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Billlie Love hadn’t meant to disappear.
Then again, she hadn’t meant to do a vast number of things that had happened anyway—all of which were unequivocally, undeniably her fault.
It wasn’t so bad at first. They were innocuous little things: an un-melting snowman could be stashed in garage off-season, a baseball with swiveling faces could be shoved in a drawer, an odd-eyed cat could become the family pet and the strangely-colored lizard had scurried off into the yard before anyone could get a hold of it. Finite pocketfuls of small, marble-shaped candies could be thrown into the trash—best not eaten, because dream-food could very well be faerie-food, and it was safer not to find out.
She hadn’t meant to bring back the rain that day. She hadn’t meant to bring it back at all even though nobody believe her, especially not the strange people standing under that eerie lavender shower that drenched the sleepy little town she had grown up in. For so long, it had flown under the radar but her purple rain had somehow put it on the map.
Careful self-observation over the years had suggested that the less she wanted to bring something back, the more likely it was to return with her, yet things would also return with her if she wanted them to. She couldn’t be blamed for this paradox. At least, she hadn’t brought back the big, black, weird monster—she was rather proud of that.
It had chased her and chased her and chased her with the determination of a thing that would follow her through realities, but when she fell through the sky back into consciousness, only the rain had followed. It would be troublesome if the rain was the type that never ended, but better the rain than the monster. She hadn’t brought any of the others back either, Sua and Suhyeon and the rest who didn’t need dreamed-up copies of themselves running around the town.
But, it hadn’t mattered. She might not have brought back the monster, but she could’ve and she would—according to some Visionary’s premonition. Billlie didn’t know what a Visionary was, but the adults had pronounced it so importantly that the ‘v’ had to be capitalized. That was enough for her to disappear, for them to make her disappear.
You can dream all you want here, they told her, it will be safe here.
Not her, she would never be safe, as long as she could pull the big, black, weird monster out from her dreams and into the real world where it could still shred her body like paper, and this time she couldn’t be taped back together. But, the rest of them, they would be safe.
Think about them: your parents, your baby brother, your friends… don’t you want them to be safe? Don’t you love them?
Billlie Love, not yet old enough to be sure she quite understood what her last name entailed, had kicked her feet at the ground and said nothing. She didn’t think it was love to let someone be taken away like this, but she was only a kid so what did she know about love, anyway? Maybe this was what it was supposed to look like.
But, Billlie Love was made out of lies almost as much as she was made out of dreams, in the same way that children tend to be. Innocent little lies of I lost my homework and my mommy said I can’t be your friend and I don’t know when she certainly did that never hurt anyone. Billlie Love knew what lies were, even if she wasn’t a liar.
But, her friends were. They were liars now, and their lies hurt.
It would be easier if she could disappear into the other world, never to be found again, and the body known as Billlie Love could dream forever. Alas, she could only bring her dreams to this one and, for that unforgivable crime, they had sentenced her for life.
This is how they came: Haruna first, and then Siyoon, then Sheon and Tsuki, Haram, Suhyeon-Sua tumbling into the world together like they couldn’t wait another night before being reunited. All of them, as accidental as the rain.
For the few moments after she awoke, Billlie Love could not move. Instead she watched, seemingly hovering outside her own body, as Sua and Suhyeon nosed about her room, poking and prodding at the mishmash of imagined belongings she had acquired over the long years, all up in her business like they were still the best friends she once knew who would barrel into her room after school to play with her cat who wasn’t supposed to exist.
At least, they could interact with this world—Billlie noted, watching as Suhyeon tipped over a book which sent November skittering across the room, letting out an affronted yowl once Sheon caught them in her arms. Their tail puffed up as they glared mismatched eyes in the direction of where Billlie’s consciousness hovered—cats, especially dream ones, were a little magic like that.
When Haruna had tumbled out of her consciousness several years ago, she was 12 and could only float around like a ghost, Billlie’s brain having neglected to fill in those details in her dream. There she was, 12 still like the day Billlie last saw the real her, floating upside down over her bed
“Morning,” Tsuki’s voice called, just as the feeling crept back into Billlie’s fingers. She wiggled them; they moved. She blinked, and then she was back in her body, Runa dangling above her.
“You brought them back.” Runa jerked a thumb over her shoulder, before realizing that she had to right herself for the gesturing to work.
