Dream

Last night I dreamt I was in a decent sized bathroom with many showers, actual showers, like full-sized tub showers with shower curtains. We were having a shower party. Lauren Bingham and I were mine (Fully-Clothed, and also, somehow we didn’t get wet, though the water was running) but we weren’t washing our bodies, everyone had an armful of clothes that they were scrubbing down. I was using the pomegranate body wash in my shower, and I thought to myself, I wish that I were in Lisa’s shower so I could use her bar of soap. Lauren left, and in crawled my mother, to tell me that she was sick of the music that was playing, aka M.I.A. Paper Planes.
“I don’t know how to change the music,” I said.
“It’s the popcorn!” called Felicity Ostvig from a few showers over. (Yes, we had many treats at our party). I tried to imagine what we meant, and had an image of each piece of popcorn in my mouth, creating a snippet of a song while I chewed.
“That’s annoying!” I called back.
Lauren, who was now in the bathroom part of the room went over to look at the blue bowl of popcorn. She put a CD that Sophie had made her for her birthday in a CD player behind the popcorn, which acted as speakers. She had changed the song to “You don’t know me,” By Ben Folds and Regina Spektor.
Then a tall handsome man named Ryan, although in my dream he had the name and qualities of a certain individual, he also wasn’t that individual, pulled back the curtains to my shower and we made out. Then he said we should go somewhere else, to talk about our relationship, which was non-existent at that time. We went to the airport.
“What about your girlfriend?" I asked.
“I don’t have a girlfriend,” he said. I knew this was a lie.
“What about Sarah,” I pressed.
“We broke up. I broke up with her.”
Oh, how wonderful, so we kissed again.
Then we decided to leave. We had no mode of transportation to get to wherever we were planning, so we decided to steal something. We decided it was wrong to steal a bike or a car, but that it was okay to steal a cart. The carts were like the big things at Home Depot, one handle and then all flat to fit luggage on. We learned that the handles were hinged, and you had to bend them in half to fit through the fence around the airport, but when you bent them, an alarm went off. Ryan pushed me very carefully to the fence, then bent the cart handle in half and shoved me and the cart through the fence.
Wee-OO-Wee-OO-Wee-OO, the alarms sounded and five or six girls, about my age, dressed in the same security guard outfits as the girls who work at the art museum, came rushing out, and crawled under the gate. We were already escaping, but as they caught up to us, we began plowing over them. Finally in an act of desperation we jumped off the cart and bolted to a parking lot where a mangled 70s van, painted orange, was sitting. All the windows and door had been broken. The only seat intact was the drivers seat, which was plaid, and falling apart. We crawled through the hole where the windshield would be, and Ryan and I both sat in the one seat and –with me driving—we took off in the van, blasting past the security guards who shook their fists and vowed to catch us.
Ryan and I stayed together, keeping that old van, and the security guards, true to their word, chased us for many years. They would find the van – hard to miss it—outside places and wait for us, and every time we would escape. One it was at a water park, and they waited at the bottom of the slide. Once it was in an elevator building, and they stood on each floor, waiting for us to get out. One it was in a neighbourhood, where we were playing with little kids, and they drove by in an ice cream truck, luring us to them. The last time was the worst. They found out where Ryan and I lived and they were all standing outside our apartment (we lived on the 30th floor) I came up behind them while they discussed how to catch us. They could see the silhouettes of two people up on the floor that they thought must be us, and they were thinking of maybe just storming up and getting us.
I don’t know how it happened, but in a moment I had been captured and driven to a terrible house for captive children. I was the oldest one there.
I was dragged into the house, where Jordan Haglund, the ruler, had her own personal waterslide, but she hardly ever used it. Jordan spent most of her time in the basement playing video games. We could always hear shooting and banging from down there.
The second day I was there Jordan set me a task. To humiliate all the children, and make it more obvious where they were, should they try to escape, I was to dye their hair bright red. The children were crying, and I felt very guilty. She sent me out into the back yard to find the paint. There was my sister Mary, a prisoner of this terrible place.
“What are you doing out here?” she asked, motioning to the trailer.
“Jordan sent me to get paint, to dye people’s hair.”
Mary started to cry and it broke my heart.
“It wont be so bad,” I realized as I said it that everyone in the whole house except Jordan was wearing pigtails on top of their heads that had obviously been dipped in turquoise paint. They were stiff and ugly, they looked painful, even.
“If I do it, it won’t be so bad,” I promised.
“I’ll pick an okay colour and be very gentle.” I went though the paint, but there were only neon pinks and oranges. The shelf they were on was shaking, and the shaking of the uncovered paint buckets was causing the paint to turn more horrible colours.
I gathered several of the cans off the shelf before they could get worse and brought them for Jordan’s approval.
“Can I add a little brown or yellow to the paint?” I asked about 30 times, but Jordan wasn’t answering me. She took a pink bucket from my hands and dumped several boxes of raspberries inside. With the stirring stick she mashed them up inside, making the paint a deeper red, but also full of seeds, and way nasty.
She thrust it into my hands, “Start with your sister,” she ordered.
I went into the backyard again and Mary was sitting in the grass, and I had her flip her head and slowly, layer by layer, I rubbed the hair-paint-dye stuff into her hair. It was now the colour and texture of a melted raspberry-chocolate shake. It started to fill the small yard, combined with the hose that was on, until Mary and I had to stand or be drowned.
I ran out of dye near the top of her head, so only her under layers were dyed and only barely. You could only just see streaks of neon pink. We went in to show Jordan and as we walked, we decided to escape. As we passed the other prisoners we invited them. The prisoners included the Sarah Simonsen, Leann Ostvig, and the Lovejoy girls. We went downstairs to find Jordan, and only Leann was downstairs, on the computer.
“We’re looking for Jordan,” I said.
“She should be down in a minute,” Leann said, “anything particular?”
“We’re going to escape,” I breathed, “want to come?” Leann couldn’t even hear us, but she saw my lips move and shook her head. She looked pointedly behind me where a black sleeve was poking around the corner.
“Jordan!” I called. The sleeve disappeared. “Jordan!”
We ran around the corner where Jordan was booking it up the stairs.
“Jordan!” I screamed, “I wanted to show you Mary’s hair.”
She came back down, admiring the tips. “It’s like magic, how only her tips and weird streaks dyed, “she said. “I will give you an awarding nickname,” she said.
“Hmm. Baby, antlered deer,” she said. “No, African leaping deer.”
“Gazelle?” I asked.
“Yes!” she cried in jubilee. “The Gazelle!”
Then she sat down and started playing her video game. Mary and I went upstairs and stole Jordan’s keys. Locking the door behind us, so no one could follow us, we took off on her motorcycle. Right through the garage door. She chased us down the street, but we were way faster than her. We escaped, and I woke up.