Jenna's House of Idiosyncrasies Version 10.0 [Focus.]

I had a dream last night that I was an orphan, living in an orphanage that was some cross between a warm version of the one in Annie and the dormitory in Real Genius. There was some cookie and lip gloss eating contest going on, in which I was not participating, but I remember feeling that the stakes in the contest were quite high; the winners were to be spared from some unnamed but dark fate.

I snuck through some small, short door between the contestants, who were measuring their success somehow by filling large, Plexiglas bins that resembled aquariums. In the dream I was a child, but I still had to duck and shimmy through the door, which was square and only a few feet tall. The door was sunk a couple of feet into the wall and had aged iron hardware; it felt very Alice in Wonderland. I came out into an empty, sun filled room. The side that I had come out of mirrored the opposite wall; both walls had the same small wooden doors in the center and were otherwise covered with large planks of light colored wood, that had been finished and polished to a high gloss sheen. The floor was covered with the same wood. The walls to my left and right were painted an eggshell color, and above me was a dome of glass. The room was easily half the size of a high school gymnasium, but I remember thinking that was secret, that it was a place only I knew about, even though I had never been there before, I had known all the time of its existence.

I stared up through the dome for only a moment, sort of marveling at the sky, feeling like I hadn't seen it in a long time. Then, in a determined way as if I was on a mission, but still unsure as to exactly where I was going, I crossed to the other side of the room and crawled through the other door.

I came into a kitchen, as long as the former room across but narrow; I nearly hit my head on the cabinet across from the door when I came in. I stood and saw that the whole kitchen, including the walls and the cupboards and the counters were covered in the same wood as I saw in the previous room. There were no appliances that I saw, but I was still sure that i was a kitchen. The counters on both side were covered in plates of cookies and pastries of every kind, and probably several varieties that only exist in my imagination. I found a plate in one of the cabinets and started piling it up, suddenly ravenous and delighted.

When I had what must have been a good stockpile, I started thinking about how I was going to get this all back to my room without being seen. I couldn't go back the way I came because of the cookie and lip gloss eating contest. I also had a sense that being caught with this platter would not just be bad but would win me the same questionable fate of the losers of that contest.

I looked up and down the narrow room where I was, and at one end a white door appeared, the kind that might lead to a stairwell in an office building or a public school. It had a glowing red exit sign above it and on it a sign that said “To Stairs”, complete with a street-sign style illustration of a stick figure man climbing a staircase. I raced towards it and gingerly went through. It lead to a narrow, gleaming white staircase with black painted rails, hitting a landing and then continuing where I could not see. I bounded up, and halfway to the landing another older teenage resident of the orphanage came around the bend and started down towards me.

I stopped where I was and quickly hit my plate behind my back; the teenager's eyes were at their feet, not in a shy way but in the way your eyes might be if you were making your way down a long staircase. This person made their way past me, and we exchanged pleasantries, then this person hit the bottom stair and went through the door I had just come out of. The teenager never suspected a thing.

I continued up, went around the bend, and hit another flight of stairs that looked exactly the same. I knew I had to get to the fifth floor, and the paranoia was starting to weigh on me, but I figured I could make the whole trip. I hit the top of this flight, went around the bend, and the staircase opened up into a room with stairs going every which way. It was kind of like that Escher lithograph everyone thinks of when you talk about a nonsensical set of stairs, but they weren't in any way gravity defying, in was just all stairs and ramps and landings and rails, several of which appeared to go nowhere. It was like a Dr. Seuss room, if Dr. Seuss's rooms full of stairs were completely devoid of colors not white and black, lit with a skylight dome, and kind of ominous.

The room didn't seem to scale more than one floor. I stood on the landing where I had come out, trying to figure out where to go, trying to decipher what set of stairs would possibly get me to the fifth floor, when other residents of the place started to appear. They came from doors I could not see, from around corners, and began to congregate in this room, sitting casually on the railing, stopping and leaning against the walls, talking to each other. I panicked and hid my contraband behind my back, and then walked as casually as I could to the center of the room, up three or four stairs and across a ramp.

I approached another short set of stairs where a cute older boy was standing. He had short, blond, wavy hair and was probably 17 or so. He had some camp counselor type of leadership role in this institution; I got the sense that he was not just older but senior to me. He was talking to a girl near his age, looking down at a ramp where she sat on blue couch that was not there before.

The girl was completely bald on the top of her head, sporting a badly done comb over that was not fooling me but was, evidently, fooling everyone else. She sat with her knees curled up to her chest in that girlish way, twirling the hair she did have, trying to be charming.

“It's not my responsibility. It's not my responsibility!” the boy snapped at her.

“But it's your old room, you should have to clean it up!” the girl pleaded with him.

It was then I remembered, in that dream way where you knew something all along but you didn't, that the room above the boy's had flooded and his ceiling had fallen in, trashing his room and all of his stuff. I got a flash of it as if it was in my memory, the dripping plaster, the smell of mildew, the feeling that something might fall on your head. It was like I was there. It was also then that I remembered, that for some reason, they had moved him in with me when his room had been destroyed, and there was some institutional reason in the dream that completely trumped the obvious ludicrousness of moving a 17-year-old boy in with a preteen girl. We had separate beds. It seemed normal.

The boy greeted me, snapping me back to the weird stair room. “Hi, Jenna.” He smiled, I smiled back, and he walked away. He had not suspected a thing about the cookies. I sighed with relief. The bald girl called up to me. “Hey Jenna!” I looked down at her, and she winked at me salaciously.

“He has a big ole crush on you.”