Dreamland

He hesitated for a fraction of a second. “My dad got laid off,” he said. “My uncle—that’s Will’s dad—is a cop down here. He hooked him up with a landscaping job. Dad was a teacher before. My stepmom has some family nearby.”

So the woman she’d seen unpacking was his stepmom. Dea waited for him to mention his real mom but he didn’t, so she didn’t press.

He was quiet for a minute and Dea started to panic. She couldn’t think of anything to say. Then he blurted out, “It’s too open here. Too much sky.” Almost immediately, he laughed again. “I guess I’m used to the city.”

She knew exactly what he meant—the sky was like a big mouth, hanging open, ready to swallow you whole. But she just said, “Where’d you move from?”

“Chicago,” he said.

“I lived in Chicago for a while,” she said. “Lincoln Park.”

He turned to look out the window. “That’s where we lived,” he said. Then, “Where to now?”

She got a flush of pleasure. Don’t trust it, a voice, her logical voice, piped up quickly. You know you’ll only be disappointed.

Maybe not, another voice said stubbornly. Maybe he’s got those four nipples after all.

It was so absurd: she was actually hoping that the boy next to her had extra nipples.

“We could go to Cinci

Dea found it easy—almost too easy—to open up to Co

“So it’s just you and your mom, then?” Co

She nodded. “What about you?” she said. “No siblings?”

A muscle twitched in Co

Dea felt vaguely disappointed, as if she’d missed an opportunity. “Despise them,” she said.

“Even banana bread?”

“Even worse.” She made a face. “Why ruin bread by putting banana in it? It’s like a banana sneak attack. I like them out in the open, where I can see them.”

He laughed and chucked her chin. “You’re a piece of work, Donahue.” But the way he said it made it sound like a compliment.

Co

He gestured out the window; they were passing an industrial farm. Dea knew only one way of driving to Cinci

Co

“Are you serious?” Dea couldn’t help but say.

He spread his hands wide. “There are more things on heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” She was impressed that he’d memorized a Shakespeare quote, and didn’t want to tell him she disagreed. There were plenty of things that were dreamed about, more things than you’d believe.

He’d been a vegetarian for four years, which was weird, because he didn’t seem like one. When she asked him about it, he shrugged and said, “I really like dogs.”

“We don’t eat dogs,” she pointed out.

“Exactly,” he said cryptically. “Anyway, I’m not vegetarian anymore. One day I went crazy at a steak buffet. It wasn’t pretty.” He had to rearrange his whole body to turn and look at her. He reminded her of a puppet whose strings aren’t working all together. “What about you?”

“I’m not vegetarian,” she said.

“No.” He laughed. “I meant what about you? Weird quirks? Dark secrets?”

For a split second, she thought of confessing: I walk other people’s dreams. I get sick if I don’t. Mom is afraid of things I don’t understand. That’s why three locks. That’s why no mirrors. She’s probably nuts, and I might be nuts like her.

“I don’t have any,” she said.

Something flickered behind his eyes—an expression gone too soon for her to name. “Everyone has dark secrets,” he said.

They went on a hunt for billboards. The weirder the sign, the better. She got three points for spotting LAVENDER’S: INDIANA’S LARGEST EMPORIUM FOR XXX TOYS, VIDEOS, AND POSTERS. Co

They’d crossed over the Ohio border when Co

“Pull over, pull over!” he said, so she did, barely making the exit. A big billboard, faded from the weather, was staked into the dirt: OHIO’S LARGEST CORN MAZE. In the distance, she saw it: golden walls of corn, stretching toward the horizon.

“Really?” she said.

He was still gazing at the sign, enraptured. “It’s the largest, Dea. We have to.” He turned to her and put a hand on her thigh just for a second. Her heart went still. But then his hand was gone, and her heart started hammering again, even though she’d walked a dream the night before.

The last time Dea had been in a maze of any kind was in Florida. That one was made of walls; it was part of an amusement park called Funville, which was only thirty miles from Disney World but smaller and older and cheaper, the dollar store equivalent of the amusement park industry. Dea’s mom hated crowds but she loved mazes because they reminded her of dreams: that same twisty kind of logic, the same sense of being suspended in time, moving forward without moving forward at all. She especially loved the maze at Funville, which was all white, made from cheap plastic studded with glitter so it looked kind of like snow, especially if you lived in Florida and didn’t see snow very often. In Dea’s memory, the white walls were the size of skyscrapers.

Dea and Co

At least it was cooler inside the maze. The ground was dark with shadows. Co