She got home and her stepmother was yelling at someone on the phone.  Irene's face was beet red, livid, and she was cursing foulness with every other word. Toby was nowhere to be seen, gone from his usual encampment in front of the television. 

Sarah tried to sneak around the stepmother as quietly as possible as spittle flew from her screaming face into the phone's receiver. A bill with a flash of suspiciously red text was in her hand. 
Irene looked at Sarah indignantly and Sarah disappeared up the stairs. 

From the hysterical yelling, Sarah gleaned that it was her father being yelled at by the evil harpy, whose prospects were obviously drying up (wasn't Chad clear enough evidence?) and who was getting hers while the getting was good. Robbing the cradle and Sarah’s father simultaneously. 
Sarah felt her own internal thermometer rising. How dare the Irene yell at her Daddy, only two days home from the hospital. She wanted to grab the phone out of her hand and end the conversation, slamming it down on the both of them. 

How could they even get married in the first place if they had any inkling they would one day act like this towards each other? They were worse than infants. 

She wanted to pack her suitcase immediately and drive up to Daddy's and never come back. Forget Toby or any of her belongings. Forget community college! She could work. Her brain burrowed wildly through the possibilities. She didn't have to go to Daddy's. Not Mom's though, that dream had been dead for what seemed a thousand years. She was free to do what she wanted! 

She could just drive and keep on driving until there was a town where she didn't know anybody, where there was no family and no college and certainly no Seth. 

But what kind of job could she get, realistically? A factory in a small town where there weren't even enough office buildings to outnumber the farms? She had no skills save the ability to read a ton of books. The car was technically the Irene's because it was Irene who had bought and made payments on it. 

There was nothing Sarah could do except sob into her pillow, and she knew enough about that already. She could call Seth and he would be over within seconds. With him would come temporary escape, a movie or a long drive, but with it came the inevitable pressure, his endgame to have her all to himself. 

She opened her old diary, thinking that she would re-read some old accounts of her past misery or maybe even write some new ones. Instead, she found herself writing about a character who was like her in ways but fundamentally different in others, a character who existed in a parallel future universe.

She was scribbling words into the poor beaten-up diary an hour and a half later, a crazy story about a spaceship in the year 2410. Her hand was cramped and tired. She re-read the weird story and though rationally she wanted to dismiss it as nonsense, a part of her felt it would be wrong not to continue. Even though she had not read her Tolstoy and was officially behind, she felt good for the first time in a long time. 

She hadn't even noticed that the contentious phone conversation between Daddy and his soon to be ex-wife had ended. 

The house was quiet again. 

That night she dreamed lovely dreams about her future-world where she lived on a verdant planet of trees and glowing white oceans. She inhabited the Great Hall where she could gaze upon three huge moons riding the sky of black and cobalt. She was at total peace, able to sense the magic all around her as if she were a monk who had devoted a lifetime to meditation. She did not long for Jareth uncontrollably, though he did exist in the glittering map of stars stretching beyond the moons in their glorious phases.

She felt so good about the positive turn of the previous day that she called Seth the next morning and let him take her out for dinner. He was delighted to see her. He was wearing his new shirt and tie, the fedora, and a pair of faded, baggy pleated pants. The combination was slightly better than his usual, but still ridiculous. She told him he looked nice. They went to an Italian restaurant.

"I wish I could order wine."

"I could order some and give it to you."

"No! That's illegal. Next time I'll have to remember my fake ID is all."

"Fake IDs are illegal, Seth."

"I know, Sarah." His brown eyes met her green ones and she felt butterflies escape her solar plexus. Seth truly was sexy.

"My Dad says that wine helps cut the heaviness of the pasta."

"How is your Dad?"

"Not so great. My hag stepmother was yelling at him on the phone about money. He's just days out of chemo."

"Is it working?"

"Honestly? No. I don't think so."

"Just give it time. It'll work eventually."

"How do you know?"

"My Aunt Delores had cancer. She died last year."

"Of what?"

"Cancer."

"I don't get you, Seth."

"Well, she was in remission for a long time." 

Sarah rolled her eyes. Seth was always saying stupid things. It was as if he liked to hear the sound of his own voice.

"Do you want to go to a ball?"

"What?" A flash of memory invaded her mind, the ghost image of herself after eating a poisoned peach, clad in a ball gown like Cinderella, dancing with her dark Prince. 

"They're throwing a masquerade ball for a charity my mom's involved with. It's either for starving children or diabetes, I forget.

"Starving children or diabetes. Ironic, isn't it?" She quipped.

"What's ironic? So you wanna go to it?"

"Sure."

The peaceful dream of her lunar sci-fi palace did not return the next night, or the week after. It was replaced. 

The weekly Sunday drive to her father's condominium was a long one. Saturday’s dream haunted her as she merged onto the melancholic stretch of highway, the sleet-colored road unfurling under a sky of mottled chalcedony. 

She hated being haunted by her dreams. She had dreamed (of course) that Jareth had kissed her instead of Seth. 

It wasn't so much of a dream as a replay of the kiss with a different person: she and Jareth in Seth's room, their feet submerged in the Rice-A-Roni carpeting. Jareth's lips were dry and rough like antique lace. Jareth's shirt had been no more than rags under which his poor chest was emaciated and bony. She had caressed him tenderly, like a mother, and his pleading voice had implored her not to leave him ever again, ever. 

But dreams always ended and leaving could not be helped.

The dream had been especially disturbing. Jareth had been pale and fragile, nothing like the dominating riding-boots clad monster she had known in the Labyrinth. He was thin and wasting. Seth’s room was both his room and a dripping undergroud dungeon at once in that strange way of dreams. 

Was this some Cassandra-complex garbage dredged up by her subconscious because of her guilt that she couldn't help her Daddy in his cancer battle? 

Probably. 

Didn't she have enough pain in her life without her subconscious joining in the torture sessions?