Someone is sitting out in our back yard. A stranger.

It is eerie. The yard is small and she sits casually at our picnic table. We must investigate.

When we do, we discover our home, which is my grandma's house on Chestnut back home, with major revisions due to my lack of visual memory and dreamland's eternal compensation, is jointly occupied by a swarm of strangers.

They are affable enough, if teeming, they go about unconcerned as if they belong among us, and we begin to accept that they must. We move hither and yon, Niki J and I, and so do they, like in a bus station.

I must go to the bathroom, and the new provision for that means the fridge offers privacy if you open the door, and the lady of the other grouping is addressing me from the hall, so I do not continue.

I must go to school. I have missed the morning classes. It's high school, and I'm an undedicated stoont. I have two problems. I do not know what my class will be in the afternoon. I somehow cannot remember what class I have after lunch. It's fifth period, right? Then what is it? I can know when I have been there all morning because it's just the next one. Only, now I don't know.

Maybe it's like jumprope. You can continue if you begin standing over a limp rope, but it's harder if they are swishing it in a hard loop and you have to gauge the right moment to run in while it's up before it slaps down. Maybe it's like that. A day of school half gone is like a swishing rope.

And my second problem is, I'm afraid of what might happen if anybody learns I do not know what class I have first in the afternoon. Maybe they will put me away. I cannot run the risk. I cannot just show up on campus, not knowing where to go. I'm expected to know that, above all. But I don't know even that, not at all.

I must skip the afternoon classes as well. There's no help for it. The only remedy for being caught not knowing where you are supposed to be is not to even be there. That should fix it.

Of course, there's tomorrow, but that's not today's worry. I go downtown. I have other occupations.

Like...waking up.