Gillian Underground

Since dropping out of college the year before, Gillian had hitched her way all over the South, from the waterfront elegance of Charleston to the wrought-iron decadence of New Orleans. She'd visited Dr. King's church in Alabama and looked for peacocks in Flannery O'Connor's yard in rural Georgia. Now after four straight days of hitching all day and sleeping rough, fleeing a bad scene at a country bar in West Virginia, she'd fetched up in the North Carolina mountains. The spring sky above was stern and gray, a wind howling down from the peaks, threatening rain. Gillian was ready for a break.

Welcome to Dearborne, the sign read. From what Gillian could see Dearborne was a big town trying to burst the boundaries of its valley and become a city. The name sounded familiar. There was a college here, maybe. She shouldered her patched camouflage bag and walked past the sign, wincing whenever she stepped on her left foot, where a blister had burst on her heel. She tried not to look down at the asphalt under her feet; she'd dropped out of school because she wanted to see the country, and she couldn't do that with her head down.

A few tall buildings, a poor man's skyline, stood in the center of town. Blocky concrete buildings crawled up mountainsides like children trying to escape from a playpen.

Gillian desperately wanted a cup of coffee, and downtown looked very far away. She stopped at a bench on the side of the road and looked at the schedule nailed there. A bus should be by in a few minutes. She sat down to wait, wondering if the sky would open up and drench her, if she should muster the necessary motivation to get the poncho out of her bag. A good cold rain would wake her up as well as a few cups of coffee, but she couldn't afford to risk getting pneumonia.

Her chin dropped to her chest the moment she allowed herself to relax. This place looked as good as any for a girl to catch a quick nap, she figured, and then she was out, dreaming of the lady once again.

Gillian had first found her on campus, in the balcony of her college's largest lecture hall, and this dream took place there, as always. Except unlike the lecture hall in reality, this lecture hall had a fountain, a thatched hut, and a windmill located in the balcony. The lady sat under the falling water of the fountain, dispensing moist certificates of achievement to a line of students in their underwear.

Gillian looked down, and of course she was wearing the bra with the wire that always poked her in the armpit and a pair of baggy granny panties.

The line disappeared and Gillian was facing the lady with the breeze from the windmill and the spray from the fountain mixing and cooling her off. She heard a scrabbling sound from the hut, and then the lady was holding out a piece of paper to Gillian.

"Have you earned this, my girl?" the lady said with a smirk that said she already knew the answer. Her long-sleeved dress floated on the surface of the pool under the fountain like a white lily pad. Her diamond-encrusted crown sat dangerously askew on her head, as if bobby-pinned to her long, gray hair.

Gillian reached out for the certificate, but the ink was already starting to run from the water, and all she could make out were the words "Achievement" and "Intrepid" and "Fulfilled Requirements" along with a date a year from now.

"It's postdated, so make sure you have sufficient funds when the time comes," the lady said, and then a hiss of air brakes cut short the dream.

Continued...