AWKWARD, GATORADE BOY
Dream me is in a classroom. The room is at least the second floor up and both the weather and the general mood are overcast and grey. The desks in the room are aligned in a clean pattern but are scattered randomly around the room facing the same direction. Today is the first or maybe second day of school as I hardly know anyone, including the teacher. A girl that I know, but not well, is sitting next to me. Some boys sitting near the windows are clearly trouble makers, talking amongst themselves and making crude jokes during class. One other student stands out: an awkward looking boy. He seems to have forsaken haircuts because his hair has grown to almost shoulder length, waving slightly, and is not styled in any particular way. He is wearing a black vest with numerous patches attached to it.
Because the boy is awkward he sometimes speaks up at the wrong time or says something he probably shouldn’t have. This is bothering the teacher. To make matters worse the delinquents near the window are provoking the vest-wearing boy causing him to act out more often. I don’t remember what happened exactly but finally the boy said something to make the teacher snap. He called the boy out on it, put him down in front of the whole class and them forced him to leave the classroom. Most of the kids in the classroom were laughing. Even the girl sitting near me was smiling about it.
I thought the teacher was incompetent. The boy’s awkward personality and stand out dressing style probably already caused him to have a low self-esteem. To humiliate him in front of all his peers was perhaps one of the least productive things a teacher could do. The teacher was also failing to recognize who was really at fault in the situation because while the boy was the one to speak out, he did so without bad intentions while the kids near the window had been catalysts to the whole scenario for their own amusement.
Class ends and the girl tells me she likes my pencil, though I can’t remember any specific feature of the pencil I had. I tell her what I thought about the vested boy, the teacher, and the kids near the window. She agrees with me and looks guilty for having laughed when the teacher called out the boy. On the way out of the school building the girl and I run into the boy. He had gone up onto the building’s roof for the rest of class. The girl asks him how he is and if he wants her sandwich. The boy says he was fine and shakes his head at the sandwich. He holds up a large bottle of pink Gatorade he had been drinking to show that he’s fine with what he has.
Immediately outside the school is a parking garage. Huge concrete pillars hold up the levels above us, though unlike a normal parking garage there is enough space between any two levels to drive tall vehicles like semi-trucks. The weather is still overcast and cold and the concrete looks kind of frosted. I think to myself that I’d gotten to use to weather in California and scold myself for putting on Birkenstocks because my toes are freezing.
After a little bit of walking I arrive at a house. I know it belongs to Jon Richey, my real world friend from 6th grade. I step inside. It has hard wood floors. I don’t see John anywhere and I speculate he’s up the staircase directly in front of me. To the left of the stair case is a dining room and my brother is sitting there. I then hear my mom talking to him from the other side of the house. She’s persuading him to let her photograph him. She wants to take a photo of him in his track uniform and she wants to take the picture from a low angle so that the picture will be of him, somewhat silhouetted, from the waist up with only the blue sky as background. She never said this out loud but I knew that it’s the photo she envisions. Eventually the bribe my brother settles for is that he will get to eat out at a restaurant of his choice. However immediately after the conclusion is reached he begins to argue that some of the other bribes that had been discussed were also part of the agreement. I start to wander around the house and wake up.
I roll over in bed and type “Kid put out of class. Laughed at by students. Cold feet parking garage. (kid with long hair and vest with patches) (waited on roof with drink) girl likes my pencil. Jon Richey’s house, sandals. Mom and Andrew photo of running going out to eat and being even.” on a new word document on my laptop, use the bathroom, and fall back to sleep.
HOURGLASS DANCE
Dream me is alone in a room. Some events have taken place before this but I don’t remember what they are now. The room is a very large play room with chests of toys, a bunk bed, and elaborate mobiles hanging from the high ceiling. The room is part of a small building detached from the rest of a nearby house and as I’m looking at it I realize it belongs to a spoiled kid. I walk across the room and out a door on the left ending up on a porch in between the smaller building and the main house. It’s early morning, slightly foggy and damp. The surrounding landscape is composed of very steep hills that lead down into a large valley. The general area around the house looks more country-like than urban. It is sort of like a town that came about and grew to its current size 80 years ago and hasn’t made any major developments since then.
Ron Weasley steps up onto the porch with me and asks if I remember this place. I tell him I don’t and he seems disappointed in me. I feel bad too for not remembering something important to him. He leads me through a door right next to the one I just came out of. After walking down a short hallway we come into a huge, huge room that leads me to believe the detached building is much bigger than I first thought. The room’s ceiling is at least 4 stories above us and is wide enough to fit many commercial airplanes. Rather than airplanes though the dim room is filled with thousands of arcade machines, air hockey tables, and UFO catchers that make the whole place glow all sorts of colors. The arcade is crowded with many people walking around and playing the different games.
