Mezzanine

The Hotel Room and the Missing Board Shorts

So I'm in a hotel room and my parents have left to go somewhere but have not told me when they'd be back. There's someone else in the room on the bed but it's no one I know. After a while of just looking around, I get the feeling that they've left me and aren't coming back at all. So I start packing up all my stuff. Into a suitcase I'm putting all my clothes from the vacation. Shorts, t-shirts. I must be somewhere beachy. So I'm thinking... I really want to go to the pool or the beach. I start looking for my board shorts because when I look down I'm wearing khaki shorts and gym shoes and I just can't go swimming in that. I look in the bathroom thinking maybe they were wet and hanging over the edge of the bathtub... not in there. I look through everything I packed... not in there. Then I look under the bed... there are two Pez dispensers, but no board shorts. I look in between the bed and the nightstand... there are two pairs of Adio shoes, my grey ones and my black ones... and a glass of red wine... but no board shorts. I start finding all the shoes I own currently in the hotel room and I put them all in a silver Express bag. I go through my stuff again and find the board shorts!! They're black and white, but I was looking for purple ones. I pack them. I walk out of the hotel room.

The Lucid Casino

I'm walking out of the hotel room thinking, maybe I won't go for a swim, but I'll go to the casino. Mom and dad are gone, they won't care. I think on the way that I've left my player card in between the mattress and box spring back in the hotel room. It was fleeting though, because I kept going to the casino. I get there and look in my back pocket and find among other things my player card. I walk up the the first slot machine I see and put in my player card and choose to play all reels. I see that I only have like three dollars left, but it's on my player card, not on a slip of paper. Anyway, I play once and win like $20. Which is awesome because I am pretty sure I'm only playing penny slots. So I play all reels again and... I hit the jackpot! Something comes up on the screen that says it's just going to give me cash. I look down and sure enough there's a dispenser spitting out ones... then fives. I have a stack of almost all five dollar bills like a foot and a half tall. On the top the last bill to come out is a $50,000 bill. I look at it and it's from the casino, not real money. It says I'm in a drawing to win ten million dollars and the odds are three in twenty. Not bad. So I think I need to cash this in for smaller bills. I go to "customer service" and tell the lady that I need to change this out. It was really hard to walk with all that cash. I put it down on the counter and the stack tipped over. She was surprised at all that cash and asked how I wanted it. I said fiftys and hundreds. Then... I tried to text Andrea to tell her I just won $50,000!! I look at my phone and it's like a sidekick. I don't have a sidekick. Texting her didn't work. I was thinking, am I in Vegas or Atlantic City? My heart is racing... and I think... this oh no, this is all wrong... this can't be real... I'm dreaming this. And I think I told the lady at the counter, "This isn't real, is it?" And I just thought, FUCK. I really wish this were real. I got so angry and I started telling the lady, "This is $50,000. I was going to pay my car off, my student loans, all my bills!" The logic part of my brain kicked in. But for a moment, everything was so life like. I really felt like I was standing at the counter there, feet on the ground, counting all that money. I was too upset to try to do anything now that I was lucid. I was looking at my phone that was all wrong, trying to tell myself, this isn't a dream, this is real!! I was trying to convince myself that I really had just won all that money. The lady asks me if I was on machine 258 because she was reading the stats this morning and that one was supposed to pay out today. I said I didn't know, and then in the middle of the stack of money was a paper with the machine info on it. She looked at it then showed me and sure enough I was on machine 258. Then the lady hands me a touch screen thing to sign for the money and I asked her didn't she want to see my id. She said no. Fuck. I'm really dreaming. So I'm losing my lucidity. I take the thing to sign and it's so hard to write my name with this stylus she handed me. Then I look at it and my last name isn't spelled right. I go into some options screen to change everything to times new roman and fix my last name but it doesn't work. Then Andrea's alarm went off.