America Redux

I was enrolled in some sort of educational certification program similar to my Professional in Human Resources Certification I received in December (ooh. aah.). Natalie, former girlfriend, was also in attendance, and we were at some hotel where these sessions were going down. We had paid bank for this thing and there were a bunch of people there all sitting at these very long tables in a narrow, awkward room and, for whatever reason, I was beginning to think this had been a waste of my time and money, as nothing was really happening.

I told Natalie I was going to go get something to eat. I left the building and found that I was in a strip mall. I wandered about. There was a glass case in a wood frame up against one of the walls and there were bags of gummi worms displayed in it. “Mmmm. Gummi worms,” I thought. I rounded the corner and there was a deli. A dimunitive but rotund somewhat swarthy woman was working behind the counter. There was another figure, I think male, in the periphery behind the counter at the corner of the shop. I walked in.

The woman had just finished making a huge cheese sandwich. It was built out of a loaf at least a foot long of golden brown bread that had a wedge taken from the top center, with everything stuffed inside. She held it up and out to me. “I made it for you,” she said, smiling, and began wrapping it for me.

“Oh, thanks,” I said. I looked around for a few moments and saw the gummi worms. They were to the left of the counter, tacked against a board. The smaller bags were $1.69 and the larger bags were $3.75. I picked up one of the larger bags at first, but decided to put it back and took a smaller one instead. “And this,” I said.

As the woman rang me up, I saw a girl, probably 18, looking much older, gazing at me through the window to the left of the counter. From my vantage point, the girl was just over the deli woman’s right shoulder. The deli woman noticed I was looking beyond her and turned around. “Oh, another one. They’re all over the place here,” she said.

And then, the perspective of the dream shifted, and rather than being party to the events, I was instead watching a news show documenting the details of what I had just observed.

And the story was this. The girl I had seen was one of many, as the deli woman had suggested. These were the high school age daughters of the upper middle class families in the area. For whatever reason, the trend was for these families to persuade their daughters to attend special classes and camps to become combination supermodels/waterskiiers. The news show was all quasilurid photo shoots with these girls in high fashion, and always holding their skis. And there was the pressure, the insane pressure the families were placing on these girls to be successful in this field. And the rivalry was horrid. The girls were evil to each other, clawing the way to the top, wanting to be the next big name, and all for their families.

And the undercurrent in all this was the generation of lost boys in the shadows of these girls. And having had all of their parents’ love siphoned off to support this sick fad, these boys had created their own support system, and had formed these desperate, violent gangs.

And the big story, was the deaths. That several of these girls had been murdered. And evidence had come to light implicating several of the parents of some of the surviving girls. They had paid off the boys in the community to off their daughters’ competition.