Munmun

by Jesse Andrews

  Prayer wasn’t doing a whole lot better. Some of these law school men started recognizing her, making fun of her, playing mean games of Who Can Make Prayer Agree With The Stupidest Thing, which was not hard to do because her whole attitude was, agree with everything, compliment everyone, that’s how you make someone fall in love with you.

  “Well what do you know, here’s Prayer again,” they would say, like her name was something made up. “Prayer, don’t you think the government gives too many munmuns to littlepoors.”

  “Oh sure, I think so, yes,” she would say.

  “Isn’t it sad how the government punishes middles and bigs for success by taxing some of their munmuns, the more success the more they get punished, how is that fair,” they would say.

  “It’s so sad and unfair, and bytheway no one’s talking about it,” she would agree.

  “Wouldn’t it be great if the government punished littlepoors instead, for example by jailing them every few months,” they would say.

  “Hmmmm, well that’s an intresting proposal, and to be honest I might be too stupid to really understand it,” she would say.

  “Because then littlepoors would finally have the motivation to work hard and improve themselves and scale their way up,” they would say.

  “Wow, I have to agree with you there,” she would say. “What a smart idea.”

  Obviously Prayer didn’t actually agree that yes, please randomly jail us littlepoors every few months. She wasn’t an idiot. Except maybe in the way of, she believed if she ever argued with a guy even once, it’s over, he hates her now forever and no longer thinks she’s cute. That way I did think she was a littlebit an idiot.

  Also another thing you have to understand, we had to work and wait for hours to get one of these convos. Most of the time we spent figuring out how to get up to a place near a lawstudent’s head. And once we were there they could walk away at anytime.

  I mean obviously when you’re littlepoor most of your time ingeneral is spent just getting from ay to bee, anxiously walking or jogging around the edges of stomping forests of legs and boots and you barely have time to do anything else.

  Anyway the point is in Lifeanddeathworld our wooing was on average super pathetic. But in Dreamworld we did a little better.

  It was Prayer’s idea to make romantic lovey dreamzones.

  “Dreaming is the only thing you’re good at so we might as well use it,” she said.

  “I don’t really know how to make a lovezone though,” I said.

  “I guess study up at Prettyshop,” she said.

  Everyday is Valenday at Prettyshop, says Prettyshop, a mallroom where middlepoor girls bring middlepoor boys to buy them flowers, jewels, trinkets, candies, candles, crowns, fake animals, basically it’s a cozy shitscape of roses and pinkpurple plastics and blaring lovesongs. I hung out there for two days, hiding in a basket of candybelly monkeys and peering around, until a shopper uncovered me and started screaming and a salesman broomed me all the way into the street.

  That night I dreamed a Prettyworld. A rolling sunsetted garden of just a peenload of cherryblossoms and chrisandthemuns, rosebushes and daftdill vines, pinkpurple bees and birds buzzing sugary melodies like flying phones, paths of diamonds and golds twisting into little pillowhouses. Gianteyed cartooncats and bears dancing through the garden like Rushians and sprinkling you nonstop in twinkly glitter, bouncing chocolate rabbits begging you to eat them. Dusks of heartshape moons and fireworks exploding in candyshowers, dressing you in candyskin that you now must lick off each other in an uncontrolled passion.

  “It’s a little over the top, but, goodjob,” said Prayer, hiding in the Prettyworld bushes and waiting for lawstudents.

  But mostly we got tooyoung dreamers, tweens and teens like us coming in and wandering through and giggling at it, mostly girls, a few boys too. Not just middlepoor kids, plenty middlerich youngsters were floating down from High Dreamough, following the sugarsmell and flowerlight. I even saw that psycho girl Willow stroll in, rolling her eyes like how terrible is this crappy place, but also running her hands through the flowers and watching the colors change.

  I didn’t talk to her. But a few other girls I thought were intresting, I approached.

  “Hey,” I would say to a girl. “Can you keep a secret, if so here’s the secret, I’m the one dreaming all this.”

  “Yeah right,” she would say, rolling her eyes.

  “Watch, I’ll turn it blue,” I would say, and dreamed blue, and everything went cool and blue, and the girl would gasp or giggle like a maniac.

