As far as I know, nobody ever said that eating chicken-fried steak gives you weird, disturbing dreams all night, so my mom’s cooking can’t be to blame for all the strangeness that started the second my eyes slid shut.
But all I know is, no sooner had my head hit the pillow than I heard a tiny little voice in the back of my brain whisper, Jendra. Jendra. Don’t go to the ceremony tonight.
“Where should I go?” I mumbled, squeezing the sides of my comforter.
Confidentially, I was hoping for France, which has been my dream ever since I read about Joan of Arc last year in exploratory French. Kind of goes along with that whole sidewalk café thing I mentioned earlier.
The voice had other ideas, though. Don’t go to the ceremony, it said a second time. If you dance there tonight, you’ll never dance again.
“Good,” I grumbled with a snore. “I hate dancing, anyway.”
Sounding exasperated, the voice snapped, I don’t think you get it, Jendra. You’re in a lot of trouble.
Suddenly another voice practically screamed, “Save me! Help me! Get me out of here!”
In an instant an entire scene flashed before my eyes. I don’t quite know how to describe it, but there was this beach, and it was covered with tents, and bodies, and soldiers with swords, and then off in the distance there was this big, walled city.
A second later the image flickered out and a girl’s face abruptly appeared. She was really young, not much older than me, and she looked totally hysterical—the way Leah looks when you make her use butter instead of low-fat yogurt spread.
“Help!” the girl sobbed. “Please help me! Get me out of here! I didn’t do anything! I’m innocent!”
Her voice was so shrill that with a sharp gasp, I sat up sweating in my bed, suddenly wide awake. Then I looked at my clock.
“I’ve only been asleep for five minutes?” I groaned. “No way! When are those stupid cheerleaders going to summon me?” I eyed the window suspiciously and wondered if they’d come in that way. After all, it wasn’t like them to use the door.
Nobody was there, though, so feeling annoyed, I fell asleep again.
Before long, I felt this floating feeling, like I was flying. And I saw myself hovering over the physical science room, where I took a seat in the back row. I turned to the girl sitting next to me. She was blond and tiny and dressed in prep clothes.
(Oh, and by the way, I was dressed up like Peter Pan with webbed feet—but somehow I really don’t think that’s important to the dream.)
“What are you doing here?” I asked her, suddenly recognizing her. She was the same girl who’d been screaming her head off in my other dream.
“I’m failing physical science,” she explained with a shrug. “But Dr. Murphy said that if I redid our last lab, he’d let me slide by with a seventy. So I came in for tutorials. Tina helps me a lot.”
She nodded toward the front of the room, where I saw Tina in her cheerleading outfit peering over a petri dish. She was holding a pompon in each hand.
Meanwhile, in the other corner of the room, Dr. Murphy was busy playing mad scientist. This was a little game where the scientist uses spaghetti tongs to dip prisms into a bubbling vat of chemical soup. From the stench, I was guessing the soupy glop was Dr. Murphy’s own secret recipe.
“He’s so weird,” my new friend whispered as she nudged me.
“No kidding,” I replied in an Italian accent as I realized I’d forgotten my locker combination. (Again, probably unimportant details.)
Just then, though, something really bizarre happened. Dr. Murphy lifted a soup-soaked prism from his stew pot just as an exceptionally bright sunbeam shone in through the window.
As the light passed through the prism, we were dazzled by a blinding white flash—like white pepper thrown in the eyes.
Speaking of eyes, I rubbed mine for a full sixty seconds. Then, as soon as I could focus again, I saw a pair of twelve-foot-tall translucent beings standing by the soup pot in full armor.
Everyone in the room was shocked into silence.
After a few seconds Dr. Murphy sort of squeaked out, “Are you here to make up a lab?”
“Silence, mortal!” boomed one of the visitors. She moved menacingly closer to Dr. Murphy and bellowed, “Who dares summon the spirits of Athena and Ares?”
“We were in the middle of battle,” the other being snarled. He didn’t look much like the nice, friendly type to me. For starters, he was holding a bloody spear, which was kind of a turnoff. His eyes burning, he finished savagely, “And I would have won.”
The female being burst out laughing.
“I would have!” her companion insisted indignantly.
The goddess laughed again. Even harder this time. And then she noticed Tina.
“Girl,” she began, sounding interested, “you look athletic. Which god do you serve?”
