Part 1

When I was young girl I thought everyone would become another person when they were asleep.

I would see myself in a huge old house, never any plastic, never any telephones… never any pokemon. Sometimes I would see glimpses of my own face in a mirror, but I always wore strange white dresses. Any time my name was called, I was named Cecelia.

It wasn’t a dream. I had dreams also, and I knew what they were like. Sometimes I had dreams, and sometimes I became Cecelia. Then when I was still very young, it all stopped.

When I was older I managed to convince myself they were dreams after all, dreams of a rich life to make up for my poverty. But then I became Cecelia again, in the worst of circumstances.

I was traveling with James and Meowth. We had given up on stealing Pikachu and were hoping to do something better for the Boss when we came across Ash and Misty, purely by accident for once. They had lost Brock and were very concerned. After the inevitable jokes about which Officer Jenny or Nurse Joy he had run off with, we began taking them a little seriously.

Then it dawned on me that they were hinting that we should help them. I couldn’t believe it.

“Look, you kids can’t find your friend, that’s your problem!” I started to walk away, and gestured to James and Meowth to follow me.

James wouldn’t follow. “For heaven’s sake, Jesse, try caring about someone besides yourself for once!”

I glared at him. He’s not supposed to speak to me like that. “You want to follow these twerps around after all they’ve done to us, go ahead.”

I asked Meowth why he cared what happened to Brock. He just shrugged. “When people disappear, you look for them, that’s all.”

“You want to spend a few days with that pikachu?”

Meowth shrugged again. “Whatever.”

Meowth and James still wouldn’t agree with me, and I didn’t want to troop through the woods on my own, so I went with them. I complained constantly, just to remind everyone that they shouldn’t have expected this of me.

It was already dark when we met up with them, and no one knew how safe it was there, so we had to stop soon and set up camp. It was that night that it began again.

It was daytime there. I was sitting in front of a mirror, and I could see that I was dressed in some strange old-fashioned dress, and my hair was piled on top of my head. I knew I was Cecelia again.

Suddenly I realized there was someone else in the room. It was a woman about my age, but her clothing was much simpler. She looked at me and asked “Will there be anything else, ma’am?”

So Cecelia had a maid. She was better off than me for certain.

I shook my head.

I began looking around the room. I had seldom had time to look around in my short strange visits as a child. There was a pitcher of water in a bowl. It hit me that I was certainly in a different time, a time without sinks, a time when women had their own maids to wait on them.

Suddenly I noticed a small book on a table. When I opened it I saw that it was a diary. I began reading the first entry.

“I have admitted to myself that I love Mr. D______. What a miserable creature I shall be, as I have nothing to interest him.”

This woman sounded absolutely pathetic. Nothing to interest a man, with my looks (evidently) and money too! I read on.

“I feel lately as if I am letting go of life.”

I began to become frightened. Could I somehow end up in this woman’s life, instead of my own?

Just then I opened my eyes, and it was nighttime again and I was on the ground in a sleeping bag near James. The kids were sleeping nearby.

I turned to James. “Wake up!” I said.

He stirred and looked at me sleepily. “What’s your problem?” he snapped.

“You don’t need to yell at me, I just want to talk to you!”

His face softened. “Well, that’s a change anyway. Is something wrong?”

“Do you ever wish you were someone else?”

He looked at me quizzically. “Sometimes I wish I were someone smarter.”

“I’m serious,” I protested.

“Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like to be what my parents wanted me to be… not to be married to Jessiebelle, I know what that would be like. But if I were rich, and could just hang around and be lord of the manor like my father, I wonder about that.”

“Well, that’s our main goal, isn’t it James? To get rich.”

“Yeah. I still couldn’t handle being like my dad though.”

“Well, you’re better off as you are,” I said.

He smiled; he seemed to like that.

“You’re O.K. too,” he replied.

I didn’t feel like I could really tell James what I was going through, but I felt better when he said that. Earlier, he had told me to “think about someone else for once.” Maybe he didn’t think I was that bad after all.

He continued to look at me. “So, where do you think Brock is?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t think it has to do with a girl, or he’d have said something. Either something bad happened to him, or it’s something more complicated than a girl.”

James grinned. “Some girls are pretty complicated.”

“You’re remembering the Ghost?” I asked.

James blushed, but he shook his head.

Finally I turned over and tried to go back to sleep.