Chapter Four

“I got this.” I say to my mother, stretching my neck forward to see the front of the line.

It’s been four days since my dream. 

The day of the dream, I hadn’t really done anything. I fed my dog breakfast and then went back to bed until three, until I had to get up and get ready for work at five. Work had been busy, a pleasant distraction from thinking about my dream. The next few days after that I spent mostly trying to occupy my mind. I cleaned the house and my room, gave my dog a bath, sorted out some clothes to sell for extra cash, stuff like that. My mom thought I was on drugs and I think she was seriously considering buying an at home drug test.

I’ve obviously slept since then, and no dreams like that have happened again. I had a dream that I was a mermaid trapped in disney world, and I swear, I could see the guy from the field standing outside my tank, watching me with those blue eyes that captured the moon so perfectly. I mean I know he had said he was from my dreams but... I heard that you can’t dream about someone you haven’t seen before, so where did he come from originally? A magazine maybe? Social media? Just a random attractive stranger that my mind weirdly clung onto? Is it possible that my mind captured a snapshot of some random guy, added a personality onto him, and has been putting him into my dreams for years? Because the more I think back, the more I think I can remember him from previous dreams. Never really acting like a main character. More like someone walking by, or a bird with suspiciously blue eyes flying over me. 

I was snapped out of my thoughts by my mother pushing me by my shoulder. “Let’s go, Dee.” She looks at me from the corner of her eye as we slowly shuffle forward. “What were you thinking about?” She asks.

I shake my head. “I just had a weird dream the other day is all. Having a hard time getting it off my mind.” I feel her fingers tighten around my shoulder, and I look at her. Her face looks pinched, like she’s trying not to let me see some emotion. 

“What kind of dream?” She asks, avoiding looking at me.

“Well, the dream itself wasn’t all that impressive…”I looked at her face, wondering if I should tell her something so personal. “But when I woke up, It felt more like a memory rather than a dream.”  She was quiet for several minutes, her eyes glued to the back of the woman ahead of us. “Mom…?” I ask after the silence begins making me sweat worse than the burning sun.

“Look, I need you to promise me a couple of things.” My mom is suddenly pulling me closer to her, so that she can speak more directly to me without others overhearing, as though she was about to tell me the meaning of life or some other big secret. She was very rarely a serious person, almost always level and easy going. It made it really easy to talk to her about things. I don’t think I’d ever seen her face look the way it did right now. It worried me.

I nod, staring at her suddenly wrinkled and worried brown eyes. “First, I need you to know, dreams can be very real.”

“What do you mean by that?” I ask, stepping closer to her. My attention was captured.

“All I mean is… dreams have meaning in them, Dee. You don’t just dream stuff for no reason. A lot of people think dreams are like foreshadowing, visions, if you must. I myself am one of those people. I take every dream I have very seriously, and I suggest you do too. Do you understand what I’m saying?” She stares into my eyes, and tightens her grip on my shoulder as though that’s going to make me understand better. 

“Yeah… got it. And the second thing?” She stares at me for a second longer, like she’s considering saying one thing, but then decides on another.

“I need you to promise me that you're going to go in there and pass this thing, because I literally never want to come back to this place ever again.”

And then she was pushing me back into my spot in front of her in line, straightening her crisp white shirt, and turning me by the shoulders to face forward, acting as though she hadn’t just sounded like she knew exactly what was going on in my life right now.