Wednesday, January 11, 2012

A Dream: Part One

      (Written December 30th, 2010) 

      I'm camping, but there are no tents. It's dark outside, and raining. I'm sitting with a lot of other kids my age in a large field with a forest at the edge with an outlining path of gravel. A streetlight must be standing somewhere in the field, though I cannot see it, because its light is illuminating the drops of rain and my surroundings. Some of the people around me I know. We've been asked to go on some kind of scavenger hunt in the woods individually, and apparently, we're going to be graded on it by three people: evaluators. All the teenagers, including me, have completed the test. I see the evaluators head into the rainy woods with clipboards and pencils. There are two men, and one woman. The woman is stunning. She has long, flowing brown hair and hazel-green eyes. For some reason, my mind catalogs her as a homicide detective, but I can't think why. One of the two men is hispanic. He looks serious, as does his partner: A white guy, wearing a suit and tie. A name comes to me for him: Honey MIlk. It makes no sense, but I go with it. i see them leave markers on branches of trees. The markers are different colored pieces of tape and plastic. The colors represent grades. A girl gets me to follow her so we can both check them out. She wants to see her grade before the announcement. But it's strange...there are grades on the markers, but no name that corresponds to them. We can't tell who's is who's. The girl is disappointed. I go about my own business.

      There is something that is bothering me about the test we have all just taken. On one part of the test, we were asked to identify two symbols of the "Wawa" tribe that were carved on a piece of stick we were asked to find. I know for a fact that many people got stuck. I was able to get one symbol: the symbol for death, but not the other. The death symbol was written on my hand, and I remember how it got there. I drew it, after looking something up in the dictionary that showed me all the Wawa symbols. Suddenly, a girl my age comes up to me and asks me if I know what the second Wawa symbol was on the test. I say no, but that I know where to find it. We go to look in the dictionary, which I remember turns into a Wawa symbol book if you look up the word "wawa." We find the dictionary in a black shelf with about 12 cubby holes. It's just standing in the middle of the rainy field, near the streetlamp. I watch the girl as she flips through it. She is softly pretty, with kinky brown hair cut shoulder length. She tells me her name, but I forget it immediately, except that it starts with an "S."

     We can't find "wawa" in the dictionary. I tell her it must be the wrong one, so we look in every dictionary in each bottom cubby. None of them is the right one. Then "S" has an epiphany. She remembers that last week, she put a dictionary in her cubby. It is one of the top cubbies on the shelf. "S" pulls out all the binders in her cubby, spreads them out on the table in front of us. I don't remember the table being there before, but it is now. "S" keeps rummaging around her cubby and I sneak a peek at her binders and folders. I can see the tip of a red folder with a titled that starts with an "And." I ask her about it and she said the file just came with the storage space. She finds the dictionary after I ask her and looks up "wawa." It works, and we start to open the symbol book.

Everything blurs and suddenly everyone's asleep.

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