Dreamer School

It was midnight and the violins from the first act of Swan Lake were fluttering through Molly's head from the whispering speaker of her radio. She bit the corner of her lip, hunched over at her desk, applying the last coat of shiny black nail polish to her immaculate pinky toe. Five smaller Mollys were clenching their slender brows in concentration and looking back at her from the obsidian mirrors of her toes. The small plastic brush tickled her in tune with the violin bows and the invisible dance of fumes from the polish reminded her like a rude smack to the face of the friends she used to have. Molly grimaced and finished applying the last glossy stroke with dainty expertise. She delicately screwed the lid back on the glass bottle of "Raving Royal Raven" and placed it in the pen cubby on her desk with a clatter. It was the only color she had left and it was already halfway gone.

"Royal raving raven, raning rotal raving, royal raving raven, raving royal raving..." she muttered to herself, twisting and knotting her tongue across the slippery forms of the tricky nail polish title.

She switched the bone-colored desk fan on with a thick, plastic click and unfolded her flexible, petite body back into the stiff embrace of her squeaky wooden chair. The fan was blowing out the thin baby hairs around the crown of her head and the fumes from the polish were stronger than usual as they burned through her nostrils with a chemical uncaring. Molly felt like she could almost see the air wavering in front of her, like a summer street in heat. Maybe the polish was going bad, she couldn't remember when exactly her friend had shoplifted it, they must have been in highschool? God... highschool, it seemed like forever ago. But even then, she felt like an outsider... how about that time when... Molly frowned and shook her head, fucking memories, if only the fumes could burn them out of her head. They were useless now, these memories of her friends tangled together with her little web of neurons, they were just taking up space and pulling her thoughts down raw tunnels of disappointment. She sighed.

She studied her small, pale foot propped up on her desk and fought the urge to wriggle her toes in the gentle breeze of the cute whirring fan. She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror and sighed. She had six different Mollys looking back at her and they all hated her. And she hated them.

The seventh Molly crossed her arms over her skinny frame and stared into the dark eyes that hid behind the smudged glare of her large circular glasses. Her neglected fingernails dug into her arms. The scrawniness of her life made her depressed, she felt like the embodiment of a wet cat, pitifully roaming house to house looking for an understanding master. The smattering of brown freckles on her nose undulated like a living connect-the-dots as she scrunched her face and flashed a strawberry tongue at herself. She pushed up her glasses and studied the Asian straightness of her messy black hair, her average round face, weak physique, and lemon-sized breasts. She hated it, hated all of herself.

She snuck her journal out from the top drawer of her desk tenderly, like a lover through a bedroom window, and opened up into the warmth of its embrace. The familiar feeling of the fake leather in her palms made her mind turn over with a halting clunk as it unbuckled itself and unfastened the tethers that held her down into the drab torture of her waking reality. Her body moved automatically as her mind stripped itself of all thought and settled in, naked and yearning, behind the obsidian vestibule of her large eyes, ready to be filled with whatever flowed through them.

Her porcelain hands held the thick journal securely at her sternum, the soft leather corner dug into the space between her breasts like a knight offering its hilt to her. She relaxed her grip on the spine and let the book open out upon the soft cushions of her upper breast, unfurling into a story she had bookmarked. She ran a hand down the buttery-smooth paper and flattened the page with dewy, expectant fingertips. Her eyes found the beginning of her loopy cursive and her mouth watered. The burning coal pits of her eyes set off like a flaming metronome, back and forth as she began to read a story she had penned in luscious ink the color of a bruised and beaten eggplant, stretching out across cream-colored fields of paper. Molly swallowed and relaxed her body one last time, softening her breath and lowering her eyelids.

The vivid images of a handsome stranger filled the dark mirror of her mind in a sordid rush of simulated senses, he pressed himself into her imagination, building himself up heftily, word by word. Molly's mind and body fell into the pages next to him and she was somewhere else, no longer in her bedroom, no longer in her parents' house, no longer a hopeless college student. She was a goddess of the lovers' moon and a pale, handsome man with dark hair and green eyes was making her heart buzz. Molly could smell him, almost taste him, like a wonderful spice in the wind of her thoughts, as the beauty of his words closed in on her, drenched in the blood of their pairing.

