ReduxI am sixteen years old. It’s my first day of school - though the school year started a month...

Redux

I am sixteen years old. It’s my first day of school - though the school year started a month or two ago for everyone else here - at the American School of Kuwait.

The location is not what bothers me. The thing that makes today incredibly weird, is that yesterday I was thirty-eight and working for a living making tiny things.

There’s an old hypothetical question, “If you could go back to any time in your life, would you?”

I’ve always answered that question with a ‘no’ to be honest. There’d be so many cruddy things I’d have to go through again, and I’m sure that if I tried to change things I’d miss out on all the really good things I’ve had.

But apparently the choice has been taken from me. Of all the things I wouldn’t mind doing, high school would have been far, far down the list. Here I am, all the same.

The bus ride is over though; that would have been fun. At least, I remember it, unlike the details of my first day. Hareef picked me up by driving the wrong way down a divided highway, and then trundled off through the desert on paths that might have resembled high tech roads a couple thousand years ago. It was hilarious and startling.

From what I recall, I was really depressed and introverted the whole time I was here last; spending my recess/lunch times reading and rereading some favorite books (there had only been so much weight allowance for books after all). I kind of made some friends, but the only one I still talk to, the one I was the maid of honor for and still see once a year, won’t show up for a month or two.

My class schedule is weird. It’s a six day rotation kind of thing, so no two days in a row are the same, and no two weeks in a row are the same. Today is a “B” day. And since weekends in Kuwait are Thursday and Friday, today happens to be Saturday.

More than anything, I feel irritation. Seriously: I didn’t ask for this. There were no weird fortune teller machines, magic lamps, creepy old ladies in alleys, nothing. I just woke up standing here in the plaza, looking at the paint-chipping white and blue buildings and holding a too-full backpack.

I roll my eyes. The school has lockers, but I remember that I carried all of my crap around with me until a month or three in, when I finally got assigned one of them. It was weird starting a school year later than everyone else around me.

I don’t have time for this crap. I go to the office and ask about a locker. I’m sure that that rib that likes to pop out of joint when I’m older is from all that time I spent carrying around a backpack full of books for a couple of years. At least I’ll be doing future-me a favor. They’re out of junior lockers, so I get one in the row with the seniors, at the end of the third floor. I think it’s the same one I remember having, so if the world’s going to explode in a paradox, it probably won’t be from that.

School here starts with a homeroom class that lasts fifteen minutes or so before we go off to our first classes. Mine is with the drama teacher - an american woman who is a lot of fun and has long ginger hair like my friend Jennifer (seriously, if I’m stuck here, at least I’ll get to hang out with her again - maybe it’ll give me a chance to be a better friend). Rats: if I’d just gotten here a couple weeks earlier, I could have signed up for drama class. If you want to be an animator, you should totally take some acting classes. Something I wish someone had told me when I was younger.

Oh well. Maybe I can try out for a play this time.

I have a lot of trouble finding my first class. It’s the first indication something is wrong.

I don’t remember having trouble finding my first class.

Granted, I don’t remember much of my first day. But this seems wrong somehow.

I show up extremely late, but it’s one of my two favorite teachers. I remember how I hung out in her classroom during lunches periodically, talking books and art, and when Jennifer showed up it was the three of us. She goes with it, and I know what she’s teaching (Beowulf), so it goes fine.

But my backpack has a pile of crap in it that I don’t recognize.

I pull out a messy notebook full of doodles and pages hanging out. I don’t recognize any of these drawings, and there are pages and pages of them. The handwriting is mine, but the linework doesn’t resemble anything I’ve ever done. Many are better than anything I’ve ever done.

I don’t know why it hasn’t occurred to me until now that this is probably a dream. I mean, it doesn’t feel like one, but don’t dreams feel real when you’re in them?

I pinch myself. It hurts. I sigh. Nothing for it but to ride it out, I suppose.

In the pile of crap in my backpack, I seem to have lost my class schedule. I have no idea where to go next, and while I can remember many of the classrooms I spent time in at this school, it’s a vague guess at best where to go next.