Tina looked blank. Finally, sounding flustered, she managed to say, “Well, my mom was raised Methodist, but my father is Catholic, so I guess I serve—”
In confusion the goddess interrupted, eyes narrowing into two slits, “Not Aphrodite?” As she asked the question, the room shook like thunder, and I could tell that everybody pretty much had their fingers crossed that Tina wasn’t a big Aphrodite fan.
Fortunately, she said, “No, I’ve never even heard of Aphrodite.”
She’s such a good liar, I thought. I mean, come on, even I have heard of Aphrodite.
The goddess smiled. “How nice,” she said and then asked, “Is there a temple of Athena nearby, by chance?”
Knowing Tina, she was probably planning to lie again and say yes, but dumb ol’ Dr. Murphy just had to butt in. “The ancient Greek gods aren’t worshipped here in twenty-first-century America,” he said.
There aren’t really words to describe the goddess’s reaction, so I’ll just put it this way. Athena did not take that well.
Ares, meanwhile, started storming around the room, smashing stuff—beakers, Erlenmeyer flasks, test tubes. Glass was flying everywhere. I winced and wondered if Dr. Murphy would note that on his inventory sheet and make him pay a fine at the end of the year.
Just as Ares was about to move on to breaking animate objects, Tina suggested desperately, “Of course, we could always start a temple.”
Again, Athena smiled. (Ares didn’t, though. He just kept right on breaking stuff, but since Athena was talking, we all just kind of ignored him.)
“Worshipping me will have its rewards, girl,” Athena announced. “I will make you my priestess, the head of a sacred cult. And I can offer you powers, special powers, powers that will enable you to accomplish whatever you desire. . . .”
Suddenly the scene changed, and I was back at the cheerleaders’ shrine, eating cookies and drinking Crystal Lite.
I heard myself asking, “What’s the Pompon Follies?”
“Only the biggest cheerleading competition in the entire universe,” came the sinister reply. “And this year we’re going to win.”
“Athena will give us the power.”
Immediately back in the science room, I saw Athena levitate Tina’s pompons into the air. She and Ares then each extended a single finger and sent forth two surges of power—I could see them—like bolts of lightning. The pompons took on a life of their own then and began to glow.
Then the gods were gone, and Tina was standing beside me, talking to the other girl in the back of the room. She obviously couldn’t see me.
“You saw them, too,” Tina said. “And we can’t pretend you didn’t. But don’t worry. We’ll make room for you on the squad. You can be our mascot. Okay, Chrystal?”
The scene changed again.
I still saw Chrystal, but now she was in the shrine, backing away from the rest of the cheerleaders in terror.
“I didn’t do it!” she shrieked, sounding desperate. Her eyes were wide, and one of them was bright blue. Somehow she’d lost a contact.
“Liar!” Jamey Fitzhughston snarled. “I saw you! You betrayed us!”
“No!” she shrieked, even more desperately than before. “It wasn’t me! It wasn’t—I swear! I don’t know what on earth happened to it, but, honestly, I didn’t take it!”
“She’s lying,” I heard Jamey say as the scene changed again. “How can you possibly believe her? Ares disappears and some seventh-grade nobody just happens to find a piece of him stuck to Mr. Talbert’s shoe? She’s lying, Tina.”
Pacing the floor nervously, Tina demanded, “LaKaisha, are you sure nobody saw you with the mascot suit on?”
“I made myself invisible before I put it on,” she insisted.
Sinisterly, Jamey said, “That didn’t stop Mr. Talbert from figuring out it was you who stole his pants and loafers. He knew those basketball players weren’t serious about wanting his pants and shoes. And he figured out that we were responsible for what happened to Chrystal, too.”
“We shouldn’t have tried to frame the basketball boys for Chrystal’s disappearance,” Tina decided. “Pinning that malicious note to the mascot didn’t make the basketball team look guilty like we planned. It just made us look suspicious. And that stupid wad of phony death threats you showed to Jendra, Lien Hua, I’m sure she saw right through those. She must know we got rid of Chrystal.”
“We’ll have to do more than scare her now,” Jamey Fitzhughston said darkly. “You’re right, Tina, she knows. And we’ve got to do something to keep her from talking.”
You see? pleaded the voice that had called my name before. Now do you get it? Don’t come to the ceremony, Jendra. Your life may depend on it! Stay asleep!
So, naturally, just then I woke up.