The Dreamers

17.

It is hard to tell who is in charge—beyond the campus police who take turns standing near the elevators—but someone somewhere has decided that it is time for Mei and the others to leave the dorm. Rumors zoom: the germ is in the water, they say, or the ventilation system, or there’s poison in the carpet or the paint.

In just a few days, Mei has grown numb to the chill of the stethoscope on her chest each morning, and those gloved hands that read the glands of her neck like braille, the spearmint breath of the nurses. Even the skin behind her ears has begun to adjust, chapped by the elastic that holds the mask to her face. And something similar, maybe, is happening to her mind.

A weariness has come over the whole floor, a quiet, as they rush back and forth past the emptied rooms, each one sealed shut with yellow tape.

But now: they are told to pack a bag.

Once outside, Mei stands blinking in the sunlight, as if she’s been kept all these days underground. The campus is empty of students. Dried leaves skid across wide lawns, where so recently Frisbees sailed instead, and where, in a different time, these same freshmen lounged in tank tops, bare feet.

She is alert to the smallest sensations, the fall breeze moving the fine hairs on her wrists, the seesaw call of a bird she cannot name, the sun, hot and fresh on her face. A sudden coming-to.

Also there is this: a new profusion of police. Their cruisers are parked on the sidewalks. Their belt buckles flash in the sun.

A row of news vans is waiting, too, satellite dishes pointed to the sky. Soon her parents will see these pictures: Mei, small and thin, on the evening news, walking like a hostage among the other masked kids.

They walk as instructed, single file, a few feet apart, a chain of kids slowly snaking across an abandoned campus.

From somewhere behind her there comes a sudden thud, the sound of a duffel bag landing on the pavement. The crunch of quick footsteps. A sprint.

She has an idea who it is before looking: Matthew. There he is, sprinting away from the line. The sound of his footsteps is immediately drowned out by the shouting of two dozen police officers, now running, too. The other kids stop to watch as Matthew’s faded baseball cap flies off his head. There’s a kind of glory in it, or desperation—who can say?—in that boy’s legs pumping so quickly in the sunshine, the way he tears off his mask and how it floats to the ground behind him, as slowly as a petal.

A burst of envy comes into Mei as Matthew shrinks away in the distance. This is the kind of thing she would never do.

Matthew is young, and he is fast, and the rooflines of town are visible, just beyond the chapel and the library. He keeps running. What does it matter whether he has a destination in mind or not? A sense of possibility—that’s what they’ve been missing, and so they cheer for him, Mei and the others, as he runs.

But the police finally cut him off, surprising him from behind the dining hall. A synchronized gasp floats up from the throat of every kid in the line as they watch the police tackle Matthew to the pavement.

When they return him to the line, there is a long red scrape on his cheek. And in that scrape, and in the bits of asphalt that linger in the cut, something only suspected has been proven true: these kids have no say at all.

One of the boys behind Mei is talking.

“So?” he says. “Why don’t you?”

She realizes then that he is talking to her.

“What did you say?” she says.

“Why don’t you ever leave your room?” he says through his mask.

“I do leave my room,” she says. Her pulse is beginning to pound.

He looks at her, skeptical, as if she has told some kind of lie. At the edges of his mask there grow the beginnings of a mustache—some of the boys have stopped shaving.

“No offense,” he says, “but I forgot you even lived with us.”

She has heard somewhere of the bonds people sometimes form in times of crisis, but somehow she has gone the opposite way. A friendly face flashes in her mind: Jennifer from her English class—if only Jennifer were here with her now. She doesn’t know her that well, but they’ve had lunch a few times after class. The thought embarrasses her: this Jennifer is maybe her only friend at college.

She shifts her duffel bag from one shoulder to the other. It is something for her hands to do.

It’s a short walk to where they are going, and when they get there, a disappointment.

“The gym?” say the girls. “We have to live in the gym now?”

It’s only temporary, say the nurses, who seem newly jittery, in their latex gloves and green scrubs. The ventilation system in the dorm, it was decided, might have been contaminated.

The doors to the gym have been propped open so that no hand need touch the metal of the handle. Bacteria, they’ve been told, can live for up to five days on a surface. A virus, even longer.

“Maybe they’re not telling us the truth,” Matthew shouts as the police release him into the gym. “Maybe all the others from our floor are dead.”

“You’re not helping,” say the girls.

But Mei has wondered that same thing. It is hard to know what is happening. It is hard to know what is true.