The stranger gripped Molly's left arm and pulled it towards the firm softness of his thirsty lips like a man in the desert asking for a drink. Molly's arm went limp in his grip as an invitation to quench himself upon her. He dragged a kiss in skips along the tender path of her forearm, like a prince hopping from lily pad to lily pad. His last kiss came too quickly and he gazed up at her while his lips were still planted on her creamy flesh. He accepted all of her in the blink of an eye. The skin on Molly's arm rippled with delight and her heart skipped. The green of his eyes leaked out of his sockets and flew up past his dark brow like a vivid green fire of wild ivy. Molly's breath stopped in her chest and the stranger let her arm go gently. She pulled it into her bosom like a wounded rabbit. Who was this man?

The stranger interrupted her thoughts with an unexpected touch, he placed a hand on her lower back and drew her into the hard wall of his body as if she was a cloud of mist being swept across a lake.

Molly braced herself against his solid chest with her arms like a fresh vine setting root. She gathered her courage and looked up into the perfection of his face. A slippery rush of heat coursed into her eyes, surged down her body, and gushed between her thighs as his green gems burned into the abyss of her gaze like a tumbling inferno. The young, dewy buds that ran along the length of her bloomed instantly into twirling white honeysuckles that dripped her weakness for him from silent yellow tongues. She swallowed butterflies and peered into his wonderful soul with awe. She felt her throbbing heart beating against his chest echo out into the hollow of his powerful lungs. Her own heartbeat mingled with his and came back into her body amplified and pounding. Pounding, pounding, pounding! Her knees faltered and he held on to her tighter. The conjoined vibration of their heartbeats rattled her fragile chest and shook her small breasts with a power that threatened to overwhelm and consume her. Their love echoed out into the cosmic drum of the universe, droning and spinning in a three billion year dance like two pulsars waltzing across the milky way.

He dragged a probing finger along her throat and under the left strap of her black silk dress. The stranger slowly guided it off her milky shoulder in a single, suggestive caress that barely touched her. The black snake of a strap surrendered instantly and slid down her trembling arm like a virgin's promise. He kissed her inner neck with lips that knew no boundaries, trailing moist kisses past her clavicle and over to her now bare shoulder before venturing down into the sensitive, supple skin of her upper breast. He teased her with the devilish pinch of a hungry bite mingled in with the angelic feathers of his innocent kisses, like a wolf in sheep's wool.

Molly's head tilted back and her eyes fell closed in a flutter of long lashes as she felt his gentle lips placing the rose petals of his kisses into her longing flesh. They sank down deeply into her rushing blood and dressed the bed in the darkness of her heart with silky scarlet sheets tainted in the scent of roses and stained with the promise of her satisfaction.

Molly intertwined her fingers with the musky curls at the back of his head and let slip a small groan of pleasure as the pale stranger undid her right shoulder strap and her dress died to the ground between them like a waterfall of ink running dry of words, revealing the page of her nudity. She gasped pleadingly up into the starry heavens and like the moon cutting into the night, her nipples hardened in the cold air of her desire. She fell in closer to the raging fire of his burning body and kissed his smouldering neck with an entreating whisper that screamed, "I'm yours." He wrapped the sun that was the protection of his arms around her and Molly melted into him like snow falling on the tip of a tongue.

He kissed the top of her head and whispered a strange language into her. Molly's large, dewy eyes glanced up at him puzzled. She could hardly think, her head was a warm, overflowing mist, her body was a gooey ease, a slippery mess of leaky honeysuckles. His right arm glided down across her lower back and his commanding hand pressed against her rear, forcing her closer into his groin as he stared down into the damp well of her eyes and with a voice rumbling like thunderous flame, he said:

"Go to bed Molly, you have class tomorrow!"

Molly jerked out of her journal and found her mom yelling at her shrilly with hard eyes from her bedroom doorway. She slammed the door shut with a loud crash. Molly felt a deep anger replace the love her stranger was filling her mind and body with just a page before. She was twenty-three and in college, why the hell was her mother still treating her like she was barely twelve. The hook she had hanging on her door fell off in a thud and rattled on the floor. Her body winced all at once from the sight and sound of the metal hook.

