Chapter 1

That’s me. Art. People point at me and say, “That’s Art Something.” Nobody knows my last name, I guess. Nobody cares.

But Art is the important part. Art is my name. Art is my life.

“Art! You have to get ready for school! Come on, honey. The bus will be here in ten minutes.”

“In a minute. I’m almost done.”

It was a normal exchange between my mother and me. Almost every morning. It’s been that way for years. When I wake up in the morning, I have to get out my sketchbook and draw. I often go straight to the easel in the corner and paint, but then it’s hard to get to school. I used colored pencils to capture my latest dream. Lately, I’d been using a lot of red and my pencil was just a stub. I needed to go to the art supply store this weekend.

I paint dreamscapes.

“Hey, Pen. We’ve really got to go. I’ll drive. Mom’s got food for you that you can eat in the car,” my sister said over my shoulder. I sighed and laid my supplies down. I wasn’t allowed to take art supplies to school. All I’d do all day is draw and for some reason the teachers didn’t like that. We’d had some serious negotiations when I was a freshman.

“Thanks, Fay,” I said. “Sorry I’m such a pain.”

“Not to me. Don’t worry, we’ll get to class on time.”

Fay had only had a car for a few days—since her eighteenth birthday. I got a new easel. Not for my eighteenth. For my seventeenth. I was exactly a year younger than my sweet sister. We went downstairs and I took the sack breakfast from Mom and dutifully kissed her on the cheek. I opened the bag in the car and wolfed down the scrambled egg sandwich with crisp bacon. She’d packed a thermos cup of spicy vegetable juice cocktail. My favorite.

“What are you going to do when I go to college next year?” Fay asked.

“Flunk out.”

“Pen, you can’t just give up. You need to keep your grades up so you can go to school. It will be better in college, I promise.”

Oh. My nickname. Only my sister uses it and I’m the only one who calls her Fay. That’s only when it’s just the two of us. Arthur and Morgan. Pendragon and le Fay. Our dad teaches English literature at the University. He sneaked the names in on Mom without telling her where they came from.

“It’s getting worse, Fay,” I whispered.

“I’m here for you, Pen. I’ll always be here for you.”

You see, art—painting dreamscapes—isn’t about making pretty pictures for me. It’s about staying sane.

I have very vivid dreams. But I’ve never been able to describe one. My language skills aren’t the greatest. I didn’t talk at all until I was four. And I’m not that brilliant kid who started talking in whole sentences out of the encyclopedia when I did start to talk. It was the normal gaga dada kind of talk that most kids start with. Gaga, for me, was the best imitation I could do of ‘Morgan’. I said it the day we left her at her first day of kindergarten.

I screamed it most of the day.

I couldn’t tell my mother and father what was wrong, but I sat for hours with crayons and paper trying to express the heart-rending loneliness I felt when my sister left for school.

The good part was that crayons and paper settled me down. I got used to Morgan leaving me and going to school each day. And each afternoon when Morgan returned, she brought me treasures.

“Look what I did today, Arder. I made letters. Soon I be able to read books!” We both liked books and being read to. The idea that my sister would be able to read the mysterious things to me was exciting enough to forgive her absence during the day. As soon as she’d shown me her letters, I pulled out my crayon scribbles. She looked at them like they were serious art. “Oh, Arder. You were scared I wouldn’t come back,” she said as she ran a finger over a particularly angry purple line. “Don’t worry, Arder. I won’t ever leave you. But I have to go to school. Next year, Arder go to school. We’ll always come home together.” And we have.

But that was when the dreams started, too. And like every other time in my life, when I needed her, Morgan was there. When I woke up crying, it was Morgan who was first in my room to crawl in bed with me and comfort me.

“Arder had a bad dream,” Morgan said to our mother and father. “I help.”

“You can tell us about it in the morning, son,” Dad said. “Both of you go to sleep now.”

I asked Morgan if I should call this next part a caveat and she said it sounded more like a disclaimer. So, I’ll go with that.

1. I’m not mentally challenged. I get good grades in school. I know stuff. I know words, but I have a hard time saying things.

2. Dreamscapes are not the same as fantasy art. Sometimes I don’t recognize anything in them. There are no dragons or bare-breasted damsels in distress in them. I’d like there to be bare-breasted damsels. I’m seventeen.

3. I don’t always have nightmares. Sometimes the dreams are funny or happy or sexy. The first time I woke up covered in my own semen, I just had to go paint right away. There still weren’t any bare-breasted damsels.

4. This isn’t a high fantasy story. Neither my art nor my dreams are a gateway into some alternate reality. I don’t foretell the future. As far as I can tell, there’s nothing special about my dreams at all. Which seems to be the only problem: I can’t tell them. Words just don’t form around my dreams. All I can do is paint them and because they don’t have words, they are just that much more intense.

5. My sister doesn’t sleep with me every night. But she always seems to know when I need her and will hold me until I settle down.

End disclaimer. Unless I think of something else later on.

When I told Fay the dreams were getting worse, I didn’t mean the dreams were all bad. Dammit! It’s the words. I meant that I couldn’t control them and they were getting more intense. If I didn’t get to a place where I could draw or paint as soon as I woke up, I couldn’t think all day long. That night, the dream would be back twice as intense as it was the night before.

The drawings—and paintings—were getting more and more complex. They were taking longer for me to put in details. When I was little, all I could do was throw color and scribbles at the page. Gradually, actual images had taken shape, and then people. My teachers said I had artistic talent and needed to develop it. But it was so painful. I think that for a good night’s dreamless sleep, I’d gladly give up being an artist.

That night, I struggled against a bleak nightmare, begging for it to be something better. It improved. It was beautiful. I bathed in its images of joy and pleasure and knew that when I woke up, I would paint the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. I was in heaven.