The throng of people around me breaks around a teacher like a river around a rock, and the teacher grabs me as I try to pass. He yells at me for leaving this mess on the floor and demands I clean it up

The mess on the floor is a pile of garbage; paper with doodles on it that look like what I found in my bag and some kind of liquid substance that looks suspicious.

“I’m not cleaning that up. Are you serious? That smells like pee, which is a biohazard; there’s no way I’m touching that.”

The teacher glares at me. “You’re going to do it because I said so.”

Since I have the experience in my head at least of growing up and realizing that adults are just as fallible as I am, and I don’t necessarily have to do what they say when they’re being completely unreasonable I tell him no and walk off, and try to find my next class.

The day goes more and more wrong, in a way that suggests more that it’s a dream and I begin to wonder when I’m going to wake up. I don’t have any of the work done for one of my classes (it’s my art class, and instead of being the incredibly cool teacher I remember, she treats me like my Oceanography teacher did, which was horrible).

At the end of the day I magically miss both of the buses home, though each of them leave an hour apart and it feels as if no time has passed.

“Okay, okay, I get it!” I shout to the sky. “It’s a dream. I’m not in school any more, I don’t live in Kuwait, and I like my life the way it is, thanks, so can I wake up already?”

Instead of answering, my coworker from the future shows up. “But we’ve missed the buses; how are we going to get home?” he asks.

I quickly do the math. He would have been six when I was sixteen; there’s no way he’d appear the same age as me at this point in my life.

“What are you talking about,” he asks, “are you insane?”

“No. I’m not insane. This is some crazy dream where I go back to my school days and everything goes wrong. I’m just surprised I didn’t end up missing my clothes all of a sudden.” I roll my eyes.

He backs away, looking askance at me. “Do you WANT to end up without your clothes..?” He seems half serious.

“What?” I back away. “No! God no. Ew. Geez. We are not that kind of friends.”

He looks confused a moment. “We’re not?”

“Oh. My. Lord. No. We are not,” I say. “Who are you, because you’re not who you’re pretending to be.”

His look of confusion remains a beat and then he straightens. “Oh fine.”

My coworker’s facade shimmers and a creature stands before me. It looks vaguely humanoid, but not like anything I’ve ever seen before. “This is one of the weirder dreams I’ve had,” I say to it, unfazed.

“Hmm. Yes,” it says, regarding me. “It is. I wonder why it didn’t work this time.”

The question seems rhetorical. “Because I just watched an episode of the X-Files and this is so ridiculous it can’t be real, maybe.”

I’m not impressed. This is by far the weirdest dream I’ve had, and I’ve had some pretty memorable ones before. Aliens aren’t really new, but I wait to see if it has anything else interesting to say.

There’s a pause. I think it’s annoyed at me for answering but I can’t tell. It stares at me for a few moments longer while I wait, eyes half lidded and waiting to wake up.

It makes a few comments into what appears to be a recorder that I can’t quite hear, then takes out another device that looks like a stapler and approaches me. Before I can react with the jujitsu skills I’ve gained since I was sixteen it grabs my left arm and applies the device to my forearm. A burning sensation radiates out from where it hits me and searing pain, many times worse than the pinch I gave myself makes my eyes tear and I try to pull away. The alien’s grip is vice-like though, and I can’t pull free.

He let’s go and makes another note. “Well there you go. You’re out.”

I’m crying, and there is a two inch seal burned into the skin of my forearm. “What the hell, man, that’s not cool!” I shout, or something like it.

“Subject is no longer viable as a test subject. Removal from study pool is now complete.” It turns its face to me. My vision goes white as it continues speaking to me.

I wake up later, in my bed, in my house, with my kitten standing on my bladder as I’ve become used to having in my life so far, well past my sixteenth year.

That dream was the weirdest ever. I reach over to absently rub the cat scratch on my left forearm before actually getting a look at it.

Burned into the surface, and half healed, is a seal; a design I don’t really recognize but definitely isn’t a cat scratch, and the alien’s last words come back to me. “Dream study complete.”

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