Dream Life Read online

  I didn’t have any black-and-white dreams all weekend, a fact that I couldn’t help seeing as directly linked to Becca’s disappearance. She wasn’t just my best friend. She was my good-luck charm. All of the clues I’d seen last semester had pointed me to things related to her—the airplane ring, her family photographs, her brother’s demonic girlfriend. And now that she was fading out of the picture, so were my powers.

  “What do you think?” I asked Kiki on Sunday night. We were riding the elevator up to the Starlight Roof for her Scrabble game and I’d just shared my theory with her. “I mean, I had the boat dream and the Santa dream and then Becca got sucked into her Brookfield cult and everything stopped. It’s got to be related, right?”

  “Sounds to me like your friend might just have a few other commitments,” she said, watching the floor numbers light up overhead, “and I’d expect as much from a Shuttleworth.” She stiffened her posture. “Give it some time. Patience is an attractive quality that pays off. You can’t expect everything to spring from the loins fully formed.”

  Loins? Ick.

  Leave it to Kiki to put such a poetic spin on things.

  Life got a little more interesting on Wednesday. I was sitting in the back row of SHINE, drifting off to sleep during a presentation on some amateur astronomers’ society we were all encouraged to join. That was when I saw Becca. Not in the flesh. In a fully formed black-and-white dream.

  Even from my faraway spot, there was no mistaking who it was. Tall. Graceful. Wavy hair parted in the middle. Becca was in front of a brick wall, and I could make out the bust of a colorless head, like one on a Roman coin, in the background. And then a girl appeared on the sidelines, raising a gun at my friend. Becca’s face was etched with terror. I ran toward her, but not fast enough. Everything washed out and all I could see was white smoke.

  I woke up with a jolt. I’d had my share of eerie dreams before, but never anything this unsettling. Ian was doodling in his sketchbook and most of the other kids were watching the lecture as if it were some barely tolerable in-flight movie. The teacher up front must have been talking, but all I could hear was the infinite echoing of the gunshot.

  The picture of Becca looking so terrified was firmly lodged in my field of vision, like a fingerprint on glass, and when the bell rang I could barely get out of my seat.

  If this was what Kiki had meant about patience paying off, I was ready to erase the word from my vocabulary for good.

  { 3 }

  Trouble Is My Business

  “Look what the tide brought in!” Kiki was standing in her doorway, a grin curling on her face. Her cheeks were flushed and she was decked out in the red silk robe she often wears when she entertains. I peered into the background and saw all her friends clustered around the coffee table. Just my luck. I needed to get her take on the scary movie in my head, and peeling her away from a party is about as easy as keeping a Persian cat from shedding.

  “I tried calling,” I said by way of apology, “but your line was busy.”

  “Still is,” Kiki muttered, ushering me inside. “Jon-Jon’s on the blower with his psychic.” She widened her gray eyes as far as they would go.

  “His psychic?” I asked as my favorite member of Kiki’s posse, Clem Zwart, came over and helped me out of my coat.

  “It’s all twiddle-twaddle to me.” Kiki turned to me and fixed the waist of my royal blue silk Pucci dress. “Dear, do you really expect this piece to retain its integrity when you hunch? You need to carry the dress—”

  “Not let the dress carry you,” I completed automatically. I’d heard it a hundred times before.

  “Right-o,” Kiki boomed. “Now come and meet Jon-Jon, my new friend.” She gestured to the other side of the room and I noticed a dapper-looking stranger who was seated on one of the paisley damask couches, the phone pressed to his ear.

  Kiki has a thing where she adopts a new friend every year—she says it’s “to replace the outgoing ones,” though the new friends are generally out the door the fastest. Last year’s acquisition, a horse trader named Jules, ended up having a tendency to fall asleep in the middle of parties.

  “Actually,” I said to Kiki, “I wanted to talk to you about something.” I tugged on my necklace and gave her a look.

  Kiki nodded understandingly and looped her arm through mine. “Well, come meet Jon-Jon first. Then there’s something in my bedroom I simply must show you.”

