Sideways, the colors slipped past each other. I wasn’t even sure what the colors were. Well, at least I did know where they came from. It was something under a microscope my mother was sticking under my nose for me to look at.

“Mom!” I wailed. “What is it?”

“Shhh,” she murmured. “I don’t want you to judge it.

“What,” she asked, “Do you imagine when you see this?”

I thought for a moment, and then snap, the answer came to me. “Alice in Wonderland,” I whispered. “The way she falls through one world and arrives in another.”

“Anything else?”

Silence.

Alice in Wonderland. The poor girl fell down a rabbit hole and ended up in the strangest of worlds. Man, that would suck. But she coped. It took her a while, but she coped with it.

I felt like poor Alice sometimes, especially today. Like my world had been shook inside out, a shirt out of the laundry. At least Alice didn’t know a crazy boy who wore his clothes with the tags in front. A sweet boy, a weird one.

At least she wasn’t madly in love with him.