"So I'm standing in this rye field..." and other bad literary allusions.
Author: Frannyglass
I was at my apartment, sitting at my computer. I dared to look at my former boyfriend Chris's website, which I usually tend to avoid. The latest entry in his weblog involved a long description of how he'd been drunk the night before. One part read, "I woke up in a pool of my own vomit! It was really cool!" Not only was I fairly grossed out, I was also disappointed in him for trying to impress people.
Chris had posted a lot of pictures from his drunken evening. He had been at a party, which he said had been hosted by his "best friend," who was a girl he knew from online. This was repeated in several places on his website. I knew she wasn't Chris's real "best friend," though. I started shaking as I sat at the computer, mad that he could even hint that someone knew him as well as I knew him.
Chris had, I noticed, finally put a picture of me back on his website. It was on a page with about twenty or thirty other pictures, though, and my picture was pretty small. It was on the "Lauries row." That is, my picture was next to the picture of two other girls named Laurie. I expected a caption to say that I was the Laurie he had dated for twenty months, but there were no words beside my picture at all. It was as though I held just the same importance as all the other people pictured on his website.
The next thing I knew, I was in downtown Athens, and Chris was on the sidewalk with me. This should have surprised me, seeing that he goes to school in Ithaca, New York, but I was unfazed. Chris had a loft downtown, and he was standing outside talking to someone who wanted to know how often he held parties there and how often the guests spent the night.
He said, "I've had a ton of people spend the night here."
I jumped into the conversation. "No, you haven't! The only person who ever comes over to your place is Dave. And the only person who visited you before was me!"
Chris looked at me oddly. Then he yelled across the street, "Hey, Dad, don't I have a lot of guests over to my place?"
Chris's dad was sitting in a lounge chair on the sidewalk across from the entrance to the University of Georgia. He was wearing sunglasses and reading the newspaper. "Sure you do," he said to Chris.
Then, Chris and I were in my car. He was driving, and I was sitting in the passenger seat, messing with the radio. We were still downtown, and I wasn't sure where we were going. We weren't acting friendly toward each other, but we weren't being unfriendly either. It seemed as if we hardly knew each other at all.
Chris told me he was going to change the radio station because he didn't like my mellow chick music.
I took out a laptop computer that I just happened to have in my backseat. I visited Chris's website again. I noticed that he had just added a section called "MP3 of the Week." Fairly self-explanatory. I hadn't heard of any of the bands or songs he had listed. He explained that most of them were techno.
"Since when did you start liking techno?" I asked.
I don't remember his answer. Maybe he never did answer, because the next thing I knew, I was back at my apartment, sitting at my computer again. My roommate Laura came in and said she was going to one of Chris's parties over the weekend. She said she hoped I wouldn't be bitter about this.
I said, "Well, if you don't mind sleeping in pools of vomit, then, by all means, go!"
She took me seriously.
I was mad. I felt like she had been corrupted in some way, and so had Chris. And, later in the dream, I went home and found out that my younger sister had been going to Chris's parties too. And I felt that I had failed her in some way, that I had not kept her innocent long enough. I was losing everyone I was closest to, everyone who'd shared my values. I started yelling and cussing at my sister, telling her not to go to the parties anymore. She went running to my mom, who reprimanded me for trying to order my sister around. I went to my bedroom, flopped on my bed, and started crying.
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