  But there were only two ways those convos could end. One, she asks what school do I go to, and something about Dreamworld makes it hurt to lie, so I just say, look, no school, because I’m littlepoor, and she’s like, oh, wow, well, okay, and trying to hide that she wants the conversation to end so I just say, bye, I’m not going to give you a disease bytheway, but whatever.

  Way Two of the convo ending is when a girl is not horrified that I’m littlepoor, instead she’s kind of impressed, but kind of like you’re impressed by a dogwaiter walking on two hindlegs in a suit with a plate balanced on his face, and so I start to hate that girl that thinks of me as a dog. So maybe we keep talking or even mash faces touchlessly in a dreamkiss, but prettysoon I say, well, that was nice, but bye, and she says, wow you’re a badboy, stalking away down the road and breaking my heart, this is the best.

  Anyway that was just for a few nights because lawstudents were not impressed by Prettyworld.

  “Holy crap, what a tacky hellzone,” they said when Prayer tried dragging them to it.

  “Is this the sad weird dreaming of the manager of a Prettyshop,” they also said.

  “Bro, it was a good try but we need something more romantic,” Prayer said. “But you’re doing great and I appreciate you.”

  Even when it’s your dumb sis, compliments feel nice, so maybe Prayer’s strategy of Always Compliment People You Want Things From isn’t the dumbest.

  • • •

  Anyway the breakthrough I had was pretty smart, but pretty sad. Because my breakthrough was, who knows the most about being in love? Usher, that’s who.

  Usher and I were sitting onenight in a Prettyworld pillowhouse, he was explaining his learnings of the day to me.

  “Today in Business Laws I learned that a person can become a corpo,” he said. “If you set it up right no one except the bank even has to know.”

  “Hmmm, you dontsay,” I said.

  “I need to look into how but basically if you’re an accountant for a big corpo, you can route the profits through a shellcorpo and say it’s for tax reasons but secretly the shellcorpo is literally just you,” he dreamed.

  “No way, that’s crazy,” I nodded, trying prettyhard to follow along but instead distracted by trying to figure out how is this place not romantic, I mean look at how freaking fluffy and twinkly everything is, those koalas are literally having an international hug festival over there.

  “I guess this is why corpos usually cage their accountants in a special prison,” realized Usher.

  “Hey can I ask you something,” I said. “How is this place not super romantic.”

  “Do you want me to be honest with you,” he said.

  “Yeah ofcourse,” I said.

  “It’s completely fake and crazy,” he said.

  “Yeah but what’s wrong with that,” I said.

  “Love feels fake when it’s in a fake place,” Usher said. “In a real place is where it feels real.”

  “Okay, but Usher, this is Dreamworld,” I said. “The whole point is you can make stuff that’s better than real.”

  Usher shrugged.

  I thought for the billionth time, dang, it must be insane and terrible for Usher to leave Dreamworld every morning, step back into Palsyworld.

  “I mean what’s good that’s real,” I said.

  “One good real thing is, it’s nice to look at things from up high,” said Usher. “So maybe one of the best real
things would be if you could get up really high somewhere where you could look at all of Lossy Indica.”

  “Ohsnap,” I said, realizing, that’s an obviously great idea.

  “That’s probably where I would take someone I loved, if I could,” he said.

  Obviously he meant Prayer, I knew it, he knew I knew it.

  So it was a crap jerk peen move to take Usher’s idea of a perfect date with Prayer and instead create it for random lawstudents. But that’s what I did. Because look, that was the whole reason we left the beach and traveled to stupid law school in the first place.

  Here’s what I did. I dreamed a family of moons, lemony glowing moons the size of a car or boat, each with a tackedon ropenet hammock swaying underneath, and I floated in one hammock under one moon and Prayer floated in another, and hers swooped down dreamyslow to the windows of the lecturehall.

  Lecturehall was where lawstudents dreamed themselves a lot of the time, super bored or anxious, sometimes also naked. So there they were, tumbling and fretting and lazing around, and then Prayer appeared to them through the window murmuring, “Who would like to come with me and see the city tonight,” and a few guys perked up and said me me I do, even though they recognized her, even a couple bullies. So she picked one named Glen. He was thin and quiet and not super mean, and he stepped out the window and into the hammock, and up up up the moons all drifted into the Lossy Indica nightsky.

