Dreamland by Sarah Dessen Page A

mind and find yourself there.”
    I stood in front of Rogerson and looked into his green eyes. He smiled at me.
    â€œI can’t believe you,” I said to him.
    â€œIt’s the hair,” he explained.
    I shook my head. “What are you doing here, anyway?”
    He slid his hands around my waist, his fingers sliding up to touch my back just where I’d hurt it in pyramid duty the night before. “It’s a long story,” he said. “You really want to hear it?”
    And I didn’t at that moment, not really. Onstage behind me Wade was still talking, reminding me to breathe, breathe, open up and be free, and all the other nonsense words, so it was his voice I heard, and none of the others in my own head, as Rogerson leaned in and kissed me and I let go, closing my eyes and breathing all the way.

CHAPTER SIX
    â€œCaitlin,” my mother said that night, as I waited for Rogerson to pick me up. “I’m just not sure about this.”
    I was standing at the top of the stairs, looking out the front window from which I could see the stoplight that led into Lakeview. With the leaves off the trees, I could see its colors clearly, and each time it turned green I held my breath and waited for him to slide into sight on the other side of our glass storm door.
    My father, in his chair, put down the paper and looked at me. “About what?” he said.
    My mother walked across the room and adjusted her newest Victorian doll, the Shopkeeper, a short, portly man carrying what looked like a sack of flour. “Caitlin met this boy today,” she began, smoothing her fingers over the doll’s shiny balding head, “and now she’s going out with him.”
    The light changed again, this time to red. I looked at my watch: quarter of seven. He’d said seven, but I’d been ready since five-thirty.
    â€œWho is he?” my father asked.
    â€œRogerson Biscoe’s son,” she said, dropping her hand from the Shopkeeper and reaching to move the milk pitcher in the tiny tea set sitting on the end table.
    â€œThe one that was the standout point guard, or the other one?” my father said.
    I watched as the light dropped from red to green again.
    â€œThe other one,” my mother said quietly.
    â€œOh,” my father replied.
    I didn’t even bother to turn around and defend him, or me. When my mother had seen me in the kitchen with Rogerson, she asked me how I knew him and I said from school. It turned out his “long story” for being at Senior Days started with some kind of misdemeanor and ended with community service, which led to lemon cookies and punch and me. Obviously Kelly Brandt’s hunch about Rogerson had been correct.
    My parents also knew his parents: His mother was Bobbi Biscoe, a local realtor with big blond hair whose face appeared, it seemed, on practically every residential For Sale sign in town. She was always giving the thumbs-up, her head cocked confidently to one side. She was also in Junior League. Rogerson Senior was the head of a local pharmaceutical corporation and golfed at the same country club as my father. And older brother Peyton, after leading Perkins Day to the state championships the year before, was in his freshman year at the university. Normally, this would have been enough for them to approve of anyone. But Rogerson apparently had a lot of “long stories,” some of which he’d shared with me when he drove me home from the Senior Center that afternoon.
    He said, when I asked, that he went to Perkins Day, the elite prep school on the other side of town, where he was a fifth-year senior; he’d “taken some time off,” apparently because of “some problems with administration.” He didn’t elaborate.
    His family lived in the Arbors, a development of luxury homes based around a golf course: Their house was on the edge of the ninth hole. Rogerson lived in the pool house, where he could