Exposure, part one

Because I am having a frustrating evening, I'm looking through old notebooks and looking for something to type up. I find that things usually improve every time you run them through a typewriter keyboard, so there is at least some scope for creativity. Let us hope that this is the case tonight.

Ah. Something from November, 2000. Hmm. Must have been reading Harry Potter. I don't think we discovered him until about that year.

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      We began with the easy stuff, the things we already knew how to do comfortably--the findings, the fetchings, the pulling of the unexpected out of any hat. Points off for rabbits. Originality counts, they said.
     That lasted for an hour. By then, the tension that had built up over the last six months of studying and sweating over fifty new charms, spells, potions, and apparitions had worn off. We decided that the schedule had been planned this way to avoid unfortunate lapses of concentration due to nerves when we began the conjuring section of the exam. An instant of flagging attention and POOF! your lab partner turns into an orange cocker spaniel with fangs.
     We all took long drinks from our water bottles, made our last trips to the bathroom, dried our palms off against our lab coats, and got down to business. We turned over our test papers.

                      Assignment: Take a good hard look at the person sitting next to you.
                                           Conjure a representation of their most closely held dream using
                                           only your heart.
                                           No talking.

     A flutter of surprise and confusion passed through the classroom. This certainly hadn't been in the syllabus.
     Then came the protests: I don't want anyone to see my dream! Invasion of privacy! Ew! I don't want to know what he/she/it dreams about! Are the professors are going to see?
     Oh my. And I thought I was nervous before.
     I was sitting next to Minka Wells, the biggest mouth in the school. I looked at the instructions again. The person sitting next to you. No mention of left or right. Did that mean we had a choice?
     I glanced to my left. Harbley Raynor. Worse and worse. Harbley was probably the biggest non-entity in the school, and I do mean the biggest. He had to be at least six foot five and pushing 300 pounds. Hard to miss, you would think. But it was as though he didn't exist. He surely walked the halls and on his way to classes like the rest of us. He surely ate in the dining hall and went on the field trips, but something about him deflected attention, and no one could ever say whether he'd been there or not. If they even remembered to think about him. How could you see into his heart when you barely noticed his towering body?
     Who would I choose? Or...who would choose me?
     Would I rather be exposed to the town crier or to the vacuum?

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     That's all for now. There's actually more of this one...sort of a first draft sketch. I think I wrote this sitting in a beach chair on a camping trip. More tomorrow night.