Blue Is Also for Dreaming

By Laurie Faria Stolarz

Someone’s watching you . . .

The nightmares are back. Only it’s twenty years later, and Stacey Brown’s daughter, Anna LeBlanc, is experiencing haunting dreams that keep her awake at night. The dreams involve Madeleine, a fellow student at Hillcrest Prep, the same boarding school that Stacey and friends attended all those years ago.

In her dreams, Anna sees Madeleine trapped in a closet with a blood-stained note at her feet. As the nightmares get progressively detailed and disturbing, Anna remains in denial, keeping the dreams a secret. She doesn’t want to believe they could be prophetic, like her mother’s, nor does she want to feel responsible for someone else’s life—even if that someone is a close friend.

If only Anna could embrace the power of magic to help her cope. But Anna hates all things magical, despite having been raised on moon-bathed milk, lavender-sprinkled bedsheets, and crystals. After all, magic wasn’t able to save her father, so what good is it?

But as eerie things start happening in Madeleine’s life—creepy notes, menacing phone calls, and a mysterious person lurking—Anna can’t deny it: her premonitions are real, and if she doesn’t embrace her abilities and use them to help her friend, Madeleine might just wind up dead.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Flux
• Release date: Nov 8, 2023
• ISBN: 9781635831009

Laurie Faria Stolarz

Laurie Faria Stolarz (Massachusetts) has a great interest in teen culture, and admires young adults for their passion, energy, and creativity. Blue is for Nightmares is the product of her desire to write a novel that would have appealed to herself at that age, namely one that has a blending of suspense, romance, and the art of keeping secrets. Stolarz has an MFA in Creative Writing with a concentration in Young Adult Literature from Emerson College in Boston. She currently teaches writing and is a member of the SCBWI as well as several professional writing groups.

Book preview

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1

I see her.

Madeleine.

A girl from my school.

In my dreams, almost every night.

She’s a junior, like me, but I didn’t really know her until just weeks ago, when I got a job at the place she works, the diner in town. That’s when the nightmares started.

The nightmares . . . they unfold the same way each night. I picture Madeleine huddled up on a concrete floor, trapped inside a cleaning closet of sorts. There are brooms, spray bottles, and lots of boxes.

Even her clothes in the dreams—they’re the same too: pale gray sweats with a hooded top and white tennis shoes. Her reddish hair is always pulled back with a bright-blue headband. A folded note sits at her feet. In the dream, she reaches for it—each time. The edges are soiled with dark, dark red, like dried blood. Her blood? Someone else’s?

The image of her comes into focus, like a movie inside my head: her trembling body, her twitching fingers. Somehow, I’m able to feel her too: her terror twists like metal inside my gut. She goes to read the note, smoothing out the folds. But I wake up before she can, and find myself burrowed in bed, writhing from the pain in my stomach, unable to get warm.

Just like now.

It’s 2:00 a.m. I should be asleep. Instead, I’m wide awake because of the dream. I click on my bedroom light. Everything in my room appears normal—striped bed covers, antique dresser with a tall woodcut A (for Anna), a shelf of books (mysteries, mostly).

Still, nothing feels normal.

My heart pounds. My insides shake. Because I feel like I’m trapped in that tiny cleaning closet, with a blood-stained note pressed between my fingertips, right along with Madeleine.

I reach for the chunky crystal quartz on my night table. If only it could give me a bit of strength. But I’m not into magic, not at all. It’s my mom’s thing, and she litters my room accordingly: with crystals, and candles, and incense, and extracts. She does moon-phase spells with things like lemon balm and stinging nettle, as well as cleansing rituals and summoning incantations.

I, on the other hand, cringe at spellcasting: the forced rhyming patterns and the uneven beats. And don’t even get me started on consecration: the need to purify like surgery, with the tools, the table, the herbals, the oils . . .

All this dislike, despite the fact—or maybe because of the fact—that I grew up with all-things magical, as the daughter of a mother who practices witchcraft. I’m a girl who’s been raised on moon-bathed milk and sun-blessed biscuits, who sleeps beneath lavender-sprinkled sheets, surrounded by bowls filled with sea salt and sage—a girl who’s started having nightmares, just like her mom’s, that scare her to the bone, and make her not want to sleep.

2

I tuck into bed and click off the light, trying my best to fall back to sleep, but the sound of rain pelting against the window interrupts the loud silence: click , click , clack .

I return to