The Twinning: Verse One: The Silver Coins
Chapter II: Dreams
II
Dreams
After the incident in the bathroom, the rest of the school day dragged on for Michael like a bad movie. He wanted nothing more than to go home and ponder the strange place he visited while feeling sorry for himself in the bathroom. When the bell finally did ring at three o’clock, Michael Smith ran to his bus without even stopping to get his books.
That night, as Mr. Smith stood over the stovetop stirring the Hamburger Helper with a long wooden spoon, Michael sat at the kitchen table, his mind fixed entirely on what had happened earlier at school. Michael sat scratching the side of his plate with his knife when Mr. Smith spoke.
“Michael is something the matter? You seem, I don’t know, sad, depressed. What’s up?” Mr. Smith looked back over his shoulder where he had draped a white and blue striped cloth as he asked, “What’s up?”
Michael knew he wasn’t about to tell his dad about the episode in the bathroom that afternoon, so he just made up a response, the usual get-the-parent-off-your-back type of thing.
“Oh, nothing, just a long day at school. We are doing this really hard stuff in math right now, that’s all.”
“Okay,” said Mr. Smith turning back to the noodles and meat. After dinner Mr. Smith retired to his study to work on the case he was handling. Michael went up to his room under the premise of studying, but what he really wanted to do was find a way to go back to that colorful place. Although he had been confused and a little afraid, he had been in awe of that new place. Now, being back in this mundane, normal world, he felt like he couldn’t take it. Everything was so dull compared to there. The sky was like an old sock here. There, in that strange place, the sky shone brighter than a thousand vagrant constellations. Everything was so full of life and color. The boy could not deny the impulse that throbbed inside his mind; Michael knew he had to go back, no matter what.
He lay back on his bed and thought about what had happened earlier. He was sitting in the stall in the boys’ bathroom, thinking about his mother, and he felt as if he was going to cry. It must have been around twelve thirty, he guessed. He had eaten a turkey sandwich for lunch, washed down with some soda and had enjoyed a brownie for dessert-the soft kind without nuts in it, he hated nuts. He was wearing his red t-shirt with his dark blue jeans. He couldn’t think of anything else specific to that exact time and place. He fell asleep as he thought about what happened to him that afternoon and he had a dream. It was about the girl.
She was standing in the same field as the one he had seen that day. Only this time, instead of roses as far as the eye could see, there was only one, single rose. It sprung up from the ground exactly next to where the girl was standing. It was white. He was again sitting on the tree stump as before. It was night now in this place, but everything was still alive with color. Even the black velvet of the nighttime sky seemed to shine and gleam. Michael looked from the rose, to the girl, and back to the rose. He noticed the girl was wearing the same odd clothes as before except this time her dirty blonde hair was let down to dangle just above her shoulders. Before it had been tied up into a tight bun. Michael now noticed for the first time how blue the girl’s eyes were. Her eyes shone ten times more brilliant than the daytime sky of this place, beacons lighting the world. They were full of such life and energy as Michael had never seen before. Those eyes seemed to shine as if casting their own light into Michael’s personal darkness. Then something strange happened.
The girl’s blonde hair turned red. At first Michael didn’t realize what was happening, but then he suddenly saw it: her hair was bleeding, the blood pouring down from the middle of her skull. Only, it wasn’t blood, was it? It certainly looked red like blood. But Michael was not appalled by it like he was when he saw blood on television or in a movie. This red liquid seemed gentler, and the girl clearly was in no pain. It seemed almost as though the red was flowing out of her like a small creek in the forest, as though the girl wanted it to flow. Even stranger was the way the blood (redness) was falling. Instead of simply splattering upon the ground, it seemed as though the blood was being sucked into the rose, like a vacuum cleaner. After a few moments, the flow of red stopped abruptly and the white rose faded to deep, deep red in color. Realizing something was different, Michael looked more closely at the ground and now saw that there was another rose, identical to the first, sprouting next to his foot. This one was red, and it seemed to match the first rose exactly, as though they were twins, one for Michael and one for the young girl.
