Dreamland Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Cass

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  Rogerson

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Me

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  ONE TOUGH CUSTOMER.

  That was Rogerson, or so I was learning. He divided the world coolly into black or white, no grays or middle ground. People were either cool or assholes, situations good or bad. My friends, and my life at school, consistently fell into each of the latter. His friends were older, more interesting, and most importantly, not jocks or cheerleaders. When we did go to parties where I’d see Rina or Kelly Brandt or anyone else from the squad, it was always awkward. They’d want me to stay, pulling up a chair, handing over the quarter so I could take a bounce. But Rogerson was always impatient, finishing whatever business he had and heading straight for the door, making it clear he was ready to go.

  NOVELS BY SARAH DESSEN

  That Summer

  Someone Like You

  Keeping the Moon

  Dreamland

  This Lullaby

  The Truth About Forever

  SPEAK

  Published by Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

  Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand

  First published in the United States of America by Viking,

  a division of Penguin Putnam Books for Young Readers, 2000

  Published by Puffin Books, a division of Penguin Putnam Books for Young Readers, 2002

  This edition published by Speak, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2004

  Text copyright © Sarah Dessen, 2000

  All rights reserved

  THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE VIKING EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

  Dessen, Sarah.

  Dreamland: a novel / Sarah Dessen.

  p. cm.

  Summary: After her older sister runs away, sixteen-year-old Caitlin decides

  that she needs to make a major change in her own life and begins an abusive

  relationship with a boy who is mysterious, brilliant, and dangerous.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-04229-8

  [1. Dating violence—Fiction. 2. Interpersonal relationships—Fiction. 3. Identity—Fiction.

  4. Runaways—Fiction. 5. Sisters—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.D455 Dr 2000 [Fic]—dc21 99-044102

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For Bianca, Atiya, Ashley, Hannah,

  Gretchen, Leigh, and Charlotte,

  who have always told me their stories,

  and Jay,

  who is still listening to mine

  I am grateful to my agent, Leigh Feldman, for seeing me through;

  Michael and Mariangeles, for support and spirit; and my parents,

  Alan and Cynthia Dessen, who survived my lost years and,

  like me, lived to tell. Thank you.

  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 ago—she’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 statistics-five-four, brown hair, brown eyes, mole on left cheek—and 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 s
ee 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 thing—she 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

  CHAPTER ONE

  When I was four and Cass was six, she whacked me across the face with a plastic shovel at our neighborhood park. We were in the sandbox, and it was winter: In the pictures, we’re in matching coats and hats and mittens. My mother loved to dress us alike, like twins, since we were only two years apart. We did look alike, with the same round face and dark eyes and the same brown hair. But we weren’t the same, even then.

  The story goes like this: Cass had the shovel and I wanted it. My mother was sitting watching us on a bench with Boo, who had her camera and was snapping pictures. This was at Commons Park, the small grassy area in the center of our neighborhood, Lakeview. Besides the sandboxes it also had a swing set, one of those circular things you push real fast and then jump on—a kind of manual merry-go-round—and enough grass to play baseball or kickball. Cass and I spent most of the afternoons of our childhood at Commons Park, but the shovel incident is what we both always remembered.

  Not that we ourselves recalled it that well. We had just heard the story recounted so many times over the years that it was easy to take the details and fold them into our own sparse memories, embellishing here or there to fill in the blanks.

  It is said that I reached for the shovel and Cass wouldn’t give it to me, so I grabbed her hand and tried to yank it away. A struggle ensued, which must have looked harmless until Cass somehow scraped one hard plastic edge across my temple and it began to bleed.

  This moment, the moment, we have documented in one of Boo’s photos. There is one picture of Cass and me playing happily, another of the struggle over the shovel (I’m wailing, my mouth a perfect O, while Cass looks stubborn and determined, always a fighter), and finally, a shot of her arm extended, the shovel against my face, and a blur in the left corner, which I know is my mother, jumping to her feet and running to the sandbox to pull us apart.

  Apparently, there was a lot of blood. My mother ran through the winding sidewalks of Lakeview with me in her arms, shrieking, then took me to the hospital where I received five tiny stitches. Cass got to stay at Boo and Stewart’s, eat ice cream, and watch TV until we got home.

  The shovel was destroyed. My mother, already a nervous case, wouldn’t let us leave the house or play with anything not plush or stuffed for about six months. And I grew up with a scar over my eye, small enough that hardly anyone ever noticed it, except for me. And Cass.

  As we grew older, I’d sometimes look up to find her peering very closely at my face, finding the scar with her eyes before reaching up with one hand to trace it with her finger. She always said it made her feel horrible to look at it, even though we both knew it wasn’t really her fault. It was just one more thing we had in common, like our faces, our gestures, and our initials.

  When Cass was born my mother still wasn’t sure what to name her. My mother had suffered terrible morning sickness, and Boo, who had moved in next door during the fourth month or so, spent a lot of time making herbal tea and rubbing my mother’s feet, trying to make her force down the occasional saltine cracker. Boo was the one who suggested Cassandra.

  “In Greek mythology she was a seer, a prophet,” she told my mother, whose tendencies leaned more toward Alice or Mary. “Of course she came to a horrible end, but in Greek mythology, who doesn’t? Besides, what more could you want for your daughter than to be able to see her own future?”

  So Cassandra it was. By the time I came along, my mom and Boo were best friends. Boo’s real name was Katherine, but she hated it, so I was named Caitlin, the Irish version. Cass’s name was always cooler, but to be named for Boo was something special, so I never complained. Her name was just one thing I envied about Cass. Even with all our similarities, it was the things we didn’t have in common that I was always most aware of.

  My sister wasn’t a seer or a prophet, at least not at eighteen. What she was, was student body president two years running, star right wing of the girls’ soccer team (State Champs her junior and senior year), and Homecoming Queen. She volunteered chopping vegetables at the homeless shelter for soup night every Thursday, had been skydiving twice, and was famous in our high school for staging a sit-in to protest the firing of a popular English teacher for assigning “questionable
reading material”—Toni Morrison’s Beloved. She made the local news for that one, speaking clearly and angrily to a local reporter, her eyes blazing, with half the school framed in the shot cheering behind her. My father, in his recliner, just sat there and grinned.

  There were only two times I can remember ever seeing Cass really depressed. One was after the soccer State Championship sophomore year, when she missed the goal that could have won it all. She locked herself in her room for a full day. She never talked about it again, instead just focusing on the next season, when she rectified the loss by scoring the only two goals of the championship game.

  The second time was at the end of her junior year, when her first real boyfriend, Jason Packer, dumped her so he could “see other people” and “enjoy his freedom” in his last summer before college. Cass cried for a week straight, sitting on her bed in her bathrobe and staring out the window, refusing to go anywhere.

  She drew back from everyone a bit, spending a lot of time next door with Boo where they drank tea, discussed Zen Buddhism, and read dream books together. This was when Cass became so spiritual, scanning the world around her for signs and symbols, sure that there had to be a message for her somewhere.

  She got into three out of the four schools she applied to, and ended up choosing Yale. My parents were ecstatic and threw a party to celebrate. We all applauded and cheered as she bent over to slice a big cake that read WATCH OUT YALE: HERE COMES CASS! which my mother had ordered special from a bakery in town.

  But Cass wasn’t herself. She smiled and accepted all the pats on the back, rolling her eyes now and then at my parents’ pride and excitement. But it seemed to me that she was just going through the motions. I wondered if she was looking for a sign, something she couldn’t find with us or even at Yale.