“Hey,” I said, as her head popped up through the hatch, “I need to go pee. You two can talk. I told him about my dream,” I said to Jenny, and raced down the ladder before she could react.
There was a bathroom off the laundry room, so I hardly had to go inside at all. I sat down and did my business… it seemed like I had to pee all the time now. The I then stripped off all the way in front of the mirror and stared at what it showed me. I just had to be dreaming, but every minute that went by put the lie to it. I had now peed three times. But you can’t pee in dreams. If you pee in dreams you wet the bed, don’t you? So I couldn’t be dreaming. I looked back at the mirror staring and hoping that it would just flicker and I would wake up. I had to be dreaming. Things like this simply didn’t happen. They didn’t. I liked sci-fi, especially since Caleb did, and it was fun and all, but it wasn’t real. This couldn’t be real.
I looked out the window at the clubhouse. What were my Caleb and Jenny doing right now? What was my mom doing? I leaned over the sink and cried, and cried.
“You’re a big girl, Bobbi,” I said to myself in the mirror. “Wash your face and get back to Jenny and Caleb or they will start worrying about you.”
I laughed as I washed my face. I was behaving just like Alice, lecturing myself. I would have to read that book again to see what else I was supposed to do.
“Hey,” I said, popping my head back up into the fort. I guess I wasn’t the only one that had been crying. Caleb was awkwardly holding Jenny as she sobbed. His face looked very concerned.
“All right, what’s up? I thought you had cried this through, Jenny?”
“I… Caleb said…” Jenny began, and then started crying again. Caleb looked very uncomfortable.
“OK, so-called best friend, what have you been doing to my sister?”
“I, I was just worried about if you were… Ok.”
“Like, am I nuts? Good question. Here, let’s lay it out in my journal.”
Under my previous list, I wrote:
Possibilities:
1) I am playing a really, really mean joke.
2) I am nuts
3) I am dreaming
“There,” I said, tossing the book at Caleb and Jenny, who were still holding each other, “any other possibilities anyone wants to add?”
Caleb let go of Jenny to catch it, and she took the opportunity to sit back against the wall, her face all read and streaked, like happens to girls when they cry with makeup on.
He wrote for a second, and then his eyes lit up. “Caleb Morgen Trentin, if you suggest some hair brained science fiction idea, I… I will kiss you!” I said.
“Was that supposed to be a threat?” He said, “Or a promise? Let’s see. How many hair brained ideas can I come up with? My favorite is interdimensional mind exchange…”
I launched myself across the room to carry out my threat when, in mid-wrestle, I suddenly realized that neither of us really saw it that way. So instead I whacked him on the bottom, hard. “Naughty boy,” I said, and went back to my place, red faced, as even that had seemed… odd.
“Seriously tho,” he said, “if we are going to eliminate some of these then there really does need to be some scientific….”
’Hypnosis!“ Jenny piped in, ”you could have been…“ she stopped when I burst out crying.
“No, no… there has to be something else!” I shouted. None of these leave me me. I can’t get back from any of these. It isn’t fair. I want to be me! I don’t want to be some ’Roberta’! Roberta is a stupid name!!“
I fled down the ladder and back into the house, to ‘my’ room, where I stripped the hated clothes and threw myself onto the bed, crying bitterly. It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t! What had I done to deserve this??
“Bobbi? Bobbi? Can we come in?”
“I’m naked!” I yelled. I wanted them and I didn’t want them. I loved them, they were my favorite people in the whole world except for Mom and Dad… but it wasn’t my Mom or my Dad or my Jenny or even my Caleb. I wanted to kiss my best friend and I had been attracted to some guy at the rehearsal and I didn’t know which bathroom to use and I had these floppy things on top and nothing down below and who was I now anyway?
I heard the door open, but I ignored it, burying my face in the pillow. I felt a hand on my back and it did made me feel better, but I just couldn’t face her right now, so I just stayed with my head buried, and Jenny (at least… it must be Jenny, no?) kept stroking my back and my head.