Read Online The Blue Girl by Laurie Foos - Free Book Online Page A

back, and as I try to get up, I think, I’ve broken a vertebra before I could memorize which one is which .
    Everyone runs out of the classrooms and into the hall. I lie on the floor with a stabbing pain in my back. Mr. Davis yells for everyone to crouch down and hold their arms over their heads like a crash position. Rebecca is screaming, Greg is screaming, Fuck this! Fuck this! The wind howls and blasts through the hall. I feel my body twisting as the wind blows me across the floor. Audrey reaches for my hand. Hold on, hold on , she says, and I grip her hand as hard as I can, so hard I can feel the ligaments in my arm stretching.
    I lift my head for a minute. Every nerve ending in my brain must be shooting messages at once. My brain feels overloaded, but I keep my head up as long as I can to watch the blue girl spinning in the wind, to see if I can tell if she’s breathing. When the wind finally stops, the girl stops in mid-air and then spits out a fountain of water that covers everything. All I hear, just before I wake up, is the splash.

Libby
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    I AM NOT A PERSON WHO DREAMS. SOME PEOPLE MIGHT say that this is not possible, that everyone dreams, that dreaming is part of the brain’s natural function, that the psyche has to release, has to relieve itself, has to figure itself out. But for me, there is nothing to figure out. Diseases spread. We pass afflictions on to our children more terrible than anyone could imagine. We try to undo the undoable. Babies are born blue. People seem to die and then seem to live again, even though life seems impossible.
    I used to dream but not anymore, not for a long time. When I did dream, I was a frequent dreamer. I kept a diary next to my bed and wrote the dreams down when I woke up. Before Ethan and Rebecca, I’d sometimes read the dreams aloud to Jeff in bed in the morning. He was never interested, I know that now. I complicated things, he told me years later, and he did what he could to settle me. Once he bought me a dream dictionary so I could lookup the meaning of the symbols, but after Ethan was born it all stopped. I’d dreamed too much, Jeff said. It was time to wake up.
    Now I am awake, or as awake as it is possible to be. I cannot imagine being more awake than I am now.
    I haven’t told the others, Magda and poor Irene, but when the blue girl first appeared that day on the lake, I felt awake for the first time in years. She was a rumor until then, a whisper overheard in the parking lot of the grocery store. A dream, except I’d stopped believing in dreams. When I heard about this strange blue person who lurked somewhere around the lake area—I don’t think we knew then that she was a girl—I thought maybe I would be able to dream again, that I would look forward again to nighttime, to sleep. I felt comforted by the possibility of dreaming again. I thought there would finally be an end to this blankness. And there has been, even without new dreams, because I have awakened. The blue girl, who came to our woods and almost drowned in our lake, has awakened me.
    Of course when I first heard about her I thought of Ethan. How could I not? I thought of the day he was born, how the doctor had told me first to push and then suddenly not to push so hard. My first baby—how was I to know how hard to push? Wasn’t that the point, the pushing? Afterwards, they told me I’d pushed too well, that Iwas too good a pusher. He descended so fast, they said, faster than they’d wanted him to.
    Why are they saying that to me? I asked Jeff.
    He didn’t answer. I kept waiting and waiting for them to bring the baby over to me, to lay him on my chest the way I’d seen in all the movies. They were cleaning him, the nurse said. I told her they didn’t need to. Jeff told me to stop yelling, and I thought, Who’s yelling? Not me , but I know now I must have been. The nurses gave each other looks. If I close my eyes, I can still see