In the dreamscape, she can see who they really are, what they hide, what they want. The other night Fred Jenkins was still sliding his mouth down her thigh while murmuring, “I want you. I miss you,” even three months after summer camp. Not her thigh, mind you. Rather she watched as Fred licked on the inside of a thigh that was slightly too thick to be her own. He got her nose wrong too, but she liked the shape of it so much that she decided to adopt it.

Last night she also watched her mother weep, surrounded by painting supplies that were still unwrapped, fresh from the store.

Sometime Darla liked to see the underdreams, the secret dreams within dreams that few ever remembered. For instance, remember Sally Jacobs from the fifth grade? The one who moved to Pleasant Valley? Darla never knew her well, but she was always fascinated by the way she moved, as if Sally was walking through a dream in the real world, as if the world were familiar and yet inherently puzzling and shifty. Sally must be 15 or 16 now. Her dreams were full of honking horns and gyro salesmen these days; she must have moved to the city. There were also the normal teenage girl dreams: boys boys boys, late homework assignments, walking into class with her pants down and when she looks down, seeing she’s 100 pounds overweight full of jelly rolls, and more boys. But there was one dream Darla was curious about, the one where Sally would walk through a door into a vast plane of flowers, the wind carrying fragrance and whipping her hair.

The way you entered underdreams was simple. You simply walked into someone else’s dream and tried to ask what was really there. What was in the heart of the dream? The belly? After a sensation of sinking downward the dream would fade into a new one, a deeper one.

Under Sally’s field of flowers was an under-underdream. There was a smaller Sally, cradled in the arms of her mother. Her mother was rocking her back and forth and Sally was saying, “Don’t die, mommy.” Her mommy was saying, “Shhhh shhhh,” but the woman’s face was slowly turning into dust that whirled through the air and disappeared. Soon her mother was gone, and Sally was crying on the floor. Then something extraordinary: the space around Sally somehow was her mom, and the space itself was giving Sally a hug. It was a hug on every surface of her body.

What most people didn’t realize was that they dreamed more than one thing at once. This is why dreams are so confusing: each part inside a person dreams a different dream, but the parts overlap and so sometimes the dreams blend and change, and just when you thought you were putting a coin into a pinball machine you’re now the Queen of England.

Darla tried to be the Queen of England one day but it wasn’t for her. When she awoke the next morning, in the woods outside her school, she picked up a piece of the birch bark she’d stored in her hut and drew the tiara she’d worn in the dream, with a crayon she’d stolen from art class. It was not to her satisfaction, so she put it in the pile with all the letters her school had sent to her “parents.” One of these days she would need to think of a crafts project for that junk heap of letters.

But for now it was time for school. She gathered all her loose math and English worksheets alongside the backpack she’d swiped from an unlocked locker and started the long walk to Springfield High.