Page 53 of Flirtasaurus
“No, I… I conjured and talked to my future wife.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“Well, girlfriend, anyway. As a dorky kid with super divorced parents, that’s as far as I dared to dream. And I wasn’t on a jungle gym. I was at space camp, lying in my bunk bed. But yeah, I did the same thing.”
“Huh.”
“Yeah.”
“Weird.”
“Yeah.”
We stare straight ahead as a group of kids run by and smack the aorta.
“Also… you went to space camp?!”
“Yeah, finally got my mom to ease up on the dance classes and send me to space camp instead. Went five summers in a row.”
“Cool! I never met a real live person who went to space camp. I thought that was just something for kids in PBS commercials and inHighlightsmagazine ads! How was it?”
“Amazing. And awful. I puked for the entire week. Every single year.”
“But… you still went five years in a row?!”
“I’m not a quitter. Plus, it was my dream to go to space for real, so I was going to do everything I could to get there until I realized that a person with perpetual motion sickness wasn’t going to do so well orbiting the planet in micro-gravity. It turns out, I’m better off studying space from the ground. I think the dream job now would be working for Mission Control. Ya know, helping the astronauts navigate while they’re up there and seeing that they get home safely.”
“Amazing but hold on a second. Are you telling me you were a kid named Ralph who was constantly… ralphing?”
“That is correct. Childhood was not kind to me.”
“Hahaha, oh my God.”
“Yeah, it wasn’t pretty.”
“Is childhood kind to anyone, though?” I ask, still laughing.
“Hell yeah, it is! Just ask Brett Hanratty. From first grade all the way through his senior year of high school, Brett Hanratty was the man.”
“Brett Hanratty is a washed-up, bloated has-been working a job he hates, married to a wife he hates, and generally living a life he hates.”
“Whoa. You know Brett Hanratty?”
“We all know a Brett Hanratty. Gimme the dorks any day. They end up way more interesting, if you ask me.”
He’s quiet for a moment, then says, “You, uh… you said you had a dream about me?”
“Huh?”
“You said you had a dream about me last night?”
“Oh. Yeah. I did.”
“What was I doing in the dream?”
“It was weird as hell,” I warn him.
“Try me.”
