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Chapter 2

"Your dream girl?" Grimm translated. He wanted to face his student--years of lecturing had left him uneasy talking to someone he wasn't looking at--but he didn't dare take his eyes off Sara. Her behavior around other people had become unpredictable, sometimes even dangerous. He positioned himself between Alejo and Sara, ready to catch her if she tried to attack this student as she had done to another just a week ago.

The "another" referenced above was supposed to be Eric, but I think I lost sight of that later in the story. The idea is that Sara can't pull someone into the dream until she has met them, and/or is aware of their existence.


"This last night, I dream of her," Alejo said.

"You dreamed about her?" Grimm was too stunned to be angry. While he well knew the kind of dreams teenage boys usually had about teenage girls, the notion that Alejo had dreamed of someone he had never met with enough detail to recognize her piqued his curiosity.

"Si. In my dream, her hair iss long."

Out of the corner of his eyes, he could see Alejo miming a hair length just reaching his elbow. Sara's hair had been that long once . . . when she had been well. Now it was shorn close to her head to prevent her from ripping it out during her all too frequent panic attacks.

"She talk to me," Alejo continued. He hesitated, then shook his head. "No remember what she say."

"Are you sure it was Sara?"

"Si. Yes. I no have doubt." Indeed, he did sound very sure. "Look. She know me also."

At some point, Sara's unfocused, wandering gaze had settled on Alejo. There was no expression on her face, no indication of any emotion or desire in her stance, yet she was clearly looking at--and seeing--the young man.

"I should take her upstairs," Grimm said. "She doesn't do too well with people anymore. Especially strangers." He paused, not sure how much information was too much. Most of the school knew that something had happened to his daughter--his daughters--over the summer. Both the town paper and the university paper had covered it extensively for over a week, then dropped coverage when no new information was forthcoming. The interesting information wasn't believable, and the believable information wasn't interesting, especially when it failed to develop or resolve in short order. "I'm afraid we don't know what's wrong with her," he supplied, answering the question he knew Alejo would be too polite to ask. "Some of the doctors think it's a nervous breakdown of some variety."

There was a whole scene that never made it into the story where Grimm complains about how the doctors know nothing.


Alejo didn't respond. He was locked in some silent communication with Sara, neither moving.

Then it broke. Whatever had been happening between them ceased; perhaps a decision had been made. With mincing footsteps, Sara began walking around the edge of the room. She moved towards Alejo but stayed next to the wall instead of cutting straight across. Frowning, Grimm headed over to intercept his daughter.

This sequence is one of the few pieces left of possibly the earliest draft of the story, except the events described were written to happen in the laboratory where Grimm is practicing his Nefarious Experiments (tm).

There was also some indication of child abuse in an early draft, which is part of the reason for Sara's avoidance of being touched. That got written out later because it seemed wholy unnecessary for the story, and it became more and more out of character for Grimm.


He took hold of her hand to lead her from the room. With an uncanny strength, she jerked her hand from his grasp and pressed her back to the wall as if to get as far away from him as possible. She tried to continue towards her goal, but found her way blocked by a wooden cabinet on one side and her father on the other.

Sara sank to the floor then and, meshing herself to the cabinet, began to rock. Her fists were bunched up next to her ears, arms pressed against her face.

I did a lot of research on Autism for this story because I initially wanted Sara to be Autistic. But, the more research I did, the more I started to wonder about the nature of Autism itself. In the end, a comment by one of my beta readers changed things. He had read an early mostly completed draft. When he handed it back to me, he said, "Why is this girl allowed out? Why isn't she institutionalized?" Ya know, he had a point.

Once Grimm stopped being Nefarious, it became easier to justify Sara being home. Still, I had to tone back on some of the overt craziness and figure out if she was actually Austistic or had some other condition that mimicked the symptoms. That's when the story really started coming together.


"I'm sorry you had to see this," Grimm said without turning around. He didn't want Alejo to see the pain he knew was on his face. "You should leave. I'll have to give you a rain check on the hot chocolate." Behind him, he could hear Alejo gathering up his coat, the chair scraping back into position under the table. He waited until his student left the room, then sat down on the tile across from his daughter and prepared to wait with her until she was ready to move. "Someday," he promised, "we're going to laugh about this."

They sat together, separated, the young professor in his suit and tie, and the teenager wearing the female version of his face and too-large sweats.

