Global Warming

I am on vacation with my family and the Kolpacks. We stop and park our van behind a cedar-shingled house and one-by-one go inside. I think it must be a gift shop, because there are lots of distracting object hanging down at eye-level, making me repeatedly forget what my goal is.
Eventually I make it back out to the van, and now my mother is impatient because we are going to be late for Christmas. I remember that the reason I went in was to retrieve her.
We make it home in time, but I get impatient waiting for Christmas to get there, and all I want to do in the meantime is take a nap, but the door to the spare bedroom will not close.
I end up in the basement, sitting at a circular table next to the piano. Kris and a girl that resembles Beth, Sarah, and Deb from Napoleon Dynamite all at once sit across from me. We are having a conversation about my plans to rent a house with Kris and some roommates. We are all giddy. He is saying, "I just don't know why we have to live there as separate couples."
"What do you mean." I say.
"Well why couldn't we exist as one relationship? Because I love you-" At this point he leans across the table to kiss me, but I'm starting to feel less giddy."And there's no reason for you to be jealous, and I love her too."
"So what then, Kris? All I need to do is love her-"
"No!" he cuts in, as if that is the silliest thing, but what he is suggesting is not. "You just have to be okay with us. Look!" And he kisses her shiny pink gloss-coated lips tenderly. She giggles.
My reaction is the thought "Do it again". I'm not sure if this is because I don't know yet if I feel jealous; or if I mean it as a threat. He's watching my face, I'm watching her shiny pink lips. "Do it again, Kris." This time it's sounding more like a threat, but I almost say it as a request, when he leans in and kisses her again anyway.
I feel it physically that time, as if I'm swallowing vomit and getting the wind knocked out of me at the same time. I jump up, crying out, "I can't be in love with a boy who is in love with someone else!" and run away.

Now I am in the Art building, room 301. I am collecting my things now that the quarter is over. There are a few grad students there, doing self portraits, and the model Robert, just taking a nap, not wearing clothes. Lucas from my class comes up to him and examines his face as he sleeps. Robert wakes up and asks if he needs anything. I feel bad and want to tell Lucas that now that the quarter is over he's not modeling for drawings anymore. Lucas says, "Man, I need to work on facial features." He shows Robert his point drawing, and it's very good, so I don't feel as bad.
Joel is over on the other side of the room, curled up on a couch reading. Remembering what just happened with Kris, I go over and say, "Joel, I wonder if maybe you can help me understand something." He says sure, and I begin repeating the conversation with Kris word for word. As I repeat it, I begin to realize that when I said, "I can't be in love with a boy who is in love with someone else", that has and always will be true for me, no matter how hard I try to convince myself otherwise. I tell Joel and he nods, but then I wonder what "can't be in love" means. I'm still wondering that, actually.

I stand on a beach with many of my friends, I think it is graduation. I am skipping stones. Then: some powerful figure ( possible my geology prof) has declared that there is no possible way to stop Global Warming. I watch that shoreline and think, "Well then if we can't stop it, why can't we at least stop it from dragging out so long and get it over with? We could all use a little adventure."
The air warms, the alpine glaciers melt, and the sea lazily rises. We all skip up to the parking lot where are two orange VW camper vans are waiting for us, ready to transform into houseboats. The water is rising more quickly now, and we all pile on top of the vans. Matt gets annoyed with Kellen or something and decides he doesn't want to be a part of our van, so he jumps off, but I grab him before he can float away, because we had a deal: I need him to tend to the sails.
We've got quite an assortment my friends on the boat. No one over twenty, all vaguely acquainted. When the water stops rising we float around, observing the new landscape. No one knows who exactly survived, if our families survived.
Some people who formerly lived on a cliff in Normandy park now have a volleyball net set up where people on jet skis joyfully play a game in the "yard". Even though there is a potential for tragedy, starvation, and suffering, everyone shares the air of giddiness, and we soon discover that oral sex is actually the best way of sustaining ourselves. No, really.

My Houses

My parents are on vacation, and the babysitter has plotted to let some burglars into our house, who will kidnap me and my twin brother. I hear her talking to the men as she lets them into the house, so I run upstairs to hide while my brother runs to the basement. I think they capture him, but I climb out of the upstairs window and run though my neighbor's backward in my pink nightgown. I ring their doorbell frantically, but the men pull up in the driveway. I sprint across the street to my other neighbor's house, yelling, hoping someone in the neighborhood will hear me. As I run up to the door a man opens it and I run inside. With a chill, I realize the man is not my neighbor, but a cohort of the crooks.

I crouch in the my neighbor's kitchen, which is now much older with a wood stove and dirty pink linoleum floors. I know it is useless hiding here.

My parents hug me and as we walk back to (not) our house. They press the garage door opener and the walls roll up, revealing a gigantic well-stocked beverage refrigerator, like the kind in the grocery store where the shelves are tilted so the bottles slide forward. My sister lounges on top of the bottles on the top shelf, a little cramped under the roof of the machine. She welcomes me back and casually asks if I am going to stay away for a while this time. I hadn't thought of that, but now I remember that sometimes after an Ordeal, children will stay away from home for a while, having earned a vacation. This sounds like an excellent idea to me, so I climb up into the refrigerator, the heels of my striped Fluevogs slipping on the plastic bottle caps, wedge myself underneath a ceiling beam and into the other side of the refrigerator, and slide down and out for the house.

Kathryn and I drive along a freeway towards Canada. We approach a bridge spanning a ravine, and somehow get in the wrong lane so that we hurtle at a rapid speed down a small river in the center of the bridge, and down into a tunnel in the face of the cliff.

Somehow we survive, and pull up in the line to cross the border. The wait is going to be a long time, so we decide to get out the car and use the bathroom and a Chuck E. Cheese/cruise ship we can see on the a nearby forested hill, but I think it might be in Canada, and I worry that we won't be allowed back to the car without our birth certificates. Kathryn isn't concerned, so we continue on.
There are more people with us now, like Anna, Kellen, and Lindy, and as I wait for them outside of the bathroom, I critique the wall in front of me that I see as somehow more generic than any other wall I have seen. It is coated in plastic, and has perforated outlines where one might punch out an extra doorway of needed. I scoff at the Chuck E. Cheese/cruise line for only having used one of the five possible doorways.

We go back to the car, which is now a school bus that we live in. Somehow it is turned around facing the other direction, but everyone else is convinced that Canada is that way anyway.