Dreamers Often Lie by Jacqueline West

shards of glass seeped through, forming tiny pink blossoms in the white gauze.
    “God,” I whispered. “Mom must have been . . .”
    “Yeah,” said Sadie, when I didn’t go on. “It was bad. At first.”
    “I’m so sorry.”
    “You don’t have to be sorry.” Sadie pushed a hank of myhair into place. “Once you woke up, she got a lot better. It was just at first that it was really hard.”
    “I don’t want her to have to feel like that again. Ever.”
    “Well—hopefully she won’t,” Sadie said. “You look
so much
better. Really.” She gave my shoulders another squeeze. “Come on. Let’s go eat.”
    She hauled me to my feet. Then she led me out of the room and down the stairs without letting go of my hand.



CHAPTER 6

    I f you sit by yourself in a dark room for long enough, you’ll see ghosts.
    We used to play this game at slumber parties: Find some dark closet or basement pantry and take turns hunched inside, waiting for the total blackness to form itself into impossible shapes. Then we’d lunge out, screaming.
    It was a lot like brain rest.
    For the next four days, I lay in my room, without music, with my velvet curtains shut, until morning blended into night and back into morning again. If I kept my eyes open, strange things started to appear on the ceiling. Cracks wriggled. Glow-in-the-dark stars moved. Shadows waved at me from the corner of my eye and disappeared when I turned to catch them. If I kept my eyes closed, the inside of my eyelids became the screen for movies played in fast-forward. Clips of school, classes, stupid things I’d said. A silly argument with Nikki over who’d heard of a certain band first. Pierce Caplan at one end of a half-empty hall, not even noticing me watching him from the other end.
    But what my brain really wanted was to run lines for
A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
    Staring at the bumps on my ceiling was a ridiculous waste of time, and even my subconscious knew it. I’d wake up with Titania’s words in my head, or the fairies’ lullaby playing over and over, and have to try to push them out again.
    I
needed
to run my lines. I wasn’t even sure how many of them had been left intact in my memory. If I didn’t catch them soon, they would dissolve and seep away. And then there was the folder of notes from Mr. Hall. The folder I hadn’t even opened.
    The folder that Pierce had delivered.
    Which, of course, brought me back to Pierce Caplan, Pierce and the tornado of questions and memories and stomach butterflies that came with him, and—
    Empty stage. Empty stage.
    Sometimes I hung on for a long time. I’d focus on the red velvet curtains and breathe in the dust and paint, and there would be no sound but the hum of anticipation coming from inside of me.
    And then the voices behind the curtain would begin.
    Michaela Dorfmann and the show choir girls whispering, my name sprinkled now and then into the hiss. Ayesha, the stage manager, calling for places. Titania giving her
Come sing me now to sleep
speech, and Hamlet’s voice interrupting,
But in that sleep of death what dreams may come . . .
Mercutio from
Romeo and Juliet
ramblingabout the fairy queen Mab who brings dreams in her nutshell chariot. Macbeth muttering,
Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse the curtain’d sleep . . .
    And no matter how hard I tried to keep it still, the stage’s red velvet curtain would start to twitch.
    Terror prickled through me. Every time. I was frozen, imagining who was about to step through the seam: Shakespeare, or Romeo, or Hamlet, or someone else. Some
thing
else. Whatever gruesome image my brain decided to toss into the middle of my thoughts like a grenade.
Something wicked this way comes
.
    Then the curtains would rip apart, and my eyes would fly open, and I’d jolt up in bed, feeling sloshy and sick, and I’d try to focus on a ticket stub or program taped to my wall—any little, insignificant thing that could drag my brain away.
    On the third night