“White Frosting,” Collaboration with Bianca Gutman, Part 8/8
(See Bianca Gutman, Image 
Setting: Thea walks through her front door to find her mother, and a man and a woman, waiting for her, sitting on the living room couch (continued from Part 7/8), late April, 2009.
I’ve always had really intense dreams. Which sounds dumb, I know, of course everyone feels their dreams are intense. What I mean is—okay, for example. A couple years ago, like two years ago, maybe, right after we moved here, I had this dream that I was at a wedding and I ate so much cake at the wedding, I got sick on that white frosting. And when I woke up that morning, wide awake, and all morning, I felt so sick to my stomach.
Seriously, I couldn’t eat anything until after school that day, I was so full. It was that disgusting, that real. I used to wonder if I sleep walk or sleep eat, maybe, or why that was? Like why I felt it in my body like that intensely while everyone else, it seems like their dreams are so easy on their nerves, you know I mean? I don’t know.
But I had a dream that night, or that morning. The morning after I had that talk with my mom, just before I woke up, I had a dream I got called in to see Foley again. And we’re sitting there, in the interr—I almost called it the interrogation room, no. We’re sitting there, at the table, across from each other in the teacher’s conference room, like always. Except I’m sitting down, across from him, and I never sit directly across from him. But otherwise, it’s so realistic.
And then Foley says, You know, Theadora, what’s interesting is that arson is one of the earliest warning signs of a serial killer, and I started laughing.
I did, I just broke down, laughing at the man. It was so . . . ohmygod, it was beyond ridiculous, like way beyond. I mean, I’ve heard Cam called a hacker, a runaway, a drug dealer, a juvenile delinquent, and now, now he throws this at me? A serial killer? My boyfriend’s showing warning signs of being a serial killer. And in my dream, I’m laughing, because it’s so ridiculous, of course, but because it’s so ridiculous, it would make a perfect script, somehow, or at least we could joke about it—if Cam were there. I caught my breath, at that last moment in the dream, and then I opened my eyes, and I was in my bed.
My first thought was, How can I talk about him? How could I ever talk to strangers about him just to make money? What would he think of me? He might understand, but it would hurt him. Or maybe not, I don’t know. Sometimes, or most of the time, I guess, he was the sensible one. I made no sense alone once, but I didn’t know how to do it alone anymore. I’m not explaining myself very well, I know, but it’s like when you’re so used to having someone to play off of, when you feel so connected, they’re so in your head that whenever you have a thought, a joke, a story, you turn to them, to thinking about telling them, and you imagine the scene, you know? Like how’ll they’ll laugh, how you’ll laugh about it, together, whatever. Because your mind is still so connected to them, it doesn’t know the body’s gone.
So, if you’re like me, your thoughts turn to them, but they’re not there. And then, if you’re like me, you wake up, and you believe it was true. You start to believe your own dreams are true, real, the other life. Lives.
I was thinking about it the whole way to school on the bus. I couldn’t—I didn’t feel entirely in my body, you know. I still felt that post-intense-dream humming, or whatever it is. My blood vessels feel like their tuning forks and someone just banged them against the corner of the table, I don’t know what. I did not feel entirely present, though. So I was pretty out of it until I walked to first period, second bell, and before I even made it to the door, I saw Linda heading straight my way. She stopped, seeing me, and she nodded yes, meaning, yes, it’s you, head to the office, and she’d go to class and tell them what was going on.
I turned around, took one step—one step, and I knew what would happen. It was like the reset button, and I knew how it was supposed to play out, everything that would happen with Foley, I’d seen it before. So I walked right in, I didn’t even stop at the desk to wait to be told, I just walked to the back, knocked on the conference room door, and walked in. I didn’t even wait for Foley to tell me to come in, I just walked in, closed the door, and sat down in the stat. The chair I knew I was suppose to sit in, which was directly across from him.
And I have to say, eh hid it very well, but I could feel this shift in him. Because he’d never been on the defensive before. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say he changed his mind about me at that moment. He saw me very differently, at least.
