Disclaimer: I know you, my caring reviewers, might have noticed a slight change in Sonny's personality. She was mild-mannered, at best, but now she has rather gone a bit bitter, wouldn't you agree, maybe even a little…salty? Well, you would you feel if your dog/sister/brother/social studies teacher/mom/dad/cat/grandpa/young adopted son David was thrown down a rubbish bin by supposed friendly wood creatures. Which reminds me, if you happen to be walking along some wood paths and a small group of consists of a Bambi-look-alike, a Thumper-look-alike and the works cross your path asking for Martinez's Client, tell him I will have his money as soon as I can get it. I'm also taking the idea for this chapter from Dreamland by Sarah Dessen. Read the book, it's beautiful.

BTW: I do not own the works of Roald Dahl, I do however own Sonny salt ©.

Chapter Eleven

Veruca Salt was dreaming when she woke up suddenly to the sound of her mother screaming. It rang all along the spacious palatial mansion. She ran to her door, threw it open, and promptly tripped over her feet and whacked her face on a fancy hall switch. With an aching face and a bone to pick with her Mother for interrupting such a nice dream, she got to her feet and ran down the spiraling stair-case to the kitchen, finding the rest of the mansion empty as the maids hadn't even returned yet. She made her way to the kitchen where her Mother was standing against the stainless steel and shinning granite of the décor with something in her hand.

"I just don't understand this," Mrs. Salt was shakily saying to Mr. Salt, who standing beside her in his pajamas with his reading glasses on. The coffeemaker was spitting and gurgling happily behind them, most likely turned on by the last maid to leave at five-something in the morning before coming back an hour later. It seemed like this was any other morning. "She can't just leave. She can't."

Mrs. Salt didn't normally sound so vulgar like this when she normally spoke. In fact she usually bore an air of cosmopolitan charisma and indolence, as a woman who was cosseted along with the every caprice of her and both her daughters. This was not normal.

"Let me see the note," Mr. Salt said calmly, taking it out of her hand. It was on Sonny's thick, monogrammed stationary with matching envelopes. It had her initials: SS.

Later, when Veruca managed to snatch it from the gossip cleaning ladies and send one off crying, she saw it was completely concise and to the point. Sonny was not the type to waste words.

Parents,

I want you to know that I hope to be able to explain this well enough to you so that you'll understand.

Please don't worry.

Sonny

There was something considerably off; the p in parents was undoubtedly very shaky, as if she didn't want to write that word. And since when did Sonny ever refer her Mother and Father simply as parents? And the way she dotted her i's andher y's and oddly her w's. She hadn't even said she loved them; she always did.

Mrs. Salt wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and looked at Veruca, who instead of going into one of her browbeats stood silently away near the entrance of the kitchen watching. "She's gone," she said. "She went to be with her, I know it. How can she do this? She's supposed to be at De Montfort in three weeks."

"Angina," Father said, squinting at the note. "Calm down."

The "her" was Sonny's friend, Tory: She was twenty-one, had fair hair up to her chin, and lived in Northumberland in the slums somewhere with her hoodlum family and mother. Veruca knew that her mother worked on the Jocky Jordanes Show. It was one of those shock talk shows where people tell their boyfriends they've been sleeping with their best friends and guests routinely include Klansmen and eighty-pound four-year-old. It was a show that Mrs. Salt found amusing, and a show her father said she couldn't watch; it was where Veruca got most of her ideas where she had to teach so-and-so a lesson. Tory's mother's job mostly consisted of getting coffee, picking up people at the airports, and pulling guests off each other during the frequent fights that scored the show big ratings. Since she'd come home from their grandfather's beach house in Merseyside ten years ago - she'd met Tory there - sometimes while doing homework Sonny did it in front of the telly each day at 4 PM, wishing aloud for a good fight just so she could catch a glimpse of Tory's mother who occasionally had Tory help grab the other guest while she (the mother) dragged away the other. Usually she did, smiling at the sight of her charging with her mother onstage, her face serious, to untangle two scrapping sisters or a couple of rowdy cross-dressers.

