I walked like a ghost, like I was hypnotized, down the hall to an open doorway, a light rectangular cutout in the otherwise blank and unremarkable walls. I could hear voices—a singular voice—distant and watery.

When I turned into the room, I saw a classroom. Or, a semblance of one. Dreams aren’t exacting or particularly detail-oriented, I’ve found. I couldn’t tell you a single thing about the other faces in the room—or even if they had faces and weren’t just blank dream mannequins. But there was only one figure I cared about, the person my eye was immediately drawn to, the moment I entered the classroom.

It was my mom. A younger version of her—my age, maybe, or no, must have been even younger than that, a stiff school uniform hanging off her body. She had her head buried in her notebook on her desk, her dark bangs falling into her eyes, when the teacher called on her.

“What?” There was pure terror on her face, her eyes wide, skin white as a sheet, sweat immediately forming on her brow, making her hair stick to her forehead.

“Weren’t you paying attention?” The teacher’s voice was, quite literally, like nails on a chalkboard.

“Oh, I-I—” my mom stuttered, her hands starting to shake, her damp palms crinkling the pages of her notebook.

Then suddenly I was behind her. I hadn’t moved, not consciously, but that happens sometimes—a dreamworld is so strong it makes the decisions for me. I could see over her shoulder now, see what she had written in her notebook and found … it was the same thing that was written on the board. A mathematic formula that I’m not sure was even real, but that Dream Mom had solved already. If she knew the answer, why was she panicking?

“Still too slow to keep up, I see.” The teacher sneered and I wanted to punch him in his stupid face.

“No, I-I—” she stuttered again. I’ve never heard my mom stutter. Is this something that happened a lot when she was younger? Was this a typical high school stress dream (and god, great to know those never go away) or was it based in a real memory?

The kids in her class laughed and laughed and soon the teacher was laughing too and I could feel the red hot humiliation, the suffocating shame, radiating off of my mom. It tasted like pennies and dirt and anger rose up in me.

“Rose?” My mom had turned around in her chair, looking up at me with big, scared, teenager eyes. Did she know that I was here? Or was this just her subconscious speaking to me through the dream?

“Rose, you have to help me,” she pleaded. “You have to make them go away.”