Harper had fallen in love with the new girl.

So sayeth The Word of Samiel, who wasted no minute to dig his elbow into Harper’s side and send jeers into his supposed friend’s ears. Once they were out of earshot of said new girl, of course.

Harper couldn’t even deny the primary allegations, because he was watching the new girl like a hawk, had been for the last few days.

He couldn’t say that he was attracted to her - she was certainly striking with her flaming cherry locks and devil-may-care attitude, but not in that way. It was like she was an anomaly of the world, begging to be solved, but his unrested brain beat like it had a heart all of its own, and he barely had the wherewithal to properly arrange the numbers on his maths test page, much less figure out why he was so interested in this person he'd never met before.

He was finally done with his test, but he soon realised that he was less glad to be done and more glad that he was once again able to devote the bulk of his mental resources to the mystery of Kate Baker.

She was an odd girl, who never took off her mirrored designer glasses. That, her flowing red mane that couldn't possibly be natural, and the fact that she wore pants instead of the girls uniform’s winter dress and stockings combination, was a small but subtle declaration of war against the institution of uniform policies as a whole, much less his school’s policy itself, but no-one pulled her up on it. Why?

Cold water hit his face, a barrage of icy needles that ran down his spine and alerted him better than any shot of coffee ever could. It was this burst of awareness that had him realising that since he'd finished his test fifteen minutes ago, he'd asked to be excused, staggered to the bathroom a floor away and had been staring into the mirror ever since.

‘I’m losing it. I need to take an Advil and crash,’ he thought, properly looking at himself for once. His brown-blonde hair laid flat and straggly across his scalp, courtesy of the water, and his eyes were sunken and puffy. His tie wasn't on quite right and he had a slouch that he could only correct with conscious effort when he was reminded of it, but hey, at least he'd finally lost a little bit of the baby fat that had haunted him throughout his early high school years.

Somehow, he felt worse than he looked.

When Harper got to the sick bay, he only needed another half-garbled excuse and a shake of his head for the nurse to grant him passage. The boy crashed in the first bed he saw, his eyes closing by the time he hit the pillows. Sleep took him quickly, but once again, it was far from restful.

~*~

“Now leaving Parliament Station. The-The next stop is.. Mel-Mel-Melbourne- Parliament Station. Now arriving at... Parliament Station.”

The train PA crackled straight through The-Harper-Within-The-Dream’s headphones. When he took them off, instead of the putter of diesel engines and the talk of the crowds, he was met with… nothing.

Silence.

The world was silent, literally. On reflex, he tapped the side of his head, just to make sure that he hadn't spontaneously developed deafness in both ears. What he knew to always be a bustling metropolis, even in the wee hours of the morning, wasn’t just deserted, it was in decay, as if a bomb had blown the buildings, the people, even the weather away.

The moon hung low and full in the magenta sky, until the tallest buildings stretched and warped to blot it out. Chills ran through the boy’s body and he stepped back at the surreal sight, and he heard something crunch underfoot - deep red crystalline veins ran through the pavement and up the sides of the blackened buildings, doing their best to swallow the manmade world whole.

Even as he tried his best to still his racing heart, the conscious recognition that he was dreaming was fading as quickly as the world was becoming real around him, and then there was no Harper-Within-The-Dream. It was just Harper.

The boy tried to enter a nearby cafe that still had an OPEN sign shining through its front window, but the doorknob rippled like oil and made him recoil. Even as the metal that clung to his hand stretched and snapped back into shape, the material it was made of changed. First to brick, then to wood, then to a bright green gel that he couldn’t place, it was as if the building couldn’t decide what it was made of.

Even the bright neon of the cafe sign that he knew to be English, warped into large ink print of an unknown language in a process that made Harper queasy to witness. He forced himself to look away, but the same thing was happening all around him. Details constantly shifted and melted into each other, the visual noise almost too much to bear without any still horizon to ground himself on.

‘I’m dreaming,’ Harper finally realised. ‘I’m dreaming, because my head hurts and I fell down the escalator. Wait… Aren’t I in the sickbay?’

The boy punched the door frame, and let out the mother of all swears when his knuckles came away bloodied and aching.

‘Can’t dream that… Can I? Shit, did I hurt myself?’

The boy's simultaneous trains of thought collided - He indeed registered the injury in real time, but another part of himself told him he'd long since healed. So was he dreaming, or was this a memory. Another question Harper had to file away for later, because there was a new symphony in town - Beethoven's demented cousin, who conducted an orchestra of chainsaws and gnashing teeth. The instruments collated in one single, drawn out cry that vibrated the buildings themselves.

There was an unmistakable human element to it, peaking dramatically, like a cat’s yowl.

Stolen story; please report.

And down the street the monster lumbered, heralding the transition from dream to nightmare. It was tall as a house, and walked on four spindly legs with an unnatural, jerky gait. In the distance, he heard pavement cracking and metal bending beneath its weight.

It must have been an eternity before the cogs in his brain finally came unstuck so he could turn and run for his life, because he only managed it when the monster was nearly on top of him.

He ran and ran, through the ruined city streets that all looked the same, past rusted cars and buildings without doors. Still, the monster’s footsteps grew closer and closer, and in that classic, terrible ironic way, he tired out and his legs turned to lead just as he realised he’d gone nowhere at all. It was as if the ground beneath his feet conspired against him, keeping him in place while the monster arrived to collect its dinner.

