There were large groups of girl students. The administration from a competing school was trying to accomplish something. We spread the news that for each individual in one school, they should be paired with someone from the other school, and then invented the buddy system. I was in the backyard of a childhood home, and there was a swingset. I reminisced with my mother about why she’d let us have plastic balls to play with, like the kind you could buy from Walmart, as they were such a hassle, and ended up dirty or unplayed with. We noted that there were pools of dirty water from previous rain at the start of the slides, and the balls would roll in them. I met my competitor and we were training to kill each successive replacement. The house was for sale. My competitor, when I made myself known, was a larger “kid” than I was, with an unbothered air, and they ran across several states, and I looked at a map that showed the United States but reminded me of Alaska, with the states that they ran through lit up white on a grey-beige background. The yard had a valley into a creek, but was green. There was a point at which I was lingering around a lecture, where the female students were grouped, and I felt as though I was staff, or a lifeguard. The students were in college, but I worked there, as a kind of student leader. The buddy system was intended to protect the students from the real threat, sexual assault, while the administration was warring over the trivial competition between them.