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float free and tell me whatever comes into your head, okay?”
    “Okay,” Nellie said agreeably.
    “What did you have for breakfast today?”
    “Think Quick cereal and two pieces of toast,” Nellie said immediately. She never lied about stuff like breakfast because it was too obvious. If Westcott realized she was deliberately making things up, the game would be over.
    “Good,” said Westcott. “What did you do after that?”
    “Brushed my teeth and had a water fountain fight with Lierin. Until Duikstra caught us.” Nellie let a scowl cross her face, then listened for the smile that crept into Westcott’s next phrase.
    “You make Ms. Duikstra work for her paycheck too, I see,” he chuckled. “Tell me, Nellie, what have you been dreaming about lately?”
    “What have I been dreaming?” Nellie repeated dreamily. This was the good stuff, where Westcott really started to drool.
    “Yes,” purred Westcott. “Dream, dream, dream.”
    “The other day I dreamt a very large snake crawled out of my underpants.” Speaking in a sing-song voice, Nellie struggled to keep her face completely blank. She’d been planning to lay this one on Westcott for several weeks, but for some reason he hadn’t asked about dreams in the last several sessions.
    “A very large snake?” repeated Westcott after a slight pause.
    “ VERY large,” affirmed Nellie. “It came crawling out of my underpants and slid out the door and down the hallway in our dorm, and when it reached the end of the hall its tail was just going out of the door of my room.”
    Westcott seemed to be stuck in an extended silence. “And ... how did you feel about that?” he finally asked in an extremely casual tone.
    “It was just a dream,” said Nellie. “I didn’t think about it much.” Westcott liked it when she let him do all the thinking. “And then I had another dream where all the walls in the dorm turned into chocolate. I got pretty fat in that dream.”
    “Hmm,” said Westcott. He didn’t seem as interested in this dream. Nellie sucked at the grin surfacing onto her lips. Just wait until she told Lierin about this one.
    “Nellie,” Westcott said casually. “Have you ever dreamed that you cut off your hair?”
    Deep within Nellie something snapped into high alert. “Cut off my hair?” she asked, forcing herself to speak slowly.
    “Yes,” said Westcott. “Shaved it all off, so you were bald.”
    “Nooooooo,” said Nellie, drawing the word out like a question. “Why would I dream something like that?”
    “Oh, it’s something kids your age often dream about — rebellion, identity seeking, that kind of thing. So you’ve never ... imagined cutting off all your hair?”
    “It fell in my soup the other day,” said Nellie. “I thought about it then.”
    As far as she could tell she was keeping her face neutral, but her mind was spinning like a child’s toy. How did Westcott know about her dreams of the bald girl? Well, she wasn’t really bald, it looked more as if someone had run a lawnmower over her head. So far Nellie had had several dreams about her, all in the past week, but she hadn’t told anyone about them, even Lierin. The weirdest thing was that except for the almost-bald hairstyle, she and the girl in her dreams looked exactly alike. So much so that she could have been dreaming about herself with all her hair cut off. But how could Westcott know about that?
    “How about when you’re asleep?” persisted the psychiatrist. “Or daydreaming in class? Have you ever dreamed about cutting off your hair then?”
    “Uh-uh,” said Nellie emphatically, then repeated the phrase in dreamy tones. “Mostly I dream about the opposite,” she added, “with my hair growing and growing until it pours all over me like a beautiful dress and I can walk down the hall with it trailing twenty feet behind me.”
    What a load of crap , she thought grimly. Was it possible psychiatrists actually fell for this stuff?
    Once again, Westcott