Michael again looked from rose to rose to girl, and suddenly the girl was no longer standing next to the rose, but right in front of him. Something else had happened too. The girl’s face had changed and grown different somehow. Michael felt a great sense of recognition looking at this new face and he was certain he knew the woman who stared back at him. In dreams, however, things are odd. He could not determine who the woman was, but her eyes were the same deep blue as the girl’s who had been there moments before. He stared into those deep, brilliant, blue eyes and wanted to simply stare into them forever. Then the woman grabbed Michael’s shoulders, her expression changing to a look of desperation, as if she wanted to say something, but couldn’t. She shook him and shook him, until he awoke breathing hard and sweating. His first waking thought screamed inside his head to find a way back to that strange place.
Thoughts of getting to the boy’s bathroom occupied Michael’s mind all morning and he barely heard his teacher telling him about the Civil War. At lunch Michael made his way to the boys’ restroom, full of hope and anticipation. He had been unable to concentrate on his classes prior to this because of the hope of seeing the mysterious girl from his dreams (or maybe reality) again. He reached the big green door with the white figure of a man plastered against the black panel in the center. He pushed the door open and entered.
Jacob Niles was standing by the mirror, combing his jet-black hair down against his scalp until it was as flat as a pancake and shone with profuse amounts of hair gel. Jacobs’s eyes met Michael’s in the mirror; they stood for only a moment, locked in each other’s stares, until Jacob looked away and back to his hair. Michael opened the door to the same stall he was in yesterday, stepped in, turned, closed it behind him, put his bag on the floor, and sat down. He waited until he heard Jacob leave. Once he was sure Niles had gone, Michael tried to recreate the circumstances of the day before.
The boy looked at his watch, 12:23. When he was in the bathroom yesterday, it had been 12:45, so he had probably shifted (that’s what Michael was beginning to call what had happened to him) around 12:30. He sat down and cleared his mind. Five minutes, nothing. He thought about the girl. Eight minutes, nothing. He thought about Jacob. Ten minutes, nothing. He thought about his father. He was about to get up and go back to the cafeteria and finish his tuna sandwich when he suddenly remembered (as if out of nowhere) that his mother had made the most unbelievably good tuna fish sandwiches. He began to feel dizzy, lightheaded. He knew at once it was happening again. He was shifting. The green stall door became hazy, the slow and steady drip, drip of the sink faded away. The colors of his world slowly became darker, grayer, until they were gone completely. Then…
Thwip! The air snapped for a moment and Michael was somewhere new.
Michael’s senses were bombarded with stimuli. Colors, so bright he had to squint for a moment, sounds of birds and bugs, chirping carelessly. The smell of roses, so strong he felt he was drowning in them. The wind blowing through his hair, lifting it ever so gently off his forehead, made all of Michael's senses come alive. His eyes adjusted. He looked up at the deep blue sky, spotless of clouds. He gazed down at the stump, and indeed it seemed he was in the same place as yesterday. Then he looked out at the rose field, and his heart sank: the girl was nowhere in sight. He had now been to this extraordinary place twice, and Michael felt the need to test his boundaries. He slowly began to stand up, and as he did so he felt the world begin to sway and swoon. He held onto the colors and sounds and smells of the place and the feeling shortly passed. Michael stood there, a large tree stump at his feet, the sky a blue no Earthly human had ever seen above, and an endless field of roses of the deepest red before him. He began to walk.
Jacob Niles was waiting outside the boys’ room door for Michael. He was going to send the kid flying face first when he tripped him coming out of the bathroom. It would be great. Jacob waited five, then ten minutes. He was getting bored. He decided to take the direct approach and just go into the bathroom and punch Michael while he was taking a dump. Jacob went back inside, quietly. He tiptoed over to the stall he had seen Michael enter. Jacob could see Michael’s bag on the floor in the stall. He reached for the handle, and swung open the door, ready to spring. But there was nothing there. Just an empty toilet; Michael was gone. Jacob was baffled. He had been standing by the door ever since he came out of the bathroom. Surely Michael could not have slipped by, and besides, the loser’s bag was still sitting in the stall. Jacob scanned the rest of the bathroom, under every stall, but found no trace of his victim. Instead of wasting anymore time on this silly matter, Jacob put Michael’s bag in the toilet and flushed. Then he left, content that he had still been able to bring some misfortune upon the life of Michael Smith.
