"Just write a book" they said. "It'll be easy," they said, "Everyone gets published these days." Yeah, well, it's a little harder when your editors are gods that will turn you into a gecko and use you as a ping pong ball if you don't write them exac...
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THE REST OF THAT NIGHT WAS A HAZE. Somehow other kids showed up to drag Percy and Grover inside the farm house. I guess Princess Girl or Horse Brunner went to get them. I stumbled inside. It looked like a massive nurse's office. Lines of cots were on each sides of the room, with little night stands next to them. One of the kids pointed to one and told me to lay down.
"Are you all half animal?" I asked.
The kid just told me to lay down again, so I did.
Despite the fact that it was only a cot it felt like the most comfortable bed I had ever laid in. Somehow, I was both exhausted and buzzing with energy. My eyes burnt with desperation for sleep. Yet every time I closed them, fear kept me from actually fall asleep. It was like back at Yancy, after Mrs. Dodds. Except instead of old bat women, I kept expecting I would wake up to everyone turned into barnyard animals. So instead of sleeping, I tried to take in the room around me.
Everyone I had seen, aside from Horse Brunner, was dressed in the same orange shirts. There were a few sleeping in the other cots. I had expected typical nurses office stuff. Stuffy noses. Coughs. Headaches. Instead it was stuff like bloody bandages and black eyes. On the guy closest to me, I could make out a split lip and a broken nose. It looked like they'd been in an every-man-for-themself brawl. This realization definitely didn't help my current anxiety.
It seemed like I had laid there for an hour when someone appeared over my head. For a second I thought it was some kind of sleep hallucination. Or a ghost. Her entire appearance was washed out. She was also blonde, but it was a pale straw color compared to the gold of the others I had seen. Her eyes were big and calf-brown. They would have been sweet, but with the heavy bags under her eyes and her skin being so pale it appeared translucent, she looked half dead and the contrast only made her look eerier.
For a moment I thought she was going to eat my soul. Then she dropped a handful of something in my face. It looked like glittering sand, which made me flinch and squeeze my eyes shut. The last thing I needed right now was sand in my eyes. Instead I felt something like butterfly wings fluttering against my face.
♆
THE NEXT THING I REMEMBERED WAS THE SUN FILTERING IN THROUGH A WINDOW. I blinked and rubbed my eyes. It felt like a heavy blanket had been yanked off of me, leaving me startled out in the cold. My first instinct was to bury my face in my blanket. Then everything that had happened the night before came flooding back in. I sat up instantly. My brain seemed to sling shot even further, and if I wasn't already sitting down I might have fallen over.
