“ARE YOU AWAKE?” I whispered to Ashley. It was three in the morning on a Friday night and she was sleeping over at my house.
“No,” she said, turning over and putting a pillow over her head.
“Then how are you talking?” I asked, taking the pillow off.
“I’m sleep-talking. Leave me alone. Go back to bed.”
“I’m in bed. I need to talk to you. I need to tell you my dream.”
Ashley sat up, kicked the covers off, and threw her legs over the side of the bed.
“So much for my beauty sleep!” she said, yawning. “Let me pee first.”
I knew I had her. Ashley loved dreams. She loved hearing my dreams and trying to interpret them. She considered herself a mini-Freudina and boasted that she could psychoanalyze with the best of them.
Over the summer we had gone online and attempted to order this herb from Peru called Calea zacatechichi, also known as the Dream Herb and the Leaf of God. The site promised us we could obtain “divine messages through dreaming” and experience “intense and unusually lucid dream sequences with profound meaning,” which sounded totally awesome and which made Ashley bounce up and down in her chair. Halfway through ordering we left to get a snack and Britt came snooping in to spy on our ’Net surfing and ratted us out to Dad, who had a shit-fit. He assumed it was another name for crystal meth or something. The fact that you were supposed to smoke the stuff got his knickers all in a twist and, needless to say, that was the end of that. So, damn it all, we were left to dream on our own.
Occasionally though, even without the Leaf of God, I’d dream a doozy. And Ashley loved it when I did.
She came back from peeing, climbed back into bed, and got into child’s pose, a yoga position we had learned in gym class. Ashley was convinced that it brought more blood to her head and made her think deeper thoughts.
“So,” I began, “I was wearing my hoop skirt . . .”
“Round,” Ashley said. “Symbol of fertility. Coming into womanhood.”
“Shut up,” I said. “Anyway, we were at a dance.”
“‘We’ as in ‘you and me’?”
“No. ‘We’ as in ‘Kevin and me.’”
“See?” Ashley said. “There you go! Abandoning me already!”
“Ashley, relax! It’s a dream, for crying out loud!”
“Meanie!”
“May I please continue?”
“Humph!”
“So. It’s not the Civil War cotillion thing but the school dance. Everybody’s grinding away and it’s hot as hell.”
“‘Hot’ like in ‘sexually hot’?” Ashley asked. “‘Hot’ like in a thinkabout hot?”
“No,” I said. “‘Hot’ as in ‘temperature hot.’ ‘Hot’ as in ‘I’m burning up.’”
“Is everybody hot? Or just you.”
I thought for a moment, the dream beginning to slip away even as I spoke.
“I can’t remember. All I know is that I’m sweating up a storm, so I rip the fabric off, and there I am in front of everyone with only the hoop and not the skirt, and they’re all laughing and pointing and I’m yelling, ‘See! See! Is this what you want the world to come to? Hoops with no skirts? Is this really what you want?’”
Ashley sat up and stared at me intensely.
“That’s it.” I said.
“What do you mean ‘that’s it’? What about Kevin? What did Kevin do?”
“I don’t know. The dream was over. I woke up and gave you a poke.”
“Oh my God,” Ashley said.
“What do you think?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Ashley said. “It can’t be good. Hot as heck and hoops with no skirts? Sounds like the world’s going to hell in a handbasket!”
“But what does it mean?”
Ashley got back into child’s pose and remained in position, silent for a minute. Finally, she sat up.
“The hoop,” she said, “is Mount Tom. The skirt is life on the mountain. A skirtless hoop is a lifeless Mount Tom.”
“Wow!” I said, pretty impressed.
“The hoop,” she said, “is Mother Earth. The hot is climate change. Global warming. A skirtless hoop is a lifeless deep-fried Mother Earth.”
“Double wow!” I said. I had to admit, that was pretty inspired.
“The hoop,” she continued, “is your virginity. A skirtless hoop is a deflowered virgin. The heat is your passion, your raw sensuality, your budding sexual desire, your craving to do it with Kevin Malloy!”
“Shut up!” I said, throwing the pillow at her.
Although, come to think of it . . .
•
“You know,” Ashley said as we were eating breakfast the following morning. “I was thinking about this skirtless hoop thing.”
“Oh no!” I said. “Here we go again. Please, not in front of Britt!’
“What?” Britt said, looking up from her Teen Vogue magazine. “What not in front of me?”
Ashley ignored her. “If we took a video of you grinding away with a skirtless hoop and put it on YouTube, that thing could go viral. We could get advertisers and make millions and buy Mount Tom back from American! We’d save the mountain and you’d be a fashion diva, a skirtless hoop goddess. What do you think?”
“I think you’ve been smoking a little too much of the Leaf of God,” I said.