Treading That Fine Line...

...between reality and fantasy. I mean, it had to be somewhat real. It happened at my school, with all the people from my school, and all the hectic day-by-day things that happens at my school.

My dream, that is.

I was in the long hallway that connected the school's cafeteria to the gym when some police officers in uniform came up to me. They looked at me suspiciously, and then one of them addressed me and said, "I'm sure you have them."

"Have what?" I asked him.

"You know what I'm talking about. The diamonds."

I actually had no idea what they were talking about, but on some conscious level, I also knew what they were talking about. I had heard that the cops were looking for some stolen diamonds, and I knew that I did not have any contraband on me, although I knew it with a smug feeling that was not all that innocent.

"I don't have them," I told the police officers. "You can search me if you want. I don't have them."

The police officers took that as an invitation to search my bag, but as I had predicted, they did not find anything. The officer who had addressed me looked at me skeptically.

"All right, I'm sorry to have bothered you."

They walked away, and then Mogley came up to me, holding a brown backpack that was clearly not his (because he has a red one). I clearly had a reputation for conducting all sorts of illegal business, for the first thing he said to me was, "Can you break open this case for me?"

The case—which, might I add, was not his—was built similarly to an eyeglasses case, except it was half the size of anything capable of holding eyeglasses, and I did not know what it was used for. Mogley said, "I'm pretty sure there are diamonds in here, but I don't know how to get them out."

"Are they your diamonds?" Was what I should have asked, had I been in a more lucid state. I was, alas, not, and so I simply used my fingers to take off the lining of the case (as if I did this every day) and we both peered in and saw a handful of diamonds. Wow, so this whole story about stolen diamonds was real. I looked over at Mogley, who looked back at me and said, "We have to hide them somehow. We don't want the person who took them to find out that we have them."

I had no idea why Mogley was so willing to share this enormous wealth with me (implied by the fact that he even told me about the diamonds), but since it was free diamonds, I did not object. "Why don't you wrap the case up in something to conceal it?"

"That's a good idea." Mogley took some brown paper towel out of thin air (or he ran really, really fast to the restroom, which I doubt, but you never know) and then proceeded to wrap up the case hastily, and by the time he was finished, he had a bulky wad of paper. He then tried to stuff this whole thing into his jeans pocket, but the wad was so big more than half of it stuck out.

"Do you think this is okay?" he asked me.

"Uh, no. Put it in your bag." I grabbed his bag and stuck the paper-towel-wrapped case into the outermost compartment of his backpack and said, "Now you can pretend this is your paper lunch bag if anyone asks."

Mogley was satisfied. We walked out of the hallway that, in the real school, linked the gym and the cafeteria, but in this school, only led to another hallway that was lined with coats and bags. Mogley placed the brown bag where he had found the diamond-carrying case in the first place onto a silver rack that was the lost and found area.

"I hope whoever this bag belongs to never finds us," Mogley said.

"Why don't we search up whomever this person is sometime—say, during lunch—so we know who we're up against?"

"Okay, sure. Today?"

"All right."

We went off to class, and then, come lunchtime, I went over to the library, where Mogley was waiting for me. We found a computer and sat down, and then Mogley asked me how we were going to find this mysterious brown-bag owner and potential diamond thief.

"We'll find him on Google," I said, rather confidently. Again, if I were lucid, I would have realized, hello, I did not even know this person's name. But then again, I was not lucid.

"How is that going to work?" Apparently Mogley had more sense than I did.

"We'll just search up his name. Here, let's try yours and see what comes up."

I typed in Mogley's name, but halfway through, he stopped me and said, "You spelt my name wrong."

I was pretty sure I spelt it right, but to please him, I asked, "How do you spell it then?"

"M-E-G-L-O-Y," he said, which makes no sense at all because then it would say "Megloy" (and what kind of name was that?), but I did not argue with him and instead changed what I had typed. I pressed "enter," and a couple hundred thousand results showed up.

"Well, maybe we should narrow our search," I said, and typed "Paperclip" after "Megloy." This time, all the results narrowed down to Mogley. I thought that the incorrectly spelt name was throwing us off, but I did not think much further about it, because I glanced up at the clock, and I saw that it was already class time (more like, the class was halfway over). I had French, which never happens, because I never have French anywhere remotely near lunchtime, but it was strange, and so I did not question it.

"I have to go, I have class now," I said.

"Oh," Mogley said. "I have a free now. But we have calc afterwards." This part was at least true, because although Mogley was in calc AB and I was in BC, we both had calc during the same period. "Just skip French," he continued.

Since I would have been marked absent anyway, I concurred. We walked back to the cafeteria, then through the strange hallway with the coats and bags that connected the cafeteria to the hallway that originally connected the cafeteria to the gym. Mogley went over to the silver rack where he had placed the brown bag, but it was not there.

"Oh my god," he said, "someone really is after those diamonds!"

"I suppose so," I said, although I was not really concerned for some reason. I probably meddled with the wrong side of the law too often to be scared of something as petty as a potential bloodthirsty diamond thief coming after me.

Mogley, however, was petrified. "Here," he said, handing me the case full of the diamonds. "You take them. I don't want them anymore."

I stared oddly at him as he ran towards the gym (I did not even know why we were here, since we had calc next, and the math wing and the gym were as far away as physically possible—except maybe science is further, because all those science nerds don't need to go to gym), and then—

—here's the part where legions of literary critics will hate me forever and ever for—

—I woke up. The end. Nothing else happened. Nada. I don't know if the cops ever came after me and caught me red-handed with a case full of diamonds, or if the mysterious thief found me in the end, or if Mogley decided that money was much more important than his life and came back for his share, or if I was secretly the mastermind behind this whole theft after all and merely orchestrated this whole event for some strange reason.

The world may never know.

You've got to love alarm clocks. They kill stories by the dozen.