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176 pages

English

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Two college girls, a chem lab project, murder and a ball: Just your average day at Dreamland City

Lily Anderson is a brilliant scholarship girl, jaded and wise beyond her years. Raised in a trailer park by her stepfather Beau and a motley assortment of neighbors, she gets a free ride to a dream university, where she cannot fit in. She meets, rooms and is paired with the "It" girl for a lab project; her life will never be the same again.

Twisted, born with everything, but vulnerable, Reagan Van Stieg has friends, wealth and beauty. Yet she keeps dark secrets of her past, things she doesn't talk about, things that will unleash a sequence of events that threaten to destroy everything she's worked for.

Although complete opposites, the two girls develop a strange bond, and when the unthinkable happens, their friendship is put to the test. An action-packed novel so real and gritty you taste the dirt, Dreamland City keeps the heart racing and the reader guessing until the very end.

Sujets

Thrillers

Suspense

Fiction

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Publié par	eBookIt.com
Date de parution	29 octobre 2015
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781456625597
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0200€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Dreamland City

by Larina Lavergne

Copyright © 2015 by Larina Lavergne
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.
First Printing: 2015
Aviator Publishings
4562 Texas Street
San Diego CA 92116
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
http://www.eBookIt.com
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-2559-7
www.larinalavergne.com
Prologue: Water Birth
I was born in water.
I read recently in a fancy magazine I swiped from a bookstore that that’s what rich women in rich places are doing—natural water births in a special kind of tub with a birth coach and a midwife. Heck, maybe they even have a staff of nurses and doctors around to hand out cigars after it’s all done.
The water is important physically and psychologically for the newborn, because it simulates the safe environment of the mother’s womb, thereby reducing the trauma of the transition for the baby.
The woman who wrote that article has a Ph.D. According to the author’s bio, she is a professor, writer, pundit and apparently Super-Mom. Her name is Marsha Longfellow; she is pregnant again (six months) and has decided on a water birth for this lucky third baby of hers.
It’s a nice thought, a nice idea, and I’m sure some women spend many hours thinking about and planning the perfect birth.
My mother didn’t quite plan my water birth the way Professor Longfellow and her readers are planning theirs. She didn’t quite plan anything, actually.
I’m listening to the story for the hundredth time. I’d come over to Skelly’s to bum a cigarette and to look for Tommy; I should’ve known Skelly would corner me and we would have to dance this sad, broken dance, in this sad, broken room of his sad, broken trailer.
He tells me the story every time I see him, if he can get me to stay long enough. The words are the same each time; the set-up never changes. He’ll cough his way through a wheezing laugh, his lips will pull apart like the drying scab on a scar, and I will stare at his yellow, gritty incisors as he points out the window at the dirty hard plastic wading pool by his trailer. The pool is so old now, mold has blackened half of its bottom, and because Skelly never bothers to cover it, there are scummy things floating around in the rain from the night before.
“We were sittin’ by the bonfire outside, though we sure as hell din’t need it cuz' it was so hot. Shuld’ve been cold that late in the year.”
I can see his tongue peeking between gaps in those yellow teeth as he speaks and enunciates words differently from how they’re spelled, so different from the people I’m surrounded with now. The tongue disappears and reappears like magic, a little purplish rabbit in a moist red hat. “We just got the dang pool too, got it off Mr. Simmons in that house down the street who dun’ gone decided to get a bigger one in his backyard for next summer.”
I really need a cigarette now, but Skelly will not be interrupted when he’s on a roll.
“Yer mama, she wuz outta her mind with those damned drugs and drunk, running around and singing all night long at the top o’ her lungs, and everyone yellin’ at her to shut her trap, but she just kept on with that danged singing.”
I concentrate on the flecks of spittle on the side of his mouth against the bristles of hair on his loose, mottled skin. They remind me of this poem I read recently about drops of dew on grass in dawn. It might be the same kind of texture, and it is pure poetry that Skelly is like Robert Frost.
Skelly hitches up his pants and lets out a loud groan, rubbing his bad back. He’s distracted for a few precious seconds, and I seize the opportunity to inch away, but he anticipates me, moving with some difficulty to lean against his armchair and block my path.
I sigh.
He’s now at the part where he saw my mother stumbling over toward them.
“She wuz so danged big with you, she looked like she wuz gonna pop any second now.”
Skelly coughs again and can’t seem to stop. When he finally emerges from his ecstatic fit of wheezing, he looks at me with a dreamy gaze. “You know, you look juz like her when she wuz growin’ up,” he muses. “Hair so dark you could go blind looking, and eyes so big there warn’t hardly any room fer nuthin’ else.”