Inside, green cots have been arranged on the basketball court in a configuration familiar from news coverage of hurricanes. The cots stretch from one basketball net to the other. A blue blanket, rolled tight, waits on each one.

“Are you okay?” Mei asks Matthew as he passes.

But he says nothing. He keeps walking.

As the others claim cots with their bags, voices echoing in that vast space, shoes squeaking on the polished floor, Mei climbs the bleachers until she reaches the top bench. From that high perch, she calls her mother.

“I’ve been calling you all morning,” says her mother. “I’m so scared I can’t eat.”

Mei is resting her feet on her duffel bag, the purple nylon thinning from years of tennis lessons. She speaks softly into the phone.

“I’ve been thinking,” says Mei.

She pauses. It is a hard thing to say. It was a big deal to come here, the scholarship and all, this expensive school. From where she sits, ten rows above the floor, the movements of the other kids look as mysterious as the scurrying of mice.

“Well,” Mei starts again. “When all this is over, I’ve been thinking about moving back home.”

Just the idea is a relief, like crawling back into her own bed.

But her mother is quiet. It’s a way she has of showing disapproval, a silence for when she doesn’t like what she is hearing.

“Maybe,” says Mei, “I could reapply to CalArts.”

Far below, there is a squeal of laughter from one of the girls. Things like that are still possible, bursts of laughter.

“Mom?” she says now. More silence.

She looks down at her phone: it’s dead.

And now someone is yelling. “Hey, you,” calls a voice from below. It’s one of the campus guards. “You, up in the bleachers.” The faces of the others all turn in Mei’s direction. “Get down from there,” he calls. “Everyone needs to stay down here on the floor.”

All the electrical outlets in the gym, she soon discovers, are already choked with other people’s phones.

It is hard to say whose idea it is. It seems somehow to rise spontaneously from the group, buoyed in part by the vodka that one of the boys has snuck in from the dorm. A certain excitement attaches itself to the idea right away, a bubbling up of three words: Truth or Dare.

Mei overhears all of this from her cot, where she lies curled with her sketchbook. She is good at it, this listening without seeming to listen. The soft slide of her pencil on paper. She is drawing a series of birds.

A shadow falls across her page. The baseball player, Ryan or Rob—she can’t remember his name—is standing over her. She can see the dark outline of his mouth through his mask.

“You have to play, too,” he says.

A mechanical breeze floats through the gym, some by-product of the ventilation system, rustling the banners that hang from the ceiling and spreading the smell of the pizza that has arrived from the dining hall for dinner.

“No thanks,” she says.

“You’re going to hear all our secrets,” he says. “So we should get to hear yours.”

From behind him comes the scrape of metal against wood—already the others are dragging their cots to the sides of the room so that they can sit in one wide circle at midcourt. She feels it immediately: the impossibility of saying no.

But someone else seems immune to it: Matthew. There he is, reading some kind of philosophy book in the corner. “You’re not seriously reading for class?” says the baseball player. Matthew says nothing. He now wears a butterfly bandage to the right of his mask.

One of the girls goes first.

“Truth or dare,” says the baseball player.

“Truth,” she says.

That first question from that boy’s mouth comes as slowly as a smoke ring, the enjoyment spreading across his face in advance of the words: “Have you ever kissed a girl?”

The group likes this question. Mei can feel it all around her, the way the boys shift in their places and the girls laugh softly behind their masks, the expectation. Touch of all kinds has turned hazardous. There is a kind of electricity in that room, a wanting.

“No,” the girl says, finally, smiling through her mask. “I’ve never kissed a girl.”

Next up is Caleb. He chooses dare.

“I dare you to moon us,” says the first girl.

There is the immediate jingling of his belt buckle as it comes undone, and then the flash of pale skin as he pulls his jeans down and then up again in one swift motion, as if this were a trick he has performed many times before. What variety there is in what human beings will do if asked.

One by one, the secrets tumble out: who is a virgin and who is not, who has done what with whom. One of the girls, beloved by some for the size of her chest, is dared to take off her shirt, which she does, standing for a moment in the center of the circle, shivering in a white lace bra, arms crossed tight against her stomach.

A certain boy is dared to kiss a certain girl. “Without your masks,” calls the baseball player, which releases a round of protest from the group, a crossing into real risk.

“You guys, this is not right,” say a few of the girls. “It’s not safe.”

But they want to do it, this boy and this girl. Mei can tell from the way the girl slips a fresh stick of gum onto her tongue, and how the boy drops his mask on the floor while she folds hers quickly into squares and stuffs it into her jeans.