Molly wanted to scream. Her mother was suffocating her. If she wasn't such a meek coward, she would have ran away long ago. Molly looked at herself in the mirror again, if she had the confidence, she would pack her bags and sneak out her window right now. The other Molly in the mirror looked at her knew she was bluffing. What was she doing? What was she going to do once she did run away? Where would she go? The fairies weren't coming anytime soon to rescue her and the goblin's weren't interested in sharing their fruit with her. She as alone.

She knew her major was pointless. With all the new advances in technology, she realized by the time she graduated next year, she was already obsolete. Nothing but more despair and student loan debt was waiting for her. It filled her with a deep hopelessness. She felt born in the wrong time. Was she even human anymore? Had she ever been? What kind of creature was she?

Molly stared into the mauve pink leather of her journal. If only she could live in her fantasies. Her vision became a soggy blur of purple. A heavy tear ricocheted off her glasses and splashed onto the cover of the book. Molly felt that horrible burning feeling in her throat that came from trying to suppress her sobs. She couldn't even cry properly without her mother hearing it.

She wiped her eyes quietly, turned off the raspy radio, and climbed into bed, wishing she would just die in her sleep.

"Frosted lips, a kiss so slick, it slips and licks my sick heart to tears..." ran through Molly's thoughts as she fell into her dreams.

The next morning still came and her alarm cranked through her sleepy head like an unwelcome intruder. She groaned and went to swipe the snooze slider, but she knocked the phone off her table and it fell off the other side, dangling from its power cable and sending the alarm echoing around the waking room in weird ways. She groaned again and climbed reluctantly out of her warm bed.

Molly yawned and stretched as she fumbled with the whining phone. The brightness of the screen cut painfully through her morning haze. Silence finally came to the dimly lit room as she killed the alarm with a swipe of her small thumb.

She sat blankly on her cold, bare, hardwood floor in just her disheveled neon pink panties. The hard wood that pressed into her rear made her miss her old rug. She watched her phone dangle in front of her like a strange rectangular pendulum through the messy black curtain of her hair. Back and forth, back and forth. Today, tomorrow, Yesterday, never. She almost fell into a trance when she remembered the dream she was having just before the phone blasted her awake.

She stood up with a sleepy stumble and yanked on an old, grey-black shirt from the ground with an image of a panther swiping claws under sharp green-yellow eyes. She climbed into her desk chair and donned her smudged glasses. She pulled out her mauve journal and opened it up at the golden ribbon marker.

She took out a pen, pushed her glasses up her freckles, and began writing down the dream as best she could remember it with her spry fingers. Her words tore across the page in round, loopy cursive. Her legs uncrossed instinctively as she fell into the flow of the words running across the page.

Molly dreamt she was in some sort of school filled with weird people. A man was in the class, the same one from her fantasy that she had read before she fell asleep. But he was different. Like a monster or something. He owned her?

Molly stopped and poked the rubber cat sitting on top of her pen into her lips as she thought about it, trying to find the words to best describe the feeling he gave off.

Dead handsome?

Her large eyes widened and she shook her head. No, not dead. It was something else. And there was that gushy feeling with him, like they shared some kind of bond through space and time? The thoughts were filling Molly's head in a weird, automatic kind of way, like the responses of a magic-8 ball.

Her mother burst into the room and ripped up her thoughts.

"Let's go, you aren't even dressed yet?"

Molly rolled her eyes and dropped the pen on her desk. She stared into the yellow painted eyes of the black rubber cat, she wanted freedom.

"Give me a second, please Mom, class isn't even until nine and it's barely seven," Molly said, trying to hold on to the dream she had.

"But I'm the one driving you and I need to be at work before nine, so let's go, now," her mother said.

"I can take the bus, it takes like fifteen minutes, you don't have to drive me everyday, I'm twenty-three, I can take care of myself now," Molly tried to argue.

