Dream of Me

It started when I was younger, I was merely a teenager when he came to visit me, he was around my age but he made it a habit. Nearly every night he’d pop into my dreams and tell me tales of love, of a different being that was human with certain advantages that fell in love in their dreams with fair maidens and white knights. He would set the stage of our shared dream so that we lay beneath the stars and he’d tell me about how we’d fall in love. I’d never believed he was real, I thought I had created him when I felt lonely and depended upon him to come but he tried to make me believe differently.

His aquamarine eyes glistened in the florescence of the school hallway, his smile reflected that of the same in his eyes. He was looking at me and smiling – no one ever looked at me with the feeling that he looked at me. That messy intertwining brown hair criss-crossed over those eyes and when he reached his hand up to touch my cheek, I was jerking away. Why was I jerking away?

He was whispering something against my ear, but I was frowning and shaking my head. What was he saying? He was running his hands up the skin of my arm, bending his head against the top of my own, a small sad smile sticking against his lips as my name left his lips. It caused my breath to hitch and pause in my throat as my heartbeat rammed against my chest.

I pushed myself out of the warmth of his arms, crossing my own arms across my chest. I turned my eyes to the ground and tried to warm myself in the deserted hallway, “Noah… you don’t… know me. This is crazy.”

He came up behind me and leaned his head against my own once more, but I kept my brown eyes, flecked with green now by the feeling of distress, turned down. I didn’t know what to do, what to say, I didn’t even recognize what he had said to me. “Angel, sweet Angel, just look at me.”

I turned my head to the side and refused to look at this boy, Noah, and said just above a whisper, “It can’t happen. It’s not real; you’re nothing more than a dream.”

It wasn’t until now that I did notice I was dreaming because it just felt so real. I was wondering why he seemed so familiar to me, and it was because since I was thirteen years old, this boy had been inhabiting my dreams. I knew him well, I found, his name was Noah – just Noah, and he’d made it perfectly clear that we were in love. But, hey, it’s just a dream, right? This doesn’t really mean anything, it can’t. He began to comb his fingers through my straight blonde hair.

He was pressing gentle kisses against my temple and shivers produced over every inch of my skin. He was a dream that I always kept, I didn’t tell anyone about him and when he said he loved me, I said it right back to him. This was nothing more than a dream, so if I wanted to love him, I could. The thing that didn’t add up was that when I opened my eyes in the morning, I felt like I really did love him. The feelings clung to me like I clung to him, like he clung to me. “It’s real, Angel, my Angel. I’m real.”

I twisted in his embrace, shaking my head as a frown etched itself all over my face. This was another thing that always bothered me, besides my feelings for the fictitious Noah, was that he always tried to make me believe that he was real, that he wasn’t just in my head, but that he was alive and out there. “But you’re not, Noah! You’re just a dream; you’re nothing more than that! Why do you insist trying to push false hope through my mind? Don’t you know that I wake up relishing this dream, waiting for the next time you pop in and find me? It hurts, Noah. If you love me half as much as you assume you do, then how come you never came to find me? How come, three years later, you’re still wherever you are and I’m here, without you? Explain that.”

He moved his hands up my arms, up my neck, and finally framed the outlines of my cheeks, his thumbs rubbing against the hollow beneath my eyes. Noah groaned through a choked whine, tipping my head up so that he could mesh his lips with mine, like he had done half a million times in the last three years. This time was different. I rolled my head out of his grasp and turned my head to the side, whispering with clear intent, “No. Not until you explain things to me. Until then, I want distance.”

Noah didn’t take the first step out of the embrace, so I did. When I did, though, Noah had stepped with me, crushing me into him with arms unyielding and unwilling to release me, not now not ever. “I can’t. I physically can’t give you that. Either of those things, Angel, as much as I wish to; I can’t tell you when I’ll meet you, I can’t tell you where I’ll meet you, I can’t tell you when I’ll meet you. All you have to know is that I will meet you, as soon as I can. But, you can’t make me put distance between me and you, it hurts me too much. It can’t hurt you because you’re not like me, but I can tell you, that when you wake up and feel twice as much feeling, or twice as much feeling at all, it’s because we’re sharing our feelings. I can’t tell you more than that.”

I shook my head, my arms crossing over my chest once more as my eyes burned with flecks of green and crimson-brown, distress and disarray twining around each other. He came up behind me then, wrapping one arm solidly around my stomach and securing me against his chest. He used his free hand to climb up my back slowly and twist my chin toward him, his hand framing my cheek as he leaned in to brush his lips against mine. My body shivering in his embrace as he whispered, “I love you, Angel.”

