A review

I can only vaguely remember how it started, in the manner of dreams.

I’m on a school trip to Prague or something. A large city I’ve never been to where only most people speak a language I only mostly recognize. My high school class - 12 or so kids I respect and sometimes envy as a close-knit, loving group sharing a fascinating language of internal references, as well as obvious, fierce loyalty to each other - and I are staying in this strange old house filled with secret passages, without adults or any clear purpose. Not overly different from other school trips we’ve been on.

But somewhere along the way, as I tag along a group roaming the streets and finding a wonderful candy store where the pretty clerks give us sweets for being foreigners, I make an unlikely friend. They’re so much cooler than everybody else and we all get dragged along their reckless, brutal, infrastructure-destroying, cop-evading adventures because we want so badly to impress them.

Me as much as everybody else, although I have a special bond with them. While my classmates despise me for being different, I fascinate them. And I love them for the way they see all the way through me without judgment.

(Are they a boy or a girl? I don’t know. I want them to be a girl because that’d make them more attractive to me, and that’s why I’m terrified to ask, because it would sound like I’m reducing our special bond to just sexual attraction,, and reducing their awesomeness to just their sex.)

Anyway the whole class ends up extremely late for going to the airport to get home and runs off leaving me to pack my stuff and try to clean up the awful mess at the house, but my friend is there to help me.

This help involves first leaving the mess and getting a cab ride so fast the car slams against house walls and lane dividers at every turn, and then annoying the clerks at the candy store until they get so angry they demand compensation for all the free candy. I have only a wallet full of useless Swedish coins, but the woman takes them because the point is just to punish me.

And I’m beginning to question if my friend is really cool and adventurous or just self-destroying when they steal us a couple of racing motorcycles and force me to follow them through the streets as fast as they can possibly go or get stranded, arrested or probably killed by the growing wave of car wrecks we leave behind us.

And they go down in a suicidal corner turn, and even though they stand up it’s so frightening I wake up.

Now the fun part of the story, I had this dream about 3 hours after marathoning Our Flag Means Death.