"If that were true," her mother said narrowing her eyes, "you wouldn't have that!"

Her mother pointed an angry finger at the long scar that ran up Molly's left wrist and forearm. Molly looked away from her mom and hid her arm quickly. The guilt flooded her again and she shut down instantly.

"Now get dressed, so we can go," her mother said and slammed the door.

All of Molly's calm excitement from the wonderful dream had vanished in a cloud of wasps. Molly stared at her left arm where the scar was. More than anything she wished it had worked. She ran her finger down the white line of it. Her mother reminded her of one of those wretched step-mothers from the fairy-tales, but she was Molly's own flesh and blood, which somehow made it even worse. At least those girls in the stories had a warm mother they could remember fondly to help carry them through.

She dropped her arm and shook her head, she was done with that mode of thinking. Suicide wasn't the answer anymore. The whole thing had only made things much worse for her.

Molly shoved her journal in her school bag. She would finish writing down the dream when she got to campus. She would have time to waste before her first class anyway. She found a black and white, striped skirt hanging around her bedpost and pulled it on. She took a quick look at herself in the mirror and wasn't happy with the outfit or her mess of hair, but her mother was screaming her name downstairs.

She quickly combed her slender fingers through her messy black hair and grabbed her bag to go. Turning to the door, she noticed a long, arcing scratch in the hardwood of her floor in front of the door. At the end of it was the fallen hook from the night before. Molly gazed into the white, pulpy scar cut deep into the skin of the polished wood. She held her arms, stepped over the scratch and left. The door slammed closed behind her.

~~~O

Her mother sped off without a goodbye and left Molly standing in front of the magnificent ivory hall that her first class was in. As she watched her mother's cherry-red car turn the corner, she wondered when the relationship between the two of them as mother-daughter had died. The whole line of thinking made Molly sad, she couldn't remember the last time her mother gave her a kind look or gentle word.

Only the birds were out this early, flitting along the bushes and trees that surrounded the lawn of the hall in fast, chirping bursts of feathery browns and reds. She had an hour to kill, so she found a nice place to sit outside while the sun woke up at its own pace.

Molly concentrated on her dream, on that green-eyed stranger again, but she was only left with a vague feeling of it. The dream was gone.

She closed the book and sighed. A squirrel was prancing along the grass, it was a black squirrel, she had never see one such a color before. Her curious eyes followed its wriggling puff of a smoky tail back and forth across the green of the circular lawn of the hall and into the shade next to the entrance stairway. There was a hidden alcove nestled among the row of short, well-groomed trees and the squirrel disappeared into it.

Something caught her eyes in the moist dew of the morning sprinklers under the trees. The mulch-speckled, white-yellow folded exclamation point of a used condom and a pair of thin, wet, neon pink panties poked deep into the dark pupils of her large eyes. The image was like a complete set of a late night love affair.

Molly felt a wave of jealousy wash over her as she could almost see the scene of the drunk girl bent over with her hands out against the wall while some college stud whose name she had forgotten filled her with images of her father's anger. She stood up instantly, dusted off her skirt, and clutching her journal, backed away. It frustrated her immensely that some people were out there, living a wild, free life. It only amplified her loneliness and filled her with a fear of missing out on the passion of a life being lived in.

She found a new spot on the opposite side of the tall set of stairs and turned back to the fantasy she was reading herself into the night before:

Molly found the sensation of her hard nipples pressing into the unknown landscape of his chest exhilarating. The way he cupped his hand around her rear felt possessive and made her blush with the desire to be owned by him, body and soul. She felt something strong and stiff growing into her belly.

"I'm a virgin," Molly confessed in a whisper, looking down into her small hands splayed flat on his chest, embarrassed. The mystery of the gravity-defying thing that pulsed aggressively against her, both enticed and terrified her.

He kissed her head again and Molly looked up, searching his eyes. He didn't say anything, but his look calmed her, comforted her.

He laid her gently down on the thick mossy carpet of the forest. The sounds of the night were dense with the rich life of the small pond they were lying next to. Nature's watchful eyes serenaded the couple as he disrobed and gently came to rest on top of Molly's softness.