She was late. The hotel, though, was like a maze, and somehow she'd ended up in an official-seeming area in her search for the exit. Grayish beige filing cabinets surrounded her, and she couldn't find her way out. Then it opened into an office, and the hotel manager rose to greet her.
"Hello. What are you doing back here?" He smiled insinuatingly and approached her. She backed up, but the filing cabinets closed in on her. Reaching her, he slid a hand around her and up her skirt, grabbing her ass. "Did you come to see me?"
Panicked, unable to speak, she broke and ran, the filing cabinets miraculously parting. Then she was on the street, and she slowed her run to a walk. She was lost. The city she'd toured the day before was alien, the shops around the hotel only half-recognizable. Turning onto another street, she spotted a cafe she recognized, with charming window boxes overflowing with marigolds. She had no idea, though; if it was near the place she was supposed to meet her family for lunch. So she kept walking.
Over an hour later, she returned to the hotel in defeat. She hadn't been able to find the restaurant at all. Going up to the suite, she was careful to stay well clear of the office. On their floor, the elevator dinged open in time for her to see her father, slump-shouldered, enter the suite. Her brother, though, looked over to see the elevator doors open.
His expression chilled, but he stayed in the hall as the door closed. She walked to him, saying, "Oh, God, I'm so sorry. I couldn't find the restaurant." Trying for apologetic humor, she half-smiled. "I'm not even sure it really exists."
His expression didn't soften at that. "How could you have ditched his birthday lunch?" he demanded, furious. He was really hurt." Then, in mockery of her light tone, he went on, "If that's the most effort you can put in, then you don't exist."
Now she was afraid. With those melodramatic words, she felt herself dissolving, beginning to not exist.
Ally woke smothered in sweat and biting back a scream. Thank the gods it had just been a dream. It had felt so real, even though she had no brother and her father's birthday was in the dead of winter. She shook it off and went back to sleep.
It was only the first of many nightmare-filled nights. The year pushed on, school started, and they only got worse. Ally started sleeping less and less to avoid dreaming. Her mother, wrapped up in her own affairs (well, one affair, really) didn't notice anything, and her workaholic father wasn't home long enough to notice that his only child existed at all.
So Ally moved through her junior year increasingly strung out and short on sleep. Her friends, the ones she'd been with since elementary school, noticed, but didn't comment, attributing Ally's increasingly exhausted appearance to her home life. And with Ally, one didn't ask about her home life. One spoke about school, celebrities, difficult assignments, concert, and, one thirty-five-minute lunch-hour when they were particularly bored, dreams.
Darra, waving her salad fork for emphasis, started it, as she started everything. "I had this really weird dream last night. We were all fish, and school was basically just swimming around in huge groups looking for fish from other schools to –spend time with. Except for Will, of course. He was this giant green fish, only somehow I knew it was him, y'know? But anyway, he was just as in love with our oblivious Ally as ever."
Ally, hearing her name, raised her head and interrupted with a "Hmm?"
Almost everyone at the table snickered, except for Will, who went pink around the ears, and Darra, who continued with her story. "And we were all different kinds of fish, all different colors, and we were just swimming around. And then my alarm went off." Darra shrugged and went back to her salad. "But it was a really weird dream."
"I can top that," offered Kayla with a wicked grin.
"We've heard about the music box full of Chippendales," interjected Will. "Can we not bring it up again?"
"Sorry," she giggled out.
"I've been having odd dreams, too," said Ally.
"Oh, yeah?" asked Darra, cocking her head to one side encouragingly. Ally had been worryingly silent recently.
Ally shrugged. "Yeah. Screwy one I had last night, all of you died, and I could have saved you, but was playing video games instead."
A pause. "You don't even like video games, do you?"
"No. But I've been having a bunch of weird dreams recently. They're really realistic, though the details are almost always wrong. I keep thinking I'll wake up one day and not be able to tell the difference."
A slightly awkward pause was ended by the ringing of the bell.
Ally and Will both headed to their creative writing class. Sitting next to each other, silence reigned between them as the teacher gave out the assignment; the class was to break into pairs and practice writing haiku, giving each other feedback.
Moving their desks together without a word spoken to each other, Ally and Will paired off automatically. Ally started furiously scribbling, so Will sat back and watched until she handed him her notebook.
E tu, Brute?
Do you think I'm crazy, too/
You, as well as them?
"No one thinks you're crazy."
"Oh, yeah? You saw the look they wee giving me. You were giving me the same look."
"I don't think you're crazy," Will said fiercely. "This is just a . . . temporary difficulty."
The teacher, noting that their conversation held more intensity than poetry warranted, circulated over. Reading over Will's shoulder, her presence precluded Ally's reply. "Solid theme," she commented. "And you obviously didn't feel too constrained to 5-7-5 meter. The question marks seem a tad repetitive, but all in all it's a good start."
Both Will and Ally stared at her, and she smiled serenely as she moved to the next pair.
They passed the rest of English class without again touching on dreams. With no classes for the rest of the day with any close friends, Ally didn't speak of them for the rest of the day. At home, she finished her homework, then made herself some frozen pasta for dinner and turned on Smallville. She got through two episodes of Smallville and half of a House rerun before she felt herself nodding off. Sleepy, but violently afraid of sleep, she went to the kitchen to make coffee.
Will came in behind her. "Leave it. Let's go for a walk. That'll wake you up."
She followed him out the back door and through her yard to the park behind her house. He led her into the woods on a path she didn't know. They walked for a while in the twilit forest, emerging eventually into Will's back yard.
"Want to come in?"
She nodded, and followed him in and down the stairs. The long hall stretched darkly from the base of the stairs. Walking along behind Will, they came to where the dark wood paneling ended abruptly. The corridor was, from there, unfinished stone, and opened quickly into a cavern.
The cavern was conspicuously occupied by a large red dragon. "Are you prepared to be given away?" rasped the dragon.
Startled, Ally glanced at Will, but he was gone, replaced by a leering blond boy. "What?"
"You're mine now. You won't ever be able to leave again." The leer took on a nasty edge. "If you do, the dragon will eat you."
To reinforce the threat, the dragon lunged and snapped her jaws in front of Ally.
The tide of terror rose, and Ally turned to run, but the entry had been paneled over, was now smooth, dark wood.
"Running already?" came a soft male voice, just before those powerful jaws closed sharp teeth agonizingly around her middle.
Ally woke screaming. It was the first time she'd lost control enough to cry out.
Coffee got her through the rest of the night, as a combination of coffee and soda kept her awake for the next two week. Not sleeping made Ally's grades slip, and she repeatedly caught herself nodding off in class. Then, terrified, she would grab a Mountain Dew. Occasionally, though, she would succumb, and dream of pain in all its varied forms, so real she would wake crying.
One night, trying to finish an essay, Ally succumbed again to sleep, but no monsters thrown up by her subconscious confronted her. Instead, she rode on the back of a flying unicorn, surrounded by marshmallow puffs of cloud.
A winged lion approached her, looking more like an overgrown kitten than the King of the jungle. "You can join us, you know. You just need to use your own wings."
"But I don't have any," Ally replied reasonably.
"You can," chimed in the unicorn. "You just have to practice flying."
"All right, I will." SO saying, Ally woke, feeling happily rested for the first time in months. Dreamily, she rose from her desk and out, up the stairs to the attic. The sole window in the attic was large enough to accommodate her, as Ally knew from childhood hours spent sitting on the roof. She slipped out onto the roof and stood unsteadily for a moment before stepping to the edge. Spreading her arms, she took the final step.
And took flight.