Free Dream Boy by Mary Crockett, Madelyn Rosenberg

black, some gray with bands around their necks. The girl keeps walking, oblivious.
    “Stop!” I shout. But again, she doesn’t hear. I flounder backward, sinking into the mucky border between lake and land. A large black snake slithers toward my feet.

Chapter 13
    I’ve never been the type to freak out over nightmares. I figured dreams were just dreams—my mind’s way of talking to itself. If the dream was frightening, well then no big deal; I simply had something frightening that I needed to say.
    But now I knew how real dreams could become.
    So yeah, if you call running into my mom’s room at the break of dawn and catapulting myself onto her bed “freaking out,” then I guess you might say I freaked out.
    Luckily, my mom, who had been up late all week, was groggy enough that she just mumbled, “Okay?” and flopped over, mid-snore.
    I had plenty of time to stare at the beige ceiling and contemplate life, the universe, and the relative likelihood of a bunch of snakes slithering up the side of the bed and carting me away to my doom. On one hand, it seemed pretty far-fetched. On the other hand, so did Martin.
    In the end, though, it was Martin, not a passel of snakes, who carted me away. And not to my doom, unless an overload of butter and sugar could be considered instruments of the apocalypse. I thought we’d be walking or riding bikes downtown, but Martin showed up in a shiny red sports car, like something Mac Z would drive. It had soft leather seats and smelled like cinnamon, and for once instead of overthinking ( Where’d it come from? Why cinnamon? ), I hopped in and enjoyed the ride.
    Our lunch date turned out to be breakfast—not breakfast time, but breakfast food—because that’s what he wanted to eat. I guess he liked my mom’s cooking.
    “You need some pancakes to go with that syrup?” I asked, handing him a napkin.
    “That’s a joke, right?”
    We were sitting in an orange vinyl booth at the MELET SHOPPE, which would have been OMELET SHOPPE, except some drunk hunter had shot out the O.
    “It’s a joke,” I agreed. “What I mean is: that’s a LOT of syrup.” I looked at the pool of liquid cascading off the edges of his plate.
    Martin smacked his lips in a way that wasn’t gross, like if an old person did it.
    I smiled. “So I take it you didn’t eat, you know, before?”
    “Not much,” he said. “In fact, I’m not sure I even have to eat yet. I think my body’s still getting used to…being a body.”
    He raised a wedge of pancakes on his fork and crammed it in his mouth. “It’s surprising how infrequently people dream about food. Food causes dreams. Like pizza. But people don’t dream about actually eating it. Except grapes. A lot of people dream about eating grapes.”
    “Oh.” I made a mental note to look up grapes in my dream app, but I was starting to think Cynthia Rêve was out of her league.
    “Grapes and strawberries,” Martin continued. “Or maybe it was just my people.”
    “Your people?”
    “My dreamers. Like you.”
    I tried to take this in. “So I’m one of your ‘dreamers’?”
    “Well, sure.” He looked at me, tilting his head in that high-frequency-dog-whistle way.
    “I don’t know why, but I thought you were, oh, you know.” I was thinking mine , but what I said was, “I thought you were new.”
    Martin put down his fork and extended his hands, flipping them back and forth, back and forth, examining them. “I am,” he said.
    I took his two outstretched hands and held them across the table. Together we made a little slanted roof for his pancakes. It seemed like a romantic gesture, but really his hand-flipping had started to bug me. “Tell me about the others.”
    “There’s not much to say. They were just people.”
    “Like girl-people?”
    “Some.”
    “And that means what? Dozens? Hundreds? Thousands?” There must have been an edge to my voice, because Martin eyed the exit and shifted in his chair.
    “More than a hundred,” he said,