Dreamland by Dessen, Sarah
Dreamland
My sister Cass ran away the morning of my sixteenth birthday. She left my present, wrapped and sitting outside my bedroom door, and stuck a note for my parents under the coffeemaker. None of us heard her leave. I was dreaming when I woke up suddenly to the sound of my mother screaming. I ran to my door, threw it open, and promptly tripped over my gift, whacking my face on a hall light switch. My face was aching as I got to my feet and ran down the hall to the kitchen, where my mother was standing by the coffeemaker with Cass's note in her hand. “I just don't understand this,” she was saying shakily to my father, who was standing beside her in his pajamas without his glasses on. The coffeemaker was spitting and gurgling happily behind them, like this was any other morning. “She can't just leave. She can't.” “Let me see the note,” my father said calmly, taking it out of her hand. It was on Cass's thick, monogrammed stationery with matching envelopes. I had the same ones, same initials: CO. Later, when I read it, I saw it was completely concise and to the point. Cass was not the type to waste words. Mom and Dad, I want you to know, first, that I'm sorry about this. Someday I hope I'll be able to explain it well enough so that you'll understand. Please don't worry. I'll be in touch. I love you both. Cass My mother wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and looked at me. “She's gone,” she said. “She went to be with him, I know it. How can she do this? She's supposed to be at Yale in two weeks.” “Margaret,” my father said, squinting at the note. “Calm down.” The “him” was Cass's boyfriend, Adam: He was twenty-?one, had a goatee, and lived in New York working on the Lamont Whipper Show. It was one of those shock talk shows where people tell their boyfriends they've been sleeping with their best friends and guests routinely include Klansmen and eighty-?pound four-?year-?olds. Adam's job mostly consisted of getting coffee, picking up people at the airport, and pulling guests off each other during the frequent fights that scored the show big ratings.
Since she'd come home from the beach three weeks agoshe'd met Adam there Cass had been glued to the TV each day at 4 p.m., wishing aloud for a good fight just so she could catch a glimpse of him.
Usually she did, smiling at the sight of him charging onstage, his face serious, to untangle two scrapping sisters or a couple of rowdy cross-?dressers. My father put the note down on the table and walked to the phone. “I'm calling the police,” he said, and my mother burst into tears again, her hands rising to her face. Over her shoulder, through the glass door and over the patio, I could see our neighbors, Boo and Stewart Connell. They were cutting through the tree line that separated our houses for my birthday brunch; Boo had a bouquet of fresh-?cut zinnias, bright and colorful, in her hand. “I just can't believe this,” my mother said to me, pulling out a chair and sitting down at the table. She was shaking her head. “What if something happens to her? She's only eighteen.” “Yes, hello, I'm calling to report a missing person,” my father said suddenly, in his official Dean of Students voice. “Cassandra O'Koren. Yes. She's my daughter.” I had a sudden memory pop into my head: my mother, standing in the doorway of Cass's and my childhood room, back when we had twin beds and pink wallpaper. She would always kiss us, then stand in the doorway after turning off the light, her shadow stretching down the length of the room between us. She was always the last thing I tried to see before I fell asleep. “See you in dreamland,” she'd whisper, and blow us a kiss before shutting the door quietly behind her.
Like dreamland was a real place, tangible, where we would all wander close enough to catch glimpses and brush shoulders. I always went to sleep determined to go there, to find her and Cass, and sometimes I did. But it was never the way I imagined it would be. Now my mother sat weeping as my father reported Cass's vital statisticsfive-?four, brown hair, brown eyes, mole on left cheekand I had the sudden sinking feeling that dreamland might be the only place we'd be seeing her for a while. I heard a knock and looked up to see Boo and Stewart standing on the patio, waving at us. They'd been our neighbors for as long as I could remember, since before Cass or I was even born. They were former hippies, now New Agers; they believed in massage, fresh-?baked homemade bread, and the Dalai Lama. They had absolutely nothing in common with my parents, except proximity, which had led to eighteen years of being neighbors and our best family friends. “Good morning!” Boo called out to us through the door, holding up the flowers for me to see. “Happy birthday!” She reached down and pushed the door open, then stepped inside with Stewart following. He was carrying a bowl and a plate, each covered with a brightly colored napkin, which he put down on the table in front of my mother. “We brought blueberry buckwheat pancake mix and sliced mangoes,” Stewart said in his soft voice, smiling at me. “Your favorites.” Boo was crossing the room, arms already extended, to pull me close for a tight, long hug. “Happy birthday, Caitlin,” she whispered in my ear. She smelled like bread and incense. “This will be your best year yet. I can feel it.” “Don't count on it,” I said, and she pulled back and frowned at me, confused, just as my father hung up the phone and cleared his throat.
“Technically,” he said, “they can't do anything for twenty-?four hours. But they're keeping an eye out for her. We need to call all her friends, right now. Maybe she told someone something.” “What's going on?” Boo asked, and at the table my mother just shook her head. She couldn't even say it.
“Margaret? What is it?” “It's Cassandra,” my father told her, his voice flat. “It appears that she's run away.” This was my father, always formal: He lived for supposedlys and theoreticallys, not believing anything without proper proof. “Oh, my God,” Boo said, pulling out a chair and yanking it close to my mother before sitting down. “When did she go?” “I don't know,” my mother said softly, and Boo took one of her hands, rubbing the fingers with her own, as Stewart moved to stand behind her, his hand on her shoulder. They were touchy people, always had been. My father, however, was not, so neither made a move toward him. My mother sniffled. “I don't know anything.” “Caitlin,” my father said to me briskly, “get a list together of her friends, anyone she might have talked to. And the number for that Whitter show, or whatever it's called.” “Okay,” I said, not bothering to correct him. He nodded before turning his back to my mother and Boo and Stewart to look out across the patio at the few squirrels crowding the bird feeders. On my way back to my room I picked up my present from where it was lying in the middle of the hallway. It was wrapped in blue paper, with no card, but I knew it was from Cass. She would never have forgotten my birthday. I took it into my room and sat down on my bed. In the mirror over my bureau I could see my face was scratched from where I'd hit the light switch, the skin around it a bright pink. No one had even noticed. I unwrapped Cass's present slowly, folding the paper carefully as I slipped it off. It was a book, and as I turned it over I read the letters on the cover: Dream Journal. All around the words were comets and stars, moons and suns, scattered across a light purple background. It was beautiful. The first page was an introduction about dreams, what they mean, and why we should remember them.
This was Cass's thingshe had been big into symbols and signs in the last year. She said you never knew what the world was trying to tell you, that you had to pay attention every second.
As I closed the cover, something caught my eye on one of the first pages. It was an inscription in Cass's loopy script, my name big, the message little. Caitlin, it said in black ink, I'll see you there.
CASS