10/13
It is weird to be in high school again. In high school I never dreamed of important tests or wandering the halls, so it seems odd to do it now, a few years after I’ve left.
My first period is free, so I am in the library, and then the bell rings for second period and I realize I don’t know where I am going, so I pull out my schedule, only to find that first period wasn’t free and I should have been in gym. I pale at the thought of cutting class on the first day of school and feel a little sick, and then wander into my English class, which is complicated and confusing, and requires that we read Beowulf, but I can’t find my copy.
I leave school at this point, walk outside and everything is black and grey and spooky, and walk to CMU to hang out with Robyn and Gabe, people who have never met and will never meet in real life. In Gabe’s room, which is an inky grey-blue and feels like a ship’s cabin, we talk about math and my stomach flutters because I have a crush on him. He has a series of books I haven’t read that Robyn has, books by a famous detective novelist that are all about numbers. The Magnificent Three, I read on the spine of one book. The covers are very 70’s paperback, and look important.
“The best one is about two,” Gabe says, and Robyn nods her head aggressively.
We all leave his room, dressed to the nines (I pun, and Gabe groans and Robyn rolls her eyes), and walk to the site of the Daylesford train station, which is now an important Hilton hotel, and a Ritz movie theatre. For this party, which Claire is giving, we are all renting rooms and seeing a lot of movies. There are maybe twenty of us, and we are all sitting on the curb and laughing and mingling. At some point we are all drinking, but soon all the containers are gone, and I’m not sure to where. I walk over to a friend, who I know is gay, and make out with him a little, and then accidentally and drunkenly knee his balls and feel terrible about it. But he recovers and then I am getting ready to take pictures of this whole group, and as everyone gets into a line I see this whole weird line-up, of friends from college and high school and a few people who were never friends, and stuck in the middle of it all is a very healthy, happy looking version of a friend from middle school I haven’t spoken to in years and years, and looking at him makes my heart swell with happiness, because within this dream I know we haven’t spoken but it is good to know he is well. And I realize suddenly everyone looks happy and healthy and loving and lovely and loved.
So I smile and I take the photo.
