I slept with a naked Ella again. I don’t know how she’s not freezing. Actually, I do know. Children are little heaters. Throwing a toddler in your bed is the equivalent of putting a hot potato in your pocket. Instant, radiating heat.

I woke up from an honest-to-God nightmare. And it’s kind of funny now. I was in the Zombie Apocalypse. Yep. Most stereotypical nightmare ever. Maybe it was in my head because we talked about not wanting to survive the End of Days on Monday. Well, there I was. Solo. Trying to rescue a bunch of kids and crazy people. 

Story of my life, right?

I can’t remember now if I actually saw a zombie until the end. I woke up sweating because a zombie was trying to get through a door I was trying to lock. Until then, there had only been the knowledge that zombies were out there. Come to think of it, I guess I never did see a zombie, because even at the end the one that arrived was behind a door. The entire dream had a feeling of impending doom. I dreaded every turn. My job was to find safe hiding places for children and clients. My allies were teenagers. There were no other adults in the dream. They’d all been turned into zombies. The teenagers were awesome at Zombie Apocalypse. 

I suppose this was because of video games. Or maybe the fact that being a teenager means that you’re always gearing up for an apocalypse of sorts. You’re just flying along and any day the bottom could fall out. You never can tell. That was certainly my experience for part of my teen years. In any case, I located shelter. Every shelter had to have two locking doors. And preferably a food supply. I looked for solid houses. We were in farm country. Lots of barns, and farmhouses, but everything was enormously spread out, so there was a lot of running. 

You’re a runner. Do you experience the phenomenon of not being able to run in dreams? 

So. Frustrating. 

I also can never scream in dreams. I go to open my mouth and the world’s smallest “ahhhh” comes out. I sheltered a lot of people. Me and the teenagers did, that is. And then I’d leave the teens in charge and go look for more survivors. Until I got caught in the end, and then I woke up. 

Now I know where I’m going with this. I’ve told you I never know what I’m going to write about when I start writing. Farmhouses jogged my memory of Doodle Hill. 

When I was at USC, there was this music festival called Doodle Hill. By festival I mean that in the spring some unknown person had access to farmland, rigged up a power source, invited a bunch of local bands to play, and scattered kegs throughout a field. Every fake hippie in the county descended on Doodle Hill in their patchwork pants and their parents’ hand me down Volvo. 

My sophomore year was the second year I went. I spent the afternoon in Lake Wylie doing my sister’s hair and makeup for the prom. This is vital information because it got us a late start, and we headed out long after the caravan of folks who followed this kid Jamie, the only person who actually knew how to get to Doodle Hill.

I was armed a loose understanding of a few county roads and the knowledge that the mile-long driveway was marked with a traffic cone, and in my car I had Alison and Lily and Norah. And they’d all just dropped a sugar cube.

Norah was a year younger than us and absolutely beautiful. She’d somehow fallen into the group and we originally befriended her in a keep-your-enemies-close sort of way. She drank well and smoked weed well and was in general a cool girl who we were convinced was going to steal our boyfriends. I got to know her and found out that she was terribly insecure and was palling around with us because she was in love with our friend Jack.

Jack was a player on rollerblades. He was from New England and knew all kinds of things we didn’t know by sheer virtue of being privy to the faster world above the Mason Dixon line. Jack and I share a birthday. There is a bond that’s formed when you go out for your 21st birthday together. We’ve stayed in touch via Facebook. He lives somewhere in Europe now and appears to be a citizen of the world.

And Jack had ridden his rollerblades to Nikki’s dorm room one night, fucked her, and never looked back. She was determined they would have a relationship. Jack was clueless about this. He rode his rollerblades to a lot of rooms.

Anyway, Norah’s familiarity with drugs and her intense desire to see Jack at Doodle Hill probably contributed to the fact that she held her shit together on the sugar cube, riding shotgun with me through the dark, flat roads outside of Columbia, passing cows and searching for a cone while listening to the Dead.

The backseat was another story. Jane was doing her best, but Lily was a mess. She kept kicking my seat like a five-year-old on an airplane and alternating between asking if we were there yet and asking if we were all seeing what she was seeing.

“Only you can see what you’re seeing,” Jane kept telling her.

Lily kept asking, I kept driving, and Norah kept smoking Camel after Camel and pitching their trailing, glowing butts out the window into the night. Every time she threw one someone in the back seat would pipe up, “what was that?”

“Shooting star,” I remember saying. 

After forty-five minutes I conceded that we were hopelessly lost. After pulling down a long driveway and being chased off by a farmer with a shotgun who thought we were there to pick shrooms, I conceded that we were frighteningly lost, and I stopped at a lit farmhouse. I told everyone to stay the hell in the car. Norah calmly lit a cigarette, Jane was singing, and I think Lily was close to licking the window at that point.

I knocked on the door and the farmer’s wife answered. There was a fire in the fireplace and the whole house smelled like chocolate chip cookies. There was a stack of six blue Blockbuster videos on the table waiting to be thrown into the VCR.  She didn’t know where the festival was, but she kindly called around and asked. She finally got someone who knew whose farm it was, but they didn’t know how to get there. She gave me some vague directions that involved going “west” – what the hell did I know about west? It was the middle of the night and I didn’t have a compass – and she apologized for not knowing more.  

I thanked her and headed out to the car and my threesome, who began to look more and more excited as I approached. 

It was weird, until I realized that the farmer’s wife was following me with a plate of cookies. I stuck my head in the car and told everyone not to talk. I didn’t need this woman calling the cops to tell them there was a girl driving around lost with some seriously impaired friends. I know I said it harshly. What comes to mind is the Pulp Fiction scene and the woman yelling, “any one of you motherfucking pigs move, and I’ll execute every last one of ya!”

It worked. Cookies were offered with pleasantries and accepted in silence. I thanked her for her help and said I’d come back if we didn’t find it, and I drove away. In the rear view I could see her standing with her plate of cookies watching us go. I could only hope that she couldn’t see that Lily was trying to eat her cookie like a lollipop.

I rolled down my window, and I heard music. And somehow I followed it. And found a traffic cone. And found Doodle Hill. I let Jane and Lily loose in the field like a pair of puppies, and Norah and I went to find beer.

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