WHAT I GET FOR WATCHING STAR WARS BEFORE I GO TO BED

I was on a deep space exploration team. We had to sleep in these little cubes. I crawled into one and felt all-right. I like tight spaces--they make me feel safe. But then the grill on the bottom side of the cube starts to fill with a bubbly kind of water. Half of my nose is submersed in it--I wonder if I should hold my breath, but I will be sleeping for a long time. I can't hold my breath for that long and survive. So I try breathing the water. It's a bit wet, but I can breath air bubbles in this solution.

Suddenly the sleeping cube feels cramped. I can't stretch my legs. I can't sleep like this. I stretch my legs out and wake up. I only glimpse my room arond me and stretch out my legs and revel in the roominess of my bed. The sheets are a bit tight because I retucked everything into my bed yesterday, but that's okay. My legs are free! I go back to sleep and continue to dream about space.

I crawl out of my cube and see that there are other cubes lined up with mine. Other women, older than me, crawl out and complain about their sleeping experience. All too cramped, unable to sleep with the water filling up the cube. I said I just kicked the bottom case out so I didn't have to sleep there. I'll find somewhere else to sleep. "You couldn't have told me this five minutes earlier??" a woman complains. "I was dying of claustrophobia in there!" I shrug. How was I supposed to know how she feels?

Now I am in a bookstore with my brother. I don't know what section we are in, but we find a few books on Kai Hiwatari and his dragon companion. It's more about the dragon than him. One book is about Kai receiving a baby dragon and all the fun he has raising it. The next is about the dragon going through "dragon puberty" and how he constantly lashes out at all the humans because he's going emotionally wacko and "nobody knows how he feels". Another one is a manga with just Kai. My brother and I have fun flipping through the pages, but a lady working there thinks we've spent too much time reading just a few books. Like we're reading a book we haven't bought, and while it's not illegal, she doesn't think it's right.

She warns us that we only have a limited amount of time, or something like that. Like we should leave immediately. I sit there and continue to read. So does Josh. Who is this bitchy lady and who does she think she is? I figure, a few mintues, then we'll leave. But after a few minutes, I forget that she wants us to leave and just sit and continue to read. I find that another book on Kai, sitting upright on a display table, is a paperback with bent pages. I'm angry at the person who did this, because these books should not be treated this way.

Finally, someone different tells us to leave. Somehow he or she has more influence on us, so we do leave. I wish I had money so I could buy those books. One of them, hardly half an inch thick, costs about twenty dollars. I think it's ridiculous but then again, I probably would pay twenty dollars for a story about Kai that was not just Beyblade.

We find my stepdad in a massage chair, all this time snoozing. I wish he could buy the book for me, but ever since I started earning my own money, no longer could I depend on my parents to buy my luxuries. We wake him up and tell him we're no longer allowed here because we "read without paying too much". He gets up and we leave.