Broken Minds

Kat’s POV

Celeste and I are gonna be sleeping over at Sugar’s house today. I’ve gotten to know Sugar over the time that she’s been friends with Skyler, she’s a really pleasant person. Her and I got our hair dyed together soon after I joined their school. Her and our other friends helped me adjust to the school, but Sugar was able to help the most since she’s been there the longest. I know there’s a lot of pain she’s going through, but I don’t know the details of all of it. I know at least some of it may have to do with that boyfriend of hers, Jake. I don’t think she appears happy when they’re near each other. Skyler is jealous of the relationship because they really like Sugar, and I wish they would see that it is clearly not a relationship to be jealous of.

We enter her house, and the energy feels warm and friendly, unlike the house Celeste and I live in and the house I lived in during childhood. Her parents greet us kindly and then lead us to Sugar’s room. Sugar is on the phone with her friend Naomi when we go in her room. She smiles and says hi to us excitedly and then tells us to say hi to Naomi.

“Hey guys, I hope you have fun at the sleepover! Whatever you do, do not let Sugar end up on a sugar rush, ok?”

Sugar laughs and rolls her eyes, and then says goodbye and hangs up.

“So, what do you guys wanna do?” Sugar asks us

“Maybe we could watch nostalgic TV shows,” Celeste says

That’s always something Celeste wants to do, both because it’s fun and because it reminds her of an easier time.

“Yeah, sure! What are your nostalgic TV shows?” Sugar responds

“Would My Little Pony be ok?”

“The “friendship is magic” one?”

“Yeah”

“Yeah! I loved that show when I was little”

I guess I’m the only one out of the three of us that never watched that show. Not that I had anything against it, I just really didn’t watch TV that much. We sit on the couch in the living room and Sugar turns on the TV and starts My Little Pony, and then she gets ice cream for all of us. We keep eating ice cream while watching the show for a little while, we watch maybe five episodes before we decide to turn the TV off and move from the living room to Sugar’s bedroom.  Sugar goes to the kitchen and gets candy. Fruity candy and chocolate candy. She offers some to me and Celeste, but we don’t have nearly as much as her. I start to pick up that she isn’t only doing this for the taste. There’s something more behind it. She likes the feeling of being on a sugar rush, it covers up the pain that she’s experiencing. I wonder what exactly is wrong. I know it could have something to do with Jake, but I don’t know if that’s the only problem she has.

“I’m gonna get more sugar!” She exclaims as she leaves the room

“So, what do you think is going on with Sugar?” I ask Celeste

“What do you mean?” Celeste responds

Oh. Right. Sometimes when I pick up on something about someone, I become so certain about it that I forget other people aren’t aware. “I think she’s consuming this much sugar to distract herself from something.” I explain

“Are you sure she doesn’t just love sugar?” Celeste says

Immediately after that, Sugar comes back in, straight up drinking maple syrup. Celeste and I look at her, then look back at each other. I can tell from the way Celeste looks at me that she’s telepathically telling me she understands what I mean now.

“Hey Sugar, is everything ok?” I ask

“YEAH! I’M HAVING SO MUCH FUN!” She shouts while jumping up and down, “LET’S WATCH A HORROR MOVIE! I’LL GO MAKE POPCORN!” 

She leaves the room again, and Celeste and I follow behind and sit on the couch while she makes popcorn. When she comes back with the bowl of popcorn we decide on a movie to watch. Celeste is the only one out of the three of us who isn’t a huge fan of horror movies, but she agrees anyway and says she’ll be ok. We end up deciding to watch Scream, which is a movie Celeste accidentally saw her dad watching when she was little and it scared her. But she agrees she’s old enough now and it won’t be that bad anymore. We all hug each other while watching the movie, and occasionally jump or scream at the really scary parts. Once the movie is over, we head back to the bedroom and decide to gossip for a little bit.

“There’s that rumor I heard that Jake cheated on you Sugar, it came from his friend Mason” I say

“Yeah I heard that too, but Mason kinda likes to lie for no reason, so I don’t think it’s true,” Sugar responds. I get the sense that she isn’t saying this defensively, she’s not saying it from a place of not wanting him to cheat like how most people would feel with their partner. She’s just stating a fact, but there’s no real feeling behind it. She doesn’t actually care if Jake would cheat, she just objectively knows he wouldn’t. We talk about other things we’ve heard that might be true, mainly the stupid “he said she said” kind of stuff, who broke up with who, friends who cut each other off, etc. I’ve never really had this kind of friendship before, I always heard this was what friendship between girls is like but it’s nice to finally experience it.

We decide to finally try to sleep. Sugar takes couch cushions from the living room and puts them on the floor, Celeste chooses to sleep on the couch cushion bed while Sugar and I share the real bed. But we can’t sleep because we’re not tired enough. We keep talking and laughing but simultaneously trying to sleep.

Celeste eventually does fall asleep. Sugar and I still can’t.

“Do you ever not allow yourself to fall asleep out of fear of nightmares?” Sugar asks me

“Yeah, sometimes, I have really weird dreams” I respond

“Skyler told me everyone in the friend group has weird dreams”

“Yep, we all do”

“What’s one you’ve had?”

“It was recent actually. There was an event at school that took place at night, and the drama teacher led us to this room that doesn’t actually exist in the building in real life. When she opened the door, it led to a spiral staircase. For some reason you were supposed to slide down instead of walking down even though they were stairs.” Sugar laughs a little bit at the absurdity, but she lets me continue. “It was even considered a safety hazard to walk down. I left one of my belongings with a staff member, I think my backpack or something, and as I was walking down the stairs I passed out. I woke up from passing out still in the dream, and Mr. Evan was there. Now for this part of the dream I have to clarify something. I had some sort of supernatural connection to all of my belongings in this dream, like each thing that belonged to me was a voodoo doll connected to me. So, Mr. Evan explained to me that they had destroyed my backpack knowing it would make me pass out, as a punishment for walking down the stairs.”

“What the hell??” Sugar says laughing

“Yeah, I know. In the dream Mr. Evan told me he didn’t agree with me walking down the stairs either since it is “dangerous”, but he still thought the punishment is stupid and they shouldn’t be allowed to do that. I don’t know that teacher super well but I think he would say that”

“Yeah, he would,” Sugar responds, “One weird dream I had was where my dad was taking me home from school, and as he was taking me home, there was a blockage on the street and we had to try to take a different route. We ended up getting extremely lost. My dad was also supposed to take me somewhere fun after school, but at this point I just really wanted to go home. I was crying and repeatedly saying “I just wanna go home!”. Then I looked out the window and everything was getting more distorted. Then I woke up, still within the same dream, and saw a text from my dad asking me how I was doing because he was at the store or something. Then I woke up in real life. This was actually all after that incident at the forest with Skyler, this was the dream I had when I fell asleep after that,”

“Oh, really?” I respond

“Yeah, what do you think the meanings of these dreams are?”

I’m really into dissecting the meanings of dreams, so we end up talking about this for a while. I talk about how I think the spiral staircase in my dream was a metaphor for falling into a downward spiral, and how maybe the meaning of her dream had to do with being emotionally lost and wanting to feel comfortable and safe again. My interpretation of her dream does seem to resonate with her.

“Also, when I first joined your friend group, I had this dream where we were hanging out in an abandoned airport for some reason. We were all wearing clown makeup, and we were just laughing and shouting and it echoed because the building was dead silent, nobody was there. Eventually we got on one of the planes and you flew the plane. You took us to Hawaii or something”

She ends up falling asleep in the middle of us laughing about the extremely weird dream she just described. I keep trying to sleep, and eventually I finally do.