I was going to high school with my friend Bryan – not back in time, but at my current age. I guess I passed for a teenager? Anyway, we were on a train to there and an older woman, maybe 50s, was talking to us a lot and making us feel uncomfortable. So we just chatted with each other and tried to ignore her.

When we got there, we went straight to the cafeteria. There were a lot of students, all girls, volunteering in the lunch line, and Bryan started chatting them all up. He was very suave and brash, and I marveled at how confident he was, and vowed to try it myself later. All up until the last girl. Now, I knew that he liked a particular girl who volunteered there, but wasn’t sure who – but now it was clear. He got so shy, and so did she, although she tried not to show it. It was really cute! I noted that she was a bit plain-looking, but that made sense because Bryan himself was a bit overweight (well, that was my thought process anyway). He got a big plate of food, but nothing looked good to me so I only got a small bag of Cheetos.

We went to sit down, but for some reason Bryan kept passing by a whole bunch of tables, like he was looking for something. Up until that point we were talking a lot and acting like best buddies. But then, he sat down across from a boy and girl and they started talking, completely ignoring me. I felt very weird – it seemed like maybe he owed them money or something? So I pretended I wanted to go get more food and hurried back to the line.

This time, I saw off to the left a special cabinet of food, like one of those freezers bins in the supermarket, but not cold. Instead, it was filled with a clear light brown liquid, and I could see floating inside were hot dogs! The buns were quite wide, and I recognized them from watching tiktoks (in real life) where vendors in the middle east dip your sandwich in the meat cooking liquid before serving it. So I was intrigued even though it looked kind of gross. I slid open the top and by then, there was a dry section, so I scooped up a bread version – now the filling was ground meat – but I saw off to the side that there was also a puff pastry version, and I love puff pastry. So I grabbed that too, and now I was excited. Two of the actual lunch ladies were leaning casually on the bin now, and appeared to be Middle Eastern, and were encouraging me to try the food, but I couldn’t quite understand them.

So I found an open table and sat down. By now I also had a Twinkie somehow. I was ready to start eating, when I noticed the hot dog bun and Twinkie were wiggling and twitching, just like a larva! It was really disturbing, but I cut open the hot dog bun and I could see it was just the heat escaping. I was relieved, but that didn’t explain the Twinkie… Right then I noticed there was a girl with pink hair lying on the table and she was talking to me and looking at the Twinkie. I realized she was with a group of bullies sitting at the next table over, and that she was trying to intimidate me by taking my Twinkie! She didn’t seem to see the twitching, so I just told her to be my guest and have it. I was grossed out. But, I still really wanted to try the puff pastry and took a big bite – only to find that the meat was actually extremely thin and basically floated out of it. I couldn’t really taste anything.

The bully table got mad that I wasn’t taking their bait, so the leader started trying to scare me. But since I was 45 instead of a teenager, I just laughed and told him stop trying to act so big. He challenged me to a fight at night at the train station, so I said ok. I walked away to find Bryan, but he was gone, so I decided to try and copy his earlier style and went to chat with the girls in the lunch line (by now I was a teenager again). I worked up the courage and started talking all coolly to them, but they mostly ignored me.

Then it was night and I was walking up the stairs to the train station, getting ready for the fight. But it turned out that instead of me and the guy, it was our little cousins who would fight for us, around 7-8 years old. But of course, they didn’t know how to fight, so they just pushed each other around for a couple minutes, then everyone laughed and said good job, and it was over. For some reason, not only were all the bullies there, but also their families, so I started to realize a lot of the parents were Asian. I even heard some Cantonese, so I took a guess went over to the head bully, who looked Chinese and first told him that it was a good fight, basically trying to act like his buddy instead of a bullying victim. He said yeah, and then I asked him if he knew Cantonese. He answered in Canto, saying that he could kind of speak it but not well, and I lied that he was almost better than me, slapping him on the shoulder to indicate that we could be friends now. I thought it was a slick move anyway, but it seemed to work. That’s when I woke up.