  My heart thumped in gratitude and I headed to the back of the room. Edie and John Wilcox, George Jupiter, and Clem all followed us and swarmed the newcomer. He was wearing a bright blue suit and his dark hair was slickly combed back, in the manner of a maître d’ at a fancy restaurant. As Kiki and I approached, he hung up the phone.

  “Jon-Jon Dewars,” Kiki trumpeted, “meet my granddaughter. Her name is Claire Voyante, though don’t fault her for it. Her parents are too busy thinking to be thoughtful,” she said indignantly. “They’re of the mentally constipated persuasion.”

  That’s Kiki’s way of saying “intellectuals.”

  “Well I won’t hold you accountable, darling.” Jon-Jon’s melodic Southern drawl made Scarlett O’Hara sound as if she came from New Jersey. He was eyeing me funny. “My, she is cute as a tomcat’s kitten,” he said to Kiki, then turned to face me. “Won’t you sit down and tell me you’ll marry me?”

  “Jon-Jon is a fascinating painter,” Kiki said as I eased myself into the one available patch of couch. “And he’s also very spiritual.”

  “So I’ve heard,” I said, biting down a smile.

  “Let me see your hand,” Jon-Jon said. “I bet you have a long destiny line.”

  “Don’t worry, he won’t bite,” Edie assured me in her Betty Boop squeak. Kiki and Edie met back when they were both showgirls. Edie has the same black bob and fondness for miniskirts as she did then.

  “He won’t marry you either,” Clem said. “He’s already got himself a husband.” Clem is just as interesting looking as Edie—but in a completely different way. He has a long white beard and he wears lots of silver jewelry, along with a permanent expression of grief. His favorite word in the English language is “melancholic.”

  “Did have a husband,” Jon-Jon told me with a sigh. “We’re separated.”

  “I’m sorry,” I coughed up. Nosy as I am, I can get a little antsy when complete strangers pour their personal histories into my lap.

  “Our age difference was too much to overcome,” Jon-Jon purred as he studied my palm.

  Kiki flashed what looked like a peace sign at me. “Two years,” she mouthed.

  “It’s not just two years,” Jon-Jon barked, dropping my hand. “I’m talking spiritual age. My dear, I am an old soul. And David is a child.” He tilted his head and stared at me. “You know, Claire, you are the spitting image of those photographs I saw of your grandmother back in the day. The only difference is—”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “My eyes?”

  He let off a pleasant hum. “I once had a dog with different-colored eyes. That beast was such a sweetheart, always rubbing up against the wallpaper and wagging his mangy tail whenever I came around.”

  “So, dear,” Edie interrupted, saving us from the awkwardness that was setting in. You can always count on Edie to lighten a situation. “You haven’t talked about school in a little while. How is all that going?”

  Or at least semi-lighten a situation.

  “The usual Hudson stuff,” I said with a shrug. “All the kids are stressed out and all the teachers would rather be home watching TV or whatever.”

  They all seemed amused, so I told them more—about the unendurable SHINE meetings, the weird identical twins who were teaching my English and history classes, the silent protest I’d unwittingly been a part of at the library the day before. “About twenty kids came into the library to oppose the proposed cuts in hours. But they were so afraid of getting into trouble, nobody said a word. They just left these little flyers on the tables.”

  Clem stroke
d his beard. “Isn’t that deliciously sad?”

  When everyone was done chuckling, I turned to Kiki and opened my freaky-colored eyes as wide as they would go.

  “How could I forget?” she said, picking up on my desperation. “I wanted to show Claire something. I hope the rest of you will excuse us.” And without further ado, we went to her room.

  “Now, what was it you wanted to talk about?” She was reading my mind. I don’t say that loosely—Kiki can read my mind. At least when I’m thinking something important, she can. Kiki was the one I went to when I was younger and having wacky visions. Pictures of tabby cats and oversized sun hats would lodge in my brain and then I’d usually see the same images in real life, though it never turned out to mean very much. Later on, she was the person I turned to when I started wearing the cameo and having my black-and-white dreams. Turns out the cameo amplifies your natural talents, and skips generations. When Kiki was my age, the cameo made her intuitions even clearer, and she was able to sniff out everybody’s secrets.