Mr. Salt put the note down on the table and walked to the phone. "I'm calling the police," he said, and Mrs. Salt, uncharacteristically, burst into tears again, her hands rising to her face. Over her shoulder, through the glass door and over the patio left of the kitchen area, Veruca could see their grody gardeners, Clímaco and Rosendo. They were cutting through the tree line every now and then to trim up a lot of things; Rosendo was taking some of the flowers she had been instructed to plant and making a bouquet, bright and colorful, in her hand.

"I just can't believe this," Mrs. Salt said to Veruca, pulling out a chair and sitting down at the dinner table at the far end. She was shaking her head. "What if something happens to her? She's still a baby."

Veruca would have snorted if not for the circumstance of the situation; she, despite not being the best student in her prestigious school where it was more of a place for flaunting the goods instead of real education, knew for a fact that after you turn eighteen you were officially an adult. I'm practically an infant, she thought. She took that back, she hated small children.

"Yes, hello, I'm calling to report a missing person," Her Father said suddenly, in his official executive of Salt, Peanuts voice. "Alison Salt. Yes. She's my daughter."

Veruca had a sudden memory pop into her head: she must have been no more than eight or so, but she was still able to process a lot of things, and she remembered heading towards her room after having a maid walk her to the kitchen for a glass of water and then send her off with a wave of dismissal, nose up in the air haughtily when she saw Mrs. Salt standing in the doorway of Sonny's room, then already eighteen by then and ready to head off to De Montfort, then when her room had bright pink wallpaper and she had a bunk-bed that had an unoccupied top bed. Mrs. Salt would always kiss them goodnight, but after a while when Veruca kept dodging them she stopped and instead seemed to be spending a lot of time by Sonny's room. Veruca watched as Mrs. Salt was speaking quietly, too quiet to hear, with her eldest daughter and then she walked over to the girl who just finishing up some extra credit work and kissed her forehead, and then went back to stand in the doorway after turning off the light leaving the diamond-speckled ceiling to shine. Her shadow stretched down the length of room between them as Veruca watched. Mrs. Salt was always the last thing Sonny seemed to try to see before she fell asleep.

"See you in dreamland," Mrs. Salt would whisper, just loud enough for Veruca to decipher, and blow up a kiss before shutting the door quietly behind her and leaving Veruca to try and scurry off before she got caught. Like dreamland is a real place, Veruca thought as she lay in bed for a split second in darkness with a scoff. It wasn't as if it were tangible, where we would all wander close enough to catch glimpses and brush shoulders. For a while Veruca remembered going to sleep determined to go there and prove to her sister that it wasn't as great as it sounded, to find her and Mrs. Salt, and sometimes Veruca did. But it was never the way she imagined it would be.

Now her Mother sitting and weeping as her Father reported Sonny's vital statistics - five-four, deep brown hair, black eyes, mole on her right cheek - and Veruca had the sudden, slightly sickly sinking feeling that dreamland might be the only place they'd be seeing Sonny for a while.

Veruca heard a knock and made a face to look up and see Clímaco and Rosendo standing on the patio, waving merrily at them. They'd been their gardeners for as long as Veruca could remember, since before Sonny and she were even born. They were too chirpy and talkative, and sometimes Veruca wanted to smash their heads in. They believed in massage, one that the missis loved, fresh-baked homemade bread that was the only kind Sonny would eat and Veruca would die before admitting that it was kind of addicting seeing as how it was so poor-looking and tasted so exquisite, and crazy Mexican gods. They had absolutely nothing in common with the Salt parents, except proximity, where Mr. Salt after taking a mutual shine to them had let they live and charge rent with the money he gave them (he was basically taking it back), which had to led to years of a good employer-employee relationship that kept them good friends.

"Good morning!" Rosendo called out to them through the door, holding the flowers for them to see. "Lovely day!" She reached down and pushed the door open, then stepped inside with Clímaco following. He was carrying a bowl and a plate, each covered with a brightly colored napkin, which he put down on the dinning table in front of Mrs. Salt. They had gone past formalities a long time ago.

