As soon as I got home from school that afternoon, I went online to search for information about sleepwalking, hallucinations, weird dreams . . . anything that could rationally explain what was happening with me. There was a lot of information out there, and none of it seemed to fit what was going on. Sleepwalking seemed unlikely, as did hallucinations.
Then I stumbled upon an article that talked about something called multiple personality disorder. I was sucked in. Some of the symptoms were terrifyingly familiar to what I’d been experiencing: sleep problems, flashbacks, missing time. There were a bunch of things that didn’t ring true for me—depression, anxiety, and other really serious stuff—but within minutes I’d read enough to start getting myself even more scared.
And the more I learned, the more I was convinced I shouldn’t tell anyone anything about my lost hours. I didn’t think I was actually going crazy, but the possibility terrified me. Scared me senseless, I guess. What if they locked me up in an institution?
As I frantically paged through more and more search results, my mom called in on Skype. I felt super guilty I hadn’t yet told her anything about the eclipse or the changed moonstone or the absurdly real dreams and forgotten moments I’d been having since Velvet’s party. I didn’t really think she would have any sensible explanations, but I longed to talk to her about it—the way I used to talk to her about everything when I was little. Maybe if I figured out why my dreams felt so tied to real life lately, I could figure out some of the other stuff?
“What do you know about dreams?” I asked casually, staring down at my hands to pick at a fingernail. I didn’t want to tell Mom much—she was a worrywart by nature and had a tendency to jump to strange conclusions—but I hoped she might have some information that could lead me away from multiple personality disorder.
“I know plenty about dreams,” Mom said, staring at me through her webcam. She picked up a mug from some unseen surface and took a sip of what I knew was tea. It almost felt like we were sitting at the kitchen table together, except I couldn’t see her pants. Also, there were a few thousand miles and an ocean between us. And obviously the intangible distance that has a tendency to creep in when your mom bails on your life. “Johanna spent several weeks at a dream center in Copenhagen last spring. The dream weavers—that’s what they called the course participants—recorded nighttime adventures and spent their days exploring their meaning. Do you need some counseling?”
“I’m just trying to figure out, generally, how much dreams tie back to real life?” I was staring down, suddenly obsessed with my old Mickey Mouse T-shirt. My other hand twisted my tangled mess of hair.
“Have you been having nightmares again?” I peeked up and saw that my mom was staring back at me from the screen with a disturbing level of intensity. She used to look at me like that when I was seven and started having late-to-school dreams every night. I was always an anxious kid. This wasn’t exactly the same, but her concern made me feel better somehow. I wondered if I’d tell her more if she still lived nearby.
I chewed a piece of my hair, then spit it back out again. “No, not bad dreams, necessarily. Lately, it just seems like my dreams have been connecting really closely to stuff happening in real life.”
“Is it just dreams, Lucia?” My mom was the one looking down now. We both had a tendency to avert our eyes to keep people from seeing the worry that pulled at our faces. “Has anything strange been going on?”
I felt my heart jump into high gear. It was pounding a mile a minute, running wild. Yes! I wanted to scream. Yes, a lot of strange stuff has been going on. “I guess . . . ,” I said reluctantly. “I don’t know. It’s no big deal, Mom.”
“Lucia, if there’s something you’re not telling me, I can’t figure out the right way to help you.” She looked angry. “Have you been keeping your moonstone close, for protection?”
As a matter of fact, I had been keeping my moonstone close. For some reason, I wanted it near me more than ever now. Even though I still didn’t believe that it actually held any kind of protective power, I wasn’t willing to risk it. Especially with everything that had been going on.
“Lucia?” My mom prompted, trying to drag me back to the conversation. “Tell me what else is worrying you.”
She couldn’t force me to tell her anything more. She’d lost that right when she flew the coop. I had to do some more research on my own before I was going to confide in her. After all, nothing bad had happened. Velvet was mad at me, no surprise there . . . but it seemed like Will and I were sort of becoming friends again. It was almost as if one of my birthday-eclipse wishes was trying to come true. But that was silly. You didn’t get your wish just because—wishes came true with a lot of careful planning and luck, not magic.