  “Well,” I started slowly, “that SHINE seminar isn’t as boring as I made it out to be.”

  “You saw something interesting in a dream?” Amazing. I hadn’t even mentioned the word dream yet. “You have shadows under your eyes,” she explained.

  “I fell asleep in a session and had a dream, about Becca,” I said. “She got shot.”

  Kiki’s eyebrows drew up. “That’s not a very nice thing to do to your friend.”

  I gasped. “It’s not like I chose it.”

  “Not on the surface.” She tilted her head.

  “Come again?”

  “You are hurt by her diminished attention, am I correct? Have you ever heard of the subconscious?”

  “Um, I only live in the same building as a zillion psychology professors,” I reminded her.

  “How could I forget?” She looked like she had just swallowed a bad scallop. As far as she is concerned, the only thing Washington View Village has to recommend it is that it’s in the same city as her much nicer apartment.

  “So you’re saying even though she’s my best—” I caught myself and started over. “Even though she’s one of my best friends, I subconsciously want her to be hurt?”

  Kiki laughed. “Naturally. You’re cross with her, running around with those other girls.”

  I leaned back on the green silk comforter, sinking deeper into the mattress. Half of me resented Kiki for bringing it up. The other half was glad to have somebody who understood what I was going through. “Maybe I’m a little annoyed, but it’s not like I want her to get killed.”

  “Of course not.” She laughed. “You need to reconnect with Becca. Why don’t you call her up and invite her to tea? Do you know where they do a lovely afternoon tea?”

  “Let me guess. Peacock Alley?” I said. Of all the restaurants in New York, Kiki’s favorite happens to be in the hotel lobby. It also happens to be the stodgiest place on earth.

  “Now, that’s your magic fix,” she said.

  “Thanks,” I told her, though to be perfectly truthful, it wasn’t exactly the kind of magic I’d come looking for.

  { 4 }

  Shot in the Dark

  “A tea party?” Becca couldn’t stop giggling when I called her that night. “I haven’t had one of those since I was a kid.”

  “Me neither. I thought it would be … funny.” I looked out the window and saw that nearly every apartment across the courtyard had a television on. Interesting, considering how much my professor neighbors like to go on about the medium’s “brain-deadening tendencies.”

  “I’m down,” Becca said. “Especially if I can bring my stuffed animals.” She snorted. “When is it?”

  I hadn’t thought that far. “Friday?”

  “After school?” She sounded disappointed. “I told some friends I’d go to a Summer-in-January screening at Bryant Park this Friday.”

  This train was heading from bummer city into the land of totally depressing, and fast.

  But then the most shocking thing happened: she invited me to join them. “You and Louis should come. It’s Cat People, my favorite movie of all time.”

  My heart was trampolining all over the place. Thank you, Kiki! It actually worked.

  “Come, come,” she pleaded. “Besides, we need to celebrate.”

  “We do?”

  “Friday’s the end of that whack-job seminar of yours. Don’t you think I haven’t been counting down the days.”

  Her comment made me feel warm all over, and I was so excited that Kiki’s advice had worked, it didn’t occur to me until after school on Friday, when I was fixing my hair in my locker mirror, that I was meeting her new friends, which was more than a little terrifying.

  Thank goodness I’d invited Louis to tag along. Knowing he’d be there for moral support was a huge relief. He had other motives—ever since he’d met Becca at my family Thanksgiving dinner, he could barely talk about anything else. She, on the other hand, had barely brought him up. Not that I told him that small detail.

  As I was leaving school, I ran into Ian. He barely said hi before launching into a spiel about someone from Global Pictures who’d come to the comic-book store to do trend forecasting, but my paranoid thoughts about Becca’s friends not liking me were churning in my brain too fast to pay close attention.