I didn’t want to, Billlie thought. She hadn’t wanted to see any of them, not with the dreams she’d had after she disappeared—Billlie? I didn’t know her. Billlie? I was busy after school, I don’t know what happened. Billlie? She’s gone, and in a place where we can never find her again. The last, at least, was somewhat true.
Still, it would’ve been cruel to voice these thoughts, so Billlie said nothing, rubbing at her eyes. Unfortunately, when her visioned righted itself, they were still there. There were 8 people in the room.
Sua and Suhyeon were tall. They were also old, not old-old but the age they probably should be by now. Billlie had never seen what became of 12-year-old Moon Sua and Kim Suhyeon, nor did she particularly want to know what happened to the people who had left her behind, but somehow she knew: this is what they turned out like. She would have to count their fingers and toes, make sure everything was in place; as time went on, she’d find out if they aged too, or if they would remain forever this way like Haruna.
For now, she asked, “How’s it been, out there?”
She always asked this. It was a sort of joke, albeit not a very funny one.
Strictly speaking, with the way dreams worked, they shouldn’t come into the world knowing anything that Billlie didn’t. Then again, dreams seemed to deny logic more than they followed their own brand of it, and most of her imported books were full of things she’d never encountered before she disappeared.
Sua cast Billlie an odd look, before shrugging. “Sure is a party in here, isn’t it?”
“No—ugh—why are all of you here anyway?” Billlie dodged Haruna’s spectral presence as she scrambled out of bed. “Get out. Don’t you have your own rooms?”
As much as they were dreamed, the other now seven people who made up Billlie’s company were also their own people. Haruna might not be quite solid and Siyoon might’ve been simply pleasant and not much else, but they had enough free will to barge into her room as they pleased and live their own lives. They were only stuck here because nothing was meant to exit, especially not the stuff of dreams.
“Get out,” Billlie repeated, shooing them with a hand. “It’s not my turn to cook today, which means someone here has something they’re meant to be doing.”
Food, for the first few years, had come at regular intervals. Recently though, although Billlie could no longer quite keep track of the time, it had stopped and she had to resort to eating what she could dream up as much as she didn’t want to. It didn’t appear to have any ill-effects thus far, although she supposed it hardly mattered. Nothing quite mattered anymore.
She had also imposed a schedule on all of them, one that would now have to be amended with two new arrivals, to make sense of the passing of time.
Sense. It in itself was nonsense to a girl sealed off from the rest of the world, trapped with what could very well be hallucinations, undoubtedly slowly going insane. It showed, in the way her dreams had become more volatile. Bringing back two individual beings at once with this much complexity? She wasn’t supposed to do that.
The monster was getting closer, lurking right over her shoulder.
“What do you think it’s like, outside?”
Once upon a time, Billlie had been closest to Haruna, having been the first one who arrived. She’s since become more of a younger sibling, someone Billlie never felt genuine annoyance at, only pity.
While Billlie had grown up the best she could where she was, Haruna was still childish, child-like, a child who would never be anything more than. For that, and because it was her own fault, Billlie tolerated her the most.
“Maybe they have flying cars.” Billlie glanced up from the book she was trying to parse through. After fifteen minutes, it seemed to be repeating the same word over and over, for pages on end. No matter how fast she flipped, she couldn’t quite escape chapter two.
“Suhyeon-unnie won’t tell me what it’s like.” There was a hint of a whine in her voice.
She doesn’t know. Billlie bit her lip and said nothing.
“You could bring back whatever you want, though, right?”
The sun was setting now, the sky melting into pastels that ran into each other like spilled paint. It wasn’t the real sky, she suspected, but real was relative.
Sometimes, in her dreams, the sky came crashing down. Buildings crumbled to dust. At the crack of lightning, forests burst into blinding flame that she knew, somehow, would keep burning until they devoured everything in their path.
Sometimes, she wondered what would happen if she brought it back. If her dreams were strong enough to swallow the building. If she could burn it to the ground. If the big, black, weird monster could barrel through the barrier like a wrecking ball.
But, it was too dangerous to bring things back. They had locked her here because she had, and maybe if she stopped, if she proved that she could control herself, then they would let them back out.
After all, even if they weren’t really Haruna and Siyoon and Sheon and Tsuki, Haram, Suhyeon, Sua who were undoubtedly out living lives that had never been violently pulled off-track, sometimes Billlie thinks that, to trap them here with her, she mustn’t have loved them enough.