“Sure.”
“When you first got here, did you think Bixby was kind of weird?”
Jonathan chewed thoughtfully.
“I still think Bixby’s weird,” he said. “And not kind of—very. It’s not just the water. Or the snake pit or all the other funny rumors. It’s…”
“What?”
“It’s just that Bixby is really… psychosomatic.”
“It’s what?” she asked. “Doesn’t that mean ‘all in your head’ or something?”
“Yeah. Like when you feel sick, but your body’s really okay. Your mind has the power to make you sick. That’s Bixby all over: psychosomatic. The kind of place that gives you strange dreams.”
Jessica almost choked on a forkful of taco salad.
“Did I say something?” Jonathan asked.
“Mm-mm,” she managed, clearing her throat. “People keep saying stuff that makes no…” Jess paused. “That makes too much sense.”
Jonathan looked at her carefully, his brown eyes narrowing even further.
“Okay, I guess this might sound a little nuts,” Jessica admitted. “But it sometimes seems like people here in Bixby know what’s going on inside my head. Or I guess one person does, anyway. There’s this girl—half the time she talks crazy, but the other half it’s like she’s reading my mind.”
Jessica realized that Jonathan had stopped eating. He was looking at her intently.
“Do I sound insane?” she asked.
He shrugged. “I had this friend back in Philadelphia, Julio, who would go and see this psychic every time he had five bucks to blow. She was an old woman who lived in a storefront downtown, complete with a purple neon hand in the window.”
Jessica laughed. “We had palm readers like that in Chicago.”
“But she didn’t read palms or look in a crystal ball,” Jonathan said. “She just talked.”
“Was she really psychic?”
Jonathan shook his head. “I doubt it.”
“You don’t believe in that stuff?”
“Well, not as far as she goes.” Jonathan took a bite but kept talking. “I went with Julio once to watch, and I think I figured out how it worked. The woman would say weird, random things, one after another, until something rang a bell with Julio and his eyes would light up. She’d keep pushing in that direction, and he’d start talking and telling her everything. His dreams, what he was worried about, whatever. He thought that she was reading his mind, but she was only getting him to tell her what was going on inside his head.”
“Sounds like a good trick.”
“I’m not sure it was just a trick,” Jonathan said. “I mean, she really seemed to help Julio. When he was about to do something stupid, he wouldn’t listen to anyone else, but she could always talk sense into him. Like when he’d decided to run away from home one time, she was the one who talked him out of it.”
Jessica put down her fork. “So she wasn’t just ripping him off.”
“Well, the funny thing is, I’m not sure that she knew what she was doing. Maybe it was all instinct and she really thought she was psychic, you know? But she wasn’t really psychic, just psychosomatic.”
Jessica smiled, taking a thoughtful bite of her salad. The woman Jonathan had described sounded a lot like Dess. Her weird, probing questions and random statements, all delivered with total authority, had almost started Jessica believing that Dess had some kind of special power. Or at least they had fooled her enough to creep her out. Maybe it was all in her head. If Jessica believed that Dess had some special power, then in a way she did.
In any case, Dess certainly put the psycho back in psychosomatic.
“So it’s possible,” Jonathan continued, “that this girl you know isn’t completely nuts. She might have a different way of communicating, but maybe she does have something important to say.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Jessica said. “But whatever it is, I kind of wish she’d just come out and say it.”
“Maybe you’re not ready to hear it.”
Jessica looked at Jonathan with surprise. He blinked his sleepy brown eyes at her innocently.
“Well, maybe you’re right,” she said, shrugging. “But until then, I’m not going to worry about it.”
“That makes sense.”
Jessica smiled at those three words as Jonathan attacked his final sandwich. It was about time something made sense.
7
12:00 A.M.
DARK MOON
That night the blue dream came again.
Jessica had been lying awake and staring at the ceiling, relieved that it was finally the weekend. Tomorrow she was determined to finish unpacking. Searching through the fourteen boxes piled around her room was getting old. Maybe organizing her stuff would make her life feel a little bit more under control.
She must have been more tired than she’d realized. Sleep stole up on her so quietly that dreaming seemed to collide with consciousness. It was as if she blinked, and everything changed. Suddenly the world was blue, the low hum of the Oklahoma wind swallowed by silence.
She sat up, suddenly alert. The room was filled with the familiar blue light.
“Great,” she said softly. “This again.”
Tonight Jessica didn’t waste time trying to go back to sleep. If this was a dream, she was already asleep. And it was a dream. Probably.
Except for the matter of that soggy sweatshirt, of course.
She slipped out from under the covers and got dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. The motionless rain had been wonderful, so she might as well see what wonders her subconscious had cooked up this time.
Jessica looked around carefully. Everything was sharp and clear. She felt very calm, without any dreamy muzzy-headedness. She remembered from a psych class she’d taken last year that this was called “lucid dreaming.”
The light was exactly the same as in her dream the night before, a deep indigo that shone from every surface. There were no shadows, no dark corners. She peered into one of her moving boxes and could see everything inside it with equal and perfect clarity. Every object seemed to glow softly from within.
She looked out the window. There were no floating diamonds this time, just a quiet street, as still and flat as a painting.
“That’s boring,” she muttered.
Jessica crept to her door and opened it carefully. Something in this dream made her want to respect the deep silence; in the blue light the world seemed secretive and mysterious. A place to sneak through.
Halfway down the hall Beth’s door was ajar. Jess pushed it open tentatively. Her sister’s room was lit in the same deep blue as her own. It was wrapped in the same silence and flatness, though it was definitely Beth’s clothing strewn chaotically around the floor. Her sister had accomplished even less on the unpacking front than Jessica.
A shape filled the bed. The small form was tangled uncomfortably in the covers. Since the move Beth hadn’t been sleeping well, which kept her in a state of constant crankiness.
Jessica crossed to the bed and sat down gently, thinking about how little time she’d spent with Beth since they’d arrived in Bixby. Even in the months before the move her little sister’s tantrums had made her impossible to hang out with. Beth had fought the idea of leaving Chicago every step of the way, and everyone in the family had gotten into the habit of avoiding her when she was in a bad mood.
Maybe that was why this dream had led her here. Having to get used to Bixby herself, Jessica hadn’t thought much about her sister’s problems.
She reached out and rested one hand softly on Beth’s sleeping form.