Free In Dreams by Erica Orloff Page B

upstate. We were in the middle of a heat wave. The temperature was ninety-seven that day.”
    “Wow, Henry. I’m slightly freaked out by yourmemory. But it’s really cool that you remembered.”
    She stares at him, and I swear they have an honest-to-God—or as Aphrodite would say, honest-to-Zeus—moment. So I say, “I’m gonna run to the girls’ bathroom. I’ll be back in a few minutes.” I mean, who am I to interfere with a soul-mate match?
    I stand up and walk across the cafeteria, dodging a thrown napkin and Billy Kaye from the football team walking backward, not paying attention. When I look back at Henry and Annie, their heads are leaning across the table, and they’re deep in conversation. She’s using her hands when she talks, a sure sign she’s happily excited. I feel my heart sort of go “aww.” They are cute together.
    I stroll down the hall to the girls’ bathroom, walking around groups of kids milling near gray-green lockers, and I open the door. Oddly enough, despite it being lunchtime, the bathroom is completely empty. My footsteps echo as I walk across the floor. I look in the weird safety-glass mirror that I always think should be in a carnival funhouse and not a bathroom. As usual, the sinks are a mess, with crumbled brown paper towels on the floor, and wetness in the sinks themselves. The air reeks of cigarette smoke and the staleness of a bathroom with one tiny window that doesn’t really open.
    I find an open stall and shut the door. Then I hear someone walk in—actually, more than one someone—sets of heels along the black-and-white ceramic tiles. Click-click-click. Click-click-click. Click-click-click.
    Which is kind of weird, since no one in our school really wears high heels. Except Ms. Peluso, the drama teacher, and Ms. Margarite, the Spanish teacher, who always wears these swirly skirts, very high heels, and black turtlenecks. I think it’s because she’s only four feet ten, and if she doesn’t wear heels, she won’t even be able to see over the kids in the halls.
    But I know the heels do not belong to them. I feel it.
    Then I hear some kind of hissing sound. Like from my dream last night.
    And I get seriously freaked out. I peer through the crack around the edge of my stall door and see three goth-looking girls walking toward me. The three girls from the club. Girls? I mean freaks.
    I glance down at the back of my hand again. The stamp is still there. I didn’t wash it off because I needed to look at it today, to reassure myself that the kiss was real. That we have been together.
    But if we were together and the kiss was real, then so are they.
    I’m trapped. I peek through the crack again and look at them. They are beautiful, in this androgynous, unusual way, but scary-looking with black bobs, whitish foundation over airbrushed-perfect skin, and crimson lips. They have eyeliner drawn in a very dramatic way, extremely heavy, catlike and extended at the outer corners. Their eye makeup is smoky, and they’re wearing some seriously thick false eyelashes beneath plucked high-arched brows. They are each wearing a skintight black leather dress—with a hemline so high that if our principal saw them, he would have a fit, considering our school dress code. Instant detention. “A skirt must reach at least one inch past a girls’ fingertips when she has her hands flat at her sides.” So says the school handbook. And Mr. Bentley stops girls in the hall for skirt patrol.
    Only I am pretty sure these three don’t care. And I know that they’re not students. They’re not even of this world. They would mock detention.
    Or kill and eat everyone in it.
    “Irissssssssssssss,” one says, her voice strangely metallic, “come out and play.”
    I try to swallow but have no spit. The sound of her voice feels like a cockroach just skittered up my spine. I look up at the ceiling. There’s nowhere forme to go. I consider crawling under my stall walls into the stall next to mine—despite