At Harvard

I am attending Harvard. Leslie is going there, too; in fact, we are sharing a locker. There are Diet Coke and Diet Pepsi machines down the hall from our locker. One day, we go to our locker and see a Diet Pepsi machine right next to it; across the hall is a stainless steel freezer/refrigerator unit.

I am watching a play. A woman who bears a strong resemblance to Emma Thompson is sitting in a boat-looking thing shaped like this giant wooden shoe like the one I saw in Amsterdam, waiting for this girl she has met to come sit next to her. Suddenly this Joe Pants guy from Risky Business and later The Sopranos walks over, does a somersault and lands next to her in the boat. She is amused but makes him leave as she is waiting for a girl. A tall, kind of butch girl with slicked-back hair comes along and sits next to her in the boat. Everyone applauds; that’s the end of the play.

I, who have been watching from off to the side, kneeling down so as not to get in the way, return to the freezer/refridgerator to see what it is. It is sort of a transformer, and it appears to be unlocked and empty. Cool, we can store food in here, I think. More people are looking at it with me, then a guy — possibly Michelle’s brother, Michael — discovers that there is a nozzle for blue rasperry and cherry slushies. He pushes the lever and blue and red slushies ooze out onto the carpet.

“You're going to have to clean that up!” I tell him. He stands there looking at it. “You’re going to have to clean that up NOW!” He runs off to find something to clean it up. At that instant, here comes a security guard.

“OK, that’s another academic violation. You are suspended,” he says to me.

Sometime later, I am kicking the security guard’s ass. He is lying on the floor, mouthing me, and I am poking him with some kind of stick/pole. He continues to berate me. Next thing I know, I have this milk crate full of what looks like entrails, and they stink, and I must dispose of them. For some reason, I try to do this at a huge grocery store ... but of course I can’t find a suitable place to toss it all, there.

Eventually, I find a trash can next to the restrooms. I dump the crate and go into the restroom. In there I see Kylie Jo and another girl, and we are standing near the sinks. Kylie and I begin talking about school, and how neither of us is sure if we will be back next year. I suddenly realize that I don’t know if I actually want to graduate from Harvard because I don’t want the pressure of being a Harvard graduate. I’m thinking, if you graduate from Harvard, that’s what you’ll always be: a Harvard graduate. What if you write something that everyone really really hates, and then all they’ll be able to say is, “But she’s a Harvard graduate! We expected better!”

(I keep these thoughts to myself as Kylie is getting ready to leave the bathroom.)

I have with me a couple of flowering plants and two pairs of flip-flops. I try to put on both pairs of flip-flops but can’t get my second right one on my foot. I also can’t carry both plants, so I leave the mini light-yellow daffodil plant for a moment, figuring I can come back to get it in a few minutes. I leave, but in a few minutes I return, and the plant is gone.

The house has been transformed into a contemporary gallery of some sort, with mostly unlit candles and holders and vases and all that kind of stuff crammed everywhere. The walls are painted in bright pastel colors, blue, yellow, orange and green. I see two girls on a bed; when they see me, they roll up into their covers. Then I see a table full of women, and I ask, “Do you know what happened to my plant?”

They ask me what flower, so I take them to the bathroom and tell them where it was and how I’d left it because I couldn’t carry everything.

“We haven’t seen it,” says the owner of the house. (She looks like the girl with brown curly hair that was on the original season or two of Ellen and I think was one of Joel’s friends in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.)

She leads me down a hallway with a mantle on it, and I see my flowers. They have been trimmed and are standing straight up in a small clear vase about 5 inches in diameter, 6 inches tall.

“There they are!” I tell her. “I bought those flowers at a plant auction!”

“Those are not your flowers,” she tells me. “That’s lemon grass.”

She makes a big show of placing the flowers at her end of the mantle, the left end. Meanwhile, I am surrounded by her friends as I look at the other items on the mantle.

“You need to leave,” the woman tells me.

“If you’re going to make me leave without my plant, you should at least give me something in return. It’s only fair,” I tell her.

She looks at me for a moment, and then says, “OK.”

The women are standing close to me. I look at all the items but see nothing that I want as much as my daffodils. Then I see a small vase or candleholder that I like — very plain and simple in comparison to everything else; it is about 3 inches tall, square with rounded edges. The bottom part is clear, and the top part, about an inch and a half or so, is sort of a burnished bronze.

“This is nice,” I say, and they all seem to nod as if it’s OK if I take it, so I pick it up. It is very heavy, though, so I decide I don’t want it. I put it back and keep looking.

The two women to my direct left are wearing black choir robes. The woman on my right is weariing a blue one. I lean over to tell the first girl to my left, “Women in robes are sexy.” The other two want to hear what I am saying, so I tell them, too. They don’t seem particularly offended by this, but one of them starts to laugh. Suddenly, there is some kind of commotion, and next thing I know, all of the girls have darted into the other part of the house and I am left there, alone.

I run to the left end of the mantle but can’t find my flowers. I go back toward the middle, and there they are, toward the back, too high and too far back for me to reach. I look around (I know the women will be back in a few seconds) and I see Leslie.

“Can you reach this for me?” I whisper, and she can and does.

“We’ve got to get out of here!” she whispers back.

We start to run away.

“Wait, go slow so they won’t think anything is wrong!” she tells me. “Act nonchalant.”

So we sort of mosey toward the bathroom exit.

“Hey, guys, I really don’t want any of this crap!” I yell. “Anyway, my parents just called and there’s been an emergency at home and now I need to go.”

Leslie and I run through the bathroom and maneuver through the opening to the spiral staircase that leads down and out of the place. Luckily, it has started to get dark outside, and we decide that zig-zagging down the side streets back to campus should keep them from finding us.