I look like my dad. I looked *a lot* like him when I was young, and have started to take after my mom more and more as I grew older. For some reason, it's always been important to me to know which parent a child takes after. Also, this saved on having to provide physical description for Grimm.


"I can hear the ocean," she replied, speaking to the floor.

This was Sara's first line; the line she was born from as a character.


"I know, honey," he answered sadly, because that was all she knew how to say anymore.

****

Famous last words, Lisa thought, as she closed the door to her dorm room. It was just after 1:30 in the morning. The coffee shop had closed and the library wouldn't become 24 hour until next week.

She slung her backpack into the corner and rolled back her head, trying to loosen some of the tenseness in her neck and back. Tanya still wasn't back, she noted, her eyes falling on the empty top bunk. That wasn't much of a surprise. She might wander in eventually, or it might be days before she returned. Like the time she ducked out for a bag of Doritos. Six days later, she returned, with no clear explanation of where she'd been. And without the chips.

My first roommate Freshman year went out for a bag of Doritos and returned a week later from New Orleans. She, her brother, his friend, and one of our dorm friends had been on a bender of Ny-Quil and prescription speed (the dorm friend's migraine medicine) for a week prior to leaving. Yes, they had all been camped on my dorm room floor for that week. They came back more stoned than they had left and couldn't understand why I had been worried about them.

Tanya--altho created to be the roommate nightmare--is not doing drugs. I know where she's going and what she's doing during her frequent absences, but I shall not disclose that here.


The answering machine was flashing. Lisa crossed over to the heavy wooden desk on which it sat and pushed the playback button. There were five messages.

More Real Life for Lisa.


"Lisa, honey," the first one said, in the careful tones of someone doing her best to stay calm. "I know you're probably in class. Call me when you get back."

She cringed; it was her mom. The only person who couldn't take "we're not in; we'll return your call when we are" as an acceptable reason for someone not to answer the phone. She had forgotten to call her mom.

"Dear, I had to step out for a minute. Hopefully, I didn't miss your call. It's dinner time and I was hoping to talk to you. It's so hard to sit here and eat at this big table without you. Please call back."

She glanced at her watch. It was far too late to call her mom now. It was possible that her mom was still up, still pacing around like she always did. Lisa could practically smell the brownies baking. On the chance that she wasn't however . . . and, Lisa'd been warned about making early morning phone calls unless there was a hospital involved. With a beep, the machine started playing the next message.

"Lisa, where are you? It's been dark for hours. It gets dark so early this time of year and I just worry about you so much, having to walk across that great big campus by yourself in the dark. You just never know what can happen to a pretty girl like you."

Beep.

The next message started, and there was nothing calm about her mom's voice anymore, fake or otherwise. "Young lady, I don't care if you're laying dead in a ditch. You'd better pick up that phone?"

This is the kind of logic my mother uses with me. I told her about this scene, we had a good laugh, and then the next time she left a message on my machine, it started with "26 hours in labor."

To make it worse, I was a breech baby. My mother has never let me forget this.


Lisa slammed her hand on the delete button. "You have no new messages," the machine informed her, in its polite, assembled speech.

"Thank you," Lisa breathed.

How many times did they have to go through this? They'd been through finals twice before. The first time, Lisa sat her mother down and explained what was going on. The problem with a mother who never went to college herself was that she couldn't, or refused, to understand the nature of the beast.

"It means I'm going to be out a lot," Lisa remembered trying to explain. "I'll be at the library."

Arms akimbo, her mother answered, "And there are no phones at the library?"

"Of course there are phones. In the lobby. I won't be in the lobby. I'll be where the books are. If I have to go down to the lobby to call you all the time, I'll never get any studying done. I'm eighteen years old," she said. "You should trust me to take care of myself."

This line is meant to echo the line from Origin. I wanted to show that Lisa really hasn't grown up as much as she thinks she has.


A look of hurt crossed her mother's face. With a rush of words, Mrs. Davis covered it up. "I trust you. You know that. It's the people out there," she said, with a sweep of her arm, "who are trying to take my little girl away from me. I don't trust them. You need to be careful."

I just noticed that the adults in this story don't get first names. I'm not sure there's a reason for that.


The conversation didn't end there. It never did.

