Showing posts with label road trip. Show all posts
Showing posts with label road trip. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 11

Lots of the Same Things

Driving down to the bay, we pass through acres of rhodedendron farms. The lavender blossoms cover the California hills. My aunt explains that this area is renowned for its rhodies.

Our boat sinks just as we reach the hotel. The musical is just getting over, the audience is filtering out, waved through the doors by sparkly, lavender, anorexic ballerinas.

We browse nonchalantly through a bunch of CD racks in the video store, while our agents prepare themselves in the back room. I stick my head through the door to see how the debriefing is going. My mother watches the front door for suspicious-looking people.


My family, refugees from a war-torn metropolitan life, arrive at a camp in an icy plain. We sit down to eat our first full meal in months, but finding the food not to my taste, I leave the table to explore. I meet with an old gypsy woman and she gives me some sort of voodoo talisman to avoid my impending arranged marriage.

The magic takes on a life of its own and ruins everything.

Tuesday, February 6

We appear to be on a road trip. Andrew is driving; Holly is in the front and I am in the back with Kellen. Suddenly she demands to stop, and is unusually snappy with us, so we decide we had better stop, even though we are running late. We pull into the parking lot of a department store, and Kellen rushes inside as Andrew and I get out to stretch our legs. It starts to rain. We see a crowd of people standing underneath a gigantic statue of an ant but it looks a bit unstable to me, so we find a picnic table underneath some trees. As we sit down, everything around us disappears, and suddenly I find it very hard to concentrate on anything Andrew is saying because I am so amazed by the infinite grass fields that surround us.
Andrew begins to tell me about some freshman girl that has taken an interest in him. Her name actually consists of five names, and I feel slightly sorry for her, and wonder what her parents were thinking. Trying to describe her, he holds his hand down to his waist: "She's about this tall." I vaguely wonder if he is crazy - she couldn't be just three feet tall - then decide that he must mean three feet taller than the picnic table. Suddenly I think of the time, and as soon as I stand up, we are back in the parking lot of the department store. I look in the glass doors and I see Kellen waiting patiently on the floating escalator that will carry her to the door. Somewhere along the way she has lost her pants and hasn't noticed, but I decide not to tell her because we would lose time while she tried to go back and get them.
Now I am in Mr. Wilder's classroom, sitting in the desk that I sat in last year. There are a few other people in the classroom, talking quietly. Wilder comes over to me and demands, "What makes you angry?" I am puzzled by his question, and he repeats it three times before I shrug and pretend to be captivated by a poster across the room. He leans down next to my face, and says quietly, "Do you get mad when the little girl on your team doesn't get enough points?" Now I am even more confused, and I slip out the other side of my desk and ask him what I can do to get out of here.
He tells me he has dropped his DVD player outside, and he wants me to go get it. I walk outside and I see it laying on the grass, in pieces. Looking out to the street, I am frightened by a gigantic ant, possibly the statue that was in the department store parking lot, who is chasing a crowd of screaming people. I fumble to pick up the bits of DVD player, when off to my left, I see my old ballet teacher, Miss Sandy, walking towards me. She looks angry, and she is foaming at the mouth. I begin to run. I stop along the way to pick up an open physics book lying in the grass (I'm positive it's mine), and even though I'm running and Miss Sandy is walking, she is gaining on me. Finally I reach the door, where the janitor lets me in with a smile, then disappears.
I walk into my room, where there is a party going on. Wilder takes the DVD player out of my hands and starts a movie. As I sit on my bed, I notice Andrew cuddling a three-foot long sock bunny. I realize that the stuffed bunny is the girl he was telling me about, the one with five names, and I wonder if maybe he's been overworked and that's why he's acting so strangely.