〔TEN YEARS AGO - NEW YORK CITY〕
"You always do this," he said.
Audrey was aware, in the way you sometimes are in dreams, that she was sitting in a literature lecture. She was also aware, much more urgently, that she didn't care at all. She was leaning against a shoulder she couldn't quite see the edges of, her cheek pressed to something warm, her whole body loose and easy in a way she was almost never loose and easy when she was awake. The man beside her had one arm around her waist. Not possessively. Just - there. Like he'd done it a thousand times and expected to do it a thousand more.
"Do what?" she asked.
"Drift." His thumb moved in a slow circle at her hip. "You get this look on your face and you just go somewhere else. Where do you go?"
I don't go anywhere, she wanted to say. I'm already here. Wherever here is, I'm already exactly where I want to be. She turned to look at his face. She knew she'd seen it before - she was certain of that, certain the way you're certain of things in dreams, where logic runs sideways but feeling is completely absolute - and she wanted to see it again, she wanted to memorize it this time, wanted to hold it long enough that she could carry it out of the dream with her-
"Are you her?"
The arm around her waist tightened slightly. "I'm the one you dream about," he said. "I only exist here. In this."
Audrey felt something tighten in her chest. Not quite pain. More like the particular feeling of knowing something is about to be taken from you. "I want to see you in real life," she said. "Not just here. I want-"
"Audrey Lorne."
The voice cut through from another dimension entirely.
"Audrey Lorne, I have now said your name three times."
The shoulder dissolved. The arm around her waist was gone. The warm, unhurried feeling of that room - wherever it had been - collapsed like a tent in a wind. She was sitting in a plastic chair in room 204B of Whitmore Hall, AP Literature, third period, on a Wednesday in October, and every head in the class had turned toward her.
Professor Vance stood at the front of the room. Reading glasses pushed to the end of her nose. Arms folded across her chest, which, at seven months pregnant, required some architectural adjustment. She looked the way she always looked when a student had made her repeat herself: completely neutral, which was far more devastating than anger.
Audrey's notebook was open on the desk in front of her. The page was blank. She hadn't written a single word in the last - she checked the wall clock - forty-three minutes.
Her heart dropped.
She had no idea what they were discussing. She didn't know what page they were on. She hadn't done a single second of the assigned reading last night because she'd spent the evening lying on her bed thinking about the dream from the night before, trying to reconstruct it, trying to hold the shape of him in her mind long enough to - and then she'd fallen asleep doing exactly that and found herself right back in the dream, and it had felt so good that she'd simply stayed.
She was going to fail this class.
Something hard jabbed her in the spine.
Audrey straightened instinctively, and a folded note dropped into the crease of her chair. She pressed her palm over it, opened it under the desk, tilted it at an angle without looking down.
Felicity's handwriting. Cramped and fast, like she'd written it in ten seconds: Fitzgerald. Page 94. Third paragraph from the bottom. Starts "In my younger and more vulnerable years." Memory + illusion. GO.
Audrey exhaled. She stood up.
"I'm sorry, Professor Vance." She kept her voice level, like she'd simply been lost in thought and not actually asleep with her eyes open for the better part of an hour. "I was just working through the passage."
Professor Vance studied her for a long moment. Then she gestured for her to continue.
Audrey found page ninety-four. Third paragraph from the bottom. She read it aloud to buy herself exactly three extra seconds to think, then launched into the analysis. The passage was about illusion - about the human tendency to construct an ideal version of another person, to fall in love with your own invention of them, to grieve that invention as if it had ever been real. Audrey had read The Great Gatsby twice and underlined this particular passage both times, not because a teacher had told her to, but because it had done something strange and recognizing to her chest the first time she read it.
The words came out clean and certain. When she finished, the room was quiet in a good way.
"Excellent," Professor Vance said. She still sounded somewhat annoyed - the annoyed of a woman who resented being impressed when she'd intended to be stern. "Thank you, Audrey." A pause. Her gaze moved to the back row. Settled. "Miss Holloway. Since you were kind enough to assist your classmate - your turn."
Audrey sat down.
Behind her, she heard the very specific sound of Felicity's breath catching.
She turned. Felicity had gone rigid. Her copy of Fitzgerald was open on her desk and her eyes were moving across the page with the speed of someone who has two seconds to absorb an entire body of work. Her jaw was set. She looked like someone who had just been handed a grenade and was trying to determine which end to hold.
"Page ninety-eight," Professor Vance said. "The dinner scene. Tom and Daisy. Analyze the power dynamic in the room. Take your time, Miss Holloway."
