Dream Boy by Mary Crockett, Madelyn Rosenberg Read Free Book Online

actually said the words out loud.
    “It appears so,” he repeated, as if he couldn’t quite believe it himself. He looked me right in the eyes. My stomach flipped. “Here.” He reached for my wrist and pulled me closer, laying my palm flat against his chest. I could feel his heart beating, ta-dum, ta-dum, ta-dum .
    I jerked my hand away as if it burned. Seeing and hearing him was one thing. That could all be explained away. Some sort of super vivid daydream. A total psychotic break that would have my mother on the phone to the mental hospital. But touch was different. The part of me still convinced that none of this could be happening couldn’t argue with the feel of his heartbeat.
    “It’s okay,” he said, holding out his hand, palm up. But his eyes were saying more than just it’s okay ; they were saying, it’s me .
    I took his wrist, then let out a nervous laugh. It was more than okay. It was what I’d been dreaming about.
    For a second, I stood in the driveway, holding his outstretched hand. Talon had gotten seriously into palmistry the summer after seventh grade, when her parents were going through their divorce and she planned to run away with the gypsies or the hippies or, at the very least, the carnies, so I knew which lines were which. I studied Martin’s hand. His lifeline—the one that curved around his thumb—was hardly there, just a faint scratch. But the line for fate looked as if it had been seared into his skin, a dark crease cutting across his palm from his wrist to the base of his middle finger.
    He turned his hand over and laced his fingers through mine.
    “Shall we walk?” he asked.
    “Okay.”
    We hadn’t gone very far when I gave an involuntary shiver. He stopped. “It’s cold,” he said, and letting go of my hand, he shrugged out of his hooded sweatshirt and passed it to me. Underneath, he was wearing another short-sleeved polo, baby blue this time instead of that vivid blue of his eyes.
    “But now you’ll be cold,” I said.
    He looked down for few seconds at his bare forearms, as if he were concentrating on his own skin.
    He shrugged. “I don’t get cold, I guess. At least not yet.”
    “Oh,” I said. What the heck was that supposed to mean? I took his sweatshirt and pulled it on. It felt wonderfully warm and it smelled nice, like the pecan cookies my grandma baked that time I stayed at her house when Nick was born. “Thanks.”
    I started walking in the direction of the river, which was always my favorite place to go when I needed to clear my head or when I wanted to draw, which pretty much amounted to the same thing. Martin walked beside me, and as we passed the little houses on my street, it occurred to me that if he was here, if he was real, he’d have to live somewhere. Or… my God , if he really was from my dream, maybe he thought he was supposed to live with me! Maybe that was why he kept riding around the block.
    “My house isn’t far from here,” he said.
    “Did you—” I started, but my voice sounded too sharp, even in my own ears. I softened my tone and tried again, “It almost seems like you know what I’m thinking.”
    He tilted his head, considering. “Yeah,” he said. “I do. Cool.”
    “You’re kidding, right? You couldn’t…I mean, can you tell what I’m thinking now?” I tried to call up something unlikely. A mermaid? A picture frame without any picture in it? Will across the lunch table with burrito on his face?
    He frowned. “That’s too many,” he said.
    “How about now?” I concentrated on the most random thing I could imagine: a box turtle I’d found near Pandapas Pond last fall and kept for a few weeks in a crate in my room. I envisioned the turtle’s mottled shell and bright red eyes. Then I remembered Will had told me red eyes indicated it was a boy-turtle and had teased me about naming him Miss Elizabeth Bennet.
    “A turtle named Elizabeth,” Martin said, but he still wasn’t smiling.
    My skin prickled. “That’s