Work in Progress A Nightmare

 From Working Title - Most Popular and Never Published Stories from The Avocado Grove

Draft

A Nightmare


I’m at the cafeteria again - and my teacher is telling me the same stuff he said today in class, about my bad grades.  He is saying something about what getting an F means.  But I don’t hear him.  I’m failing, but it’s as if this is some other girl.  And for a few seconds, I mute the entourage of voices in my head and wish I could go anyplace else.

But then he asks me about Dillon and if I was drinking (as if this would explain my lack of focus).

“It wasn’t like that.”

Dillon is in line and he’s ordering the same food we had on our date.  (He is five or six people ahead of me, but I can smell everything he’s put on his plate, and I tell my teacher I don’t understand about the grades in class, the same way I don’t know what happened with me and Dillon.

I keep staring at the food.  Why is it being served here?  

I try to calm down and take deep breaths and attempt to meditate in the middle of a crowded lunchroom.  Peanut butter cookies aren’t strange.  But tofu chicken nuggets sit next to them, and this side dish we ate that night (the cook was thinking up a name) it sits next to the cookies; and it’s cut the same way, thick squares of a layered spinach side.  Three foods are the only choices in the whole place.

“Everybody knows about Dillon,” my teacher says.  

There is laughter; it is louder than a rock concert I went to when I was eight.  And my mom is here.  She warns me not to respond, but I don’t listen to her or anyone.  I go up to Dillon (he’s in the cafeteria too) and I have this idea he will talk to my teacher about what happened on the first day of school, the date and the rape.  All of my F’s will turn into A’s.  And it’s as if I forget Dillon is the reason for my problem, and I don’t magically get my concentration back.      
     
(I want to share my great epiphany and figure out how to change.  I tap my teacher on the shoulder.  But, he disappears).

I keep thinking today will be different.  I’ll wake up, and I won’t be that girl in the dorm the first day of school, the one Dillon picked.