  It’s not so hard to fly in dreams. The hard part is seeing anything faraway. The higher you get the harder it is, the more details you need to dream. So basically I was dreaming super hard to make the whole glittering city visible from cloudheight, all the streets parks suburbs slums, all the scales of house and street. All of Lossy Indica. Dockseye, Sentrow, Sandy Barb, Sacrament, Laura Cannon, Wet Almanac, Eat Almanac, the Dreamoughs.

  I even tried to dream the bigrich palacezone of Balustrade, on the coast up to the north, I’ve seen the enormous freaking houses from newsvids so I just planted a few on the beach with a couple rich giants rambling around.

  It was a lot but I did okay and when I drifted over to Prayer’s moon, invisibling myself, it did actually sound like she was having her first real convo with a lawstudent that wasn’t just the game of Humiliate Prayer With The Power Of Lawarguments.

  “So, I see you around sometimes and I do wonder about you, ofcourse, like where you even came from,” I heard Glen say.

  “Well I lived by the beach for a year, right dowwwwwwn there, if you can see it, but I left because I wanted to meet more educated people,” I heard Prayer say, and I dreamed the beach glowing a pulse like hereIam, I’m the beach where Prayer lived.

  “You’re full of surprises, I have to tell you,” I heard Glen say.

  “What I wonder is if you can surprise me,” I heard Prayer say, and that’s when I got out of there.

  Obviously Glen didn’t know that it was my dreaming, not Prayer’s. He didn’t even know I was there. But someone else from law school did.

  His name was Chess and he had stowawayed in another moonhammock, and as my moon drifted close to his, he caught me looking down and dreaming out some mountainsides.

  “Aha, are you the one dreaming this magnificent view,” he said all low and frummy.

  “Oh,” I said. “Uh, no. It’s my sis Prayer.”

  “Oh,” he said. “You’re just tagging along.”

  That was an infuriating thing to agree to so I said, “Well, look. We’re splitting the dream halfandhalf. Half me, half her.”

  “Wow, you two must be quite close if you can dream in tandumb like that,” he said.

  “Okay fine, it’s a hundredpercent me, zeropercent her,” I said, because lying in Dreamworld makes you heartsick. “But don’t tell Glen or anyone because, being totally honest with you, everyone at law school has been a peen to her until prettymuch this exact moment.”

  “I won’t tell anyone, just keep giving me this view,” said Chess, swimming his fingers through it.

  • • •

  Everynight for weeks I dreamed up a new kind of floaty skyvehicle and Prayer took a date swooping up into the night to gaze down at the winking city, not just with Glen, also with Ken, Will, Berry, Fill, Harry. Because at night here’s what happens. Each guy opens up and gets less mean, tells her stories, asks her questions, gives her compliments, but the next day that stupid guy still doesn’t want to be seen in an embarrassing Lifeanddeathworld convo with tiny cantread homeless Prayer, so the next night she gets frustrated and tries a different guy, or goes back to a guy from a few nights ago, hoping he misses her, and surprise surprise, he does, but only at night, and in the day again he won’t.

  I didn’t know whether Prayer and any of them got to the point of a full-on bangdream and no way did I ask.

  Meanwhile this guy Chess kept hanging out with me.

  “You’re a nice guy, not a jerk at all,” I said early on. “What do you think of my cute sis.”

  “She is genuinely lovely, I mean that, but how do I put this, she’s just not my type,” he said.

  It took me a while to figure that out and then my skin got prickly and I said, “Oh.”

  I must have sounded awkward or worried because he looked at me and said in mockniceness, “Oh for shitsake, Warner, it’s fine. I like men, not boys. How old are you? Twelve?”

  “Fourteen,” I said.

  “Well, what I’m telling you is, don’t flatter yourself,” he said.

  “Don’t worry, I’m not weird about that stuff,” I said, trying not to be weird. “I knew some gayboys growing up.”

