Daydream

1. The incident

Embarrassment is a surprisingly efficient motivator for making irrational and bad decisions, a fact which Miguel Ulu soon would become overly familiar with. He had just put himself in one of the most terrifying situations his fourteen year old mind could imagine. He, Miguel, had earlier during the morning humiliated himself.

It all had started as normal on space station 3-47, or the Bunuelo-station, and Miguel had promised to play some gravity basketball with his best friend Carlos Bedoya. However, since there only was one basketball court that had proper gravity controls, you could only play frictionless basketball on the other two, and the court had a tendency to be occupied all the time. Therefore Miguel had woken up extra early, put on the first clothes he could find, and left home without eating breakfast or saying goodbye to his parents who were sound asleep. In his rush to the court he had put on the wrong trousers, these ones were a bit too big for him and he had to constantly pull them up. He wasn't too worried about it though. He just had to make sure to play with only one hand while the other was holding his trousers in place. He was a great basketball player if he had to say so himself and this barely counted as a handicap.

When he arrived to the court there were already people there, three older teenagers who were sitting at the edge of the court talking about something. None of them seemed to notice when Miguel entered and since they didn't appear to be interested in playing he took a ball for himself and began shooting at one of the hoops. He would occupy the court until Carlos came to join him.

It went well. So far he hadn't missed a single shot and he felt confident enough to let his mind wander a little bit. In this case his mind wandered over to the other teenagers' conversation. He couldn't really hear what they were talking about, but from the few words he did hear and their behaviour Miguel guessed that they were shooting some kind of video. He even thought he saw one of them hold something small in their hand, maybe something to record with. This was when Miguel's mind failed him. He imagined how, when the teens uploaded their video to the stations net, everyone would notice him in the background doing some amazing shoots and he would get famous. His favourite basketball players would even get so impressed by him that they would invite him to one of their games and he would be allowed to show off his skills in front of a live audience. Everyone would love him.

With these thoughts in mind, Miguel decided to step up his game and do some more impressive shots. He turned away from the hoop and threw the ball over his shoulder, that nice trick they did in movies when they didn't look at the hoop when throwing. He heard the sound of the ball hitting the hoop and turned back towards it only to be hit in the face. He had missed the shot and instead of the ball going through the hoop it had bounced back right at him. His nose hurt from the impact and he instinctually put both his hands over it. Though, by doing that he let go of his trousers which fell down to his ankles and his yellow boxers with pink rabbits were visible. Before he had properly grasped the situation he noticed that the teenagers' chatter had quiet down. He looked over at them and they were all staring back at him still with their filming device in his direction. Miguel, who didn't want to be seen in their video anymore, began to run. It didn't matter that he had promised to meet Carlos at the court; he didn't want to be there anymore.

Then, as if it couldn't get any worse, Miguel had forgotten that the trousers still were at his ankles and he tripped on them. He landed as gracefully as a crashing ship, on his face with his colourful boxers displayed for the whole universe to see. He quickly got up, pulled up the trousers and ran away crying. This was the complete opposite of what he had wanted.

The worst of all was that this whole ordeal had been caught on film by those teenagers and they had probably already uploaded the video to the station's net, and now everyone would see it. The video would spread like air in an empty airlock and he would become a laughingstock, an embarrassment to the whole family. Would they even want to be his family anymore? Not that he didn't think that his parents loved him; he knew they adored him. But he had heard stories about times long ago when people had been disowned for absurd reasons and he could not help but worry. Then, IF his family threw him aside, what would he do? Would Carlos stop being friends with him too? Maybe the whole station would want him gone and they would send him out in space, alone, without any oxygen. He couldn't let that happen. He didn't want it to happen! In his mind there was only one solution to this, he had to disappear.