My eyes jerked open in the next second before I could plunge my lips against his, like I so desperately wanted to now more than ever. My teacher, Mr. Dodson was slamming his hands against my desktop. I pushed myself to sit upright and cleared my throat. “Yes – hi – sorry, I didn’t mean to. What was the question?”

The class snickered quietly behind me, then stopped abruptly and completely when Mr. Dodson threw his death glare around the room. He turned his head back down towards me as I involuntarily started to stretch my limbs out. Raising an eyebrow at me, the middle-aged teacher gritted his teeth momentarily. “Do you find my class uninteresting, Miss Reed?”

Yes. Seeing as it was American History, and I was never one to be even remotely interested or scholastically advanced in this subject, and that it was seventh period – the last period of the day, I tried to catch up on sleep. He usually didn’t catch me, but when he decided to call on random students when our star student – Beth Farley – didn’t answer them, I was usually one of his first victims.

“No, sir, I apologize for my obvious disruption of your class.” I enunciated thickly on every word as I sat up straight and stared him equally back into his eyes.

He stood rigidly now, “Do I detect sarcasm, Miss Reed?”

I began to slowly rise out of my seat because I knew exactly where this and I was heading. “Quite possibly, Mr. Dodson, I find your treatment unfair and in detection of favoritism, I’m staring at Robby Tucker who’s napping away as we speak. I’m sure Principal Bolting would love to hear about this little escapade.”

Mr. Dodson flicked his gaze over his shoulder to see a sleeping Robby Tucker and then jerked his head back around, pointing at the door. “Do not threaten me in my own class, Miss Reed. Send your ass down to the deans’ office, now.”

I saluted my fellow classmates and then winked pointedly with a sneer attached to my features at Mr. Dodson. He re-jerked his arm towards the door, a final warning before he would call one of the deans down and tow me out themselves. I walked coolly past him and resisted the urge to throw my shoulder into him; I didn’t need assault down on my records. I got sent out of that class practically once a month, most of the time I would agree to disagree and just keep my mouth shut, but others I just couldn’t stand to be in there, so I upped my game.

This was one of those times.

When I made it to the deans’ lounge, I walked up to the front desk where a Mrs. Dawn sat with her pixie cut hair, spiking everywhere and her light makeup, her sweet smile, and the prettiest brown eyes. She pushed the clipboard towards me once and spoke in her high pitched voice, “Lemme guess, sweetheart, class disruption – again?”

I chuckled with the quick shake of my head, “Oh, you know me too well. You could barely call it class disruption when he was the one disrupting the class, though.”

I finished signing in and pushed the clipboard toward her. “You know the drill, child.” She finished saying as she pointed toward the randomly placed plush orange couches with wood backs that were all placed beside each other. I waved over my shoulder as I approached one and took a seat. I looked around the room; it was probably the biggest room in the whole school. The pattern on the floor was brown with orange and sunset yellow and calm red circles and swirls; the walls were a calm orange color and the lighting was limited in its fluorescence.

When I finished looking around the room a couple minutes later, I looked up to see a merciful Mr. Cromwell with his gelled back black hair, his dark eyes and the scruff lining his jaw. He was one of our more attractive teachers that attended this school, one of them that the girls usually swooned about. He inclined his index finger at me, beckoning me into his small square office that was promptly six feet-by-ten feet altogether.

He nodded behind me when I crossed the threshold and I closed the heavy wooden door behind me in the same second. I sat down across from the dean who had his hands crossed on the oak wood desk. “I see not only were you sleeping during class, but you were arguing with your teacher, atop being a class disruption?”

I licked my lips, “Mr. Cromwell. I wasn’t being a class disruption, at all. And all due respect, he was showing signs of favoritism on top of unfair treatment. Favoritism because he shows signs of letting certain people off the hook for doing the same thing I’m doing, but I still end up getting the referral. Unfair treatment because people I know he doesn’t care about who sleep the whole period, but I slip up for ten minutes, and I’m the criminal here. He didn’t question the other three students that were asleep like he questioned me. Now, how am I still in the wrong? He picks fights with me, Mr. Cromwell, always. I don’t always bite the bait, but I still think it’s unfair that I constantly get in trouble and point reductions on my grade in his class, but other people don’t. How is this fair at all?”

