02: Alice in a Flowerpot

We arrived at church without further incident and I dropped Jenny at the front of the sanctuary as we were running a bit late. She joined the other girls and boys all hurrying in while I drove the car to the lot, stopped it, and sat staring off into the distance.

Was I dreaming? It didn’t feel like a dream, not anymore.  I looked down at the interesting view below the neckline, how could I not be dreaming? I sighed, grabbed my backpack, and walked inside. There were several chairs in the foyer and I plopped myself down in one of them, my backpack on my lap. I opened it, looking for one of the books I had shoved it. However my eye fell on something else, and I pulled it out.

Now I knew this was a dream. It was a script for ‘The Flowerpot’, the play I was in college. Our director had handed out the script on the last day of classes, with strict instructions to study our parts over break. This was exactly what my dreams were like… I would go along fairly normally and then something ‘important’ would pop up… a girl, a teacher, or… a script that I was worried about. I was really worried about the character I had been assigned in the play, ‘Freddie Threepwood’, which the director had described as a foppish and kind of inane young man… not exactly the kind of thing I was used to doing.

I stared at the script for a minute in silence. I thought about working on my lines but I was afraid that, like Alice, the words would turn out to be, if not nonsense, at the very least different from the real script.

I could, I suppose, at least read it through, and opened the script.

I had skipped to my favorite scenes in the book, and was reading that bit where Baxter was heaving flowerpots in at Lord Emsworth’s window; when a voice interrupted me, “Studying?”

I looked up at a boy, about my age, wearing a white shirt, slacks,and a coon skin hat; which I stared at. He had sat down beside me and he was staring at the script while I stared at his hat. Who on Earth wore a coon skin cap? “Sort of,” I said, when he looked up from the script and I realized I hadn’t answered. I had thought I would have to sit here alone while I waited for Jenny. It would be nice to have someone to talk to.

“It’s a play,” I said. I handed him the script and he looked through it.

“P.G. Wodehouse? I didn’t know he wrote plays.”

“Oh, yes! He wrote lots of plays. But this is a modern adaptation of my absoloutely favorite book of his.”

“Cool. And you have a part? A good one?”

“Pretty good. Hard though.”

“Well, better you than me. I can’t really act.  What else do you do, you’re not in a play?”

“I’m a sophomore at college, majoring in biology. You? ”

“I’m a junior, electrical engineering.”

We were having a very nice chat about music, it turns out he liked to sing too, and I had almost completely forgotten all about the dream, when I was brought back to reality by this boy, whose name it turned out was Jervis, saying, “So you must be Jenny’s big sister Bobbi, then?”

“It seems that way,” I said. My pleasure in the conversation vanishing, I realized I had to pee, and had had to for some minutes. “Excuse me,” I said, and got up.

I was halfway to the bathroom when I realized I had another problem and slowed and stared at the signs. I could feel Jervis’s eyes on me. If I went to the girls room, in one of my dreams, I would probably transform back into a boy while in there and have to hide in one of the stalls, all naked. Or I would have a girl scream at me, and get arrested or something. But, if I went into the boy’s room…

In the end, it was the sign on the door that convinced me and I went through the door with a picture of a long-haired person with a skirt on. After all, I was a long-haired person with a skirt on… and all the rest of the equipment that sign hinted at.

Just my luck, there was a girl at the sink fussing with her makeup. A younger girl, in the white skirt and blue top that Jenny’s choir was wearing. Their teacher, after some fuss in the past with a boy that came to choir practice in shorts, had laid down the law and all of the choir members now came in their uniforms, so they were easy to recognize.

I ducked quickly into a stall, not really wanting to face being in the girl’s room with an actual girl, despite the fact that my body form made it appropriate.

I pulled down my skirt and ‘panties’ but in spite of my extremely urgent need my body rebelled and I could do nothing with that girl at the sink. I decided to wait her out, and leaned back, thinking over the conversation.

Jervis seemed like a very nice boy. And he seemed interested in me, too…

My reverie was broken by the sound of the door. I peeked out. The girl was gone, and, no longer ‘in the presence’ of a strange member of the opposite sex I quickly finished my business and pulled myself back together, struggling to get my shirt tucked into my skirt.

When I emerged from the girl’s room Jervis seemed pleased to see me and putting down the script, which he had obviously been reading, he began a story of a time he and some friends have gone down a river rafting. It was a long story but he told it well, causing me to giggle at several points and even laugh out loud at one point. In fact was still giggling when the door to the auditorium opened and a girl came out; looking about Jenny’s age, although a bit taller, and wearing her choir uniform. Her face was set with anger, and her eyes caught Jervis and I sitting together talking and she came over, almost stomping.

“I’m ready to go now!” she said to Jervis, who looked startled at the anger in her voice.

“Well, it was nice talking to you,” he said, and got up and went out with her. They had just gotten to the door when Jenny came out, fire flashing from her face, too.

“Problems at the rehearsal?” I asked, as I put the script back in my backpack and started toward the doors with her.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said, and we walked back to the car in uncomfortable silence. I didn’t like this. I would have to figure out some way to figure out what was going on with her.

Seeing that talking was out of the question for the moment, I turned on the radio.

“Hey,” said one of the morning team to the others, “did you hear that story about the students at the university who all woke up with free plastic surgery…?”