Stolen backpack
I was in High School, and the layout of the school was not like any I’ve gone to, and the teachers were unfamiliar, and it was somewhere close to the present because there were MP3 players. I was the appropriate age for High School though, and had that sense that I was going to school with basically the same batch of kids that I had since kindergarten. The final bell rang for school to be out for the day, and people filtered out. I had my backpack up on the desk (The backpack I have now, which I got towards the end of college) and was standing next to it rummaging for my sunglasses. My sunglasses and MP3 player were in the small front pocket, and these were the same items that I currently own. While I was getting these out in preparation to leave, a boy came up beside me and asked me to ‘hold this’, shoving his own olive/brown backpack at me suddenly. I knew the boy in the way I knew a lot of people in school, simply because I went to school with them for so many years. I saw his face vividly, I knew his name was Bobby, but I didn’t have any specific history with him. (I was so convinced he was somebody I knew and went to school with, that on waking I grabbed my yearbook to look for his last name, and I cannot find anyone who looks like him.) The teacher was still up at the front of the room, talking to a couple other students, but neither of them paid any attention to what was going on. Meanwhile Bobby started pulling my sunglasses and MP3 player out of my bag. I loudly, clearly and calmly demanded he give them back several times, and reached for them, but he managed to hold them out of my reach. In seconds he had my backpack on, was putting my headphones on, and ambling out of the classroom. I loudly and calmly demanded he give them back, that they were mine, this was stealing, and if he didn’t return them I would have to go report it. I was following him out into the hall, trying to catch at my own backpack just to stop him, but he slid into the crowds heading out and got away from me. I was left with his backpack still on my arm.
With no other recourse, I turned and fought my way along the wall against the tide of people to the office, where I waited behind some popular girls discussing something official with the receptionist. When they left I approached and put my backpack on the counter. Immediately she started telling me about how some department or other was closed and I’d have to come back tomorrow, but I shook my head and when I could get a word in explained myself; that this backpack belonged to a boy named Bobby who was in my class, how he had shoved it at me and made off with my own stuff, and I was not a thief and therefore his pack should probably sit in the lost and found, but what could I do about getting my own stuff back? She took the pack, looking startled and confused, and asked me if the teacher or anyone else had witnessed this. I told her he was in the room with some students at the time, but that was no guarantee they saw anything. She asked me to take her back to my classroom, and left her desk to walk back there with me. The crowds were already thinning out some. When we reached the classroom only the teacher was there, and he seemed surprised anything at all had happened. I asked would I need to report this to the police, and he started advising me not to, because that might ‘escalate the situation’. I told him I’d been harassed like this since first grade, and it’s escalated ever since, so I failed to see where there was anything I could do that wouldn’t escalate the situation, thank you, and I had a legal right to get my belongings back. The dream faded quickly, unresolved.
Edited to add: I did in fact find him, not in my HS yearbook but in the Middle School ones, under Robert Gliege. His face is definitely familiar, I'm confident I went through grade school with him, when he probably was called Bobby. My brain was not just smoking crack.
With no other recourse, I turned and fought my way along the wall against the tide of people to the office, where I waited behind some popular girls discussing something official with the receptionist. When they left I approached and put my backpack on the counter. Immediately she started telling me about how some department or other was closed and I’d have to come back tomorrow, but I shook my head and when I could get a word in explained myself; that this backpack belonged to a boy named Bobby who was in my class, how he had shoved it at me and made off with my own stuff, and I was not a thief and therefore his pack should probably sit in the lost and found, but what could I do about getting my own stuff back? She took the pack, looking startled and confused, and asked me if the teacher or anyone else had witnessed this. I told her he was in the room with some students at the time, but that was no guarantee they saw anything. She asked me to take her back to my classroom, and left her desk to walk back there with me. The crowds were already thinning out some. When we reached the classroom only the teacher was there, and he seemed surprised anything at all had happened. I asked would I need to report this to the police, and he started advising me not to, because that might ‘escalate the situation’. I told him I’d been harassed like this since first grade, and it’s escalated ever since, so I failed to see where there was anything I could do that wouldn’t escalate the situation, thank you, and I had a legal right to get my belongings back. The dream faded quickly, unresolved.
Edited to add: I did in fact find him, not in my HS yearbook but in the Middle School ones, under Robert Gliege. His face is definitely familiar, I'm confident I went through grade school with him, when he probably was called Bobby. My brain was not just smoking crack.