Casey’s telling me that she doesn’t like it when I come to her house drunk. She says, “Last night was like having sex with a different person.”
I want to ask her if that’s good or bad, but by the time the question gets to my mouth I’m thinking about the dream I had last night and Casey still has a lot more to say, so I never do.
The dream:
I’m walking around the halls of my old junior high trying to find my locker. I think it’s on the second floor, but the school doesn’t have a second floor. So I go to the principal’s office to get a map and a piece of bubble gum, which for some reason I’m sure will help me. Once I get there, though, the office is really this comic book store I used to hang out in when I was a kid, and Alyna, the girl that sat next to me on the plane, is leaning up against a magazine rack reading an old issue of The New Mutants.
I say, “What’s the deal? Where’s my locker?”
She says, “I don’t know.” Then she kisses me with one of those dream kisses that make you think when you wake up you’ll have been married to the person who kissed you for twenty of the happiest years of your life.
I get tipped off that this probably isn’t real when my old family dog who died when I was ten walks in and says, “Do you guys have change for a five?”
At that point I was just a little too conscious to hold on to it and I woke up with that awful empty feeling you get when you realize the person who can make you happier than anything is a fucking dream.
Casey’s chewing off the corner of a grilled cheese sandwich and I’m so sick of the fucking cows on the walls in this place and the bitchy waitress. I think I smell dirt but it’s just the hippie-type girl next to me with blonde dreadlocks and a bent-up straw cowboy hat.
Casey says, “You don’t like the cows? I think they’re the cutest.”
And I guess I must’ve said that last bit out loud. I wonder if the hippie cowgirl heard me, but she’s not looking at me so fuck it.
I think very briefly about asking Casey what she thinks about all day. Instead I stare at our waitress’s ass as she refills a butter tub and wonder if Oprah Winfrey sucks cock, or ever has for that matter.