Ron and I run into some boys who are our friends and begin to wander through the giant arcade. We see the latest version of the fighting game we like to play and brag about how we first started playing the game in its earlier versions. Bragging this is easy because if we walk down the aisle just a little bit the earlier versions of the game are all lined up in chronological order.
After walking around for a while we sit down on a circular couch with a small potted tree in the middle. The boy next to me drops a red token into a token slot on a small box next to the couch. I guess he didn’t mean to do this because he then says “oh shoot”. He thinks about it for a moment and then decides to drop 2 more red tokens into the box. The box then spits out a few golden tokens. I ponder for a while why he would exchange tokens for tokens and then come to the conclusion that the machine must have accidently mistook the red tokens for quarters and then given him tokens to use in the arcade. The boy hands me his three remaining red tokens and asks me to watch them while he plays a few games. I hold onto them and wander off on my own.
A police man standing between two arcade machines sees me fiddling with the red tokens in my hand and comes over to me. He says “You know food and drink aren’t allowed in the arcade?” I then say “Oh, I didn’t know, but I don’t have any.” The police officer then gestures to my red tokens and says “Those are Burger King tokens.” When he says that I remember that if you buy a meal a Burger King they hand you red tokens like these while you wait for your order to cook. Then when you go to get your order you give the red tokens back. I say “These tokens aren’t mine I’m holding them for a friend. I’m not going to turn them in for food.” The officer doesn’t seem to believe me because he repeats “food and drink aren’t allowed in the arcade. You shouldn’t have let me see these.” I say “Look I can put them in my pocket and leave the arcade if you want.” I guess the police officer thought I was talking back and being disrespectful because he points his gun at me and tells me to come with him.
He walks me out of the arcade and three more police officers meet him immediately outside. Unlike when I met Ron the surroundings are very urban now and I’m under a street light that’s as bright as a spot light so that I can hardly see. I know four guns are pointed at me and I have my arms above my head, red tokens still in hand. I hear a gunshot and instinctively duck. The cops laugh and I decide that they shot to miss on purpose just to startle me. I slowly stand back up. The first cop comes up to me and confiscates the red tokens. He then tells me I’ll probably have to serve 108 hours of community service as a punishment and the cops disband.
I look around and see my dad in the driver’s seat of a limo beckoning me to come over. My whole family is in the limo along with tons and tons of boxes so that the whole limo is full. They were waiting for me to drive off somewhere together.
I tell my parents about the cops and my 108 hours of community service and they don’t seem shocked or disappointed. I guess even in the dream world the whole red token arrest fiasco seems unnecessary and ridiculous. There’s no room for me in the limo so I have to sit on the roof. As I cling to the roof while the limo drives through the city I wonder how I’ll ever manage to perform 108 hours of community service and continue my internship before I have to go back to college.
We leave the city and are now driving through the original scenery I saw on the porch with Ron Weasley. Every time the limo goes down one of the hills it picks up dangerous amounts of speed and I feel like I’m on a rollercoaster. It also occurs to me around this point that the limo isn’t a limo and my dad is actually driving a giant, green, mechanical millipede. We go over the edge of the next slope and it looks even steeper than the last. There are abandoned railroad tracks running perpendicular to us across the slope and the millipede is now going much too fast to control. I hear my mom gasp at my dad’s reckless driving as we bounce over the train tracks. There are just a few moments where the millipede swerves back and forth in slow motion and we all can feel the impending crash. It then begins to tumble and roll the rest of the way down the slope.
I’m lying on the ground after the crash and I sit up. I don’t look around for the millipede or my family because I immediately see a very strange sight across the river next to me. There is a small crowd of people all wearing strange costumes. Some of them are dressed like golden squares or cubes, and the others are dressed like hourglasses. They are all holding rods with decorations on the end such as other hourglasses, stars or hooks. Hanging from the sky above them is A giant pole and at its end some 20 feet above them is a large hourglass that makes jerky 45 degree turns to a rhythm like a giant metronome. Every other time the hourglass turns all the people in the crowd move a little bit and then freeze in place except for one small girl who moves every time the hourglass turns. They are all trying to strike each other with their rods as if they are acting out, step by step, every second of an epic battle. The small girl has a clear advantage over everyone else because she makes two movements for every one they make. The rhythm of the whole spectacle makes it seems a little like a dance and I watch it for a few seconds totally caught in a trance. Then I wake up.
