I’d been having the dream for months now. Even though I couldn’t remember all of it, the part I remembered was always the same. The girl was falling. I was falling. I had to hold on, but I couldn’t. If I let go, something terrible would happen to her. But that’s the thing. I couldn’t let go. I couldn’t lose her. It was like I was in love with her, even though I didn’t know her. Kind of like love before first sight.
Which seemed crazy because she was just a girl in a dream. I didn’t even know what she looked like. I had been having the dream for months, but in all that time I had never seen her face, or I couldn’t remember it. All I knew was that I had the same sick feeling inside every time I lost her. She slipped through my fingers, and my stomach dropped right out of me—the way you feel when you’re on a roller coaster and the car takes a big drop.
Butterflies in your stomach. That was such a crappy metaphor. More like killer bees.
Maybe I was losing it, or maybe I just needed a shower. My earphones were still around my neck, and when I glanced down at my iPod, I saw a song I didn’t recognize.
Sixteen Moons.
What was that? I clicked on it. The melody was haunting. I couldn’t place the voice, but I felt like I’d heard it before.
Sixteen moons, sixteen years
Sixteen of your deepest fears
Sixteen times you dreamed my tears Falling, falling through the years…
It was moody, creepy—almost hypnotic.
“Ethan Lawson Wate!” I could hear Amma calling up over the music.
I switched it off and sat up in bed, yanking back the covers. My sheets felt like they were full of sand, but I knew better.
It was dirt. And my fingernails were caked with black mud, just like the last time I had the dream.
I crumpled up the sheet, pushing it down in the hamper under yesterday’s sweaty practice jersey. I got in the shower and tried to forget about it as I scrubbed my hands, and the last black bits of my dream disappeared down the drain. If I didn’t think about it, it wasn’t happening. That was my approach to most things the past few months.
But not when it came to her. I couldn’t help it. I always thought about her. I kept coming back to that same dream, even though I couldn’t explain it. So that was my secret, all there was to tell. I was sixteen years old, I was falling in love with a girl who didn’t exist, and I was slowly losing my mind.
No matter how hard I scrubbed, I couldn’t get my heart to stop pounding. And over the smell of the Ivory soap and the Stop & Shop shampoo, I could still smell it. Just barely, but I knew it was there.
Lemons and rosemary.
I came downstairs to the reassuring sameness of everything. At the breakfast table, Amma slid the same old blue and white china plate—Dragonware, my mom had called it—of fried eggs, bacon, buttered toast, and grits in front of me. Amma was our housekeeper, more like my grandmother, except she was smarter and more ornery than my real grandmother. Amma had practically raised me, and she felt it was her personal mission to grow me another foot or so, even though I was already 6'2". This morning I was strangely starving, like I hadn’t eaten in a week. I shoveled an egg and two pieces of bacon off my plate, feeling better already. I grinned at her with my mouth full.
“Don’t hold out on me, Amma. It’s the first day of school.” She slammed a giant glass of OJ and a bigger one of milk—whole milk, the only kind we drink around here—in front of me.
“We out of chocolate milk?” I drank chocolate milk the way some people drank Coke or coffee. Even in the morning, I was always looking for my next sugar fix.
“A. C. C. L. I. M. A. T. E.” Amma had a crossword for everything, the bigger the better, and liked to use them. The way she spelled the words out on you letter by letter, it felt like she was paddling you in the head, every time. “As in, get used to it. And don’t you think about settin’ one foot out that door till you drink the milk I gave you.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I see you dressed up.” I hadn’t. I was wearing jeans and a faded T-shirt, like I did most days. They all said different things; today it was Harley Davidson. And the same black Chuck Taylors I’d had going on three years now.
“I thought you were gonna cut that hair.” She said it like a scolding, but I recognized it for what it really was: plain old affection.
“When did I say that?”
“Don’t you know the eyes are the windows to the soul?”
“Maybe I don’t want anyone to have a window into mine.”
Amma punished me with another plate of bacon. She was barely five feet tall and probably even older than the Dragonware, though every birthday she insisted she was turning fifty-three. But Amma was anything but a mild-mannered old lady. She was the absolute authority in my house.