Three
Lara looked at the brightly colored drinks in the soda machine. She pressed the button for Diet Coke, and with a thump, a bottle was ejected from the machine. It launched itself between Lara’s legs and skittered across the floor. She let out a pfft and chased after it, catching up to it as it rolled over to a small group of giggling girls. One of them bent down and picked it up. Oh, here we go, she thought.
“Are you looking for this, freak?” asked the girl. Lara recognized her immediately as Courtney Rathbone. Courtney was part of the popular clique, the one every high school somehow manages to have. In fact, she was the leader. She had achieved this success by being both wealthy and cruel in equal measure.
Courtney tossed the bottle from one hand to the other.
“What was with this morning?” she asked, laughing. Her gaze moved to the other girls with an expression that said Can you believe that?
“I just fell asleep,” Lara said, her eyes drifting downward.
“Uh-huh,” Courtney responded with another annoying laugh. “What’s between you and Greg?” Her eyes moved beyond Lara.
Turning around, Lara saw Greg walking out of the cafe-chapa-torium, a plastic bag in one hand, a backpack in the other. He was wearing tattered blue jeans, a dark hooded sweatshirt, and a vintage t-shirt with ‘Blue Oyster Cult’ written on it.
“Nothing,” Lara replied sheepishly.
“Are you trying to, like, convert him?”
“Courtney!” said one of the girls, before they all broke into giggles.
“What?” she responded, pretending to be appalled. “I’m just saying that if he’s not into girls, then Lara must be one of those transgendered people. Why else would he be interested?”
“I’m not a guy!” Lara responded, anger now edging her voice.
“So you were trying to straighten him out. How were you trying to do it?” she asked, giving Lara an exaggerated wink.
“I wasn’t doing anything. We were sleeping,” Lara replied, flustered.
“Together?”
“At the same time, yes.”
“In the middle of class? What a slut!” Courtney said, almost yelling.
Some students walking by stopped to see what was happening.
Lara felt her hands shake in anger. She could feel her eyes welling. Don’t cry, don’t cry, Lara told herself. “We were not sleeping together, we both fell asleep at the same time,” she replied back, trying to keep her voice calm.
“So, what you’re saying is that you and fruit loops over there both ‘fell asleep’ in class, and then he fell out of his chair after you let out a scream.”
“Yes,” Lara replied. Courtney chortled.
“Or were you two playing in the back, and he took things a bit too far?”
Lara’s face went red as a tear ran down her cheek.
“Oh look, ladies, she’s all embarrassed about it,” Courtney said to the group, which was now accumulating more students.
“Hey, guys, what’s up?” Greg said, now standing beside Lara.
The group of girls looked at Greg and broke into fresh laughter.
“Umm, what?” he asked.
“C’mon, girls, let’s get away from the slut and the rapist,” Courtney said, tossing the bottle of Diet Coke to Greg. She turned her back on the pair and walked down the hallway, her lackeys in tow. The students who had stopped looked almost disappointed that a fight hadn’t broken out.
“What was that all about?” Greg asked, turning to Lara. She looked down, trying to hold back her tears. She looked up at him to see his face filled with shock.
“What’s wrong with your eyes?” he asked.
“They’re red, because I’m upset!” she said. Why are boys so stupid?
“Lara, they turned black for a moment,” he said in a hushed voice.
“What?” She darted toward the women’s washroom and ploughed through the door; thankfully no one was inside. As she looked at herself in the mirror, her usual brown eyes stared back at her, but for a brief moment, she thought she saw two black ones.
Lara placed her left hand on the mirror, her black knit sweater rolling downward, revealing a forearm lined with light scars. Some crossed the bottom of her wrist. Fresh, light red lines marked the skin there as well. Hesitation marks. New tears welled in her eyes.
Lara knew her relationship with her mother and the stress of the business were having an impact on her. Occasionally, she thought everyone would be better off if she weren't around anymore. One less mouth to feed... The depraved whispers would nag her late at night, when she was tired, or even when she listened to specific songs, or watched certain movies. Lara knew these thoughts were not healthy. What she would never admit to anyone, least of all to herself, was that she somehow felt a macabre pleasure in indulging this small, albeit vocal, part of herself.
She continued to stare into the mirror, lost in thought.
“Lara, are you okay?” asked Greg, opening the door slightly.
“Don’t come in!” she yelled. “It’s the girls’ washroom! There are girls in here, doing... well... girl stuff!” Oh my god, Lara. Lame. She laughed at herself, took a deep breath, and wiped the tears from her eyes. Then she splashed cold water on her face and patted it dry with brown paper towels from the broken dispenser that hung precariously on the wall. She examined her eyes one last time and walked away from the mirror. Upon opening the door, she found Greg sitting down on the other side of the hallway, playing on his cell phone.
He looked up and put his phone away. “Your eyes are back to normal.”
“Thanks.”
“Is that a woman thing?” he asked, picking up his backpack.
She laughed. “I think it’s a me thing.” Did he say things like that because he genuinely did not understand women, or was he just trying to put her at ease?
“Can we still talk?” he asked.
“Sure. Where?”