The… thing, the demon, the monster, whatever it was, was easily as tall as some of the smaller buildings around, and the spindly appendages that burst out of its chest were covered in waves of rolling teeth. He squinted a little, and as it came closer, his eyes picked out a familiar corporate logo. Not teeth. It wore some sort of armour made of scrap metal and debris. The materials weren’t consistent - some of it was concrete, some was PVC pipe, but he knew instinctively that somewhere, somehow, it opened up to reveal a gigantic, horrible mouth.

Held aloft in front of the patchwork monster was an appendage that ended with a single, necrotic eye that paralysed him with a single lazy look. The monster lowered itself to his level with the jerkiness of bad stop motion, and just like he knew it would, the middle of its torso opened up to reveal the void within.

Then she came.

She pierced the air like a bullet, slamming into the shambling horror with a heavenly ring of metal on metal that echoed out through the air and up Harper’s legs; a chorus of chrome angels.

“Get out of here, kid!” the girl with silver hair ordered. She turned to address him, but her features were vague and indistinct. She was beautiful, that much The-Harper-Within-The-Dream knew in his gut, but with the way the light played off her skin, she could’ve been fair as snow or black as a raven’s feather.

He knew her, too. From a photo or a conversation, from between the time he’d stepped off the train and out onto the street.

The Harper-Within-The-Dream was in two places at once, now that she'd arrived. He had one foot in a barren street corner and another in a musty office block, with her. The office block used to be safe, or was about to be safe, but no rules concerning time nor space applied to the jumbled up mess of his active subconscious.

"Gheez, kid," the girl with the silver hair sighed. "What bad luck."

In the other place, her hands were silver, and despite being ten times smaller, she stood facing the monster and matched it blow for blow, not giving it any ground.

"Stick with me for tonight. I'm kinda busy doing something else, but... I can deal with a ridealong for a few hours."

But in the street, the monster made his subconscious finally pick a lane. The girl with the silver hair must have hit it in a sore spot, because it let out a screech of pain so loud that it simultaneously cemented the boy in the horrible scene and triggered enough panic in his heart for him to start waking up. The weightless sensation formed in Harper’s gut as his conscious mind separated from the scene his mind dictated he live out, being pulled back to consciousness.

The girl with the silver hair whipped around in a panic, reaching out for him, but she was already melting into darkness, into light, into the lamp that overhung his bed in the sick bay.

It was the nurse's gentle ministrations that coaxed Harper fully back to the land of the living and he shot up in bed, his cry of shock dying in his throat as he reassessed where he was. His panic actually started to fade, his mind doing most of the work for him as the details of the daymare started fading into obscurity.

“Are you feeling better, love?” the nurse asked with kindness, though her brittle smile indicated that he should probably get back to class if he was. He nodded his assent, filled out the sign out sheet and left.

The last vestige of his dream, a head of silver hair flying by, danced across his mind’s eye, something to mull over later.

The rest of the day passed relatively uneventfully, save for the laughs Harper earned from his peers by coming into his lab class ten minutes late. Worse yet, his allocated partner was the new girl, the only student to arrive even later than him. They regarded each other with the most perfect of poker faces, though he was the first to breach the awkward silence with a small smile.

“I’m Harper,” he said, offering his hand for her to shake.

“Kate,” she said carefully, taking it.

“You, um…” Harper became very interested in making sure the pages of the task brief they’d been given were flush against the table. “Mmm. What do you think a plant would say if it was starting to get hungry?”

The seemingly random question seemed to take his new classmate off guard.

“What?”

“What would a plant say if it was starting to get hungry?”

This time, the question earned a single raised eyebrow. “I dunno. What would it say?”

Harper handed her results sheet for the upcoming experiment. “‘I could use a light snack!’”

His attempt at an icebreaker initially seemed to draw no blood from her stoney expression, though when he turned away awkwardly, he heard the hiss-hiss-hiss of air leaving her nose, just below the register of the rest of the room. “You’re alright, kid,” she chuckled. “Now... we gotta cut this thing open, right?”

After the lesson, the bell rang for lunch and Kate made her goodbyes and left, soon replaced by Harper’s own friends. Sam was home sick, but Mikhail and Andrew were both happy to escort him to their usual eating spot just outside the library.

They were both talking about a video game or movie that was due to release soon, but Harper was barely even half-listening. Once again, he was focused on Kate, who was hanging around a circle of girls years older than her, just on the outskirts of the yard.

Kelly Liu, three-years-and-running Queen Bee of St Thomas herself, pulled her aside to talk to her, until Kate said something that made her laugh and walk away. Once the socialite in the making’s back turned to the newcomer, her pristine expression soured, though Harper was the only one to see it. What did she say?

The boy frowned. He actually was watching Kate very closely. Was he in love with her?

His train of thought was interrupted by the subject of his stakeout finally having a change in behaviour - she seemed to do a furtive sweep of her surroundings before ducking behind the sports shed, all by herself.

“I’ll… be right back, guys,” Harper murmured, and he followed her as quickly as he could without drawing attention to himself. Whatever she was doing - sneaking a smoke, a cry, or first-week hookup, it’d be in plain view when he turned the corner.

But when he arrived, she was already gone.