"We brought blueberry buckwheat pancake mix and sliced mangoes fresh from the tree," Clímaco said in his rough voice, smiling at Veruca. "Your favorites." More like one of Sonny's latest addictions.

Rosendo was crossing over and, arms already extended, pulled Veruca into one of her long, emotional and tight hugs. She smelled of cinnamon and other ethic spices. It always itched Veruca's nose. But she had learned long ago not to try and pry herself away from the hugs until it was over. Sometimes she barely reacted to it anymore, maybe a side effect from what was currently happening.

"Today's a bright day, Veruca," she whispered into her ear. "This will be a special day. I can feel it."

"Don't count on it," Veruca sneered, and Rosendo, already used to the child's attitude, pulled back and frowned and about to tell her to brighten up, instead gave a confused look just as Mr. Salt hung up the phone and cleared his throat.

"Technically," he began, "they can't do anything for twenty-four hours. But they're keeping an eye out for her. We need to call all her friends, right now. Especially those Smeaths. Perhaps she told someone something."

"What's going on?" Rosendo asked, and at the table Mrs. Salt just shook her head. She couldn't even say it. "Angina? What is it?"

"It's Alison," Father told her, his voice flat. "It appears that she's run away." This was Veruca's father, always formal: He lived for supposedly and theoretically, not believing anything without proper proof.

"Oh, my God," Rosendo said, pulling out a chair and yanking it close to Mrs. Salt before sitting down. "When did she go?"

"I don't know," Mother said softly, and Clímaco took one of her hands, his hand on her shoulder. They were touchy people, always had been. Mr. Salt, however, who didn't like smelly hippies touching his wife, was not, so neither made a move toward him. Mother sniffled. "I don't know anything." She and Sonny were just so close, that this came as a shocker. She ultimately knew everything about her from who was her favorite artist to the color of her socks.

"Veruca," her Father said to her briskly, "get a list together of her friends, anyone she might have talked to. And the number for that Danes show or whatever it's called. And be sure to ask for Smeath."

She knew better than to refuse because recently, since the whole Wonka incident, he had been refusing her a lot. When she asked - or rather pointedly demanded - a flying glass elevator, wherever she had gotten that idea from, he had said that only thing she was getting was a bath because the girl reeked and she was in desperate need of a tick bath. "Fine," she said, not bothering to correct him. He nodded before turning his back to his wife and Rosendo and Clímaco to look out across the wide patio at the few squirrels crowding the few bird feeders.

On her way to her room, Veruca turned the door knob and in Sonny's room she opened the nightstand drawer and picked up what she found inside. It was a book, nothing special, called The Four Keys, it read. As she moved past the cover she found an inscription in the little box that read who the book belonged to and Sonny's loop script, her name big.

Sonny, it said in blue ink, forever in dreamland.

. . .

In pictures (many reluctant ones), Sonny and Veruca often wore matching clothes like the same parkas and gloves. Mrs. Salt thought it'd be cute to dress them alike, like twins, despite the fact that Sonny was somewhere between sixteen and eighteen and Veruca was six and eight. The height situation didn't make much more of a difference as one would have thought. They almost did look like twins, with the same round face and eye shape and the same hair length. But with the dark eyes and shape and such they weren't the same, even then.

When Sonny was born Mrs. Salt still wasn't sure what to name her. You see, she had suffered terrible morning sickness and Rosendo, who was just starting to get on Mrs. Salt's good side, was spending a lot of time making her herbal tea that she hated and rubbing the Mother's feet which she loved, trying to make her force the occasional saltine cracker. Rosendo was the one who suggested Alison.

