Chapter 3
3
“ W hat is happening?” Sam’s voice was high and tight as her gaze frantically darted around the unfamiliar space. The sky was a wide black canvas dotted with stars.
She turned, but hit her head on the bumper of a car. In fact, she was surrounded by parked cars. And when she looked up, she saw an Islands High School Soccer Champ sticker.
I’m dreaming. She’d put on her headphones, fallen asleep from her long day of travel and now she was in the middle of a dream. Which was actually annoying, because the last thing she wanted to think about was high school. How could she make herself snap out of this?
The CD player rested in her lap, and Amy Lee sang about being numb and needing someone to wake her up. Yeah, well, you and me both, Amy , Sam nearly shouted. She tore the headphones off but could still hear the faint piano notes floating up from them. This was definitely a dream.
Except, as her chest tightened from her rapid breathing, it didn’t feel like she was asleep. The way she was aware of her twitching fingers at her side, the rub of the ground beneath her and the welt forming on the back of her head, made it all seem like she was wide-awake and somewhere else.
Sam screamed, a kind of guttural cry for help, so loud that by the time she was done, her throat was sore. When had she ever had a dream where she actually felt pain? Other than when she’d flown free of charge by riding in the jump seat, fallen asleep and cracked her head on the coffee cart when they’d hit unexpected turbulence. But this was different, because as she rubbed her stinging throat with her fingers, she wasn’t waking up.
Footsteps across the pavement snapped her back to attention, and she hid behind the car, but not so much that she couldn’t see who was coming. And as it turned out, she was the person coming. More specifically, her younger self—fifteen years old—with shoulders slightly hunched, her Converse sneakers dragging, wearing baggy jeans and a skull tee from Hot Topic. It was the same outfit she’d worn in the marching band photo above her desk. And, to hit the point home, teen Sam—alternative Sam—carried a clarinet case covered in band stickers. She wasn’t scowling, exactly, but most definitely brooding.
“What the—” Sam was sure her frown was so intense it might end up stuck there. She pinched herself to wake up, but the spot on her forearm hurt. She ducked lower behind the car, and her heart raced with dread of the unknown.
Is this a concussion?
Can you die from vegan pralines?
Shit. It’s cold. Why didn’t dream-me wear a sweater?
The thoughts stopped, though, as she discovered that trailing behind fifteen-year-old Sam was fifteen-year-old Damon, with his spiky hair and shiny black button-up shirt. Sam almost gasped but covered her mouth as she watched Damon pull her high school self in close for warmth. Damon, with his liner-rimmed eyes, looked down at Alt-Sam with the most genuinely sweet smile she’d ever seen. Sam blinked hard, willing the images to end, but she was still stuck.
Maybe the CD player was so old that it’d leaked battery fluid and now she was lucid dreaming? Did battery fluid do that? Clearly, she was passed out in her childhood bedroom and hallucinating; how else to explain why she was seeing the night that changed everything and nothing?
Still, there she and Damon were. Sam’s stomach sank, because she’d burned this moment into her memory and relived it so many times already. Seeing it again, and so sharply, didn’t exactly give her a happy feeling.
She watched as Damon’s mouth quirked up and how, when they got to the Ford Explorer, he brushed a strand of hair behind her ear.
As he did, her earring fell to the ground. Adult Sam instinctively reached up to her own earlobe, but she wasn’t wearing earrings. She hadn’t worn that set—moonstone studs, her mom’s—since that night. She’d kept the one remaining earring but had never recovered the fallen one. Now she watched as Alt-Sam bent to search for it on the ground. But it was Damon who picked it up and tucked it into the front zippered pocket of her clarinet case. Alt-Sam didn’t seem to notice at all.
Was that where her earring had been all these years?
And before Alt-Sam could find out, Damon closed the gap between him and her younger self. Sam knew what he was about to say.
“Hope you don’t hate Fall Out Boy too much, because I put one of their songs on this.”
Damon reached into his back pocket and pulled out a white CD sleeve. He handed it over, but Sam knew which CD this was—the exact mix she was now listening to.
Sam moved closer to hear the conversation clearly, but they didn’t notice.
“What is happening!?” she shouted.
Sam threw her hands up and sighed in exasperation. Fine. Fine. She was stuck watching this incredibly strong hallucination-dream-memory. Sam crossed her arms and hugged herself. Staring at her old marching band photo had probably brought this on. She should’ve known better than to pilot a long-distance flight and drive straight over to Grandma Pearl’s without any rest.
