At lunch, after Freak had traded two bananas for a roast beef sandwich and a third banana for some carrot sticks, he returned to the table and we discussed Alf and the zucchini crayon.
“I don’t think he’s going to share with us,” was Freak’s opinion. “He wants us to bring the crayon because he’s going to ask to see it and then he’s going to take it from us and lock it away somewhere. Then he’ll kick us out. All because you had to go and tell him we had it. That’s assuming he’s not a totally deranged serial killer who’s just luring us into his house so he can add to his collection of kneecap doorknobs.”
“I don’t know. He didn’t sound like the sanest person when we were talking to him.”
“We should vote.”
Fiona was three tables away. I caught her eye and waved, gesturing that she should come over, but she turned away and started talking to the girl on her right. This was normal.
I started to wave her over again, but froze when I noticed Francine “Nails” Norton approaching Fiona from behind. Francine’s lunch tray was filled to the edges with something excessively wiggly. The day’s dessert was strawberry Jell-O, and it looked like Nails had repeatedly gone back for seconds.
Freak was engrossed in scraping surplus mustard from the beef of his sandwich. I nudged him, and he looked up in time to see Nails tilt the tray and send a mountain of shimmering red gelatin down on Fiona’s head.
Nails dropped the tray to the floor with a clatter and said—rather insincerely, I thought—“Oh! I’m s-o-o-o sorry!” Then she walked away as if nothing had happened. The applause from the lunchroom was even louder than when Rudy Sorkin had slipped on the string bean.
Fiona sat very straight, raking her fingers slowly, deliberately, through her hair, depositing gobs of pinkish goo on the lunch tray in front of her. Then she stood, turned, and walked stiffly to the girls’ room. Just before she got there, the door to the boys’ room opened and Travis Miller stepped out. They stood eye-to-eye for a moment, then a ruby drop of yuckiness ran down Fiona’s forehead, clung briefly to the tip of her nose, and dropped onto her blouse. She uttered a weird, inhuman cry and dodged past him.
“We knew something like that was going to happen,” I stated.
“Yes, we did,” agreed Freak, who had returned to scrutinizing his sandwich.
It wouldn’t have happened if Fiona hadn’t been the photography editor of the school newspaper. The sports page of the latest issue had featured three photos of the girls’ field hockey team and absolutely no photos of Nails Norton’s boyfriend, Morgue MacKenzie, scoring the winning touchdown in the big football game against Flanders, even though it was well known that the historic moment had been captured by the school photographer.
“The photos vanished,” Fiona had told Freak and me at the bus stop the day after the game. “I saw them disappear one by one out of the camera, and then off the computer screen!”
“You hit the delete key with your elbow,” Freak assured her.
“My elbows aren’t that pointy!”
“A guy could shave with your elbows.”
Fiona was a target the moment the paper came out. Nobody slighted Nails or Morgue without getting messed with. I accidentally stepped on Morgue’s foot one day and wound up stuck in a Salvation Army clothing-drop bin for over an hour before anybody thought to investigate why the bin periodically shouted for help. Most people walking by the bin had assumed the shrill “Help! Help!” was a recorded announcement requesting donations.
Stuff like that happens to me pretty regularly. I get picked on a lot because I’m shorter than practically every other boy in our class. Also, because of a car crash I was in when I was little, I’ve got one leg that’s the tiniest bit shorter than the other. It doesn’t affect how I walk, but it shows up when I run.
Freak had it somewhat easier in school than Fiona or I did. He had a cool nickname and he was on the track team. Most of the other kids respected him, even though he didn’t seem to care whether they did or not. If he happened to be around on an occasion when I was being picked on, he almost always found a way to distract my tormentors, usually by showing them something shiny. You couldn’t ask for more than that in a friend.
Fiona was wearing her gym suit on the late bus that afternoon. As soon as the bus had dumped all of its basketball players and we were the only kids still on board, Fiona came up from the back and sat with us. She had her Jell-O–stained clothes in a plastic bag and her hair slicked back like she had just been swimming.
“That was some show in the cafeteria today,” Freak said conversationally. He sniffed the air near Fiona. “Is that strawberry perfume?”
Fiona glared at him.
“Are we doing this, or not?” she asked.
“You plan on meeting Alf dressed in your gym shorts?”
“I’ll be all set if we have to run. Are we bringing him the crayon?”
Before Freak could answer, I said, “Yes.” They looked at me. “It’s his crayon. We found it. If he wants to give us a reward for finding it, that would be fair. If he wants to share with us whatever he can sell it for, that would be great.”
“And if he wants to snatch it back from us and throw us in his dungeon, that would be terrific,” said Freak, imitating my voice.
“If that happens,” I said, clenching my fist and punching the air, “River Man will save us!”
