At odds
I’m dreaming I’m in a trendy store full of cute or weird things and smart-assed posters. I keep finding shirts I want to buy, but I’m restraining myself, for once. I’m amusing myself by reading the slogans, and then someone talks to me.
I look down, and it’s someone I’d hoped never to see again.
Kelly. A girl from my high school. She attached herself to the group of nerds, and even the nerds didn’t want her. Because nerds are smart.
Kelly was several years older than us; the only eighth grader I knew to take driver’s ed. I guess we should’ve been more charitable to her, but she wasn’t slow in an overt special ed sort of way. Also extremely religiously self-righteous. Which didn’t go over well to the couple of arrogantly atheist people in our group (of which I was one, of course.)
And here she is. In a mall store, as I’m reading rude stuff. She was always short, and her dirty dishwater hair greasy. Age has perhaps been kinder to her, where it isn’t with most people. She has managed to wash her hair, and it’s not in a ponytail, and she’s not wearing her perpetual sweat pants suit.
But Kelly … Kelly was just irritating. And now she’s insisting on telling me how her life has been, and how she has been doing mission work.
I’m fighting my urge to tell her to go away, a throwback from my high school days. I’ve always been a little bit ashamed of the way I acted in high school. As a nerd, there people still lower that you could focus your retaliation on. Like Kelly. Who attached herself to me like a barnacle in German class when I went to go teach fifth graders German for extra credit, and never did a thing.
So I’m trying to be nice to her, but also trying to get rid of her. If one thing hasn’t changed, it’s that she’s still boring. And still has that whiny voice.
I buy a couple of things, and then try to ditch her by buying something I know the old Kelly would disapprove of. I must ditch her, because that part of the dream is done.
My dream segues into cleaning out tons of my mother’s old books. In real life, I have almost all of the few that weren’t destroyed by carelessness over the years from either her or me.
Some books are completely worthless, and will need to be thrown out. I’m going through dank box after dank box.
I almost throw one huge blue covered tome out, but discover that it has old papers in it that were important to the family.
I also find an old letter from my mother, but as I’m reading it, my dad comes up, and I don’t want him to see it. I don’t know what it says, and I don’t want him to get upset.
We play a game of keepaway, and he starts getting angry with me. The fight ends in an ultimatum, let him see the letter or he’ll disown me.
I think it’s stupid to be fighting over this, but I have my pride (typical stubborn Wiese) and I tell him fine, I live somewhere else anyway, and it doesn’t matter to me.
Then we both feel bad, and try to make up.
Years ago, I had the experience of running into a former co-graduate from the class of 1992, about 100 people from smalltown Michigan. There we were in Everett, WA, the same mall, the same store, the same moment. Wierdness. Unlike you, though, there was no ditching necessary. Mari (that’s M’ahr-ee not Mary) was quite normal during school and at our crossing paths.
That’s really odd that you would run into someone you knew so far from home. Did you end up having a good conversation, or did you say it’s nice seeing you, bye?
Ah, it was years ago, so hard to place exactly. But I do remember a pleasant exchange in the face of our confusion to be in the same point at the same time. Has never happened again–meeting up with someone like that so far away.