Now, Rosendo's choices leaned more to Cassandra while Mrs. Salt was more towards Alice or Mary; that was why she suggested Alison, because it was the diminutive version of Alice. But she tried to defend her reason of the name Cassandra, who was a seer and a prophet. Mrs. Salt liked that she had come to a horrible end, and had chosen that as the middle name. But she especially liked Alison, "It means of noble kind or nobility," Rosendo told the Mother. "I'm not sure if Alice came to a horrible end and despite the on-off chances of going down rabbit holes what would be better than to have a daughter who knows her place in society and uses it to her advantage to make a living?"

So Alison it was and by the time Veruca came along, Mrs. Salt and Rosendo were something of best friends. Rosendo's mother's name was Varuka and she had a rather tumultuous relationship with her, calling her the "wart of her existence" and Mrs. Salt had to admit that it did have a quite ring to it despite sounding like a "wart remover powder".

Veruca always thought that at some ways Sonny's name was cooler, but to be named as the sort of bane of one's existence was something special, so Veruca never complained. Her name was just one thing Veruca envied about Sonny. Even with their similarities it was the things they didn't have in common that Veruca was always most aware of.

. . .

Alison Cassandra Salt wasn't a seer or a prophet, at least not at eighteen. But she was of nobility, and she did use it to her advantage. What she was, was student government president two years running, star right wing of the girls' lacrosse team (City Champion her junior and senior year), and Winter Snow Queen. She volunteered chopping vegetables at the homeless shelter for soup night every Thursday, had been skydiving three times in a row, and was famous in her prestigious secondary school for staging a sit-in to protest the firing of a popular English teacher for assigning "questionable reading material" - Toni Morrison's Beloved. Like many other times for being spotted by the paparazzi with her Mother or such she made the Cheshire news for that one, speaking clearly and speaking angrily to a local reporter, her eyes blazing, with half the school framed in the shoot cheering behind her. Mr. Salt, who managed to catch a bit of it, just stared and grinned.

There were only two times Veruca remembered seeing Sonny depressed. One was after her Father had been noticing some, erm, "changes" in her and said that he thought it'd be best for her to "keep it tight" which was another way of saying to slim down. She tried to get him to reiterate without being mean but instead he did the opposite, even calling her fat or chubby, and Veruca could see why; back then she did have some jingly-jingly going on and though people were attracted to her personality her weight has always been something that Sonny seemed to take seriously. She had locked herself in her room for a full day, right about the same time she started to phone Tory and email her long gooey overemotional messages. She never talked about it again, instead just focusing on sliming down or at least getting her weight right to seem slimmer if you squinted and cocked your head. She succeeded, to some extent.

The second time was at the end of her sophomore year, when Tory was downgraded to Northumberland by her frantic mother after her (along with the Salt parents) found out that out of certain circumstances that she and Sonny had been secretly sharing a flat while in Cheshire and later while the parents were processing the decision of letting the two live the rest of their youthful days in that same flat where it, by some twist, was burned down and left the two of them back to their parents. Just lying to her Father was maybe the only unhappy thing she did to upset him which led him to blame the behavior on Mrs. Smeath's hoodlum family, who reacted strongly and - the whole thing was rather messy. Sonny cried two weeks straight because her Father cut all contact to the Smeaths, sitting in her bathrobe and staring out the window, refusing to go anywhere. After another week or so she started to draw again and after managing to get an application to De Montfort she remembers the plan she and Tory made and after she gets accepted somewhere near the end of her junior year bluntly tells her parents that she's going to continue her friendship with her because she was going to be a senior and that she had gotten accepted in De Montfort with some of the highest grades and that she only sought their approval. They didn't approval but if it kept her happy, they'd have to cope.

Before she had met Tory she was very young and very influential, as one gets when an artist, and was looking for signs and symbols by then and she had seemingly found one in Tory. They had apparently spent the entire day on a hammock, talking and drinking wine until they exchanged emails and phone-numbers and decided to keep in touch.

Veruca overheard Rosendo talking about how she heard Sonny on the phone the next morning, her voice so happy and laughing over the line, that she felt the old Sonny was back who had gotten lost somewhere along the way of her attempts to "keep it tight" and capture her inner soul. But not, they soon learned, for long.