So what do we need to talk about, Foley?
Good morning, Theadora, he said, smiling Foley’s special spooky smile.
Oh, sorry. Good morning, Agent Foley. What do we need to talk about? I asked, clasping my hands, leaning toward him. And I could see it—I could see us, in profile, psychically butting heads.
And then he started in about Cam. He took that tone like, as my dad used to say, he was going to walk around the block to get next door, but yes, there was a point to be made. So I waited, and I listened, and I knew what he was going to tell me, and the whole time eh was telling me, part of me was there, in the room, but part of me was watching us, that morning. And then I remembered again: Oh, that’s right. It didn’t happen. It wasn’t even something I watched on TV: it was a dream. Only problem was, I’m sitting there, listening, remembering, trying to translate between these two realities, whatever, and the whole time, I’m also hearing Foley say the exact same thing, word for word, like verbatim, the exact same lines as he said in my dream. So when I laugh, I feel it all over again. I feel me there, and I feel me in teh dream, and I start giggling, it’s because I have this feeling that I’m losing it. For the first time, I really begin to think I am truly losing my mind.
And then I’m thinking, Maybe the teenage serial killer could bust his psychotic girlfriend out of the psychiatric hospital. We could even make it like Natural Born Killers, or not. Cam would probably want it to be more like River’s Edge or something, but anyhow.
I realized I was spacing out. That I was so spaced out, I’d laughed out loud, completely forgotten all about Foley. Now, tell me: how often does that happen? Under normal, sane circumstances, the man makes every hair on my body stand on end. He just curls all my fingers and toes in the worst way, you know. He is just so disgusting somehow. When I pulled it together, I saw his thumbs. There was some code, some mental state attached to which direction he twirled and the rate, the speed. And when Cam returned, we’d have some long, long talks about the meaning of Foley’s thumb twirling. Until then, though, I was on my own.
Well, then, Agent Foley, I said, trying not to laugh, but not trying very hard, really. Let’s hope you catch Cam before he murders again, and I made it as far as saying, murders again, and then I lost it. I was trying so hard not to laugh, and I couldn’t help it, and then I started laughing so hard I lowered my forehead against my hands, on the table. It was a good minute before I pulled it together, and then I sat up, and sighed, like, Whoosh, okay, I’m fine. Back to business. Foley was sitting there, with his hands clasped, rotating his thumbs, toward me. And slowly. Very slowly.
I remember reaching the stairwell, when I got home, heading up to the second floor. And I started laughing, thinking how hard Cam was going to laugh when I told him the whole story idea, and then, of course, we could twist the whole thing around, so the serial killer boyfriend was framed and the crazy girlfriend might still be crazy, but what she said was true . . . So dumb, I really don’t know what Foley was thinking, saying that to me. I just kept playing it over and over in my head, trying to figure out if it was possible Foley’s just completely misstepped, because at that moment, he repulsed me, but I wasn’t afraid of him anymore.
Reminds me of this story my dad told me. When he was in college, a baby was found murdered, and so the first place the cops went to ask questions was a punk club called Club Baby Head. I mean, it’s just so dumb, how could anyone really believe that someone involved with that club might be a murder suspect?
Seriously, how could Foley have been so dumb as to say something like that to me? Twice, even? I mean, it was so blatant, right? Like it was so obvious, where did he expect it to go? Then again, if I hadn’t know what he was going to say? Well, if I hadn’t know, god, I would’ve walked right into it. It would not have been at all funny, believe me.
Anyhow, I opened our front door, the next day, after school, and there was my mom, standing and smiling, much too cheerful, seeing me walk in. And there were the lawyers, standing now, too. Standing, then smiling. And then I remembered I was supposed to make a decision, take the night to think. We were supposed to talk about offers, me and mom. But she didn’t tell me anything about this, about these people. She didn’t breathe a word about that. And in that moment, a voice in my head panicked and screamed: Run!