I dream about you

My little sister, in her own way, had tried to comfort me after she saw that I had been crying. Although she seemed to stone wall my attitude, I am sure that she felt upset that I had been so cold to her in response. She kept herself busy during dinner time rather than nagging me like she usually did. And then told my parents that she would go to bed first without a word to me.

"I'm sorry, okay?" I said, waking up behind her and hugging her behind. Her pyjamas really were soft, but it is not just that, but she is chubby too, so could squeeze her like a stuffed doll. She didn't really like me doing that though and wriggled free.

"Really?" She said crossing her arms at me and pouting.

"Yeah."

She thought for a moment, before responding. "Alright, then read me a bedtime story."

I sighed. This was my loss. Somehow, she had planned this out from the start, and I fell right into her trap again. And now, she was going to make me read to her for at least the next hour. Why couldn't I have just left her alone?

* * *

The purpose of writing each other notes is to tell each other things that we have on our minds. Especially things that we couldn't say to each other in person. There were a lot of those kinds of things that I wanted to tell Terrance, but I couldn't just give him a note saying that I liked him. And I certainly couldn't tell him that I excited myself dreaming about him most nights. So, I usually went in the opposite direction, and would write about all the things that I didn't like or found annoying.

For example, at the start of the year, he came to school looking scruffy. With his tie loose and shirt untucked. To be honest, I thought he looked kind of cool like that. But that made him stick out like a sore thumb and made him look like a delinquent at school. Recently, though, he looked more presentable. He always tried to fix whatever I mentioned, which made my job more difficult.

In the last note that I gave him, I said that waving to me during exercise class was weird. Although I am actually happy that he waved to me, that kind of clumsy thing made him more likely to be teased and bullied by the girls. This is a problem because, even though physical violence didn't really seem to affect Terrance so much, I knew from experience that a few choice words could seriously hurt him.

I unfolded the note Terrance had given me and focused the light of my desk lamp on it. Terrance wrote mostly in the old script, which is the writing style that is most often used in Heaven's Gate and the island that we were a part of. He would also sometimes accidentally use mother script in some of his words. Mother script came from a place called the old motherland, which is another island, much larger than ours. It's people from the old motherland we mean when we say 'foreigner'.

Terrance is much better at expressing himself than I am. And he used the notes exactly in the way they were intended.

'Sophie,' He began. 'We had another baby, this time it's a girl! Her name is Anne, and she is four years old now.'

I hit myself in the forehead. It looked like in his dreams we would have a baby every other week. And why was she suddenly four? Terrance didn't really seem to care about consistency in the things that wrote, which annoyed me a little. He isn't really taking this seriously.

I carried on reading. This time our little family travelled to Kyra. This is a small island northeast of us, famous for eating fish raw. Terrance wrote quite a bit about the various deserts they had, because he knew I had a massive sweet-tooth. They had a colourful multi-layered jelly ice-cream. My mouth watered as I imagined it. When's the last time I had ice-cream? Not since I started trying to lose weight at the beginning of summer.

I fell asleep imagining me and Terrance going out to eat ice-cream together. We walked hand in hand, and in Terrance's other hand he held Anne. Our son ran ahead of us. I called out his name and he turned around for a moment and smiled to me before running off again.

* * *

I placed the bag of supplies down on the table in front of Charlotte. It's a good thing I said in my note to Terrance that he should come closer to my house in the mornings; There is no way I could have carried all this stuff to school by myself.

I got the rough idea that the supplies were for making posters for the upcoming club display – which I am not looking forward to. But something stood out.

"Why did you make me buy this?" I said, taking out the packet of biscuits from the bag. Charlotte specifically asked for me to buy a foreign branded one. Usually, this would be quite difficult because the only place that sold foreign products were some shops near the fish factory. And most people were too afraid to go there. I used to be as well, but Terrance had introduced me to the owner of a foreign shop near where he lived.

When I went there yesterday, the old woman that worked there recognised me as 'Terrance's girlfriend'! I thought it would be rude to correct her, so I didn't deny it.

"You would know if you paid any attention to our meetings." Charlotte sighed. "There's a transfer student coming today."

Yeah, I remember hearing something about that, but I didn't see why that is our problem. "So?"

"Well, she's… a foreigner." Charlotte said that like it is a rude word. She adjusted her glasses looked at me, but I still couldn't figure out what her point was. Finally, she gave up with her weird riddle. "Look, Sophie, I need you to make friends with her, and get her to join this club."

"Ha?!" I couldn't believe what I was hearing. "I thought you hated foreigners?"

"I-I don't hate them." Charlotte shouted. She took a breath to relax and adjusted her glasses again. "For now, just give her the biscuits, okay?"