“It has never happened to me like that: during the day, in the middle of everything. It’s always at night when I’m dreaming. It’s always when I wake up and I can’t get it out of my head. But today, in the park…it just hit me all of a sudden. Like you’d put a bag over my head or something. Like I’d walked into a movie theater. Yeah, more like that. Only now I can’t remember exactly what I saw. All I know is that it scared me, whatever it was. I didn’t like it. I didn’t want to see it. Most of the time, you know, it doesn’t feel like that. I don’t really care one way or the other—it’s just sort of there, like that glow in your eyes after a camera’s flash. Like that.”
“So you think it means something?”
“It must,” Jess said, nodding. “I mean it seems like they all mean something. And this one…this one was different.”
An hour later they’d made it through their homework, microwaved their dinners, and hurried to get in line for the bathroom so they could take showers before bedtime. Another hour later they were both in their beds reading prior to lights-out at ten o’clock.
Amanda leaned out of her upper bunk to speak to Jess. “I wish we could have talked to him,” she said.
“Shh!” hissed Jeannie Pucket from the rollaway. Jeannie made a point of being obnoxious whenever possible. She was Mrs. Nash’s favorite and, as a result, got all sorts of privileges the others girls did not. Amanda suspected she was also a spy for Mrs. Nash, so she didn’t mention Finn by name.
“He figured it out,” Jess said. “He’s smart that way.”
“But still.”
“I’ll see him tomorrow at school. You’ll see. I’m sure he’s worried about us, but he won’t be mad.”
Mrs. Nash didn’t allow the girls to take phone calls. Finn had no way to reach them, even if he wanted to.
“Be quiet,” Jeannie said. “It’s disrespectful. I’m trying to read.”
Amanda groaned and lay back in her bed. Not long after that, the lights were turned off and Mrs. Nash patrolled outside the rooms, prepared to punish anyone who spoke after curfew. Amanda fell into a troubled but deep sleep, drawn down by what had been an exhausting afternoon.
Sometime in the middle of the night, the bunk shook and Amanda felt herself torn from a strange dream that involved Finn in a boat in the middle of white water. She sat up to see an indistinct shadow cast onto the wall, only to realize that the glow casting the shadow was coming from a portable reading light in Jess’s lower bunk. Amanda hung her head over the edge.
Jess was sketching in her diary again.
“What are you doing?” Amanda said in a thin whisper to avoid waking the spy.
“Go back to sleep.”
“It’s the middle of the night.”
“I had a dream.”
“That’s the idea,” Amanda said. “That usually happens when we sleep. I was just in one myself.”
“One of my dreams,” Jess said. “The same dream I had at the park today.”
“The same one?” Amanda tried to view Jess’s dream diary upside down, but finally slithered off the top bunk and pushed Jess over and climbed into bed with her.
“Is that who I think it is?” Amanda said.
“I think it is,” Jess said.
“And what’s that behind him?”
“I don’t know, but it was exactly the same as I saw this afternoon, only this time I got the whole thing.”
The image she’d sketched was striking. Amanda felt tempted to point out how much of what she had drawn borrowed from this very room, for it appeared to be an older man sitting on the edge of a bunk bed with a string of gibberish written on the wall behind him.
“So you dreamt this twice, exactly the same?” This fit a pattern for Jess, and they both knew it: her dreams that repeated eventually came true in the future; this had happened too many times for them to believe it had anything to do with coincidence. It was a gift—Jess’s gift—nothing less.
“And that’s who I think it is,” Amanda continued.
“Wayne,” Jess said. “Has to be.”
“He knows about your…ability. About your dreams,” Amanda said. “You suppose he’s trying to communicate with you?”
“Who knows?”
Jess was still drawing. She was adding a horse to the background behind Wayne. “We’ve got to show this to Finn,” Amanda said. Jess continued to shade the sketch by adding dark circles under Wayne’s eyes. He looked haggard and much older than Amanda remembered. “He’s in trouble,” Jess whispered. “I think we all are,” said Amanda.