This was a dream, just a dream, she told herself. It couldn’t have happened. None of it. It was as if she had just emerged from a fever dream. She was afraid to go to sleep. Sketching always calmed her. So, sitting at her desk, she picked up a pencil and began to sketch what she could remember of the shoes and the dress. The shoes were incredible. There was a circular jeweled buckle on them, and from that a brighter red piece flared like a single batwing. Bat shoes! How cool was that?

Then, going to her computer, she decided to type her first entry in her blog in nearly two months.

Call these my dream shoes. They tiptoed into my dreams last night, or maybe I tiptoed into theirs.

And they’re not from a landfill! Yes, I know that my last post on shoes was about the three hundred million shoes that are dumped in landfills. It’s become a real environmental problem. In my last school, we did a student project with Planet Earth’s recycling program and went to a landfill and reclaimed shoes. But tonight it wasn’t a landfill, it was a dream, and I saw these! Manolo Blahnik, step aside, please. Sweet dreams!

The next morning when she went downstairs, Cook greeted her warmly with a twinkle in her eyes.

“Didn’t like my cake, did you? One bite and left it on the counter.”

“Oh, sorry.” She looked down and saw scratches on her arms, as if they had been torn by thorns or the brambles of a thicket. Then it wasn’t a dream?

Chapter 4

“I Don’t Exactly Hate You . . .”

Rose’s phone was turned in on Monday. It was “found on the school grounds,” a likely story. She expected the Mean Queens had done something awful with it, but so far it seemed all right. Rose was relieved. She even began to think that perhaps it had fallen out somehow when she, Myles, Joe, and Anand had gone outside to collect leaves for microscope slides in science class that day. So life went on uneventfully. But as hard as she tried to banish the thoughts of her strange experience in the greenhouse, the memories lingered. The girl in the sapphire-blue dress, the wonderful pointy-toed red shoes, the guard in tights, the cupolas that had dissolved into the sky of another day, a new morning. The more she thought about it, the more dreamlike it became. Except for that meow. She had heard the meow just before she glimpsed the girl. The cat’s cry lasted longer in her mind than the scratches on her arms from the brambles.