Licking his thin lips in deep thought, Mr. Cromwell clenched his fingers around each other, staring through me. He sighed, pulling out a yellow paper that was attached to a white thin piece of paper. He started to write my name down on the yellow paper, writing my ID number and what I was at fault for. Ripping the yellow paper off, he handed me the white paper that had all of the information that he had written down prior.

“I’m sorry, Angel. I really am. I have to give it to you because you did talk back to your teacher and you did fall asleep in class. I can’t overlook the rules just for you, but I can give you a free amount of time to make up your detention. You have until April 30th, since it’s just March 16th now; I’m giving you over a month to make it up, instead of two weeks. Okay? Is that a bit fairer for you?”

I nodded, pushing myself away from the desk and out of the chair. I turned to grab the doorknob, speaking over my shoulder, I sighed, “I thought you at least would sympathize with me, I thought you’d understand. Thank you for the extension.”

I threw the door shut behind me just as the releasing bell rang; shrieking as it let kids from their classes and released them for the weekend. I looked up the hall and saw Jules Rector running toward me, her short, petite body dodging and twisting through the sea of people. She reached me, slamming to a stop just before she would slam into me. “Well, how about that display, huh?”

I held up the now folded piece of white paper that had my detention sentence on it. I nodded, “Yeah, how about it, huh?”

Ripping the paper from between my index and middle finger, she unfolded the paper and gaped as we walked through the hall, trying to get to the main entrance a whole floor beneath us so we could walk home. As we bounded down the stairs, Jules unfolded the paper, gaping.

She shrieked the words, “Oh damn! Rejected by Cromwell himself! How could he, above anyone else, detain you? I thought he would understand.”

“I know!” I belted, “That’s what I said! I thought for sure that I could get off the hook if I had him talk to me, but he didn’t! He listened to me for about two minutes, and then started writing up the referral! Ugh!” I screamed as I jumped the last step of the stairs and walked out the main entrance with Jules in tow.

“You know what that is?” She asked as we started walking down the school sidewalk. “That’s just sheer bad luck, that is.”

I whipped my head to the side with eyes narrowed, my brown eyes swirling with crimson-brown near the edges of the color. “Thanks, Captain Obvious, would you like to tell me more things that were already painfully noticeable? How am I going to tell Gabe that I got another detention?”

“Your brother gonna kick your lily white ass, that’s another thing that’s plainly obvious as well, by the way.” Jules pointed at me as we walked under the constant cover of trees and I groaned again.

I suddenly felt a surge of calmness, warmth even though it was windy out this afternoon. I looked around, trying to see if he was in view, trying to see if he was walking toward me. But he wasn’t. Noah was nowhere to be found.

I sighed and turned back around, turning down the next street and walking into the cul-de-sac with Jules just beside me. We stayed in very nice apartments, Jules and I, they looked like mini-hotels, and the rooms looked the same way as well. I lived with my twenty-four year old brother Gabriel, and Jules lived with her twenty-four year old sister, Lizabeth. And to make it even better, Gabe and Liz had been together for three and a half years now, and Liz and Jules lived exactly one floor beneath me and my brother. It was the definition of perfect, really. As Jules unlocked the door, I bumped her fist and sighed. She lived on the first floor, and I lived on the second.

“Well, tonight if you hear something that sounds the equivalent to someone being murdered, send your sister upstairs to tame her man for me, ‘kay?” I smiled as I started to climb the stairs and Jules looked over her shoulder to smile her reply.

“Got’cha. I’ll send Liz upstairs and she’ll send you down.” She waved as she closed the door and I jogged up the remaining steps.

I walked over to the first door, shoving the key into the lock and twisted the key. Once I was securely in, I pushed the door closed and locked it once more. Looking around my apartment, I took in the dark wooden floors and the mahogany throw rug, the tan L-shaped leather couch, the coffee table, the LSD screen TV hanging on the wall. I walked into the kitchen and placed my bag down on the circular white speckled tabletop, the countertop matching the table and the modern black-and-white checkered tiles. I poured myself a glass of water and walked back to my bedroom, sipping as I walked.

I pushed my door open, kicking it closed as I walked over to my futon, setting the water down on my desk and kicking my moccasins off beside my computer chair. Rubbing my toes into the flush dark blue carpet, I walked over to my midnight blue bed set and fell onto the futon with ease and comfort. I rolled over onto my stomach and pushed my head beneath one of my pillows and sighed as I waited for a much needed nap to wash over me.
And then I felt it, his arms wrapping around my stomach and his chin resting on my shoulder as he pushed his head beneath the pillow. He greeted me with a kiss to the cheek, whispering against the lobe of my ear, “Hello, gorgeous.”