Tiny homeroom, assembly smokers, and first class

I was at a high school on the first day of classes. I had spent a little time in my homeroom, which looked like a bite-sized science classroom. There was just room for the teacher's desk and two large, black-painted tables around which maybe 10-12 total kids could sit. The classroom was a step up from the hallway, and there wasn't really a front door, or, for that matter, a fourth wall.

From homeroom, I went to an assembly, which for some reason I showed up pretty late to. The auditorium was all white. It was as wide as a movie theater, but from where I stepped in (on the left side of the middle level), the stadium-style seating stretched very far up and down. At the very bottom was a stage. I started making my way up a stairway towards the top/back row.

As I walked up the stairs, I passed two or three people who were standing on the steps. The girl in front was, just then, telling some anecdote or testimonial to the entire crowd, as part of the assembly. Her Biff-style boyfriend standing behind her was trying to light a cigarette, so I kind of pointed at him and went "Ah-ah..!" as I walked past. Other people nearby noticed too and told him to stop.

As I reached the top tier of seats, I noticed Caitie R sitting in an aisle seat to my right, smoking a cigarette. I lifted my hand up (turns out I'm wearing white velvet gloves) and tried to put it out with my knuckle. But I guess it didn't work (and Caitie didn't seem all that bothered).

I reached the very back row, which was practically empty, and sat next to Jeremy C. The assembly was just wrapping up, and he asked me if I was interested in getting a bite to eat. I said yes, but then I realized I had classes to get to during all four schedule slots that day.

THEN I realized that I didn't know what any of my classes were, or what rooms to go to. Plus I had already forgotten where my homeroom was. Jeremy walked with me as I went looking for my homeroom. Luckily, it was the second room I passed in the first hallway I checked.

My homeroom teacher was there. She looked like my algebra teacher, Mrs. Williams, but was a lot less sardonic. It turned out that she could bring up my entire schedule on her computer and print out a neatly formatted card on a blue sheet of paper. She handed it to me, and then we got into some conversation (I remember her saying something about "when she decided to get married"...), but as much as I wanted to hear what she had to say, I was trying to politely get moving so I wouldn't be late for my first class.

I looked on my schedule card and saw how the classrooms were listed. They had a classroom name, and then the "cross street" they were on (really, they weren't streets, they were hallways). My first class was called something along the lines of "EMOND" and the cross street was something like "Georgia Avenue". It was only a couple hallways up from my homeroom.

EMOND ended up being another hallway behind a doorway, perpendicular to the cross street. It was a tall, wide, L-shaped hallway, sort of an internal entranceway to the classroom itself, which was kind of a band/orchestra room. As I approached the bend of the L, Vanessa came walking the other way, wearing an outfit featuring a knee-length skirt and tights (not unusual), all a faded navy blue color. I was surprised to see her there (and uncertain why she was walking out), and I kind of pointed at her and went, "You!" But she seemed not to notice I was there; she was looking spacey and a little melancholy, and continued walking past me.

I rounded the corner, and without so much of a transition, I was at the orchestra room. A crowd of maybe 12 or 15 people, mostly girls, were standing, facing away from me, singing something informally as a chorus, but I don't recall what it was. I walked up to join in, then I woke up.

The Greenland compound

I had entered some kind of compound (on the coast of, say, Greenland?), with mostly drab, gray, concrete architecture, and was walking indoors, from building to building. Nobody was around. I looked out a big window at one point and saw that the coast was quite nearby, but several stories below. It occurred to me that there should be penguins out there somewhere (okay, so maybe this wasn't Greenland), and I continued walking through different parts of the compound, staying mostly along the edge nearest the coast, trying to figure out how to get down and outside.

A few times I came across "dead ends", where the level I was on had nowhere else to go, but there was a railing and a wide open overlook to see the lower level below; there were signs indicating that I could go down, but the only way down was literally to go over the railing and figure out how to slide down the smooth concrete wall without dying. The last one of these "dead ends" I got to, I seriously considered going down, since there was a spot where I could wedge myself between two walls that were closer together than my armspan. But I think I ended up walking back some other way.

After a quick stop at a nearby restroom (in which, surprisingly, there was actually another guy in one of the stalls -- first person I'd noticed so far), I cut back around to an area where I'd been before. Now it reminded me of the entrance to a public building or school; the first thing as I entered the room was a series of steps and landings, which stretched from wall to wall (maybe 10-15 yards wide) and had three or four railings separating it into sections; it only went up maybe 6-8 feet, and then there were more hallways and rooms.

I started searching around some more, and then as I was getting ready to leave this part of the compound, a bunch of people started coming in and up the first set of stairs. I tried to push my way through them, and got most of the way to the bottom, but then I changed my mind and started going back up in the crowd. As I got to the top again and was headed towards the main hallway, someone behind me started asking "Kevin" a question. At first, I figured they weren't talking to me, since I didn't immediately recognize the voice, and I didn't really expect to meet anyone here that I knew. But I figured I'd turn around and check anyway. It turned out to be Kelly P, who was walking with Caitie R and another girl. Kelly's hair was very slightly braided on the sides, which looked nice. She was asking me if I remembered what Tywanda C or "Derrick Arins" (or was it Darin whom I met at LSA 2011?) looked like. I told her I would probably recognize Tywanda if I saw her, but I didn't know who Derrick was.

I continued walking. Kelly and the other girl went off to some class they were taking, and Caitie had somehow ended up in front of me, at the end of the hallway, at the gift shop that was there. Lots of merchandise was sitting out on a long table outside the gift shop's entrance. I walked by Caitie, but we didn't really interact (I don't suppose we have anything to talk about). I looked at some of the trinkets on the table. One really caught my eye. It was like a medium-sized glass bead, heart-shaped, with a solid white bottom, and a black dot right in the middle of the bottom layer. It reminded me of Hello Kitty when I looked at it. But the really interesting thing was that the glass was somehow structured to refract the light in a weird way. When I moved my head one way, the dot in the middle seemed to move slightly in the opposite direction. I swirled my head around, looking at it as the dot swirled around the other way.

Then I went inside the gift shop, but I didn't really see anything that impressive inside. I cut out the side door. I ended up going to a huge room, again with gray concrete walls, ceiling, floor. The ceiling here was probably 3 or 4 stories high. I went and lay down in a bed in the back corner of the room and the lights went off. There were tons of other people in the room as well, all lying in beds, going to sleep for the night. Since I had been here before, I thought I would show off a little trick. I reached my right tennis shoe (my shoes were black) and pushed a little button that was part of the rubber sole, and the bottom of my shoe became like a flashlight. I directed the beam onto the ceiling, where there was tons of graffiti, except it was more like bathroom stall graffiti, all black and legible in plain text. Some of it had quite elegant handwriting, actually. The impressive part was that most of the writing was large enough to read from the ground, so a capital letter might be as tall as I was (or taller). I don't recall what any of it said.