I look at the two people I’ve just confessed the whole, unabridged truth to. Tessa and Grady sit cross-legged on Grady’s bed, slack-jawed. It’s a lot to digest, I know. I’ve been living with my ability to enter people’s dreams and possess their bodies, and I still have trouble believing it. But keeping this from Tessa is no longer an option. I need her. And Grady? Well, he’s my Hail Mary. He already knows something’s up, so why not tap his massive brain to help me figure out the rest?
Pursing his lips, Grady runs his hand through his pumpkin-colored hair and says, “I knew it.”
Tessa’s eyes bug. “You knew it? Knew what, exactly? That Sarah thinks she’s hanging out in our heads while we sleep, or that she’s dating Freddie Krueger?”
Grady blushes. “Well, no, I didn’t know the details, but I knew something was going on, and now it all makes sense.”
She snorts. “Oh yeah, total sense.”
Though I know it’s unfair of me, I can’t help but feel a little crushed that Tessa thinks I’m nuts. Still, there’s no time for hurt feelings. I remind myself that Grady’s openness is what’s important. His mind is what I need.
“So how do I stop Wes?” I ask eagerly.
“Good question,” he says. “I don’t know. But I’m guessing the answer lies within your disorder. So let’s break it down. Seems to me that what you’re experiencing is part chemistry, part mythology. The chemistry is actually pretty simple. Dexidnipam is made up of two main components: a controlled-release hypnotic and an anticonvulsant, correct?”
“Yeah, it puts me to sleep, and it keeps me from moving.”
“That’s what I said,” he replies dryly. “The thing is, these homeostatic functions are a focus of our nervous system while we sleep. Maintaining them is its primary job. And the fact that your body isn’t doing them means that the things it actually does do while you’re asleep are intensified. Like how a blind person has a better-than-normal sense of smell. Since your body isn’t using energy to keep you still, it can pour that energy into the other things your body does while you sleep—so your dream state is heightened. Make sense?”
“Yeah,” I say. “I think so.”
He goes on. “I’m guessing that when you’re given enough hypnotic to actually stay asleep and enough paralytic to keep you from moving, your body proportionately increases your anabolic functions to compensate. Your EEG readings are off the charts, right?”
“That’s what they say at the clinic,” I reply. “I have a very active frontal lobe.”
“Of course,” he says, clapping his hands as his pitch rises. “The part of the brain that controls lucid dreaming!”
Tessa raises a hand to halt the celebration. “Hold up. Rewind. What are you two talking about? What other things Sarah does while she’s asleep? We don’t do anything while we’re asleep. That’s why it’s called sleeping.”
Grady shakes his head. “And I’m the one who gets picked on.”
“Tess, I know it seems crazy,” I say.
“Try impossible,” she shoots back.
“Impossible,” I agree patiently. “But it’s not. I have never lied to you, and I’m not starting now. Even if you can’t believe me, could you please just go with it for the sake of this conversation? For me?”
She stares at me hard, a mixture of concern, confusion, and suspicion contorting her face, but she doesn’t protest.
I turn my attention back to Grady. “So what is my frontal lobe so much better at than regular people’s?”
“Well,” he says. “There are things we know about. Like, when you sleep, your brain cells shrink so that waste matter can easily move through your brain and get flushed out of your system. There’s a fascinating study linking this waste management process to the reduction of the protein involved in Alzheimer’s. It’s a great read.”
“Awesome,” Tessa chirps. “Sarah won’t forget who I am when she’s a hundred!” She glares at Grady. “If I have to go with this, you need to stay on topic. So tell us, genius. What does any of this have to do with Sarah voodoo-dolling Gigi?”
Grady pushes his glasses up on the bridge of his nose purposefully. “Well, delta wave and REM sleep are still pretty mysterious. There are a multitude of functions that we don’t remotely understand, and sleep science is a relatively new field of study. So while we can look at a brain scan and see that all these areas, which are dormant while we’re awake, light up when we’re asleep, that doesn’t mean we have a clue what these parts of the brain are actually doing during that time.”
He pauses and takes a deep breath for effect. “That’s where mythology comes in.”
“Mythology?” I ask.
“Mythology,” he repeats. “Just about every culture has a favorite story or theory that explains why our bodies shut down for the night and what the visions that occur during that time mean. The Greeks had Morpheus, who delivered prophetic messages from the gods through dreams. The Ojibwe dreamcatcher was hung to trap nightmares that disrupted the restorative sleep time. And in more recent philosophical belief, Jung suggested that there’s a collective unconscious, shared by all people, that we can access in dreams.”
“The train station,” I say. “Where Wes and I find people on Dexid.”
“No,” Grady replies dispassionately. “But also, maybe yes. Jung was talking about an inherited unconscious way of ordering and understanding the world that each individual utilizes to process his or her own personal experience.”
“English!” Tessa yells.