  “It is definitely time to change this subject,” said Chess.

  But honestly, and I know this is wrong to think of gaymen but I can’t help it, I stayed a little suspicious of him. It was along the reasoning of, guys his age were going on dates with Prayer and she was only a yearandahalf older than me, so why wouldn’t a gayman want to date teenage me. Basically I just suspect all men of wanting to date teenagers, because, you see them trying to do it all the time.

  So a night or two later I asked him why he kept chilling with me.

  “Because I enjoy your dreams, ofcourse,” he said.

  “Why,” I said.

  “They’re just very rich,” he said. “Very different from anyone else’s.”

  “Huh,” I said.

  “Believe me, they’d have to be pretty remarkable to get me to spend this much time with a fourteenyearold boy,” he said.

  “What does that mean,” I said.

  “You’re not the most gifted or intresting conversational partner,” he said.

  “Neither are you,” I said, hopefully hurtfully.

  “I actually am,” he said.

  Anyway I got better and faster at dreaming the skyview of Lossy Indica, and I added extra dreamstuff for me and Chess to enjoy. Nightfish, starbirds, moonbats. Fireworks blushing up at us from below. Clouds made spooky by lights inside, tiny wildfires and fireflies, bright wires like lightbulb linings. Faint faraway fields of moss and flowers as big as half of everything, out behind the stars.

  I had to keep the extra dreamstuff away from Prayer’s part of the sky because she kept saying, hey, these extra crazy things are not helpfull to my date, in the sense of, they are super distracting and also I have to explain to a guy, here’s why I chose this specific moment to dream a string of golden murmuring butterflybats.

  I got to enjoy Chess being there, my skin stopped prickling, it was nice to have a fan.

  “The best yet,” he said everynight. “Wow. Delightfull. Amazing. Sumpchewus. You’re a prodedgy.”

  “I’m okay,” I said. “I’m surprised at how no one is as good as me at dreaming stuff, because it’s not that hard.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I know you wanted to sound humble with that, but that actually wasn’t humble at all.”

  “I’m just being honest,” I said.

  Onenight though Chess snuck in a couple super frummy friends.

  “Ohmygod, this is the best drea
m I’ve had since I was a kid,” one of them said, cradled by the tentacles of a skysquid.

  “You are a psycho,” the other one told me. “Literally, I love how much of a psycho this kid is.”

  “Chess what the heck,” I said. “I told you not to tell people.”

  “They won’t tell anyone, I promise,” he said, but by then I knew you could never trust this pearlyskin middlerich or his golden friends.

  “If any of Prayer’s dates find out, these dreams are over because there’s no point anymore, so, I would recommend that you maybe be more aware of that,” I said.

  “I know, I know,” he said, giggling from the ticklings of a rainbow of doggypaddling shrimp.

  “And also it will ruin Prayer’s best chance at happiness,” I said.

  “Yes yes I know,” he said. “Wheeeee.”

  “Not that you care about what happens to littlepoor kids,” I said, losing control a little and the shrimp blew up pretty big and really started clawing him, not that he could actually feel it, he just felt like he could feel it.

  “Okay, I get it,” he said, thrashing around a little.

  “We’re just dreamstuff to you, like this stupid shrimp,” I said to make sure he got it.

  “I said I get it,” he yelled.

  I let the shrimps get heavy, puff and fill like waterballoons, dive down at the city like bombs. We watched them burst and drench palmtrees and apartmentblocks, the big drops break on the doublescale condos, the little drops scatter onto the quarterscale tenamints.

  “Warner,” he said after a while. “Honestly, though, I mean what do you think is really going to happen between your sister and my classmates.”

  I realized I didn’t really want to think about it too hard because deep down, totally honest with myself, I wasn’t hopefull.

  “I think the dates are going well right now, so, who can say, and overall nothing is certain and everything is possible, so, bottomline, who knows,” I said.

  We left it at that.

  • • •

  The next morning Prayer had exciting news.

  “But first I have to tell you I don’t know if the squids are the best datemobile,” she said. “Ingeneral I think you got it right the first time with hammockmoons and I don’t know if you need to keep experimenting around because it’s getting super weird.”