Adventures in Dreamscapering

real world

Class was so boring.
I was exhausted even though my sleep was fine enough. Perhaps adventures with Max steal from my supply of energy.

My eyes fluttered shut. A movement, really fast. I blinked them open with the sharp jerk of the head that comes when you fall asleep during something you ought not be sleeping through.

I propped my head up on my arm, but this position wasn't any more energizing than my previous one and still found myself falling asleep again.

I heard my name; once, twice, three times. I looked up, forcing my eyes open.

The teacher hadn't called me. I looked around in confusion to see if a friend had called my name, nothing.

I felt a ghost of something round and smooth like a beetle enter my mouth and it was such an unsettling feeling that I almost cried out until I felt my head drop and smack the desk. My desk neighbors' noises of confusion were suddenly slowed down and then their actions were frozen and wavy like an old tv.

My upper body was still above my real body, like when I was fed an ice marble and slipped out of my body.

"Oh god," I said. I was confused as heck and felt so disoriented I wanted to puke.

Then I saw him standing before me,his hands in his raggedy denim  short pockets and his heterochromatic eyes pondering the room lightly before staring at me.

"Oh. It's you. You should give me some warning before you pull some crap like that, I thought I died!" I said and Max grinned and laughed a little.

I stood up, now fully apart  from my real body.

"What's happening?" I asked.

"I found more holes, is what happened." Max looked proud of himself. Then he holds up an oval caplet that's blue like the bottom of a pool.

"This allows us to go through the holes at the same time! Well, mostly it just keeps it stable enough for me to be projected into the real world and for you to pass through as well. Cool right?"

At this point I am secretly frightened, I didn't need someone in my head feeding me pills and causing me to knock out in class.

"Uh...yeah, sure." I rubbed my arm sheepishly.

"Don't worry. You can trust me," Max reassured, and while the butterflies in my stomach weren't nervous anymore and instead just the usual cute guy near you! ones, I had a weird feeling about why he would need to tell me that.

"Alright so what are we doing?" I asked.

"Dreamscapering."

"But I'm still conscious. This is like a microsleep, right? Is that the hole you came in through?"

"Yeah! Smart Gwen, you catch on fast!" Max snuck a kiss on my cheek and pulled me by my hand through the door out the class before I could object.

The world looked like old VHS tapes, with pale neon lines running through it and shivering.

"Why did you take me though? There can't be much you can do in the real world besides walk around," I noted.

"Au contraire, mi amor!" Max said with a grin. With a flourish he produces two drinkable pasta glasses like we had on our first night together from a locker without opening the door, merely sticking his hand through it.

"Nice. But mi amor, that's Spanish."

"So persnickety! Who cares?" Max laughs again and knocks back his red sauced (pappardelle??) ...pasta in one gulp, replacing the empty goblet in the closed locker.

I sip on mine, a buttery ditalini that was slightly cold but still pretty delicious.

"How are you controlling this?"

"I won't bore you with the lore now... But it's a little bit of science and a little bit of something that goes over even my head."

"Will what we do here...affect the real world?"

Max grinned a grin of someone up to something mischievous.

"I don't know...maybe."

----
It was a demented horned beetle. (I couldn't remember what they looked like enough to dreamscaper it into existence properly okay?)

Max laughed at it, the poor thing wriggling on its back in the sink of the girls bathroom.

"You should have probably made something you actually knew. But I suppose this looks scary enough," Max says, giggling. He picks it up by one of its misplaced legs, and it writhes.

"Stop teasing me!! I'm new at this okay??"

We both started laughing at that.

We were going to put the thing in Nathan's backpack. Just for a test.

"Are you sure you don't want to do something more benign, like put French fries in your locker or something?"

I snickered. "Nah, it's gotta be this."

We slipped back into my classroom. Time must be moving a lot slower in the real world than in our time because things had only been moving a little bit. I saw my desk neighbor moving incredibly slowly trying to tap my shoulder.

"There's Nathan!" I said, pointing at him in the corner. His face was a mix of annoyance and false concern; he was probably all mad because the lesson was being interrupted. Nerd.

Max carefully opened his backpack wide enough to fit the beetle in and zipped it up slightly.

"I should probably get back now," I said.

"Are you sure you don't want to do anything else?"

I shook my head. "No, I don't want them to take me to the hospital or anything."

Max shrugged. "Okay."

"See you later, I guess," I said, or was about to say but Max had wrapped me up in a kiss, his hands on both sides of my face. He must have felt my skin burning because he pulled away about a centimeter from my face and said, "You know they can't see us, right?"

"I know, it's just weird. It feels weird."

Max pressed his lips to mine again.

"Ahaha, okay, okay. I love you too. I gotta go."

Max kisses me again. "I never want to let you go," he says, feigning loneliness.

I wrap my arms about his neck. "Me either."

I kiss him one last time before I slide back into my body.
----

"Gwendolyn?" The teacher said as I sat up.  My head hurt something fierce and so did my nose.

"Ah, yeah, I'm fine."

But no one was listening as everyone had turned to face Nathan who had just  released a scream like a banshee.

He flipped over his backpack, flinging it on the ground and swearing.

"What is it Nathan?" I asked gently, excitement building in my stomach.

"Ew! It's like--a beetle! Kill it now!" Nathan's shouts were met with more as the poor thing shook and shivered down the aisle ways in confusion.

"Oh!"
It worked.
My nose started bleeding and the teacher excused me to go to the nurse.