When The Air Runs Out (Part 1)

Carly woke up with a start, breathing hard and looking around frantically, grabbing at the heart-shaped locket around her neck; this was the last thing she had of her parents. "It was just a dream" she thought as she let out a sigh of relief. Moments before, in her minds eye, she was being cornered by a pack of what she thought were wolves but didn't exactly look like wolves. They were thin with matted fur and she is sure she saw an extra tail or leg on a couple of them. What was going on? She knew the world was pretty messed up but was it really that bad?? She new that the air she breathed was getting polluted and that soon, there would be no clean air left, but she just figured that everyone, human and creature, would adapt. Maybe that wasn't the case after all, though what she had just seen was only a dream, wasn't it?

Pouring herself out of bed, she started getting ready for the day. Her university class would start before she knew it and she was already running late from trying to analyze that dream. Good thing the class she was going to was an elective course on dream theory, maybe that would help her determine what it all meant. This was her first day of university, though she had been living in her dorm for about a month. Carly chose the early move in date so she could get a feel for the campus and figure out where her classes were in relation to the dorms and plan out the fastest route to get to each place in case she was running late, like this morning. This university was fairly new, this was only its 3rd year being open and had quickly become one of the most prestigious universities in the mid-west. Carly still couldn't believe she got in; her personal essay really must have wowed the admissions board because her high school transcript certainly wouldn't have.

It's not like Carly was a bad student, she just found herself distracted and prioritizing other things over her homework and, by senior year, she had showed up just enough to at least pass and graduate, but spent many of her days out in the woods in a circle with friends, smoking weed and drinking whatever alcohol they could get their hands on. Senior year of high school, Carly knew what she wanted to do with her life and it didn't involve what she was learning in a public high school where the class sizes were too big for the teachers to handle and a lot of students fell between the cracks. Now, rushing to her first class in the next step of her life, she couldn't help but wonder if she fell through the cracks because she chose to, or if it really was the student-teacher ratio. "Oh well" she thought, "can't worry about that now" as she pulled open the doors to her lecture hall and quietly sneaking in to the back row, hoping no one had noticed her.

"Ah, Miss Jamison, I presume?" She heard a voice from the front of the class echo through the room, speaking her last name. "Uh, yes, that's me" she said, scanning the front of the room, trying to locate the professor and then realizing that he was standing behind the rolling white board in the middle of the floor. As he stepped out from behind the board, Professor Jackson spoke again. "I am so glad you could grace us with your presence, Miss Jamison. In the future, my class starts promptly at 8:30 in the morning and you are expected to be in a seat with your computer open to take notes. Is that understood Miss Jamison?" Carly wasn't sure what to say, so she just nodded her head and slid down ever so slightly in her seat, hiding her face behind her computer screen.

Carly thought this class was going to be fun, learning about why we dream the way we do, and what those dreams mean, but Professor Jackson was such a proper man and spoke in such a way that made Carly want to fall asleep. Finally, class was over. Carly closed her laptop and stood up, stretching her back and arms as she did so, making sure she was awake enough to make it to her next class, one that counted toward her degree and that she knew she would struggle to pay attention in; Neuro-biology. Why she had chosen the path of neurosciences, she couldn't exactly remember right now, but she knew she just needed to stick with it so she could get away from the hometown that felt like it was suffocating her.

Carly's childhood wasn't the easiest, and perhaps that was what led her down her drug-induced teenage years. Carly's parents died in a car accident when she was 6-years old and she didn't have any other relatives that anyone was aware of, forcing her into foster care. Her first set of foster parents were the worst she could've imagined. They made her sleep on a couch in the basement, took all of her nice things for their daughter and gave her ratty, old tattered clothes and shoes with holes that wouldn't last longer than a week if she wasn't careful. Carly finally came up with the idea to become a nightmare-ish kid, making the foster parents hate her so she could get placed elsewhere.

The next 2 families she was with were actually pretty good and bought her better things because they had seen what kind of clothes and shoes she was left with from the previous home. However, because the first place was so bad, Carly now believed that every place she went would end up being bad, no matter how nice they seemed at first, so she kept up the act of being a bad kid. By the time she was 16, she had gone through so many foster homes that no one would take her anymore and she ended up in a group home, not much different than Juvie, other than she could come and go as she pleased and she hadn't been formally arrested...yet. About 2 weeks after her 16th birthday, that is when Carly found out about drugs. Sure, by senior year it was only weed and some alcohol, but a couple of years before that, she would smoke, snort or shoot-up whatever was offered to her, not caring what happened to her.

One Friday night, Carly went to a party at a classmates house. The flyers said that the parents would be out of town, which always meant there would be drugs and alcohol which meant this was a party that Carly had no plans of missing. Throwing her bag over her shoulder and getting her bike from the side of the house, she thought to herself "alright, lets go see what kind of party favors these ones have." None of the parties she went to had anything too hard, some light hallucinogens, a couple pounds of weed that barely caused a high, and maybe some molly to get people in the mood. Nothing that Carly couldn't find on a normal day. She was seeking something that would make her brain stop running so fast, something that would numb everything that she felt all the time, not just something that would cause a basic high.

Of course, the people throwing the party were the "I'm too good for you twins" that never did anything wrong, until now. Of course they didn't have any drugs though because they had no idea how to throw a proper party and they did not find a different location for it, something they should have done since they live in the part of town where people call the police if someone sneezes too loud. Carly didn't care though, she was not one to turn down a party, though she wished she had brought more drugs with her, but she only had a couple kinds of opiates and some weed as well since her connection needed to get more supplies in.

After taking a couple of pills, smoking a couple of joints and drinking her 3rd or 4th Screwdriver, Carly was finally feeling like this party was worth coming to, especially since someone turned the rave lights on, though she couldn't figure out why no one else was dancing. That is the night that Carly got arrested and sent to a rehab center. While there, she found a therapist that didn't make her want to gouge her eyes out like so many she had been to over the years. If your parents die at such a young age, it tends to stick with you and mess you up a bit. After rehab, she promised her therapist that she would stay sober, something that clearly didn't happen, but she did stay away from the hard stuff at least; not like that would make a difference if the therapist ever found out.

Well, here Carly was, about to enter her second university class that she never believed would happen, and studying a topic that she knew she wanted to do but couldn't really remember why...maybe it was all of the drugs that killed off some brain cells. "Ok" she thought "here we go" and she pulled the door open to her new future. After the class ended, Carly was very hungry since she had to skip breakfast to get to her first class on time, something she still didn't accomplish. She headed for the cafeteria to get a sandwich, or maybe a salad, she would decide when she got there. On the way, she bumped into her professor from her dream theory course, Professor Jackson, apologizing as she started to pick up his papers that she knocked out of his hands while she was daydreaming about her lunch. She looked into his eyes as she was handing him his papers and got a glimpse of something that looked a lot like the dream that had woken her that morning.