been trying to persuade me to think up delicate things to say, so as not to hurt his feelings.”

  “So she told him, with the utmost delicacy, that he’d damn well better find some other princess to worship,” I explained.

  “Adding that otherwise I’d stick his poems where the sun never shines.” Snorting, Mia kicked a pebble along the sidewalk. “Unfortunately that didn’t put him off a bit. It just inspired him to write another poem.”

  She was right. Even I had to admit that it’s no fun riding on a bus with someone behind you trying, at the top of his voice, to find rhymes for eyes of heavenly blue and teeth with a glittering brace.

  “Mia and I have been thinking of fighting back with a poem of our own, called ‘Walker the Stalker,’” I said.

  The crinkles at the corners of Henry’s mouth were still there. “Ah, yes, that’s love!” he said with a theatrical sigh. “Makes one do peculiar things. By the way, Mia, do you sti
ll remember South Africa and a certain Rasmus?”

  All of a sudden the joke was over.

  “Rasmus?” repeated Mia.

  Oh my God. Please don’t. I had stopped dead in alarm. That was the trouble with lies—they always caught up with you sometime. Now Henry would not only realize that I’d made up my ex-boyfriend, he’d also find out that Rasmus was a dog. And then the pity in his eyes would be only too appropriate.

  “Rasmus? You mean the Wakefields’ Rasmus?” asked Mia.

  I was still standing there as if rooted to the spot on the sidewalk, trying to tell her telepathically to keep her mouth shut. Unfortunately the telepathy didn’t work.

  Mia and Henry just looked at me, mildly intrigued.

  “Er … hmm, yes, the Wakefields’ Rasmus. Rasmus Wakefield,” I said, pointing frantically at someone’s front garden. “Oh, look at those beautiful daffodils!”

  My pathetic attempt to change the subject failed dismally. Without waiting for me, Mia and Henry turned around and went on. I stared helplessly after them.

  “What was this Rasmus like?” I heard Henry ask.

  “Why do you want to know?” Mia asked suspiciously back.

  “Oh, no special reason. Did you like him?”

  At last I managed to get moving again.

  “Rasmus? Yes, sure,” said Mia. “He was really cute. Maybe rather pushy. Kind of possessive. The Wakefields had spoiled him rotten.”

  Oh no! Please no! She’d be talking about his blue tongue next.

  “Pushy and possessive, was he?” Henry looked briefly back at me and raised one eyebrow.

  “Wait for me!” I got between them.

  “Liv always called him a little slobberer, didn’t you, Livvy? Ouch.”

  Unfortunately my elbow hit her in the ribs just a second too late. I linked arms with Mia and Henry, uttering a small, artificial laugh. “No, I didn’t. Does anyone have a spare mint?”