Grady sighs. “In dreams, we all have the same basic ways of trying to work out the personal problems that we can’t solve while we’re awake. Reductive enough for you?”
She fake-smiles.
“But you make me wonder,” he adds ominously. “What if that shared space was in fact tangible? After you fall asleep, when you wake up in unconsciousness, you said you’re in a train station?”
“Yeah, Grand Central,” I say.
“Why Grand Central?” Tessa asks.
“Yeah, why Grand Central?” Grady echoes.
They look at me expectantly, but I have no answer. I’ve never before wondered why I’ve entered the train station every night since I’ve been on the Dexid or what the significance of the space or location is. But when I open my mouth to say as much, a forgotten truth comes out instead.
“Ralphie, my tech, mentioned it to me my first night in the clinic. I was asking him what to expect while on the Dexid, and he told me another patient visualized the train station once they fell asleep.”
Grady claps his hands together, causing Tessa to squeak. “That’s great! That explains it.”
“Yeah, I totally get it now,” she sasses.
“The train station is just a construct,” Grady says, ignoring her. “An imagined space you’ve clung to so that you could order the void. I’m guessing Wes was either the patient who first imagined Grand Central or the tech planted the same visual with him right before he fell asleep for the first time on Dexid. Either way, it was just bread crumbs to lead you to where you needed to be: an actualized shared unconsciousness into which you, Sarah, can astral project. You and Wes are like shamans, metaphysically traveling into a nonphysical realm where the rules of our reality do not apply.”
I stare at Grady, speechless. Part of me wants to shout for joy, to thank him for not just believing but understanding my impossible reality, while the other part of me is so overwhelmed by the possible truth of it that I feel like I’m about to cry. Before I can put any of this into words, Tessa chimes in.
“Okay, wait,” she says slowly. “Not that I’m onboard with any of this, but for the sake of argument, I think I get the shaman thing. Don’t they believe that, like, the mind isn’t in the body to begin with? And if you drink some nasty concoction, you can get into other people and sort of control them?”
Grady and I stare at her, impressed.
“What?” she says with a shrug. “I know things too.” Dexterously, she grabs a brownie bite from the bag I bought at the bake sale and tosses it into her mouth.
“Today’s most potent concoctions come in pill form,” Grady says. “The Dexid must have allowed you to connect with other people who had been narcotically induced into this state of literalized collective unconscious.”
“Like you were,” I say.
“Like I was,” he agrees. “But when I took the Dexid, I became a passive participant in that realm. Unlike you who, thanks to those mysterious functions that grow exponentially when you take that drug, is able to be in total, active control. And the more you took, the more control you had. Not just of yourself but of the entire Dexid-shared unconscious space and anyone in it.”
“But not just me,” I say.
“No,” he replies solemnly. “Not just you.”
The specter of Wes has entered the room and brought us back to terrifying reality.
“Why me and Wes?” I ask. “There are other people in the Dexid trial, but they’re not jumping into anyone else’s skin.”
“Anyone else with RBD?” Tessa asks. “Any other kids?”
I shake my head.
Grady taps the side of his glasses. “Maybe it’s your disorder. Maybe it’s your brain. You know the brain is still very much under construction in adolescence, developing key parts of the cortex and contending with more gray matter than scientists once thought. Add to that the incredibly volatile and unpredictable hormonal changes of the teen years, and it’s no wonder you and Wes have a unique response to an untested drug. But whatever the reason, the fact remains, you are special. And so is Wes.”
For a while, we’re all quiet, not knowing what else to say. Tessa shoves more brownie into her mouth. I join her.
Finally, she breaks the silence. “Oh, I know. Why don’t we just keep the Dexid away from Wes? I mean, without it, he’s just a creep. So if we make sure that Wes can’t dose anyone or take a pill himself, we’re in the clear, right?”
Grady smiles. “That’s brilliant. All things being equal, the simplest answer is the right one. Occam’s razor.”
“Uh, sure,” Tessa says.
“I took the Dexid myself,” Grady offers. “But how did you guys dose Gigi and the rest without them knowing? I assume you used the stash I gave you?”
“Yeah,” I say, feeling the absolute definition of ashamed. “But Wes was in charge of the dosing. And to tell the truth, I never knew how he did it.”
“Well, he definitely didn’t hand them a pill,” Tessa says. She begins to yawn, speaking before she’s finished. “There’s no way any one of them would take drugs from a stranger. Except maybe Amber.”
Grady nods. “Gigi and Kiara never did anything harder than alcohol. Maybe the occasional joint. Generally, jock girls don’t do much for my business.”
“Poor you,” Tessa says as she stretches. She leans in for the last brownie bite, but Grady snatches it in protest and shoves it in his mouth.
“Regardless,” I say, “we used up all the pills you gave us, and the clinic only doles out a week’s worth at a time. So, Wes probably has only two or three left after he dosed Jamie and took his own pills last night. On the downside, that’s one full night of damage. On the upside, it’s only one night.”