River Man was what I used to call myself in the days when Freak and I played superheroes. River Man could channel energy. He said things like, “Go with the flow!” as he sent bad guys tumbling down the street in a flood of raw power. River Man helped me explain why, for some reason, my aunt had embroidered my initials on the front of one of my shirts. I sometimes pretended to be him whenever thinking about my parents got to be a little too much for me. It was all right for River Man’s face to be wet; water was one of his weapons.
“Right!” said Freak, giving a basketball he had found in the aisle an enormous bounce and catching it as it ricocheted off the ceiling. “If that’s what we’re doing, I’ll run over to the house and get the crayon.”
“While you’re doing that,” Fiona announced, “I’m changing my clothes.”
The bus let us off and Freak and Fiona headed across the field toward Bagshot Road. I stopped by the sofa.
It had rained briefly during the afternoon. The leaves on the ground were wet and shiny, but the sofa, I was somehow not surprised to see, was completely dry.
I stretched out on it and stared into the overhead tree branches. An escaped party balloon fluttered on a twig near the top of one of the trees. As I sank comfortably into the cushions, I closed my eyes. The sun filtering through the tree branches caused odd, yet surprisingly clear, shapes to appear on the insides of my eyelids. I saw four rectangles arranged like windowpanes, two panes above the others. The upper right pane pulsed twice with wavering sunlight. Then the upper left pulsed once and the right pulsed twice again.
It was hypnotic. After the third or fourth repetition, I felt myself drifting into sleep.
And I dreamed.
I knew I was dreaming because I was walking along Breeland Road toward the bus stop, but when I got there, the pavement ended in a clearing where the bus stop should have been. I stepped into the clearing and was suddenly on the top of a hill. I could see land stretching out in all directions, full of forests and lakes and villages. In the distance, where the horizon should have been, the land curved upward. It curved upward and made a dome over my head. I looked straight up, through patchy clouds, and I could still see land. The overhead land was very far away. I thought I could make out continents and oceans. It was like I was in a planetarium, only instead of projecting stars on the ceiling, somebody was projecting a map.
“It’s not to scale, of course,” said a voice behind me.
I turned and found Mr. Hendricks, my English teacher, standing behind me. He was wearing a suit made from the same material the sofa was upholstered with. It made him look like a giant leprechaun.
“You’d need a telescope to see this much detail, if you were actually there,” he added.
“Actually where?”
“Indorsia.”
“Is that a vocabulary word?”
“It is for you. I hasten to add I am not really your English teacher. Mr. Hendricks is currently in his apartment reading a trashy detective novel with the shades drawn. I am taking his form because you seem to like him and I wanted to appear to you as someone familiar.”
“Thanks. That’s not really something someone would say in a dream.”
“Possibly not. Then again, you’re dreaming, so maybe it is.”
“What is Indorsia?”
“This place.” The person who wasn’t Mr. Hendricks gestured at the landscape around us.
“It looks like it’s on the inside surface of a giant, hollow sphere,” I said. “It’s probably the inside of the basketball Freak was playing with on the bus. That’s how my dreams work. I put in things from right before I fell asleep. If I’m eating pretzels while watching a monster movie on TV and I doze off—”
“You dream about a monster eating pretzels?”
“I dream about pretzels eating a monster. I’m a little messed up.”
“You may think of Indorsia as being on the inside surface of a basketball if you wish. The analogy is not a bad one.”
“And you’re probably supposed to be the sofa. You’re upholstered the same way.”
“It would be more accurate to say I am the sofa’s spokesperson. The sofa is a wonderful example of smart furniture. Smart furniture is all the rage among upper-class Indorsians. It keeps itself clean; it digests stains; it can change its color to match the drapes. It grows from cubes no bigger than this.”
He held out his hand. Something resembling a sugar cube sat in the center of his outstretched palm. The cube was the same green as his suit.
I was used to people talking crazy in my dreams. I knew enough to humor him before he turned into a forty-foot-tall Morgue MacKenzie.
“Furniture grows from tiny cubes, huh? That’s… terrific.”
“It saves a bundle in shipping costs. It also makes it easier to pack if you’re being pursued by storm troopers.”
“Good point,” I agreed, glancing around for possible escape routes.
“It took about a year for the sofa to grow to full size. The nannies replicated themselves and constructed it according to a standard template. This particular sofa is unique in that it has nanotech factories in both armrests. The nannies there can manufacture small items, once they’ve been given a sample. Handy if you need spare change.”
“Nannies?” I looked up, half expecting to see Mary Poppins out parasailing.
“Very tiny machines. So tiny, they could float through your bloodstream without your being aware of it.”
“Sounds… ticklish.”
“The most interesting thing about this sofa is its ability to tesser.”
