[1. WHAT WAS SOMETHING UNPLEASANT THAT HAPPENED RECENTLY?]

My dream last night was unpleasant . . . It was a memory, actually, of when my mom walked out on Dad and me. It started with these random flashes of things that happened earlier in my life. The first happened when I was six, when I was kidnapped from school for two weeks before they found me sitting by the river that runs through south part of town (I forget what it’s called).

Apparently, the man wanted ransom money to pay off his debt or something. He found out later that we live in a run down apartment complex. He must have been too much of a wimp to do anything to me, so he just let me go. The police later caught him robbing a convenience store, or so the story goes.

The dream just showed a bunch of confusing flashes from that time: street lights pulsing past a car window, later blending into a dark room lit by a computer screen; the thick, steaming stench of cigarettes and instant noodles; and the sticky-tight feeling of duct tape wrapped my hands and mouth and feet. It all felt very real to me.

When the face of the man flashed in front of me, I’m pretty sure it almost woke me up. My heart is racing now when I think about it. His face was different from how I remember it. It still had that gross beard and those yellow teeth and that red face covered in acne scars. I think it was his eyes that were different. They were hollow somehow, and at one point I think they weren’t even there. They were just big holes in his face.

Then, the dream switched to an event about half a month after that. It showed my mom doing laundry for the first time in a long time. In the dream, I could see her expression when she found the winning lottery ticket in the pocket of the jacket I must have been wearing when I was kidnapped.

I’m not sure if that was the actual expression she had on her face back then, but seeing the look of shock and surprise and the strange mixture of greed and somehow release . . . well, it turned my stomach even in the dream.

I can vaguely remember the man buying the ticket, but I never did figure out how it had managed to slip into my pocket, nor how he never realized it was a winning ticket. My mom, though, was almost hysterical when she found it, probably more so than when she found out I was missing.

She never really had much of an emotional connection with me. I think it’s because when she was pregnant with me, she had complications with the pregnancy right as my brother got hit by a car. He must have been about five at the time. They both were rushed to the hospital, but they got there too late to save my brother’s life. Dad tells me I almost didn’t make it either, but my mom didn’t seem to ever remember that.

I think she blames me for my brother’s death, but well, he was the child of her first marriage. I hear her husband died fighting as a soldier. She really loved him.

Later, she met Dad at a mechanic shop getting her car fixed. They hit it off. He was sweet and she liked him well enough, so they got married. But maybe he was too sweet. The attachment didn’t last long. She’d yell at him and he’d try to please her and I’d sit outside on the porch watering my dying flowers in the cracked planters.

I guess that’s why it was no surprise that six days after she found the lottery ticket, she walked out on us. With Dad’s younger coworker, no less. I hated having to rewatch that scene, watching her in those red high heeled boots that clicked against the tile as she strolled with her suitcase right out the door. It’s was so uncomfortable, and it brought back all the swirling emotions I thought I had banished. Still . . . seeing it all again makes me I wonder she might have just been tired of life at that point.