“Away from the blonde-bimbo brigade,” he responded, looking in the direction Courtney and her lackeys had gone. “Where should we go that they would never be caught dead in?”
Lara smiled. “To the library!”
They walked down the hallway, taking a left at the launching pad that was the soda machine, and past a sign that read ‘Workplace co-op program submissions due March 1’. Greg stuffed the white plastic bag into his backpack along with the bottle of Diet Coke.
“Mr. Jackson won’t let us take food inside,” Greg said.
They opened the big heavy doors to the library, walking through the alarm system that chirped anytime a book or magazine 'mistakenly' tried to leave. The room was in the shape of a large letter L. On their left was a computer lab filled to the brim with students on computers, or impatiently waiting for one. The students who had managed to secure one were using them for various scholastic activities, such as playing games or checking their email.
Mr. Jackson sat at the library desk, eying them suspiciously as they walked in.
“Any food in that backpack, Mr. Parker?” asked the librarian.
“Of course not, sir!” Greg replied. Mr. Jackson’s eyes narrowed.
The two looked to their right. The stacks were vacant except for five long shelves of books. Just past this section, in the lower part of the L, was the study area filled with several rows of empty tables. Lara and Greg proceeded to this section, passing several chairs, a lone teenage boy sleeping in one of them. He was the one who had beaten Greg both in real life and in the dream they shared.
Several educational posters lined the walls of the study area, including one on the Amazon. ‘Did you know 20% of the world’s oxygen comes from the rainforest?’ it said, while another poster on endangered species read, ‘There are about 2,270 endangered species (both plant and animal) that are currently found in U.S. territories’. All the posters were faded from the sun, which streamed in from the large windows that lined one wall. Lara usually enjoyed the view of the central courtyard, but with it being January, the normally lush gardens and large trees lay barren and stark. The two finally took a seat in the furthest corner of the room, beside a window.
Greg plopped his bag on the desk and opened the zipper. He pulled out Lara’s Diet Coke along with the white plastic bag. Reaching back in, he yanked out several flimsy plastic containers with sandwiches in them.
“I got these from the caf. Do you want chicken salad or turkey?” he asked, holding out a container in each hand. Lara looked at him blankly. “I just thought, with you helping me and all...” he said, his face taking on a slight reddish tint.
“I’ll take the turkey.” she replied, reaching for the container. “Thank you. But as I remember it, you hit that thing with a chair.” She opened the container and took a small bite.
“Well, you saved me from being pummeled!”
Lara looked downward. “Greg, I’m sorry I didn’t help you before,” she said softly. He gave her a bemused look. “I mean, not helping you when you were being hurt by that guy in reality.”
Greg looked away for a moment and then back at her. “I wouldn’t have wanted you to. He was on a rampage. The only reason the teachers could stop him was because there were three of them.”
Lara nodded her head. “You did save me from the floating inkblot!”
“I don’t know about that. I gave it everything I had with the chair, and well, you saw what it did. I might as well have been a fly. By the way, what was that thing?” he asked, now starting to eat his own sandwich.
“I don’t know.” She thought for a moment, absently rubbing the palm of her left hand.
“I think your inkblot metaphor is right. But I’d call it a Rorschach test.”
“Why?” she asked.
“Because I’m a geek,” he replied with a small smile. “I'm a comic book fan.”
“Alright...” she said, not understanding the connection. “Do they often put comic book fans through psychological testing?”
Greg laughed. “No, he’s a character in a comic—” A glazed look spread over Lara’s face. “Never mind,” he finished. Greg reached into his bag and grabbed a juice box, which he shook gently before stabbing the straw into the top. A few seconds passed until Greg, staring at Lara, said: “So, did you want to talk about the whole dream thing?”
“I thought we were,” she responded, finishing the first half of her sandwich. She was now eyeing the Diet Coke on the table.
“I mean, how you were in my dream,” he retorted. Lara thought his voice sounded too flat, as if he were trying hard to keep it as level as possible.
“I—” she started. “I don’t know that we should talk about that.” Lara crossed her arms and sat back in her seat, moving her gaze to the window.
“I don’t think it’s weird,” he said. She shot her eyes back to him, a look of disbelief crossing her face.
“I think it’s actually pretty cool!”
“Really,” she said, unconvinced.
“Yeah! I bet you see all kinds of neat things.” He looked off into the distance.
Maybe he was imagining what it would be like to jump in and out of other people’s dreams. She had to give him credit: His enthusiasm was infectious. “It is kind of cool...” she conceded with a half smile.
“Have you always been able to do it?” Lara was again reluctant. “I’m sorry, you don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.” Greg took a large bite of his sandwich and gazed at her like a puppy waiting for a bone.
“Greg, I’ve really never talked about it with anyone.”
“Not even your parents?”
“No. Well, it’s just my mom,” she said, trying to gently open her drink. It fizzed violently and she quickly turned the cap closed and placed the bottle back on the table. “My dad is not in the picture anymore. He died when I was three.”
“Really?” he asked, his eyebrows raised. “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, so am I.”
“When did you first start doing the whole dream surfing thing?” he asked after a few moments.
