The Cure for Dreaming(13)

I shrank back. “I—I—I don’t—”

He cracked a smile and nudged my arm with his elbow. “Don’t look so terrified, Olivia. I just meant I think you need to work even harder to persuade your father to let me take you to that party.” He reached out and stroked a piece of my hair and, with it, my cheek. “Will you do that for me, Sleeping Beauty?”

“Yes, of course.” I peeled my eyes away from his red ear. “I’d be happy to.”

“Good.” He dropped his hand to his side. “Tell him I won’t bite, unlike”—he patted the novel—“your friend Dracula here.”

He tucked the book into his satchel and wandered away.

Frannie’s face came into view from around the corner to the stairwell, and as she approached she peeked over her shoulder at Percy disappearing down the steps. Without slowing her stride, she grabbed me by the elbow and steered me toward the music room at the opposite end of the second floor.

“So,” she said, “was he kind to you when he drove you home last night?”

“Very kind. But something awful happened to him just now.”

“What?”

We passed a boy named Stuart from English who was pantomiming Mr. Dircksen’s attack on Percy to a group of his friends in front of the library.

I lowered my voice. “Mr. Dircksen smacked Percy in the head in front of the class . . . and he threatened to send him down to the principal for a paddling. Percy and I had just been exchanging whispers about Dracula.”

“A paddling on the backside?” Frannie lifted her chin, her eyebrows raised. “Well, now. That’s highly appropriate.”

I stopped and shook her arm off mine. “Why on earth do you hate Percy?”

“It’s nothing,” she said, but her face went red and splotchy.

I took her by the arm and pulled her aside, one door down from Stuart and his friends.

“It doesn’t seem like nothing, Frannie.”

“I just . . .” She shifted her weight between her feet. “I just think he’s a snob, that’s all. And snobs are only fun in Austen novels.”

“Are you sure you don’t have a particular reason for hating him?”

“Just watch yourself with him—that’s all I’m going to say.” She hooked her arm again through mine and pulled me toward the opened chorus room doors. “I’ve heard he flits from girl to girl and doesn’t care about their reputations. Watch out for his hands.”

“His hands?” I asked.

“On your bottom, you ninny. I’ve heard he’s a grabber.”

She tugged me into the music room, and we sealed the subject of Percy closed.


I OPENED MY MOUTH AS FAR AS MY JAW COULD STRETCH and joined my girls’ chorus sisters in rehearsing “Silent Night” for the Christmas concert.

In the middle of the second verse, just as my vibrato was gaining strength and feeling good in my chest, my friend Kate entered the room with a folded piece of paper tucked between her fingers. Her new black shoes with buttons on the sides clip-clopped across the floor to the beat of the metronome sitting on Mr. Bennington’s piano.

Mr. Bennington stopped conducting and scratched his waxy mustache. “Let us take a short break, ladies.”

Kate handed the teacher the note. Mr. Bennington pulled his wire reading glasses out of his striped coat pocket and squinted through the lenses, as if he couldn’t quite decipher the words.

“It’s for Olivia,” said Kate.

My insides liquefied. I wondered why the devil someone was sending me a message in the middle of the school day.

“Olivia.” Mr. Bennington peeked up at me. “Come read this note and then return to your position.”

“Yes, sir.” I climbed down from the risers, out of the depths of the deepest altos stuck in the back, and took the piece of paper. Kate patted my back as if I were receiving a summons to the gallows and clip-clopped out of the room.

I unfolded the note.

“Let us take it from the beginning,” said Mr. Bennington.

My classmates cleared their throats and stood up tall, while I read two sentences scribbled in Father’s squiggly cursive:

My daughter, Olivia Mead, must come to my dental office directly after school. She should NOT go home.

Respectfully,

Dr. Walter Mead


My blood froze. I reread those phrases at least three more times apiece. Our rather somber rendition of “Silent Night” seized the room with a harmony that pricked the little hairs on the back of my neck, and Father’s ominous second sentence stared me in the eye.

She should NOT go home.





n Father’s downtown office, tucked in the heart of Portland’s business district, a door with a frosted glass pane separated his mahogany-lined lobby from the windowless operatory in which he tended to his patients’ teeth and gums. I could see him moving beyond the glass—a distorted figure in a trim white coat, bending over the silhouette of a man tipped back in the padded dental chair. Laughter erupted from the patient, first in snickers, then in loud brays and hiccups that told me the man had inhaled a bag of nitrous oxide, otherwise known as good old laughing gas.

I seated myself in a rigid chair in the lobby and stared up at Father’s four-foot-wide oil painting of a pair of silver dental forceps shining against a green background. I recalled Percy’s utter dread of my father’s profession (even though Father worried I would scare Percy away), and I slunk down a little farther in my spindle-back seat, wishing Father were a bookstore owner like Frannie’s pa, or even a chimney sweep or a sailor. Someone who didn’t hang pictures of torture devices on his workplace walls or cause men to suffer from fits of laughter while they shouted out, “No! I’m not ready!”—as was happening beyond the frosted glass beside me.