Awake...

I woke up with a start. My head hurt a bit and I saw Jay standing next to me. I looked around and saw the others waking up as well. Max and Ashley, who were still strapped onto their chairs, woke up with a shake and gasped.

“We’re alive,” Those were Eleanor’s first words. She looked at Jay and we all smiled.

“In a scale of 1-10, how much would you rate this invention?” Jay asked in a ‘Baymax’ voice. We all rated it, numbers under 8 though.

“Seriously?” Jay asked, looking flabbergasted. We all laughed.

“It seemed almost real,” Ashley mentioned in a matter-of-fact voice. Jay smiled and said, “That’s the point.”

He unstrapped Max and Ashley and they rubbed their wrists. Eleanor and I got up, bid Jay farewell and thank you and walked out the backyard.

As Eleanor and I walked together, she suddenly asked me, “Alex, how do we know we’re not dreaming?”

I look at her and begin thinking the same thing. “Well, in Inception, Leonardo Dicaprio spins this sorta top, right?” I mention, looking at her. Eleanor thinks for a while before saying.

“At the end of the movie though, the top keeps on spinning. If it keeps spinning, it means he’s still dreaming. If it stops spinning, it means he’s not dreaming anymore.”

“But the top kept spinning, didn’t it?”

Eleanor and I just stop in our tracks and look at each other, wondering if we’re still dreaming. We don’t say anything for a minute before Ashley calls out to her.

“Eleanor! I’m riding with you, remember? Don’t leave without me!” Eleanor glances back at Ashley over her shoulder and yells back, “Got it!” She looks back at me, shrugs, and says, “We’ll come back to Jay if we’re still dreaming.”

Eleanor and I embrace awkwardly. She pulls away and tugs a streak of blond hair behind her ear and smiles at me before scampering to her motorbike. She pulls on a helmet and takes one out for Ashley who’s running her way. They leave soon, leaving me standing alone on the front lawn. Jay and Max are still in the backyard for some reason.

Once I decide it’s time for me to leave, I look at my bike that I’d thrown on the front lawn a while ago. It somehow looked… different. I thought of running back to the backyard to ask Jay if he’d done anything with my bike but thought again and shrugged. So what if he did anything to it? I didn’t see any rockets or missiles on my bike so I guess it was just my eyes.

I got onto my bike and started paddling. As I paddled back to my house, I heard a loud rumbling, as if something was crumbling. I turned back and saw the road being sucked into a bottomless pit, and it was still catching up to me. I gasped.

It’s my dream.

-End.