  “None of us is cooperating,” he was saying when we got outside. The sky was tinged with purple and the after-school crowd was more boisterous than usual—we weren’t the only ones celebrating the end of SHINE. My focused friend went on, “The whole point of Toro Boy is he has this one amazing power, his superstrength, and is otherwise a totally normal teenager.” He was so worked up, he barely paused to take a breath. “He’s supposed to live in a normal apartment building and listen to punk rock and never get girls but they’ve changed everything. Now they’re setting it in a castle and he has a supermodel girlfriend.”

  “Doesn’t sound very punk rock to me,” I mumbled.

  “I know, they’re ruining everything. They’ve also added stupid powers like a cloak of invisibility and I bet they’ll find a way to mess up his horns too.”

  We stopped in front of my bike, which I’d locked to a pole down the block from school. I can usually unlock it with my eyes closed, but my hands were shaking and I didn’t get it until the third try.

  “What’s with you?” he asked.

  “I’m fine … just …” Then he caught my eye and the truth came spilling out. “I’m meeting Becca’s new friends. I mean, they’re her old friends, but they’re new to me. … How do I look?”

  I was wearing black jeans and a cream-colored tunic that had once belonged to Kiki. I had carefully applied black eyeliner à la Brigitte Bardot.

  “Fine. Is some guy gonna be there or something?” He scrunched up his face, clearly confused.

  “No, but … The girls all go to Brookfield. It’s the most uppity school in the city.”

  “I know what Brookfield is.” He sounded peeved. “But so what? I mean, you go to the biggest dork school and it’s not like you’re the biggest dork on earth.”

  “It’s not like I’m the biggest dork on earth? Is that supposed to be a compliment?”

  Ian’s face lit up with a trace of a smile. “Around these parts, sure.”

  • • •

  I rode uptown and locked up my bike outside an Indian video store on Forty-first Street. Louis and I had planned to meet up by the sandwich shack on the edge of Bryant Park. Waiting there, I took in the park’s transformation. Its new temporary movie house made it look like the world’s biggest container of Jiffy Pop, with an enormous silver bubble looming over the grass.

  Something sharp pressed into me from behind and I jumped back like a spooked horse.

  “Why are you such a spaz?” Louis murmured. He smelled like deodorant soap and his racket case was strung at a diagonal across his navy puffy down jacket. Louis is always coming from either tennis or his shrink’s office. “You’re the one who to
ld me to meet you here,” he uttered.

  I looked down. “So I’m a little nervous. I haven’t met Becca’s friends yet.” Might as well get it out in the open.

  “I thought I was the one who’s supposed to be nervous.” He pulled a CD out of his pocket and waggled it in the air.

  “You made the mix!” The night before, I’d told him he needed to ramp up his efforts at getting Becca’s attention. “Nothing too gushy though, right?” I checked.

  “Just my favorite Barry White and Justin Timberlake love songs.” Louis waited a second, then shook his auburn nest of hair in disbelief. “Give me some credit. Now are you ready to watch me work my magic?”

  “You better believe it.” I hip-checked him.

  Inside the bubble, there were so many electric heaters I nearly forgot it was January. In one corner a band was playing swingy old-fashioned music and volunteers were coming around and handing out pizza and soda to the people who’d settled on the ground.

  My green jacket must have been brighter than I’d realized; barely a minute after we’d entered the area, Becca had spotted us and called Louis’s cell phone. I know, I know, I am the only fifteen-year-old in the Western Hemisphere without one. My cheapskate parents share a shoe-box-sized cell phone that they use about once a year, combined.

  Louis hung up. “She says they’re by the stage,” he told me.

  “Then we should go there.”

  Louis cast me an unsure look through his tortoiseshell frames. “I guess so.” He looked nervous beyond belief and I felt a ripple of uncertainty flutter through my stomach.

  “We can do it,” I said, more for my benefit than his, and we proceeded to try to navigate the cracks left between people’s blankets.