Free Dream Boy by Mary Crockett, Madelyn Rosenberg Page B

grabbed a wad of napkins from the little metal box and covered my face.
    “Did I say something wrong?”
    “It wasn’t wrong,” I said. “It was just that no one’s ever said anything like that to me before.”
    “I have,” he said.
    “Yeah, but…” That was then. In dreamland or whatever. It was different hearing it in real life, with the glare of the everyday all around me. The orange plastic booth with a little tear on the seat, the stained ceramic mug, the jittery light from the ceiling fans. “Right,” I said, pointedly changing the subject. “How does it all work then? How did you get here?”
    “Who knows?” he said. “In old stories, there was our world, the world of dreams—the place you go when you dream. And on the other side, there was Earth, which was empty except for shadows. They say a dream crossed into the shadow Earth through a tunnel of mist. And she became the first dreamer.”
    “That’d be like…what? Our first human? Are you saying she came from your world, that she was like Eve?”
    “What’s eve?”
    “ Who ,” I corrected. “It’s a name. Our first woman. Eve .” Which made me think about last night’s serpents again.
    “The dreamer didn’t have a name,” he said. “But her dreams were so powerful, they spun a cord between the worlds—yours and mine.” Martin’s eyes grew distant, like he was looking out a plane window. “The legend says she would walk along that cord between the worlds. And sometimes she’d lead others from our world back with her to earth. They lived with her there. So, I guess if she was your first woman, they’d be your first people, right?”
    “Weird.” I was getting tangled in all this talk of different worlds.
    “Of course, it wasn’t like that for me,” he went on. “I didn’t see any rope or a tunnel of mist or anything.”
    “What did you see?”
    “It happened so fast. Everything flexed at once, and then contracted.” He paused, looking for the right words. “I felt like I’d been squeezed inside the nozzle of a vacuum. And I was here.”
    “Vacuum,” I repeated, but so softly he couldn’t hear me.
    “I’ve heard stuff about that, too. And these stories aren’t so old. They say one dream escaped to your world by running through fire. One crawled through pipes. Compared to them, I got off easy. Not that I ever took it seriously, the stuff I heard.”
    I think this was the first time in my life that my jaw literally dropped. “So there are others like you? And they come through pipes?”
    “Yeah, I guess it sounds strange.”
    “You think? Pipes!”
    “I’m not saying it happened that way,” he said. “They’re just stories. It’s not like I know they’re all here exactly.”
    He rubbed his jaw with the flat of his hand.
    I waited for more but it didn’t come.
    “Anyway, I’m here now, right?” He nodded his head a little too emphatically. Maybe he was avoiding saying something, or maybe the sugar from the syrup just kicked in. “And I bet the longer I’m here, the more human I’ll be.”
    “Oh.” I could actually feel my mind whir. “You’re not human now?”
    “No, I totally am.”
    “But you could be more human?”
    “Right.”
    Apparently dream people aren’t real big on logic. There are degrees of human-ness? This is the kind of thing that would have made Will zap into debate-mode. Well, this and the pipes.
    “Oh my God.” It just hit me. “Do you have a belly button?”
    On the boat, what I’d seen of his body looked totally normal, but suddenly I wasn’t sure if I’d noticed his belly button.
    He rolled his eyes and lifted his shirt just enough for me to see a standard-issue belly button and a few dark hairs trailing down his stomach. If it were Will, I would have poked him. With Martin, I just tried to breathe.
    He pulled his shirt down. “What if I didn’t have a belly button?” he said. “Would you still…”
    I waited to see what word he’d use, but he just left it