Kissing Kate (20 page)

I smiled. I was glad she was happy, but I couldn’t help thinking that only a week ago, Finn had tried to kiss me. Was that a bad sign, that he could go from one person to the next in such a short time? Then again, I’d done pretty much the same thing by fleeing to Kate on the very night he’d taken me out to dinner. Oh, well. So we both had someone else in mind when we tried each other out. Was that really such a crime?

A lightness filled my chest as I realized that I could think about this—about Kate—and not fall to pieces.

“What about you?” Ariel said. She nudged my leg with her foot. “You seem like you’re in a good mood, too.”

I turned toward her, bringing myself back to the moment. “As a matter of fact, I am.” I paused. “I had another lucid dream last night.”

“Lissa! You stud! I’ve been trying and trying, and I still haven’t had one. So tell me about it!”

“Well, it was weird. But wonderful, too.” I leaned into the sofa. “First I had this icky dream—not a lucid dream, just a normal dream. It was a dream I used to have a lot, even way back when I was a kid. But for a while I hadn’t had it, and I’d hoped it was gone.”

Ariel seemed confused.

“I know,” I said. “It’s kind of complicated.” I backtracked and told her what had happened when I was five, how I was supposed to be waiting for Mom outside Service Merchandise, but instead I almost got myself kidnapped.

“And for years I had these awful dreams about it,” I said, “which I guess isn’t so surprising. And then for a while the dreams went away. But in the last few weeks that same dream came back, and it got mixed up with other stuff, too. Like one time Ben Porter and Rob Lynch were in it, leaning against a car and laughing at me.”

“Yuck,” Ariel said.

“And another time I dreamed about a kid from my elementary school, this girl named Cookie Churchill. She was, like, luring me farther into the parking lot.”

“
Cookie
?” Ariel said.

“Yeah. We used to be friends, sort of, but sometimes she’d be mean to me, too. Like if I got upset about something, she’d say, ‘What’s your prob, little snob?’ And one time she told the whole class my toenails were gross.”

“So why’d you hang out with her?”

“I don’t know. I honestly don’t.” I shrugged. “I guess I still liked her, even though she made me feel like crap.”

Ariel looked at me in an odd way.

“What?” I said.

“You heard what you just said, right?” She waited, then raised her eyebrows. “You still liked her, even though she made you feel like crap?”

“Yeah, well, I was in third grade. Give me a break.”

“That’s not what I mean,” she said. “Cookie doesn’t remind you of anyone? Someone who
isn’t
in third grade?”

“Ariel, I have no idea what you’re—” I stopped. Blood rushed to my face. “Oh. Oh, God, I didn’t think about it like that.”

“In your dream it was Cookie, but I bet it was really Kate.”

“Wow, that is so weird,” I said. I thought about it for a second. “But yeah, they both treated me the same, didn’t they? That kind of freaks me out.”

“Tell me about it,” Ariel said. “I had a dream like that about Mickey Mouse, when actually it was my dad.” She leaned forward. “Okay, so keep going. What ended up happening?”

“Well, last night I had the dream
again,
” I said, “and when I woke up, I just got mad. Because why should I keep having a dream that makes me feel so awful?”

“You shouldn’t,” Ariel said.

“Exactly. And then I thought about this chapter from my dream book, how the author says you can re-enter a dream on purpose and turn it into a lucid dream. You’re supposed to think about the dream as you slip back to sleep, telling yourself that the next time you have it, you’ll realize you’re just dreaming. And then you can deal with it however you want.
You
control the dream, instead of the other way around.”

I checked her expression. I felt jumpy, but I wanted to make sure she was getting it. “So that’s what I did,” I said. “And it worked.”

“Are you serious? Lissa, that’s amazing!”

“It really kind of was,” I said. I drew my legs up on the sofa, folding them beneath me. “I closed my eyes and let myself drift off, thinking about the dream the entire time. And then there I was, standing in the middle of the parking lot. The same parking lot as all the times before. And it was hot, and the sky was blue, and I had that creepy feeling on the back of my neck, you know? Like something terrible was going to happen.”

“Because something terrible
was
going to happen,” Ariel said. She shivered. “That is so spooky, Lissa, that you really did walk off with that guy.”

I pushed my hair behind my ear. “So . . . I was in the parking lot, and all the cars were, like, really bright. I can’t even describe it, just that they weren’t like regular cars. And I was standing there, feeling all edgy and wondering what I was supposed to do, when someone called my name.”

“Ooo. Was it Cookie, who was really Kate?” She slapped her knee, a series of excited pats. “That would make sense, wouldn’t it? That instead of, like, this dangerous guy, you were being drawn toward the whole Kate situation?”

“Maybe,” I said. “Except whoever it was called out from behind me, not in front of me. And at first I told myself,
No, you can’t turn back now. You’ve got to go forward, you’ve got to face whatever it is you’re so afraid of.
”

“You are so brave,” Ariel said.

“Yeah, well, but then I heard the voice again.”

Ariel frowned. She looped a strand of hair around her finger. Then her eyes widened and she asked, “Was it. . . your mom?” She said it gingerly, as if afraid of overstepping.

“For a second I thought so, too. But it wasn’t.”

“So who was it?”

I swallowed. I remembered how my heart, in my dream, had started pounding like crazy when at last I turned around. “It was me,” I said. “Me when I was five, with my hair in two long braids.” I tucked my legs in closer. “I was standing outside the store, and I was safe after all.”

“Oh, wow,” Ariel said.

“Yeah,” I said. I suddenly felt embarrassed. “And then I woke up. And I knew things were going to be okay.”

She gazed at me in this proud way. A little teary, even. “So the scary stuff
was
Kate,” she said. “Kate and Ben and—I don’t know. Even me, I guess, pressuring you to be someone you weren’t.
That’s
the horrible fate you’ve been marching off toward all this time, even though deep inside you knew you shouldn’t.”

I stared at my jeans.

“But you called yourself back,” she said. “You called yourself back, and you were finally able to listen.”

My throat tightened, and my lower lip got that trembly feeling of wanting to cry. I thought about Mom, who used to stand behind me and fix my hair.
Like corn silk,
she would say, weaving the sections with her fingers. How long had it been since I’d thought of that?

Ariel put her arm around me, and I leaned into her embrace.