Secret Star by Nancy Springer Page B

hot showers for the foreseeable future, especially if she had lost her job. Damn, she hated being poor, she hated it, she hated it! All her life, or at least all her life that she remembered, it had been poor, poor, poor, government-surplus cheese and powdered milk, which tastes putrid, and brush the teeth with baking soda, which tastes even worse, and don’t lose the pencil the teacher gives you.… Store-bought clothes? Forget that. Get by with secondhand. Being poor was supposed to give a person character, and Tess knew this was true because she sure was the school character in all those funky old clothes. Which was another reason why, damn it, she wanted things. She wanted a CD player and the Crux CD, she wanted a Walkman, she wanted some real clothes—all right, mostly she wanted jeans, brand-name jeans so the other kids would stop thinking she was contagiously and terminally uncool.
    She wanted—a chance.
    She went to bed and lay there twitching her fingers in time with the rhythms going in her head, trying not to think. She went to sleep.
    The nightmare came, as she knew it would. Just a little different this time. The walls were soot black and solid brick. Gloomy, but strong. They would never give way.
    Yet they moved, they bulged, the dull black paint cracked, the brick started to crack, and Tess was scared—
    Don’t wake up .
    Even in her sleep, Tess knew what she had to do to help Kamo. She was going to take charge of her dream. Whenever she had her nightmare she was going to stick with it and—find out. Find out what it was about. Whatever was walled in, hidden away from her and trying to get out—that was the scary stuff she couldn’t remember, and it was time to remember. She wanted to remember. For Kam.
    The black brick walls thinned and rippled and turned to a black curtain. And behind it there was something—terrifying—
    Don’t wake up!
    She stuck with it. The next moment, it was as if the curtain pulled away, like she was watching a play, and she could see—the rectangle of sunlight as a door opened, and she could almost see—the man—silhouetted in the—doorway—
    Then there was a red explosion, a black scream, someone crying. Tess woke up, gasping and sweating, her heart pounding, feeling dizzy weak shaky like in school once when some girl with asthma had given her a whiff of her inhaler, except this was worse—she felt like a heart attack case, a candidate for one of Daddy’s pills. She sat up in bed, trying to calm down, afraid to go back to sleep if she had to face the red-and-black terror again.
    Just a nightmare .
    No, dammit, not a nightmare, really. A memory. Walled in. She knew that now.
    It’s too hard. I can’t do this .
    Yet—she had to try. She had to keep trying. For Kam.
    For herself.

7
    â€œSo where were you so late?”
    It was breakfast time, there was bread but no margarine, and Tess couldn’t quite tell whether Daddy was in a better mood or not. He was trying to be. He was talking to her. He was keeping his voice down, keeping it light. But there was worry in his eyes.
    Tess didn’t exactly answer. “Daddy, I wasn’t that late. You went to bed early.”
    â€œI never heard you come in.”
    â€œYou went to sleep.” She tried to tease. “It’s hard to hear anything when you’re asleep. Hard to tell what time it is when the clocks don’t work, either.”
    He nodded, smiled, changed the subject, letting it go. They talked about the Phillies, losing again, as usual. They talked about making some pork and sauerkraut sometime if pork shanks went on sale. He kept looking at her as they talked.
    She asked him to sign a blank piece of notebook paper for her because she needed a note for a field trip. He knew she was lying, she could tell he knew. But he didn’t say anything. He signed it. She wrote herself an excuse and used it to get back into school that