Daydreams and Nightmares (Complete)

[Jamie Morrigan]

Jamie Morrigan sat at a desk in a classroom that was bigger than a football stadium. In every direction were more identical desks with identical students underneath rows and rows of identical rectangular florescent lights for as far as she could see - but then, she couldn't really look because her essay was overdue, and she was trying to finish it, but every time she looked back to the page on her desk it was blank again. And she was in her underwear.

She looked down at herself and sighed. "That one again? Can't you come up with something better?"

She was in her pajamas, only they were several sizes too big, and it was hard to hold on to her pen. The thing slipped out of her sleeve-encumbered hand as if it were a live fish and clattered to the floor.

"Jamie Morrigan. I'm waiting for your paper."

Jamie looked up to see Mrs. Baumgarten standing over her desk with a stack of finished papers, and all the students had turned to stare at them. Now the whispering began, and the laughing.

"No, you're not," Jamie said. "I handed this one in months ago. And you're not even my teacher, you're the school counselor, and you're only here because I'm more afraid of you."

"Jamie, your behavior is deteriorating," Mrs. Baumgarten said. "You're a nuisance and a danger to the other children, and everyone thinks you look stupid in those pajamas. We're going to have to send you away."

"Well, good, I don't like being here," Jamie said, and she stood up violently, knocking her chair over backwards with a terrible sound.

She spun around and found herself at the top of the basement steps in her school, watching as Brayden Thomas tumbled down them like a puppet with its strings cut until at last he crashed on the floor below with all his limbs pointing the wrong directions. Jamie gasped and stumbled back away from the steps, hugging herself to try to stop the trembling.

"Okay, that was a cheap shot," she said with a tremulous voice. "It wasn't my fault, and he's already out of the hospital."

"You're going to have to go away, Jamie," said Mrs. Baumgarten, towering behind her. "Don't worry. I know just the place for you."

Jamie squeezed her eyes shut. "I know what you're going to do. I'm going to turn around, and I'll be back at the Jericho Center. It's not going to work, okay? It's not going to scare me."

"Of course, not, dear. It's where you belong."

She opened her eyes, and now she was in a brightly lit corridor that looked like a hospital but wasn't, because hospitals didn't have guards with assault rifles at every wardroom door and even the worst hospitals didn't feel like all the happiness and warmth had gone out of your life and you were never going to have any fun ever again. Jamie looked down and saw that her pajamas had been replaced with a disgustingly pink medical smock. She was defiant as Mrs. Baumgarten marched her down the corridor and stopped at a very familiar door.

Jamie spun to glare up at her counselor. "I told you, it's not going to work!" she repeated, though she felt her heart thundering against her narrow chest. "I get it, okay? I know I'm dreaming."

Mrs. Baumgarten smiled just the way she always did when Jamie said something she found particularly interesting. "Of course you are, dear - and you're very good at it! But how do you know where you're going to wake up?"

The door behind her opened with a crash, and Jamie stumbled backward and off the edge of the stairs to the basement in her school.

She woke with the dizzying sensation of falling still ringing around her ears and lay for a moment half-buried in her pillow, clutching at the sheets in her hands. But the sheets felt wrong. Where the thin and faded prints of tropical birds and insects should have been, there was a starchy sheet of institutional blue. Jamie choked and bolted upright on the hard mattress to see sterile white walls with no windows, a metal door with charts in a plastic folder hanging from it, and a small TV in the corner beside a bookshelf of books and DVDs she'd already read and watched a hundred times. And instead of the fuzzy pajamas Anna had bought her last Christmas, she was wearing that horrible pink smock.

"No, it's not real!" she whimpered, and she pressed her hands hard over her eyes and tried to remember her bedroom in Redención House, but the memory of her dream was still vivid and raging through her brain.

"Dr. Roken to gene lab four, please, Dr. Roken gene lab four."

"It's not real!" Jamie howled at the PA speaker in the ceiling. "Go away! It's not real, it's not real, it's not real!"

Jamie hugged her knees to her chest and put her face between them, sobbing as the whitewash slowly faded to wallpaper, the tile floor to carpet, and the buzzing florescent light to the gentle morning sunlight beaming through her bedroom window.