In Your Dreams

Storytelling

After being release, I stayed home for the rest of the school week. It wasn't like my attendance would make any difference to my intelligence level. My math teacher would probably be relieved to know she didn't have to dumb talk the lesson to me. Biology and history were a sad story, though. Oh, English? You thought I took English? School administration wasn't that stupid. That's what special ed was for.

In other words, I got a lot of time to mope and think and sleep.

I found Basil in my dreams only once after the hospital. In them, he had become just as rigid and cold as he had been originally: tight-lipped and shark-eyed.

"You're scared of me," I said, feeling a big sweep of déjà vu.

"You are evidence that I'm clinically insane. If I can, I'd like to stay away from you forever."

I stepped towards him, and he took one back. I wasn't certain of our surroundings. It was the desert, or perhaps just a painting of desert, and people watched us as they ate their pita bread tacos.

"So you kiss every girl in your dreams," I said.

He snorted. "Like you've never kissed a guy in your dreams. Except it's our brains dicking around with us."

"Then why not let it?" I thought I might burn with the sudden intensity of heat rushing through my insides.

He gave me a familiar chin ducked down, narrowed glare out from under his perfectly styled bangs.

"And what if it's real and I wake up to find I've just had sex with a girl I don't know? Or worse, a pillow?"

I felt my mouth smile, but it tightened up somewhere at the back of my head instead. "But you do know me. And is there someone there to watch you do your pillow?" I paused. "Whoa whoa, hang on, you want to have sex with me?"

He drew back and the desert rose up in a carpet of sage and skin colored sand to accept him. It could have been a fantastical sweep of his hands inwards that magicked the land about him, but I know he did no such thing. He simply drew away.

And people couldn't live in paintings anyways.

But the painting dream itself had inspired me, as art often does.

After a good deal of thought, I approached my History teacher again after class.

"Hey, Tenny," Mr. Handson said, with his wide, customary smile. "I take it you need help with something."

I wrinkled my nose. "Oh, wow, jee, glad to know I scream charity case."

"Don't give me that. What is it?"

Even so, my face flared like a volcano. But the pounding of my heart would not let me back down, as cheesy as it sounded. I could have made that leap of faith of a cliff just then.

"I need your help writing a story."

He did his famous single, tall eyebrow that sent wrinkles down his bald scalp. "As in...what, you write it and I fix it?"

"No. As in I talk and you write it down."

He let out a low laugh that wasn't humorous at all, but uncomfortable. "Tenny, I have a full-time job on my hands. Why me? Is there no one else?"

I felt my face flush again. "I'm not as close to anyone else who has your typing speed."

He started with confusion. "My typing speed...?" Then understanding dawned. "My power point last week..."

Now I smiled. He had accidentally deleted some pages on the powerpoint. Instead of abandoning the presentation altogether and just going with his stories like he usually did, he sped wrote the entire thing, even as he talked. I didn't need to read to know that talking and type two different things at the same time was exceptional.

"I'm willing to pay you," I said.

"Now that just sounds wrong," he said. "Though...I guess students usually pay their teachers. How much are we talking?"

"...I can't go above $100." More heat in my face. I was drawing from my small family's pool too much just by saying that. Mom would have to use the credit card next week...

Even so, his eyes went wide. "Crap, what's in this story? Conspiracy theories? Blackmail?"

"It's just a story. A gift, actually."

"A $100 gift..."I rubbed a finger along his jaw. "I can't say I'm not interested. A girl who can't read writing a story."

"I've listened to plenty."

He smiled, and this time it was warm. "I know that, Tenny. Which is why I want to see what you can do."

We set up a time where we met for an hour after school for the rest of the week, except Friday, and I promised him the hundred on our first meeting. He asked if it would be okay if he brought his young son with him on Wednesday and Thursday, as he had to watch him while his wife was out of town, and I almost hesitated. The idea of an elementary school boy listening on my weird romance story...it was going to be weird enough to say it aloud let alone to a kid who'd probably call me gross or ask awkward questions.

But...then I thought of Basil.

Let the whole school hear if they must.

"Alright."

I stayed awake Monday night, head brimming with beginning sentences and the words I needed, along with a thorough scrounging of my memory. Throughout the school day I dozed off in nearly every class, but near the end I became wired, like a kid on Christmas Eve.

When I finally came before him, I was too nervous to take the chair he offered me. I could feel sweat trickling from my pits.

It made me think of Basil huddled up on the roof of a skyscraper, trying to control his panic over a sneeze.

"Kay, word for word, starting...now." Mr. Handson set his fingers to the keyboard imperially.

I took a deep breath.

"I had a dream," I said. "In it, his Lamborghini's seat conformed to my body as though it were made for it, as a billion dollar car's seat would..."