It was my first day teaching at Mather High School and I had agreed to meet a woman I’d met a few weeks earlier who worked at a publishing house who was interested in publishing my novel.
Walking out of my classroom I ran into Rachel, who I was pleasantly surprised to see considering I had heard rumors that she’d been killed in a ghastly murder back in the 1990s.
I told her I was heading home to do a reading for a publisher and, as I was interested in pursuing a romantic relationship with her, asked if she’d like to come along.
She agreed and as we were walking down the hall we ran into Rena, who said she had come back to Mather to say hello to some of her old teachers as she did every year since graduating more than 40 years ago.
As Rachel had stepped aside while I was talking to Rena, I asked her if she wanted to join us at my house, as I was going to meet with a publisher to do a reading from my new novel.
Rena agreed and thinking I would have to introduce her to Rachel, I had a temporary loss of memory and couldn’t seem to remember Rachel’s name.
Just then, Rachel walked over and introduced herself to Rena, saving me any possible embarrassment and what would have been an awkward moment.
Just as we were about to leave the school building, Rachel pulled me aside and said that she didn’t feel comfortable interrupting my reunion with my old friend Rena, and that perhaps we could simply meet up another time.
Rachel gave me a kiss on the cheek and handed me back the copy of the manuscript that I had given her moments before and said goodbye and walked away .
As Rena and I left the school building and started walking towards the parking lot, I realized that my apartment was a mess and that I was about to have guests coming over.
At that moment, I decided that it would be more convenient to hold the meeting at a nearby café, so I called the woman from the publishing company and asked her if she could meet us at the mall.
Rena and I arrived at the shopping mall and needed to walk down a very steep set of stairs to reach the atrium where the café was located.
Rena decided that the center staircase looked to be the easiest to maneuver so she began to descend the steep flight of stairs nearly falling halfway down.
As I began to descend the stairs, I nervously held on to the small manuscript booklets I had removed from my briefcase earlier.
At one point I also slipped at nearly the same place Rena had just seconds before and as I lost my balance one of the booklets slipped from my hand and fell to the floor below. I saw Rena walking underneath the staircase to try and retrieve the booklet and the loose papers that had fallen out of it.
Once I finally got downstairs, I realized that my formal dress shoes were simply too uncomfortable to continue wearing, so I decided that I would change into the Sperry Topsiders I had in my briefcase, but soon decided the Topsiders would look ridiculously unprofessional so I put them back in my briefcase and put my dress shoes back on.
Then I woke up
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