The Salt family didn't know how much they'd needed Sonny until she was gone. All they had was her room, her stories, her drawings, and the quiet that settled in as they tried in vain to spread themselves out and fill the space she'd left behind.

. . .

The kitchen became mission control, full of ringing phones, loud voices, and panic. Mrs. Salt refused to leave the phone; positive that Sonny would call any minute and say it was all a joke, of course she was still going to De Montfort. Meanwhile her other wealthy friends - who admittedly took up the company of her because of the boosting of their social status couldn't help but worry about Sonny - and the cleaning ladies that were on good terms with her circled through the mansion making fresh pots of coffee every five minutes, wiping the counters down, and clucking their tongue in packs by the patio door. Mr. Salt shut himself in his office to call everyone who'd ever know Sonny including his factory workers and every other child she had met when he took her along to meet his inner circle, hanging up each time to cross another name off the long list in front of him. She was twenty-one, so technically she couldn't be listed as a runaway. She was more like a soldier gone AWOL, still owing some service and on the lam.

They'd already tried one of the Smeath's apartments in Bedfordshire, but the number had been disconnected when their owner had gotten evicted. Then they called the Jocky Jordanes Show, where they kept getting an answering machine encouraging them to leave their experience with this week's topic - My Twin Dresses Like a Slut and I Can't Stand It! - so that a staffer could get back to them. He had even phoned her old school, Marley Pang's School for the Musically and Artistically Gifted, in hopes of getting any kind of clue. Right now he was phoning the early service of De Montfort, trying to keep the Smeath number.

"I can't believe she'd do this," Mrs. Salt kept saying. "De Montfort. She's supposed to be at De Montfort." And all the cleaning ladies and wealthy women around her would nod, or hand her more coffee, or cluck again.

Veruca, still inside Sonny's room, was sitting on her bed. She felt that her hair was twitching with all the negative energy coming from outside, and looking around she saw how neatly Sonny'd left everything. In a stack by the wide bureau was everything she and Tory had bought on endless Saturday trips to Bailey's Avery. She remembered those few mornings where Tory managed to make it past the front door and the two of them, on the floor, would groan about the things they'd have so far. They weren't roommates but they were in enough proximity to seem close enough. "I mean, God," Tory was like on Saturday back a few years in midst of June getting ready for their first year of university, "who knows the difference between a duvet and a comforter?" With Sonny's gold card, the list of items that the university suggested for all incoming freshmen, and a letter from Tory's future roommate, a girl from Berkshire. And apparently she'd already been in contact so that she and Tory could color-coordinate their bed linens, discuss who should bring what in the way of the telly, microwaves, and wall hangings, and just to "break the ice" so that by August, when classes started, they'd already "be like sisters." And from what she remembered it to be like, the dumb blonde with her stupid haircut and dumb problems, Tory was already glum about separating from Sonny by at least four doors and now the letter was pretty much doing her in.

"A duvet," Sonny had told her, stopping to eye the stack of thick purple towels Tory had come with, and looking down at linens magazine, "is a cover for a comforter, usually a down comforter. And a comforter is just a glorified quilt." Sonny always seemed to have the answers to everything, so sure about everything, having the kind of determination and answers able to keep Tory, amongst others, grounded by that kind of perfection. She was the type of person who would a break a sweat for everyone if it met being closer to perfection, and up until recently, she was going to live on perfection hill - to her, it was no longer something she saw coming to the horizon.

Veruca pushed some air from his lips in a unladylike fashion, beginning wonder how long she'd know she wouldn't use any of the new stuff she'd bought a month ago - the new pillowcases, fans (both manual and electric), a new little plastic basket to hold her shower stuff, more hangers, and her new blue comforter, still in its plastics - when she'd (most likely) hatched this plan with Tory. She bloody fooled us, every one.

She had come back to Buckinghamshire beach tanned, gorgeous, and sloppy, and proceeded to spend about an hour each night on the phone long-distance with her, spending every bit of the money she'd saved up over the course of her summer.