“You look really great.” He longingly admired her face.
Damon’s hand reached for younger Sam’s and squeezed her open palm. Then he tilted her chin up gently with an index finger. His eyes locked on to hers as he asked, “Can I kiss you?”
“Ah, God,” Sam muttered to herself. This was the part of the memory that really hurt—when Damon had been so vulnerable, and she couldn’t reciprocate. His expression had hope, while hers had dimmed. And she remembered what came next. Poor Damon.
Teenage Sam hesitated, the same way she had all those years ago. She’d wanted to kiss Damon. He was adorable, like if Ezra Koenig and Pete Wentz had a baby. But with Damon, she’d known that if they kissed they would no longer just be friends. He would expect more. She had a plan to leave Tybee and, deep down, she also knew Damon wasn’t going to leave with her.
So she’d faked being sick and asked him to take her home. They never spoke about it again, and their relationship hadn’t bounced back to the normal level of best friend status they’d once held for each other.
Sam waited to hear the lie— Actually, I’m not feeling well... There was a long stretch of silence, save for the background music still playing from the headphones in her hand as Amy Lee yell-sang the climax of the song.
And then, instead of lying to Damon, Alt-Sam gave a slow but certain nod that made Damon lean down and cup her face with both hands. Their lips met. She pulled him in close as Damon backed her up against the hood of his car, in what was, honestly, a very smooth move. He quickly removed his snare drum case, and her clarinet, as their bodies pressed tightly together. Then he gently traced the line of her cheekbone with his thumb as she scratched through his hair with her painted black nails.
What in the teenage hormones is going on? Adult Sam uncrossed her arms, cocked her head and watched as history rewrote itself in front of her. “Huh,” she said.
Maybe she’d been playing the “What If?” game too much during flights, wondering what if they’d ever tried being together. Though she didn’t love that the blue roll-on body glitter her younger self had put all over her arms was now covering Damon’s shirt. That would be a dry-cleaning nightmare.
Adult Sam got so close that she snapped her fingers next to them, but they didn’t respond. The rules of dreams were confusing. She circled, but it was like she wasn’t even there, or maybe they were just so focused on the make-out that they didn’t notice. The sound of their lips meeting—of Damon’s low growl in his throat—was honestly not her thing. She put the headphones back on to let the music drown out the saliva swapping. The last line of the song came through, where Lee carried the word liiiiiiife out until her voice went hoarse. Sam closed her eyes to let the last notes sink in but as she did, the air felt warm again and her eyes abruptly shot open.
The CD player had turned off. The song ended and silence filled her ears. There she was, back in her childhood bedroom—dream over.
Sam tore off the headphones and accidentally bumped her head on the wall she’d been leaning against. “Ouch.” She hissed as she rubbed at the tender spot. Maybe that explained how she’d hit her head on a “car bumper” in her dream. She’d likely just bumped it at this same spot on the wall as she nodded off.
She hastily pushed herself up, grateful to be awake. The CD player and headphones thunked to the floor. “Okay, yeah, wow.” She cracked her neck. “That was strange.”
She held a palm to her chest and tried to concentrate on the present. She was still in her bedroom. And, yes, she’d had a fantasy about kissing Damon, but that didn’t have to mean anything. So what, the dream had been super intense? Jet lag could do wild things.
She smoothed a hand down her pilot’s shirt. Her hand shook, though, and she clenched and unclenched her fist to try to stop the movement. “Nothing to get worked up over.”
Flying nonstop from Paris to Atlanta, along with the stress of her trip and the nostalgia of being back in her house, had all conspired to make her so exhausted that she’d fallen asleep and dreamt about what could’ve been. And, to be honest, she’d often wondered what would’ve happened if she’d stayed in Tybee, or kissed Damon. Not because she regretted where she was; it was just a kind of curiosity that popped up whenever she thought of him. So she’d had a kind of fantastical dream about Damon that felt way too real.
Sam slipped on an old sleep shirt. Probably her subconscious was sending a message that she had unfinished business with Damon. So perhaps the easiest thing to do was to just see him again. He might ask her questions—no, he definitely would—but she needed to ask him some, too.
And maybe it was all just a bit too much, because her eyes started to close on their own. Sleep. She desperately needed sleep. Lack of sleep was what had brought this weird hallucination on in the first place. She put her head on the pillow, closed her eyes and wondered if she’d have another dream of him.