I'm a student again. Class is just about to start--only I doubt it. During the night, the room's been methodically trashed--heavy desks overturned, even broken. Hours of carefully brutal work. The saboteur even left a defiant note scrawled on the blackboard. Silky, a classmate I like, a skinny birdlike girl with long black hair, is erasing one telltale word just as the teacher comes in, so he won't deduce who did it.

The word was "Gypsy." One of our classmates is a Rom girl. But did she really do it, or was she framed? Either way I'm startled that that Silky risks covering up for her. But I start to see why, as our teacher bursts in and gasps in horror. He's a bristling man with a formidable beard--a no-nonsense type at best, and now he builds up to a towering red rage. First words out of his mouth are "GYPSY! What have you DONE?" Even without that incriminating word on the board, he's got a thieving, dishonest Gypsy to blame! Open bigotry.

We just listen, glumly, till he winds down to a cold disgust. The room's so wrecked that we assume he'll have to excuse us for the day, so the janitor and school fix-it man can repair things. But our teacher says "No! I won't let this sabotage keep me from teaching! Anyone who leaves will be punished!"

And we sit amid the rubble, learning... some sort of lesson.

IN THE MORNING

• Slave-driving teacher = me! I insisted on painting ALL day! No getting out and taking a break, having mere FUN! I'm being CREATIVE, here! Get a sense of priorities! And so on...
• The saboteur = someone like Piano-Playing Jane in Ann Faraday's The Dream Game: a girl who sabotaged the music she loved, because she was bullied by a perfectionist mom caring only for performance--not fun.
• Gypsy girl NAMED Gypsy?
  1. Just saw the film Gypsy Princess: a Jewish-American princess discovers her ancestors were Rom not Jews, and during Prohibition they were rum-runners. Rom runners? Sorry.
  2. not long before this dream, I knew someone named Gypsy, and the dream may be using her name as a symbol, since she was playful where I was inhibited. "Rom" couldn't work here; to me it means an actual culture, not playfulness.
• Silky protects the vandal in hopes of some play time = a strong side of me erases evidence of inner sabotage, but a scrawled name doesn't prove playfulness committed it! Don't jump to conclusions! There are masks within masks here.

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