Or tired of us.

~~~

I frown, tapping my pencil against the sheet of paper in front of me. I don’t like what I wrote. In fact, I want to just erase it all, but Mr. Reynolds only gives like five minutes to complete the annoying prompts he calls journals. He gives them out every week, and I swear every kid in the classroom hates them to death. Even worse, the topic this time was especially cringe-worthy.

I don’t have enough time to think of a new subject. I’m not even sure what I have will actually count well towards the prompt. The only reason I wrote about the stupid dream was because it was still fresh on my mind. I hesitate to say that it’s still bothering me, but it is. I’ll probably get docked on it. That’s how it goes, right? The more heart you put into something, the worse the grade you get. The people that get A’s are somehow the ones that manage to regurgitate nonsense onto their papers. The school system is ridiculous.

I groan when I hear Mr. Reynolds call out, “Time’s up. Pass your papers forward.” I tear out the sheet of paper and reluctantly hand it to the guy in front of me. Class goes by quickly after that. I mostly zone out once Mr. Reynolds starts talking about the themes found in Romeo and Juliet. I’m not exactly interested in doomed love stories at the moment.

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When the bell rings, I’m glad to be out. It’s my last class of the day which is good, so I could go home. I’m kinda hesitating to, though. That dream’s been distracting me all day. I think my teachers noticed it, but I’m a good enough student that it doesn’t matter. They’ll probably give me some leeway.

If I go home now, though, Dad’ll notice something’s off right away. He’ll try and talk to me about it, and he won’t buy it if I try and brush it off, and well, if I tell him, he’ll get that guilty look in his eyes that comes up every time anyone mentions either Mom leaving or the whole kidnapped thing.

Nope, let’s not go home just yet. Instead, let’s go to the greenhouse in the community garden. I spend a lot of time there anyway, so Dad shouldn’t be too suspicious if I tell him I was there when I eventually get home. Yep, let's do that.

As I walk out the school gate and down the street towards the greenhouse, I try to ignore the images of my dream that keep popping into my head. Why’d it have to be such a vivid dream? I wish I forgot it all when I woke up, like other, normal dreams. It keeps giving me an unsettling feeling in the bottom of my stomach that’s really hard to ignore, almost like something bad is going to happen.

I shudder, then shake my head and push the thought aside as I opened up the sad-looking wooden gate to the community garden. I make my way past planters filled with a messy scattering of vegetables and follow the sandy path to the greenhouse that lay in the back corner of the plot. Humid air greets me as I lift up the plastic flap and step in. It’s cramped in the one-car-garage sized tent, and it’s filled with various planters lining the floor and the bleacher style wooden shelving. In the center, a path loops like a blocky zero around bench placed in a small gathering of trees in pots. Well, welcome to my haven.

I slide off my backpack by the bench and roll my sleeves. Grabbing a watering can, I walk over to the water spigot and fill it. It doesn’t take me long to get back into the rhythm of checking how each plant is doing as I water. As I do, I think about how far I’ve come with the place.

The few old ladies that tended the messy gardens outside never bothered with the greenhouse. It used to be really rundown. It’s plastic covering was torn, one of the four long shelves inside was broken, cigarettes were scattered everywhere, and the pots only contained dead plants. When I was seven, I took a liking to it, though, mostly because it was somewhere secret I could go to get out of an empty house when Dad was working.

I spent close to six months fixing it up. The old ladies were nice enough. They provided me with a few starter seeds and pointed me to the tool shed in the opposite corner of the garden when I asked if I could fix it up. I could tell they gossiped about me later, making bets about how long I would stick with the project. I’m not sure who won.

It was a rough start, that’s for sure. Most of what I did fell apart the next day. I can remember being so frustrated that Dad worried that I was being bullied at school. (I was, but not enough for me to really care--probably one of the reasons why I have no friends).

The public library provided me the books to figure out how to make more lasting repairs with limited materials (duct tape and the sort), but no gardening book I read, no plant website I checked could help me figure out why I couldn’t grow anything. It took me two years and a ridiculous amount of experimentation to finally figured it out.

It’s really weird, but everything I figured out that worked for me I know for a fact won’t work for anyone else. I’m pretty sure that if anyone else tried my methods, they’d kill everything, just like how the most tried and true gardening methods will kill all of my plants.

My method concludes that each plant needs something different to grow. More importantly, none of it is remotely close to logical. Some plants wanted very strange things (like peanut butter on their leaves or plastic animals glued on their branches) or they wouldn’t even sprout. Others needed very specific schedules, with days of watering and fertilizing followed by days of ignoring. My wooly senecio succulents, for example: they need watering every day but Tuesday. I have no idea why specifically Tuesday, but it’s definitely Tuesdays that they must not be watered.

Honestly, it’s all very bizarre. I’ve asked plenty of people about it online and in person. Most people think I’m joking, but those I can convince can’t make heads or tails of it, like my biology teacher who’s completely flabbergasted. He asked me if he could research it some, so he comes by the greenhouse every once in a while, but I don’t think he’s made any progress. Yesterday, he told me that he had to throw away another batch of onions at his house because they started to mold from the nacho cheese they were dipped in.

It’s so unscientific. At this point, I’ve stopped asking why it’s like this.

After I finish my routine, I sit on the bench and stretching. Then I reach for the backpack on the dirt floor, pulling out a cheesy romance book from the main pocket as well as a packet of corn chips. It was my way of destressing. I can laugh at how stupid everyone’s IQ is in romance novels, and more importantly, I don’t have to think about life.

Time passes as I quickly immerse myself in a world of kissing, flushed faces, and embarrassing situations, every once in a while grabbing a couple of corn chips. Most go into my mouth, the remaining I crunch up in my hand and scatter distractedly into the pot next to the bench where a vibrant apple tree grows. Anyone watching would be wondering why I’m wasting food like that, but my apple tree really likes corn chips . . .

I find myself smirking at a particularly cringey line in the book when a chill runs down my spine.

It’s back.