Chatoyant College Book 12: Chapter 15: Breakfast

Corrie could tell that Annie looked unhappy as they headed toward the cafeteria—she didn’t feel entirely happy herself—so she made a point of mentioning that she had left Edie a note. She also tried to look around surreptitiously when they left Gilkey, but she didn’t see any sign of Edie or Leila.

Annie and Corrie both cheered up once they started eating their food, but Roe still seemed grumpy, staring down at her eggs and not talking much. Corrie tried to involve her in the conversation, and finally came out and asked, “Roe, what’s wrong? If you were just up late last night, I’ll stop bugging you.”

“I was up kind of late, but that’s not the problem,” Roe said. She pushed her hair back out of her face and sighed. “I had a weird dream last night.”

“A vision?” asked Corrie, interested but a little confused. Roe usually didn’t mix up dreams and visions—and she tended to be a lot more happy about visions when she had them.

“That’s the weird part. I’m not really sure.” She poked at her eggs with her fork. “It seems like it must have been a vision, but I’ve been remembering visions much more clearly. This one just left me with one image.”

“What was the image?” Annie asked.

“Teeth,” Roe said. “Pointy, scary-looking teeth. I felt scared when I woke up, but I don’t know if that was an actual emotion left over from the dream or vision, or just because I woke up and remembered the teeth and they’re scary.”

Corrie shook her head. “That is pretty freaky. It probably was just a dream, though. When I remember my dreams, it’s usually just fragments like that. They don’t have real narratives.”

“Mine often have narratives, but they break apart when I wake up, or at least my memory of them gets scattered,” Annie said. “This morning when I first woke up, before I opened my eyes, I know I had a storyline in my head about trying to sell a house. But now I only have a couple of images—a refurbished kitchen and a really big heart-shaped bed.”

Corrie and Roe both laughed. “Are you sure you weren’t just daydreaming of what you’d like to have in the future?” Corrie teased.

Annie grinned and shook her head. “No, there was a whole thing… well, I think there was a whole thing. But my impression was that I was a real estate agent trying to sell a house, but a company I had hired to spruce things up had made a lot more changes than I knew about and it didn’t look familiar anymore.”

“Do real estate agents really hire companies to fix things? Wouldn’t the owner do that?” Roe asked.

Annie shrugged. “Don’t ask me. It’s just dream logic.”

“I guess I do have dreams like that sometimes,” Roe said. “One of the things that makes it different from a vision is that in the dream, I know why things are happening, or what’s happening, even if it doesn’t make sense.”

“But in visions, you don’t have explanations?” Corrie asked.

“Right,” Roe said. “I don’t have any context. Sometimes it seems obvious, but sometimes it would be really nice to remember what I was thinking in the vision, if I was even in it.”

Corrie nodded, then movement caught her eye and she waved. Edie had joined them in the cafeteria. She waved back and hurried her steps, reaching their table quickly and setting down her tray.

“There you are,” she said. “Thanks for leaving me that note.”

“We must have missed each other by just a few minutes,” Corrie said, noting that Edie already had her food. She was relieved that Edie had returned in one piece and didn’t seem to be too upset. “Were you talking to Leila?”

Edie nodded as she sat down and scooped up a spoonful of cold cereal. “She came back to campus this morning and I saw her out the window. We didn’t talk for long.”

“Is she coming back to be a student?” Annie asked quietly.

“I don’t know. She hasn’t decided yet. We didn’t really figure anything out.”

“Well, it will take some time, probably,” Corrie said. “She’s just come back to a school where the rules have all changed, and unlike us, she wasn’t there to see it.”

“Yeah, that’s true,” Edie said. “She also mentioned seeing Link yesterday, Roe. She was one of the faeries he visited to make sure everyone was still following the Djanaea agreement. She said she has no problem with it, of course.”

“That’s good,” Roe said. “I hope my weird vision last night wasn’t about something that’s going to happen to him. Do you know any faeries with weird, scary teeth?”

“I think a lot of them do,” Edie said with a grimace.

“It was probably just a dream,” Corrie said. “You’re worried about him, so you imagined something scary he might face.”

Roe nodded, staring at her food again. “You’re probably right.”