I say nothing—it’s best to say nothing. Skelly blinks and goes on with his story.
“I tol’ her she was gonna hurt herself with all that prancing around, but she juz laughed at me when I yelled at her to get her ass back home. Then she snatched my bottle and went and sat in the pool, and she just kept on drinking and laughing and singing in the water.”
Skelly gestures at my birthplace but I don’t bother to look.
“It was so dark after the fire went out, and she was still sitting there. I wuz done ready to go to bed, and I shouted at her to go back home, don’t let me catch yer tomorrow morning passed out in my pool like the last time. And as I wuz walking up the stairs, then she started screaming and cursing, and motherfucker can yer mama scream and curse.”
I sweep my gaze around and finally catch sight of what I came here for on the kitchen counter. As he’s in the middle of a sentence, I sidestep him with a swift move and ignore his wounded look. I grab a cigarette from the packet of Marlboros lying on the counter and walk slowly back to him.
Skelly digs into his trouser pocket and gives me a light. “Those things will kill ya,” he says gruffly, before coughing again.
He continues, “She didn’t stop screaming and cursing, and we wuz like, ‘What the hell?’”
I take a drag of the cigarette and savor the gritty smoke at the back of my throat. It’ll be over soon, I think. He should be almost done.
“And I go over, I’m sayin’ to her ‘What’s wrong, Maddie? What’s wrong?’ And she just screamed and screamed, and I’m holding her. We’re both in the tub now. And she’s saying, motherfucker fuck fuck fuck, and Michael’s just standing there, looking like the screaming wuz hurtin’ his head.”
Michael was my father, I think.
“And then you popped out.”
There’s a strange, terrifying note of tenderness in the old man’s voice.
“I goddamned birthed you in water, right here, seventeen years ago,” he says. “Cut the cord with my own goddamned scissors. With my own goddamned hands.” He holds them up, displaying those marvelous birthing hands. I notice that the yellowed tips are the same color as his teeth, but that doesn’t bother me as much as the big pair of shears I spot hanging by the door. They’re rusty and blackened with dirt. I shudder, imagining them ripping and slicing roughly through an umbilical cord.
He follows my gaze.
“No, heck, that warn’t it,” he assures me. “We used them bright shiny ones, from the kitchen. He gestures grandiosely; the magician about to finish his act.
He reaches out then, and I hand him the cigarette I’m smoking. He takes a drag but doesn’t hand it back immediately. I eye it as wafts of smoke curl around the tip and rise to the ceiling.
So far, I haven’t said a word. I’m thinking about my mother now. My entire life, my mother has barely tolerated me, and she’s done her best to distance herself from me. I don’t remember my real father, and my earliest childhood memories are of Skelly and his son my best friend Tommy, and then Beau, my stepfather. I can see them so clearly—Skelly barbequing, Tommy and me playing, and Beau with his dusty cowboy hat as he two-steps with my mother. In contrast, I never simply see my mother—I’ve always absorbed her through smell, hearing and touch because seeing her…hurts. I can’t explain it, but when I think about my mother, I feel her, and it’s always a painful feeling.
“You alright?”
Skelly eyes me cagily, sensing that I’ve stopped listening to him. He takes another puff on my cigarette and I nod slowly as he continues his monologue.
“That Michael was no damned good,” he proclaims. “Big baby who ran out the first sign things weren’t all peachy. A real prince. And now Beau—don’t get me started. Yer mama could do a whole lot better, let me tell you.” Skelly will never change his mind, and I’m too tired to defend Beau.
I listen a few more minutes to him as he bitches about my mother and the mess she’s made of her life, and the blasted men who can’t keep their hands off her. And then I can’t stand it any longer. Mid-sentence, I push past him and I’m at the door, my hand on the knob. He looks stricken, and he sounds suddenly fearful.
“You leavin’ so soon?”
Skelly’s lonely, but we’re all lonely.
I don’t answer and turn away, walking out the door and racing down the steps and across the grassy patch in front of his trailer. I circle around the pool of my birth in all its scummy glory, trying not to think about how lucky I am not to be retarded, brain-dead, or just plain dead. Instead, I think about Professor Marsha Longfellow.
Simulates the natural environment of the baby.
Reduces the trauma of the transition for the baby.
I don’t know why I look back, but I do, and I see Skelly outlined in the doorway. He’s a black figure against the blinding light of the setting Southern sun and I realize suddenly, with a conviction that saddens me, that he’s going to die one day. That we’re all going to die.
As I’m watching, Skelly lifts his hand. I think he’s waving goodbye at first, but instead, his fingers go to his lips and he takes a drag from the cigarette.
I forgot to take the cigarette back from him.
1
Lily
It’s been a few weeks since I started school. I forgot to bring my keys today, but that really doesn’t matter since we never really lock the door. It’s not as if there’s anything of real value to steal in our trailer, and if someone needs something and no one’s around, they’ll need a way to get in, don’t they?
Folks here share everything; we come and go as we please. It was a huge shock after I got that scholarship ride into Duke and realized that people label