“I’m not sure. I think I could always do it, I just didn’t realize it,” she said, rubbing her hand absently again. “The first time I knew that I was, well, different, was just after I turned nine years old. I remember a horrible dream with my mom. I dreamt that she was in some old house. It was really old, like out of the eighties or something.” In one quick move, Lara opened the soda bottle and slurped up the fizzing drink.
“The house had somehow caught on fire and she was stuck in a bedroom. I just remember seeing her there, flames all around. She was petrified. I tried to help her, but I couldn’t.”
“What happened next?” Greg asked.
“I woke up to her doing dishes at five in the morning. I went in and she said she’d had a bad dream. I told her that I’d had a nightmare of her in a fire. She dropped a dish in the sink and turned to look at me.” Lara rubbed her ribs through her shirt. “I’ll never forget that look on her face. She looked so scared. She told me to go back to my room, and I remember hearing her crying in the kitchen. I must have fallen back asleep, because when I looked at the alarm clock again, it was 8:30 am. She was tidying up the living room. Later, Mom told me that I must have overheard her talking about the house she grew up in burning to the ground. She had been trapped in her bedroom and only just escaped when a firefighter broke through the door.”
Lara took another sip of her drink. “She never told me about the fire, and she’s never talked about it again. She does have the same nightmare all the time, though,” Lara said.
“So can you control it, then?”
“No. Well, I have a pretty good idea if someone's asleep. I haven’t tried to jump in someone’s dream. It just… seems to happen.”
Greg started to speak but faltered. “Can you, uh, do anything cool in your dreams?”
“Anything cool?”
“Yeah, like…” He looked off into the distance again, rubbing the back of his head with his hand. “Flying, shooting lasers out of your eyes, turning into Godzilla and biting the head off Courtney Rathbone. Y’know, anything cool?” A smile spread across his face.
Lara laughed, which quickly turned into a pained expression. “No, nothing like that. Except for today when I threw that kid clear across the room.”
“I don’t remember that,” he said, his eyebrows raised.
“That’s because you were shielding your eyes from my awesomeness!” she said with a wink.
Greg grinned. He gazed down at her clothed arm, which was resting on her ribs. “Lara, are you okay?”
“Yeah, just a bit sore,” she responded, waving away his worry. “Most of the time, people don’t even realize I’m in their dream. If I want them to wake up, I touch their shoulder. Except...”
“Except for today,” he finished her sentence. “Why is today so special?”
“I don’t know. I’m not even sure how we woke up.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, we were in that other boy’s dream, right? I didn’t touch him, yet we both woke up.”
Greg sat back in his chair. “What about the inkblot?”
“What about it? He was part of that boy’s nightmare.”
“Yeah, but he—it—wasn’t interested in him. He went right for you.”
“What are you getting at?” she asked, her tone sharp.
“Okay, bear with me for a second,” he said, raising his hands with his palms facing Lara. “It was his dream, but if that thing was part of it, wouldn’t the inkblot have been interested in him? You said most of the time, people don’t even notice you. It came at you and pinned you against the wall. Didn't it also say something... ‘Mare’?” Lara shifted in her seat. “Isn’t a mare a female horse?”
“What an ass! I’m not a horse!” she said, sitting back in her chair again, arms crossed.
“A horse is a horse, of course, of course,” Greg said in a sing-song voice.
Lara stuck out her tongue at him. “I’m not a horse,” she replied quietly with a pout.
“Obviously you're not a horse. Either I misheard him, or a 'Mare' is something else entirely,” Greg said in an uncharacteristically mature fashion. He removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. She smiled up at him. For the first time, she noticed his soothing grey eyes, and studied him further. Greg had an angular face with high cheekbones and a cleft chin. She liked his light stubble, which matched his messy brown hair, giving him a devil-may-care look. Greg was, in fact, very cute.
“Lara?” he asked.
“Yeah?” she said lazily.
“Are you spacing out on me?” he said with a subtle grin. She shook her head and sat upright in her chair. She gave another pained expression, moving her arm back to her ribs.
“What's wrong?”
“My ribs are sore for some reason.”
“Lift up your shirt.” She gaped at him. “Not that far, just below your, uh, lady bits,” he replied, his face turning a deep shade of red. Lara lifted her shirt up above her belly button, just below her bra. A large blue–colored bruise spread across her torso. “Holy crap!” he said, standing up and knocking over the chair. Lara sat and stared at herself in stunned silence. “We have to get you to a clinic or something!”
“And tell them what? Hello, Doctor, I was recently attacked by an inkblot monster while gallivanting in somebody’s dream.”
“Tell them anything but that!” he replied seriously.
“Greg, I’m being sarcastic.”
“Oh, well. We have to go. We’ll take my car,” he said, stuffing the remains of their lunch into his backpack. “First we have to get our jackets, then we’ll sign out at the office. We’ll go to my car, then the hospital,” he said, numbering the items on his fingers.
“What if I don’t want to?” she asked, pulling down her shirt.
“It started with my dream. It’s my fault that thing attacked you.” He took her by the hand and gently pulled her up. She let out an exasperated sigh as they headed for the door. “Lara, has something like this ever happened before?”
“No, never,” she said as a cold prickle ran down her spine.