“It grows hair?”
“It can fold space. It can teleport. It has a maximum range of two miles, and it has to recharge between transits, but it figured out how to do this all on its own. It is the only entity in either world that can do it.”
“Tesser?”
“Isn’t that a word from a children’s book?”
“Yes. And robot is a word from a stage play. New words have to come from somewhere.”
“Then, if you ask me, this whole dream is getting hyperdiculous.”
“I don’t hold out too much hope for hyperdiculous. I don’t see it coming into common usage. It’s not frabjous enough.”
“I’m going to wake myself up now.”
I pinched my forearm and winced. Nothing changed.
“I’m sorry, but you have to stay asleep for another twelve seconds. We haven’t quite finished the neural mapping. Wouldn’t you like to know where the sofa gets the energy it needs to tesser, and to manufacture small objects, and to think?”
“No,” I said.
“I will tell you anyway.” He gave his watch a quick glance. Then he leaned in close, looked from side to side as if he were afraid of being overheard, and whispered, “Dust bunnies!”
Fiona woke me up. She poked me in the arm until I opened my eyes. As she leaned over me, I noticed that her hair was wet from a quick shower. Even though she had run a comb through it, it still looked stringy. She was wearing pants with an orange checked pattern and a purple sweatshirt that was a little damp around the collar.
“How can you possibly sleep at a time like this?” she asked. “What were you dreaming? Your eyelids were fluttering a mile a minute. That’s a sure sign of REM sleep. Rapid Eye Movement. That’s when dreams happen.”
“Not to be confused with RMM sleep,” said Freak, leaning in beside her.
“What’s that?” demanded Fiona.
“The kind of sleep I assume you have,” said Freak. “Rapid Mouth Movement.”
It doesn’t take much to distract Fiona. Being angry with Freak usually does it. She stopped wondering what I had been dreaming and turned to argue with him. I tuned the both of them out.
I sat and looked up and down the length of the sofa. I remembered that my aunt Bernie had been complaining about dust bunnies the day before. Dust bunnies, she’d said, were clumps of hair and dust that collected under furniture. I found it reassuring to be able to trace at least part of the dream back to its source. The dust bunnies. The basketball. The sofa itself.
I thought about how things from our waking lives sometimes manage to show up in our dreams. I was sometimes able to trick myself into dreaming about my parents by looking at photos of them before I went to sleep. They had died before I was two, so I had never had a real chance to know them. In my dreams, we were always going places together. In the best dream I had ever had of them, we went on a picnic.
I suddenly realized I was gripping the edges of the cushion I was sitting on very tightly. As I started to let go, I thought I felt the cushion squeeze back. I got off the sofa as quickly as I could.
“I dreamed the sofa showed me how it was made!” I blurted out, interrupting my friends’ argument. “Mr. Hendricks was there. Only it wasn’t Mr. Hendricks; it was the sofa.”
Fiona stopped waving her finger in Freak’s face. They both turned and stared at me.
“Mr. Hendricks was the sofa?” said Freak.
“It’s that stupid velour jacket he wore yesterday,” said Fiona, immediately knowing more about my dream than I did.
“There are nanotech factories in the armrests and I was in this place where people live on the inside instead of the outside, and the sofa can tesser.” I noticed the blank looks on my friends’ faces. “I’m not explaining this well, am I?”
“Were there purple unicorns?” inquired Freak.
“No. What? Should there have been? It seemed so real.”
“Most dreams do, you know,” said Fiona, not unkindly.
“Can we get on with this?” Freak nodded toward the Underhill place. He was holding a cigar box. I assumed he had the crayon in it, along with maybe the coin, the domino, and possibly the plaid sock. Freak confirmed this, adding that the box also contained the crushed peanut shell. He said that anything that was Alf’s should, absolutely, be returned to Alf.
We walked to the gate.
“Hello?” I said.
The hinged door in the gatepost flipped down.
“You’re late,” said Alf.
“Some of us had to freshen up,” I explained. “How do we do this?”
“In a moment, I will open the gate. But there are some rules. When you walk up the drive, stay to the right. This will keep you under the trees. If, at any time, you look up and you can see open sky directly above you, you will have to turn around and leave and we will have to reschedule. Stay under the cover of the trees at all times. Do not come to the main door of the house. There is a servants’ entrance on the side. You will be able to reach this door without breaking cover. The key is under the mat. Wipe your feet and let yourselves in.”
“You think somebody is watching from above?” I asked.
“Somebody is always watching from above. Step back from the gate, please.”
The sound of turning gears came from within the gatepost. The gate shook and then slid sideways to the right. It stopped when it had opened wide enough to allow us through single file.
Freak went first and I followed Fiona.
The gate clanged shut behind us.
