Unsympathetic Magic - Laura Resnick [77]
“Okay, everyone,” I said to the students, who were restive in response to Shondolyn’s distress. “I want you to think about what I’ve just said as you run through your scenes with each other again. I’ll be back in a few minutes, and we’ll see if what I’ve talked about is helping you.”
I left the room and went directly to the place I thought I was most likely to find Shondolyn. Sure enough, she was in the ladies’ restroom. But she wasn’t crying, as I expected. She was cursing and punching the wall.
Tough girl.
She looked embarrassed when she saw me. “Sorry.” She went to the sink, turned on the tap, and started splashing cold water on her face.
“That’s all right,” I said. “I just came to see how you are.”
“I’ll be okay in a minute.” She sounded tired.
I hadn’t worked with kids before, so I hoped I wasn’t taking the wrong approach. Starting with what seemed to be the most likely cause for her distress, I asked, “Is there someone in the class that you’re uncomfortable with, Shondolyn?”
“What?” She ripped off a paper towel from the dispenser and started patting her face dry. “No.”
She was a very attractive girl, with a lot of poise and style for a teenager. But I noticed now that she looked exhausted and there were dark circles under her eyes.
I said, “You haven’t, uh, quarreled with anyone in the group?”
“No, Miss Dia—Esther. No, it’s nothing like that. It’s just . . .” Tears welled up in her eyes again. She brushed them away angrily. “I just feel like I can’t take it anymore.”
I put a hand on her shoulder. “Take what, Shondolyn?”
“I’m so tired,” she said, still sounding angry. “I can’t sleep. It’s been bad for weeks, and lately it’s getting worse. So now I’ve got a headache almost all the time. I think it’s just because I’m so tired.” She added apologetically, “It makes me pretty bad-tempered, too.”
The headaches must be why she had been carrying that bottle of painkillers yesterday. I hadn’t thought about it at the time, but I realized now that not that many teenage girls went around with a jumbo-size bottle of ibuprofen in their purses. “Has your mom taken you to a doctor?”
She nodded. “He gave me some sleeping pills.”
“Did they help?”
She said irritably, “I don’t take them. My mom thinks I do, but I don’t.” She added, “Don’t tell her, okay?”
Worried that I was out of my depth, I nonetheless said, “Okay. But, Shondolyn, why don’t you take the pills?”
“I’m scared I won’t be able to wake up if I do.”
I frowned. “You mean . . . you’re afraid of dying in your sleep?”
She looked at me like I was an idiot. “No. Why would I die in my sleep?”
Then what are you afraid of?”
She took a breath. “The nightmares.”
“Nightmares?” I repeated.
Considering the hormonal roller coaster that teens experience, the conflicting pressures they feel from their peers and their families, and the way they’re so often forced to straddle the fence between childhood restrictions and adult problems, I thought that nightmares might easily just be a side effect of adolescence.
But as Shondolyn spoke about her dreams in recent weeks, I realized she was experiencing something strange in her sleep. The girl relieved her anxieties in a rush of uninhibited honesty, the words tumbling over each other to get out of her mouth. Maybe it was because I was a stranger who listened without interrupting or judging her, or maybe it was just because she had reached a breaking point. In any case, she told me about her nightmares in vivid detail.
And in her dreams, I discovered, this girl had seen the baka.
Having seen them myself, I recognized them quite clearly from her description—which included their dirty claws and their stinking