Maybe nothing else would happen, and I was worrying for no reason. I was tempted to slam my laptop closed, to show Mom that we were done talking. But I thought better of it, since I knew that closing her out like that would seriously hurt her feelings. Even after what she’d done to us, I didn’t have the heart to hurt her back. “I’ll call you in a couple days, okay? I think I’ve just been having too much cocoa before bed or something.”
“Okay, baby.” She looked unconvinced. “You know, if you don’t want to talk to me about it, you could go see my friend Suze. You remember Suze, right?”
Yeah, I remembered Suze. Her house had always smelled like magical nonsense when I was a kid—incense and rose water and something else that made me sneeze. I think I remember that she even had a crystal ball on her coffee table. As if I had any intention of talking to Suze.
Mom continued, “She lives near the train station now. I think she lives above that pizza place. Beek’s?” She laughed, and I joined in. “Yeah, there’s something amusing about someone like Suze living above a pizza place. It all sounds so quaint and inspiring, doesn’t it? But her boyfriend is a grad student, so neither of them is really rolling in dough.” She wiggled her eyebrows at me. “Get it? Dough? Pizza dough?”
I shook my head. “Yeah, Mom. Good one. Her boyfriend is a grad student?” I said, still amused by the image of hennaed, scarf-wrapped Suze grabbing a slice of pepperoni for lunch every day. “How old is he?”
“Old for Suze.” Mom laughed. “I think this one’s twenty-eight.”
“Isn’t Suze, like, fifty?”
“She’s fortysomething. Suze is interesting—but she has some good insights on dreams and memory and shadows.”
“Shadows?” I stared at Mickey Mouse on my T-shirt again. “Why shadows?”
Mom shrugged. “She’s big on things like light and dark and dream states—you might actually find some of it interesting. Considering your moonstone and the eclipse and all, you might enjoy talking to her. I’ll e-mail you her number.”
We hung up, but I kept thinking about our conversation. Shadows, dream states, memories. My moonstone. Light, dark, the eclipse . . .
I took a deep breath and dug under my bed, open once again to the idea that maybe one of my mom’s books would hold some clues. I finally found a book with a passage on moonstones, so I lay down to read with the little guide propped up on my stomach. Apparently, in India, moonstones were sometimes thought of as dream stones. They were supposed to bring beautiful visions at night. I thought about the dreams I’d had this weekend and had to admit that they were beautiful. Dreams were one thing—but elements of my dreams seemed to be real. That was the problem.
“Why are you reading that?” My sister was standing in the door of my room, scanning the collection of magic books strewn around my bed.
I sat up, slightly embarrassed, and said, “Curious, I guess.”
Romy came closer and grabbed the book out of my hands. She read aloud, “ ‘A moonstone symbolizes a person’s being. It is said to strengthen emotions and give power to a person’s subconscious.’ ” She broke off and looked at me. “Seriously, Lucia?”
My face flushed. “It’s interesting,” I whispered. I had taken my moonstone out of my pocket so I could study it while I was reading. But now, while my sister paged through the book, I shoved the stone deep inside my pocket again. As soon as I touched its smooth surface, my head was filled with images of the river, the tree house, Velvet’s rooftop, and Will.
Romy flipped to another page and read, “ ‘If you possess a moonstone, you will be blessed with a more powerful intuition and a greater ability to understand.’ ” She looked up. “Lucky you.”
I smiled weakly. What she had read was absolutely not true for me. I couldn’t understand anything. I was more confused than I’d ever been in my life. I hated that my stone had changed sometime during the night of the eclipse, and I wondered what that meant. Was it normal?
Romy tossed the book down on my bed and said, “Happy reading.” As she turned to leave my room, I once again considered talking to my sister about what was happening. But she already thought I was a freak, and this would probably make her think I was crazy, too. She’d try to blame whatever was happening to me on the divorce, and that would make her hate Mom even more than she already did. The last thing I needed was to create extra family drama—my job was keeping the peace.
Maybe I was just going through some sort of hormonal rite of passage that everyone else already knew about. Had my mom failed to warn me about some secret female “thing” that happens on your thirteenth birthday? Or was something in me broken?