Dreamwalkers Read Online Free Page B

him to see if he
was injured. You can’t expect anyone in a dream to behave the way
they would in real life, and it can be very disconcerting when
you’re dreamwalking. All the rules are different.
    I leaned over Alex, who looked like he wanted
to curl up and die. He wasn’t injured. Because it was just a dream,
remember? “Are you okay?” I asked him.
    And he just stared at me in wonder.
    Then we both woke up.
    The next day at school I noticed him looking
my way. I tried to play it cool, pretending I wasn’t always looking
at him. The few times our eyes met my heart stopped in my
chest.
    The next time I dreamwalked with Alex Lo–only
a couple of nights later–I found myself sitting in the cafeteria,
at my usual table but alone, as Alex walked into the room with a
lunch tray. The cafeteria wasn’t especially crowded, but I didn’t
really recognize anyone. When I tried to focus on them, they got
blurry and out of focus.
    I watched Alex as he glanced up and made eye
contact with me. I felt how empty the space around me was, the way
the chatter and laughter ramped up but left me inside this odd
bubble. Alex took one step toward me–my heart leapt–then he
tripped. Flat on his face, Superman-style, lunch tray smeared
across his t-shirt, and of course it was spaghetti day and he wore
white.
    The laughter started, the pointing. If I
thought it had been loud before, it was deafening now. People were
crammed in that room, all open laughing mouths and staring eyes and
pointing fingers.
    Alex picked himself up and looked around, his
face flaming red. He took in the damage done to his shirt, a
plate-sized sauce stain, right across his chest. Then more red,
bleeding down from his nose and forehead.
    I stood up, struggling to see over the crowd
of assholes. Alex was bleeding and everyone was still laughing. He
gazed around in confusion. “I’m bleeding,” he said, quietly yet I
could hear it through the laughter.
    I pushed through the crowd. They were a
nearly solid wall. I pushed and no one moved. “Here comes your
girlfriend,” I hear over the wall. “Why don’t you let your trashy
girlfriend take care of you, the way she takes care of her cousin?”
Kissing noises and fresh bursts of laughter.
    I stopped pushing and stepped back.
    This dream wasn’t like the last one.
    Alex had heard these words before. Someone
had discovered that Alex had an interest in me. Maybe, after the
first dream, he had thought, “I had a dream about that girl… she’s
pretty.” And then had tried to be casual when asking his jock
friends, “Hey, do you know anything about that girl over
there?”
    And these were the things they had told him.
That I was white trash. That I spent too much time with my cousin.
Oh, and don’t you know her dad and uncles were murdered? They think
it was her cousin. He disappeared right at the same time. They
don’t really seem all that concerned about finding him.
    There it was.
    Now Alex had a new reason to be anxious.
Before it was some kind of performance anxiety. Now they made fun
of me, like he had even chosen me. I had chosen him. I had walked
into his dream and earned him the ridicule of his so-called
friends.
    So, I turned away from Alex, and stepped out
of his dream.
    I tried to stop thinking about Alex after
that. I could tell he believed the rumors about my family, the same
way everyone else did. Even Sissy and Melanie. They only sat with
me because they were excluded too. We were the outcast table and
pretended to be friends to keep everyone from thinking we were
total losers.
    I had friends once. That was in middle
school. Before Daniel killed everyone and took off. I was pretty,
and athletic, and I played on the soccer team. I could have been a
cheerleader if I cared about that sort of crap, Claudia Childs kept
trying to convince me to try out.
    Before.
    When I went back to school after two weeks
off for the funerals and the police investigations and trying to
wrap my head around the fact