Claudia and her Blue Bike

Every time I dream, I see Claudia on a blue bike, the kind that she can pedal with her arms. She’s never there at the beginning. I dream of kissing the girl I like, or killing a monster that shot my little sister with a dart gun, or manipulating a Will-sized puppet onstage so that no one notices our lead actor is outside smoking a cigarette. And then, inevitably, Claudia pedals across the dream on her blue, arm-powered bike.

In real life, Claudia is a girl in my homeroom. She doesn’t ride a bike. She’s got a face like a mix between a toad and a young Taylor Swift. Her hair is chin length and never brushed through in the back. She wears clothes with bright colors and cuffs her pants wrong, so you can tell immediately that she’s not one of the popular eleventh graders. Sometimes I’ve seen her reading. Once I had a conversation with her where she asked me who I “fancied” and I didn’t know what to say.

She’s haunting me, I tell a friend. She laughs it off. But I swear Claudia was looking at me just now, that she followed me home yesterday and whispered something in my ear. Am I in love with her, or scared of her? Why does she feel the need to steer through my reveries, pumping excitedly, not even looking back at me as she passes? She’s not my friend. She’s just always there, in the background, smiling even though no joke has been told, at least not to her. And then she’s there at night, briefly, and she doesn’t take me with her.