A bittersweet dream I had last night.
I dreamed I was waiting on the curb at the front of a highschool. I myself was a ninth-grade student, new, anxious, and not really certain how things worked. Apparently my school would shuttle kids from our main building to a different school for music classes, and so I was waiting there for the shuttle in a crowd.
I stood somewhat off to the side and made small talk with a boy in a wheelchair - Chinese, short haired, slightly disinterested - as I watched a strange bus in the shape of a cake roll its way down. I didn't remark on it in the bizarre way that dreams work.
As he and I talked - or at least, as I asked him questions and he nonchalantly hummed affirmatives, I watched that strange cake bus roll away.
It occurred to me, seeing through the sugar pane windows, that all my music classmates were on that bus. Except I was confused because the wheelchair boy had also missed it, but was calm, so I thought there'd be a second one coming soon since the first looked full. The second one did indeed pull in, also looking like a puff pastry - except this one was clearly labelled Wheel Trans. Oh.
I help him get on and the bus lady - a caucasian woman with 80s curly blonde hair - starts to drive. But when she notices me still on, she got very, very cross with me. We had a conversation as she stared me down in her rear view mirror. I explained how I was new, I was lost, I didn't know there wasn't any more buses, if she could just let me ride until I got to the new school.
She told me, "You can find your way there on your own when I let you off on the next curb."
So I was kicked off the wheeltrans. All the while, the boy in the wheelchair was glancing at his phone. He cast one glance at me before the doors swung closed, and for a second, he looked hesitant and concerned because I was crying. As the bus drove away, I stared at the landscape around me - cut and paste suburban houses in what looked like Scarborough, except there was no one on the road, nowhere I could ask for directions. So I wandered into what seemed like a plaza, and that's when the dream cut.
Out of myself, time fast forwarded to a missing persons report about me. I never made it to the other school. They had no idea where I was, and the last I saw in the dream was the boy in the wheelchair sitting at home in his living room, eyes glued to the screen as his phone fell out of his hand.
Bizarre, but... quite an interesting start to a novel, no?
