1st 5 Pages July Workshop- Parrott Rev 2

Name: Brooke Parrott
Genre: Young Adult // Sci-fi
Title: The Column

PITCH:

Strangers are dreaming about Wilder—and they’re drawn to her, everywhere she goes. The only thing worse than not knowing why it’s happening is not knowing why it suddenly stops. She can’t help but feel like it’s related somehow to her childhood recurring nightmare, which is back with a vengeance ever since her mother died three years ago. To cap it off, Wilder’s father has abandoned her to live with his sister-in-law in a small town Oregon that has a vendetta against her family. When she discovers lucid dreaming from her father’s scientific papers, she goes on a mission to control her dreams and reconnect with her mother there, only to discover that the dream world is as real as the waking one.

Instead of a dream utopia, Wilder finds a parallel universe of collective-unconscious dreaming with magical powers and all the possibilities and evils of the imagination. One that her father has helped to shape into a corporate world of manipulation, where the currency is advertising to dreamers. Wilder must decide what's most important to her: finding her mother again in the dream world, or stopping the mass dream manipulation that's about to happen.

PAGES:

Wilder stared at the blank line.

“All done here?” The front desk lady trilled. She was wearing an Astoria High School sweatshirt with an ironed-on decal of a hooked fish below the school font. Sticking a manicured hand out, she grasped for the clipboard Wilder was clutching.

Wilder looked again at the empty spot on the form. “Not quite.”

“What are you stuck on?” Mrs. Penn—according to the plaque on the tall counter behind which she was plopped—leaned over to look at Wilder’s form. “Emergency contact? Oh.” Mrs. Penn’s face colored. Wilder felt a twist in her gut, anger seeping from it. That meant the administration had already had a meeting about the situation.

Dead mother. Missing father.

That left the estranged aunt.

“I don’t know my aunt’s cell number off the top of my head,” Wilder said. She heard her own hollow voice as if from afar.

“Oh honey, don’t worry about that. I’ll copy it over from your brother’s form.” She sorted through the piles of paper on her messy desk. “Noah… Noah… ah! There he is. Noah Bowen.”

The twist turned into a pit in Wilder’s stomach. Noah had been out of the house by the time she was done showering that morning. Apparently he couldn’t even tolerate walking with her on their first day in a new school.

“Have a seat. Your school guide will be here in a few minutes.”

Wilder sat in one of the too-rigid chairs with a miscellany of geometric patterns splashed across it, and watched the students flow past the open office doors. The colors of the walls changed from school to school—here it was purple and a dull gold—but the kids always looked the same.

A tiny Freshman came in the office, glancing at Wilder on her way to turn in a slip of paper at the desk. Wilder flinched as the gaze passed over her, holding her breath. No reaction. No recognition.

She slumped further down in the chair, pulling the hood of her sweatshirt up over her head, and instinctively pressed the scar on her left temple. Her fingers came away with concealer on them.

It had been almost two years since a Dreamer had last recognized her, but part of Wilder still expected it to start happening again at any moment. Even after all that time, even all the way across the country. 

It hadn’t always been that way—the Dreamers only started finding her when she was twelve, and it ended in the same way that it had begun: without explanation. But for three bewildering years in the middle, it was like Wilder was a shining lighthouse beacon, drawing the Dreamers to her through choppy waves. 

It always started with a particular look. One of familiarity, tinged with confusion. “Do I know you?” they’d ask. “Have we met?” They were all ages and from every background imaginable. Like bare lightbulbs flickering on in the darkest recesses of their minds, Wilder could see the moment that the realization hit. 

The Dreamers knew Wilder from their nightmares.

The boy was the first one.

He was about five years old, and Wilder was twelve at the time. He’d abandoned his soccer ball and ran to her, beaming, across the wide courtyard.

“It’s you,” he said. There was a lyrical lilt to his voice, as if he was on the edge of breaking into song.

“Me?” Wilder asked, confused. She was used to people recognizing her mother in public, but not her. She was a nobody. A nobody who was the daughter of a somebody.

“I followed you,” he said, and then—when she still looked at him blankly, “out of the dark place.” Humid sweat plastered his wispy blonde hair to his forehead. A nearby fountain created a soothing shush.

A feeling passed over Wilder like someone raking nails lightly on her skin. “The dark place?” she repeated, unsure if this was a game. “What was in the dark place?”

He started shaking, eyes so wide that his lashes pressed to his lids. “The bone house,” he whispered. “Shadows.”

Wilder crouched down next to him. She reached out a hand but left it hovering in the space between them. She’d never been good with kids, even when she was one. “Where is the bone house?” she asked finally, when he said nothing more. She had to force the words past her suddenly dry throat.

He stopped shaking and tapped his finger on his forehead.

“In your head?”

“In the dream.”

“I was… in your dream?” A heat was building in her gut, bile rising in her throat. A faint memory of a feeling was knocking somewhere on a door in the base of her skull. She knew what it was to dream of terrifying worlds—she’d had the same recurring nightmare since she was a little girl, always faced alone. Alone, but for the creatures. Hundreds of questions flooded her mind, but only one came out. “Are you sure? You’re sure it was me?”

The boy moved his head in a slow, solemn nod. “It looks just the same in real life,” he said, reaching out his small hand towards Wilder, who fought every instinct to flinch. He pressed a finger lightly along the puckered, faded purple scar running from her temple towards her ear.

The boy was the first, but there were many after him. She carried the burden of their dreams like a priest confided in at confessional. After all, who could she tell? Her mother would just want to send her to a psychiatrist again, her father would want to hook her up to machines and study her. So she learned to hide from them, to run. To lie.

Mrs. Penn’s too-loud cheerfulness rose above the general din of the office. “Oh good! Wilder,” she said, gesturing towards a skinny boy with a frizzy halo of hair that had appeared, “this is Jonathan, he’ll be showing you around the school today.”

Wilder shook his limp and clammy hand, and followed him into the hallway.

“The Junior lockers are in the C Hall, so you’ll be… here,” Jonathan said, with a tight smile. When he spoke, it looked like it took a supreme effort to force the words past his little front teeth, capped in braces. Wilder stared at them, neon green rubber stretched tight over the metal grids. She wondered how much deliberation had gone into the choice of that particular color.

“I’d have the same locker for senior year, too?” she asked. If she was even there next year.

Jonathan nodded. “Now, since I’ll be your Fisherman’s Friend for the day—”

“I’m sorry,” Wilder interrupted. “My what?”

The boy turned. “Your Fisherman’s Friend. You know—” he puckered his lips into a pout and raised both of his fists in a boxer’s stance.

Wilder stared at him so hard she almost went crosseyed.

“The Fighting Fishermen!” he said. “It’s our school mascot. That’s what we call your orientation guide.”

“Oh, of course,” Wilder said. Jonathan didn’t pick up on the sarcasm.

“Here, I’ll show you the combo for your locker.” He grasped the lock’s dial.

A group of students passed in the checkered hallways, eyes on Wilder the whole time. 

“New girl?” one of them said, not even bothering to whisper.

Wilder sighed. Small towns.

Wilder took the lock from her guide, moving the dial towards 32, mimicking his instructions.

“You look, um…” he trailed off, gulping audibly.