The Catcher's Dreams (FEATURED)

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO - realization: null

It was a daze, mostly, like everything these days. A smear of hesitant white.

Drake opened his eyes. The smear widened into the fabrics surrounding his bed. He shifted to look around, but the back of his head throbbed. His stomach complained. He was hungry. So hungry.

There was a sandwich on his nightstand. He picked it up carefully before biting at it. It was a tuna sandwich, but at that point he was too famished to care.

"Your head is better," someone said. Drake spun around to see Tall Bun sitting on the edge of his bed, one hand holding aside the white fabrics.

"Mm hm," he said, before swallowing his bite. "But it's still throbbing, a bit."

"It is Sunday afternoon," Tall Bun said, ignoring him.

"I was asleep for two days?" Drake muttered.

"You woke up twice," Tall Bun said. "Don't you remember?"

Drake shook his head.

Tall Bun inspected the back of Drake's head, slipping her hand under his hair to gently tap his scalp. Drake felt the pressure of cloth bandages. "We've taken care of it. It does not hurt."

"Not really," Drake said.

"Get up then. Your homework is incomplete. And please do not babble about your mother this time, thank you very much."

"My mother?"

"Yes," Tall Bun confirmed. "The first two times you woke up, you babbled about your mother and drew in that little book of yours. Don't you remember?"

"No," Drake said. He sat up straighter and his right hand inched towards his nightstand, where, sure enough, his leather-bound memories lay. "Can you tell me how I hit my head?"

"You hit your head on the floor. You fainted."

"All I remember is playing piano," Drake murmured. "I couldn't...control what I was playing or – you know, never mind. Thanks."

Tall Bun's generic glowless smile sat unblinkingly. "You are welcome, Drake Hirsch."

Drake smiled back, but before he could dismiss the Ayi, she opened her mouth again.

"The half has ceased crying." She blinked twice, then left.

"The half?" Drake echoed, but she was gone.

The half has ceased crying.

He listened. One part of the Ayi's words were correct, though. There didn't seem to be any crying. Cassandra had stopped. He wondered if the piano had worked.

Shuffling around in his bedsheets, he turned at an angle to take his journal from atop the nightstand. He flipped to the bookmark.

"So I really did write," he marveled to himself, unclipping the pen and staring at the scribbled notes just after the page about the dream he'd had. "A lot, too." He'd heard of sleepwalking and talking in your sleep, but sleep-writing? He'd never done that before.

His sleep-scribbles wrote:

Turn to the cover.

"What?" Drake asked. He kept reading.

Turn to the cover of this journal.

Hesitant, he flipped the book closed and looked at the cover. It was the same as always; dark brown leather that had lost its shine.

"There's nothing there," he said. He turned back to his notes.

Not the cover you think is the cover. That is only the back. Turn to the other cover.

A shiver pulled at his neck. With lethargic fingers he shut the book again, before flipping it over. The very action was unnatural. First he saw nothing. Then a gasp ran out of his throat.

In the corner of the old-boot leather there was an embellishment, a small button of gold. Lines of embedded metal. The outsides formed a square, and around that square, curves danced. In and out. In and out.

It was that design. The piano design. But the lines weren't moving this time.

His head throbbed with glow. The glows in his subconscious. They seemed to be rising.

Drake fought the urge to toss the book away, instead opening it again.

There were a series of doodles under those words, doodles of incoherent things. A series of unfamiliar shapes, what looked like a broken rock or chunk of glass, and a quick sketch of a person. A person with a glow. And then five words.

The sleeping dragon is waking.

It was. The glows of his heartbeat were coming up. He became feverishly warm. As he dabbed at his forehead, his eyes were filled with colors again. And faces. Faces, empty, glowless faces. All because of him.

As he flipped through the journal, at all the dreams he had written down, more faces came. More colors, swirling until it was a pond of brown. It hurt. The back of his head throbbed again.

"No!" he yelled, slamming the journal shut and hurling it across the room. There was a buzzing in his ears as he watched it hit the opposite wall with an animal-carcass thud and go sliding down, beside the bookshelf, smiling a glowless smile at him.

He stared it in the leather. The colors were gone. It thudded to the floor and lay there.

"No, no, no!" he yelled at it. "Go away, will you? I'm...I'm going to do my homework now. You just leave me alone. No. No, no, no!"

The silence grew louder. He had to hear something. Ayis, he yelled, projecting his voice through his room's door and down the stairs. Ayis, I'm thirsty. Can you bring me some water?

There was no reply.

Ayis?

Oh, and I need my backpack. Gotta do homework.

Ayis? Where are you?

Why are you not replying to me?

Then he realized that there always had been a cup of water on the corner of his nightstand, his backpack was already in his room, and he was shouting in his head.