A pained grunt escapes Grady’s lips as all the redness drains from his face.
“What?” I ask.
“In my defense,” he says, “I had no idea about any of this at the time. I just assumed he wanted to rough up Josh for letting Gigi take the photos of you.”
“Who wanted to… Wes wanted to beat up Josh? Grady, what are you talking about?”
Tessa yawns loudly. “Sorry, sorry,” she says as she lazily rubs her head. Her eyes start to glaze over. “I’m just going to lay down for a minute.”
My spidey-sense begins to tingle as she leans back on Grady’s bed.
“Yesterday Wes asked me to set up a meeting with Josh,” he says. “He gave me some cash and made me promise never to bring it up. As I said, I thought he wanted to kick that loser’s ass, which was fine with me. Josh is a douche. I had no idea Wes was after more Dexid.”
I register this very bad news, but when I try to gasp, a yawn comes out instead. I look over at Tessa, who is cuddling up with a pillow.
“Gigi would never take a pill from Wes,” I say. “But if it was hidden in something else…”
The only thing Wes learned from boarding school was how to slip a girl a roofie undetected, I think. My stomach drops to the center of the earth, and I trip on my feet as I scramble over the bed to Tessa.
I shake her hard. “How many brownies did you eat?”
“Huh?” she asks groggily.
“How many brownie bites did you eat? The ones from the bake sale. The ones I bought?”
For a brief moment, she’s wide awake. “Five, six? I ate six of them.”
“Genius,” Grady mutters. I glare at him. “I mean, uh-oh. Be right back.” He runs to the bathroom and makes himself puke up the Dexid-laced baked good.
“Listen to me, Tessa,” I say desperately. “Wes won’t hurt you if I’m there. He just wants me. And I’ll be with you soon. You’ll be okay. I promise.”
I try not to let her see the panic that screams inside me. Tessa will be asleep and vulnerable to Wes within moments. How much did I eat? How soon will I be in the dream with her? With him?
“I should have known he was after you that first time we saw him,” Tessa says, the fear subtle but evident in her exhausted voice.
“Wes?”
She yawns again, and I follow suit. “He was too quick to smack down Gigi for a girl he’d never even met before.”
“You mean in the hallway at school?” I shake my head, which is starting to feel awfully heavy. “No, remember? I told you tonight. That wasn’t the first time he and I saw each other. It was a few nights before, the night of the sleepover. Wes was in my dream in the woods.”
I still. How could I not have realized this sooner? The first time I ever saw Wes, the first dream I shared with him, took place in the preserve behind the Horsemen’s football field. It didn’t originate in the train station, because it was my dream.
“And I wasn’t on Dexid,” I say out loud.
Grady’s right. Everyone has access to the dream realm, whether they’re on Dexid or not. We each make sense of it in our own way. Wes’s train station is just another version of my nature preserve, of Grady’s carnival, of Gigi’s kitchen. We order the chaos of the unknown to control it.
Only Wes and I are different from everyone else. Since we were kids, our bodies have reacted to our dreams in a way that other peoples’ don’t. That gave us access to the entirety of the dream world; we just didn’t know it until the magic cocktail of RBD, teenaged hormones, and Dexid brought our conscious thought into the game. It’s how I found Tessa in her dream at the beach and how Wes found me in the woods. The doorway into each other’s dreams has always been there—the Dexid just gives us the key to unlock it.
Now I have to slam the door shut.
“Tessa, when you fall asleep, go to the woods behind the school. Hide in the trees and wait for me. I’ll find you there.”
“The woods,” she repeats on an exhale.
“I’ll be there soon,” I say. My limbs start to tingle. “I won’t let him hurt you.”
She looks at me through half-closed lids before falling deeply asleep.
Grady appears in the doorway to his room.
My eyes are heavy now. “He’ll be on more Dexid, so he’ll be stronger than me,” I say, my words beginning to slur.
“Then be smarter than him,” Grady replies. “You just told Tessa that you weren’t even on Dexid the first time you saw Wes, right? Use that. You may need the Dexid to control other people, but not to take on Wes. You two are special. You really are linked. But while he’s whining about it, you can use it. Use everything you know that he doesn’t to gain an advantage. Give me the list.”
“I don’t need the Dexid to reach him,” I mumble as I lie down beside Tessa.
Grady nods.
“The train station isn’t real.”
He kneels beside me. “Because there is no physical landscape. Ignore the architecture. It’s all just there to order something you don’t understand. So stop relying on it. Break through it. Wes believes he’s living outside the box. But you know there isn’t any box at all.”
The length of my blinking is getting longer now. Another yawn forces its way out.
“I’ve seen you on the field, Sarah,” Grady says, his voice distant, as if coming from the far end of a tunnel. “You’re a killer. So take him out.”
My eyelids slide shut.
I am asleep.