"I miss you," she'd whisper to her, and Veruca, then still listening in by the door, would blush; she didn't even care that she was there. She'd be lying across the bed, twirling and twirling the cord around her wrist. "No, I miss you more. I do. Tor, I do. Okay. Good night. Love you too. What? More than anything. Hand on my heart, I swear. Okay. Love you too." And when she finally did hang up she'd pull her legs up against her chest, grinning stupidly, and sigh.

"You are pathetic," Veruca told her one night when it was particularly sickening, involving hairstyles and puppies and about four cupcakes and five pumpkins. What type of friends talk to each other that way? She'd wondered when she'd overhear Tory and Sonny in her room, her across her bed and Tory by the telly, zoning out except that when they talked she'd end a sentences with maybe, "Sure thing, cupcake," or "not really, puddin'".

"Oh, Rucy," she said, sighing again, suing that insipid nickname rolling over on her bed and sitting up to look at Veruca's small figure. "Someday you'll find a best friend and this will happen to you."

"If you mean acting like a berk, then God, I hope not," Veruca said. "If I act like that, be sure to put me out of my misery. And when my will is read, stay away from my ponies."

"Oh, really," she said, raising one eyebrow. Then she closed her eyes, leaning her chin on the pillow at the foot of the bed, and breathed in. Even from here, Veruca could always decipher her sent of Ivory soap and fresh air. She looked asleep so Veruca started to march off, moody because she hadn't finished the conversation.

She had heard Sonny whisper quietly to herself, "You're such a pain in the arse. But I love you anyway."

That had been years before the entire situation. She must have probably have know even then she was leaving.

Looking up at her mirror, she looked at all the ribbons and pictures Sonny had taped around it: spelling bees, honor rolls, shots from the Cheshire Shopping District photo booth of her friends making faces and laughing, their arms looped around each other, most of them were the Smeaths and such. There was a picture of her sitting on the hood of someone's ugly car in cutoff jeans and a tie-dyed t-shirt, barefoot and wearing star-shaped sunglasses, laughing. There were a couple of them, too. One from a Christmas when Veruca was a baby, Mrs. Salt supporting her on Sonny's lap who had on a little red dress and white tights, leaning slightly against Mrs. Salt who was along with her daughter smiled. And one from a summer at another beach house, this time is Suffolk, sitting at the end of some dock with a very pregnant Mrs. Salt, legs dangling over, Sonny in a blue polka-dot bathing suit, and handing her Mother her Popsicle.

Alright, so maybe she was jealous, now and then, but there was nothing to do but pale in comparison before demanding for another pet once the stupid ceremony finished and Sonny could get off the stage and take his dumb award home already. But Sonny came to all her mini-competitions, cheering the loudest for her when she was horseback-riding in a not-so-friendly race at her school. She was maybe the first one waiting for her when she came off the ice during the time where her Father bought her that ice rink (which funnily enough I thought he'd buy her Iceland when she said she wanted to be an figure skater) after falling on her arse four times in five minutes before demanding to be taken somewhere that'd make her happy. She didn't even say anything, just took off her mittens, gave them to Veruca who threw on the floor, and helped her back to the empty dressing room where Veruca, moodily with her lip almost pouting, sat there wanting to cry as Sonny unlaced her skates and told her terrible knock-knock jokes the whole time til Veruca told her to stop before she made her.

There was always a part of Veruca that was always looking forward to Sonny going off back to De Montfort at the end of the summer or every vacation. Her leaving might actually give her some room, a chance to not hear her over the phone through the surprisingly thin wall between their rooms, and maybe a chance to finally strike out on her own. But this, along with what happened at that awful Wonka's factory, changed everything.

It's not like I always count on her to lead me, she thought. Sonny was out there somewhere, but this time she'd taken her own route seriously, and for once Veruca couldn't demand the one thing she was wanting this very moment. This time, with everything so far, she'd left her to find her own way of getting things.