As much as she loved her, Lisa decided that her mother was just going to have to wait until tomorrow for that phone call. She grabbed her Anatomy text book from the bookshelf and settled down at her desk to look over the diagram of muscles before going to bed.

****

That night Lisa dreamed. One minute she'd been staring at the Anatomy text; the next she was standing in a child's bedroom, one she'd never seen before. The walls were painted a soft yellow with a bright floral runner framing the ceiling. Two beds occupied most of the room, each covered in a thick white duvet with lace trim, barely visible through a mound of lacy pillows and stuffed animals. The room felt bright and cheerful and unimportant.

"That night Lisa dreamed" is the line this whole story is built around. This is where it initially started.

The bedroom was supposed to be a lot more important. It was intended to provide the clue Lisa needed to figure out where Sara was. I don't know what school Sara was to be attending, but Lisa originally was at Verner College. As far as I know, this is an entirely fictional college. Verner's Law is a corollary to Grimm's Law that explains away the expections.


Feeling too awake to be asleep, she was reminded of another dream once: Of the first time she teleported, and the first time she met another teleporter. The beaches of Tapahini bore no resemblance to this space. Not physically. But there was an overwhelming sense of deja vu. She'd been here before, wherever 'here' was.

"Hello?" she called, her voice sounding distant. "Is anyone here?"

She strained her ears, and heard nothing. If this was a dream, it was unlike any she could remember. Digging her nails into her other forearm, she held it until the grasping hand started to tremble. Nothing else changed.

"Okay . . . ." she said, as she started looking for anything that would answer any of the six basic questions.

Her eyes found the door, a simple wooden affair. She reached out to grasp the doorknob.

"That's not the way," someone said. "Not the way at all."

Lisa turned a circle, but found no speaker. The room was just as empty and still as when she first arrived, even the lacy drapes in the windows didn't move. The sound seemed to begin and end in her head. But this wasn't telepathy. Telepathy didn't use words, not as such. For the Tomorrow People to say that one talked telepathically or heard someone's telepathic voice was an inadequate description at best, but it was the only way they knew. This sounded like someone talking directly into her head, like listening to herself think. She realized that was also how her own calls had sounded.

"Come out!" Lisa demanded. "I'm tired of this game."

"This isn't a game," the voice returned. The air to the left of the door shimmered, thickened into a teenaged girl with long tea brown hair and china blue eyes. The girl looked pained to see Lisa, her eyebrows drawn and face twisted as if she were hurting. "How did you get here?"

Sara's hair was auburn up until about a week before posting. At that point, I figured that china blue eyes were dangerous enough, so I changed her hair color. The eye color had to remain because I think that color is fascinating, but whenever I see it, it always looks to me like the person is blind. I wanted some of that effect here.


"You're asking *me*?" Lisa responded.

The girl disappeared back into the air, then coalesced on the right side of the door. "You can hear me?" she asked, crossing her arms protectively in front of her.

"Should I not be able to?"

The girl tilted her head to the side before saying, "No one's ever answered before."

Big surprise, Lisa thought. The girl didn't seem to understand when a joke had gone on too long. "What are *you* doing here?" she asked. With any luck, she'd get a straight answer and then they could all go home and get on with their lives.

"Waiting."

Lisa sighed. No luck. "Waiting for what?"

The girl faded out, then back in. She didn't change positions, but she gave an impression of movement, as if she were shaking.

When no answer was forthcoming, Lisa gestured to the door. "Why don't you leave?" She reached for the knob again, and was stopped by something that felt like a slap on the wrist, though the girl still hadn't moved and she could sense no one else present.

"No!" came the panicked response. "You can't go there, Lisa Davis. Don't go there!"

If you walk through the door, you'll never wake up. It took almost a year of writing to figure out that fairly basic detail about the story.


Lisa blinked. The next question caught in her throat as she realized what the girl had said: The girl had known her name. Had this been a normal dream, that wouldn't have been interesting at all. But this had never been a normal dream, if it was a dream at all. Lisa didn't have to search to find the girl's name in return: Sara Grimm. She only knew of one context where names where exchanged without introduction. Tomorrow People always recognized one another. Maybe it was an offshoot of their telepathic abilities, or maybe it was something else.

Then, before Lisa could figure out how to respond to the last statement, the dream was gone and she was laying awake in her bed.

End chapter two.