Even the brushing of one hand against another might be enough to spread this thing between them, just the breathing of the same recycled air. And yet, here they are, lips against lips, as if the danger is increasing the delight, like the pleasure of a diver as his feet leave the cliff. The kiss goes on and on, and it seems it is adding to their enjoyment, too, to be watched like this by the others, who cheer with such force that the campus guard comes rushing into the gym from outside, just missing the sudden parting of those lips, and then the clumsy return of the masks to their faces like two teenagers caught undressed in someone’s basement.

“Settle down in here,” says the guard. “Lights out in half an hour.”

Mei sits sweating all this time in her spot on the floor as they move around the circle, coming closer and closer to her. It’s a stupid game. They are too old for it, anyway. An idea, crisp and clean, floats into her head: to get up and go back to her cot.

But she stays right where she is.

When she is asked to choose between truth and dare, she sits quietly, holding her knees, picturing the motions of her legs, the straightening out of her knees, the standing up, the walking away from the circle. Instead, she says, finally: “Truth.”

“Okay,” says the baseball player. “If you had to hook up with someone in this room, who would it be?”

The room bubbles with laughter. Her face turns hot. She has lived side by side with these people for eight weeks, but they remain as they were at the start, a roomful of strangers.

She keeps quiet, head down.

The other kids are all watching now, waiting for her to speak.

Through the masks, it is hard to read faces, but she can detect the amusement simmering in the room. In the distance, Matthew does not look up from his reading.

“Wait,” she says. “I change my mind. Dare,” she says. “I choose dare.”

“Fine,” says the baseball player. “Then I dare you to sneak outside.”

She is a follower of rules, a fearer of consequences, and yet, how much safer it seems to take this risk and not the other. What relief there is in these words.

She feels a tiny thrill as she walks toward the exit sign, which glows green above her head. Maybe she really will leave here, escape and not come back. The other kids crowd behind her and wait.

She checks behind her—the guard is out front, not watching.

Her hands shake as she reaches out and pulls the metal handle. But something in the door resists. There is a faint rattling of what sounds like a chain.

She pulls harder, a panic rising in her chest.

“It’s locked,” she says. “We’re locked in.”

The others don’t seem to believe her. The boys push past her to try it themselves, the smell of alcohol and sweat rising up from their bodies.

Matthew, too, comes suddenly charging over from his bed.

“This is fucked up,” he says as he rattles the handle, the veins in his wrist visible beneath his skin. The bandage on his cheek has come loose and is dangling from his face, the scrape beginning to scab.

“Isn’t this a fire hazard?” says one of the girls.

This is how the game ends, and the mood sours in the gym, and soon—in one more stroke of lost autonomy—they are told to turn off the lights.

Later, Mei falls asleep to the small noises of her neighbors, the ones who kissed, now moving around in one cot.

She wakes sometime later to the sound of screaming in the dark. She does not remember, at first, where she is, her mind rising slowly from the deep. There is a clanging of metal against wood. Many voices.

“Stop!” someone is shouting, the word echoing across a vast space. “Caleb, stop it.”

It comes back to her suddenly: the gym.

It is too dark to see, but the sounds soon arrange themselves into a picture—cots sliding on the floor, banging one against another, like boats in a storm.

“Stop,” the voices shout in the dark. “Stop.”

Finally, someone finds the lights, and the buzz of that fluorescence reveals a cluster of cots lying crooked and overturned, sheets tangled on the floor. Everyone is squinting now, except Caleb, Caleb who is wide-eyed and walking slowly through all of these obstacles as if none of them were there, tripping again and again.

“He’s asleep,” says his roommate. “He does this sometimes. He sleepwalks.”

Caleb’s eyes are open—but like the eyes of the blind. He is walking toward the bleachers on the far side of the gym.

“But this is different,” says the roommate. Caleb is saying something they cannot understand. “He usually wakes up right away,” says the roommate. No one needs to say it, that this must be the sickness. “He’s never stayed this way so long.”

Caleb Ericksen, eighteen years old, a farmer’s son, an English major, and now this new distinction: the first of the sleepwalkers to be reported in Santa Lora, California.

As the paramedics tie his wrists to the stretcher, he kicks and he shouts, and the others wonder what parallel plot might be taking place in his dream.

But they soon make another discovery, even worse: two others among them are still sound asleep in their cots. They have slept through what no normal sleeper could.

And soon they, too, are carried away like the others.