Nolan went to bed that night alive for the first time. He was starting a new life and he wanted to tell everyone he knew. Nolan felt completely at peace and he drifted off to sleep. His dreams that night were brightly colored, nothing was attacking him or torturing him. It was pleasant sleep, he couldn’t remember sleep being pleasant before. There was something special about these dreams. Nolan really wished he could understand them, they didn’t make any sense and yet they seemed like they should.
Deep into the night Nolan was sleeping harder than usual, this must be that deep sleep they talk about in school. He saw a fuzzy white space start to appear in front of him. It was like a tunnel through cloud and either Nolan was moving towards it or it was moving towards Nolan. It was hard to tell what exactly was moving but Nolan was getting closer to the opening of the cloud tunnel and soon he went inside.
Once Nolan was all the way in the tunnel he looked and saw that he was in a car. It was the car pool to school and they were picking up the Howard kids. For some reason his father was driving the car, this wasn’t the usual setup for car pool. Normally, Nolan’s parents were already gone to work and Mrs. Howard came to pick him up. But here they were in the Howard’s driveway and Nolan dad driving them all to school. There were 3 Howard kids, one younger brother, one older brother and then there was a girl from Nolan’s grade.
Nolan had always had a bit of a crush on Tory Howard but he was very embarrassed of crushes. His parents didn’t talk about that sort of thing and Nolan didn’t have any social skills in the area of girls. He only knew that the boys were merciless if they found out you liked someone. They would begin to pick her apart and insult everything about the girl that you liked until you just wanted it all to stop. Nolan had several crushes though, any girl who was the least bit kind to him seemed like an angel. Tory was kind to Nolan and it didn’t even seem like her parents made her be kind to him, she was just a caring and soft hearted person.
So Nolan sees in his dream that the Howard kids are all getting into the car. They were all in the back and Nolan was in the front, which wasn’t normal at all. But as soon as everyone was in the car and driving away from the house, Nolan’s dad did something embarrassing. He turned right around, like a boy from school might do and told everyone that Nolan liked Tory. Then his dad and her brothers began to tease Nolan mercilessly! How could his father do that to him? Nolan woke up with many mixed emotions. Was his dad out to get him? Was his crush on Tory becoming obvious? Were people going to know? It took a long time to go to sleep after that and before he fell back asleep, Nolan decided he should never talk to his dad about girls.
Practice Outlaw 