Top of the World

II. Three Old Ladies Knit For The Dead

Percy and I were used to the occasional weird experience, but usually they were over quickly. This twenty-four/seven hallucination was more than he and I could handle. For the rest of the school year, the entire campus seemed to be playing some kind of trick on us. The students acted as if they were completely and totally convinced that Mrs. Kerr - a perky blonde woman whom we'd never seen in our lives until she got on our bus at the end of the field trip - had been our pre-algebra teacher since Christmas.

Every so often Percy and I would spring a Mrs. Dodds reference on somebody, just to see if we could trip them up, but they would stare at us like we were psycho.

It got so we almost believed them - Mrs. Dodds had never existed. Almost.

But Grover couldn't fool us. When Percy or I mentioned the name Dodds to him, he would hesitate, then claim she didn't exist. But we knew he was lying.

Something was going on. Something had happened at the museum.

Percy and I didn't have much time to think about it during the days, but at night, visions of Mrs. Dodds with talons and leathery wings would wake us up in a cold sweat. Sometimes I ran to Percy's room to seek his comfort and we'd be up half the night trying to forget what we'd seen. It never worked.

The freak weather continued, which didn't help our moods. One night, a thunderstorm blew out the windows in our dorm rooms. A few days later, the biggest tornado ever spotted in the Hudson Valley touched down only fifty miles from Yancy Academy. One of the current events we studied in social studies class was the unusual number of small planes that had gone down in sudden squalls in the Atlantic that year.

Percy and I started feeling cranky and irritable most of the time. Our grades slipped from Ds to Fs. He and I got into more fights with Nancy Bobofit and her friends. We were sent out into the hallway in almost every class.

Finally, when our English teacher, Mr. Nicoll, asked us for the millionth time why we were too lazy to study for spelling tests, Percy snapped. He called him an old sot. I figured he wasn't even sure what it meant, I didn't either, but it sounded good.

The headmaster sent our moms a letter the following week, making it official: Percy and I would not be invited back next year to Yancy Academy.

Fine, we told ourselves. Just fine. We were homesick.

Percy and I wanted to be with our moms in our little apartments on the Upper East Side, even if we had to go to public school and he had to put up with his obnoxious stepfather and his stupid poker parties.

And yet... there were things we'd miss at Yancy. The view of the woods out out dorm window, the Hudson River in the distance, the smell of pine trees. We'd miss Grover, who'd been a good friend, even if he was a little strange. Percy and I worried how he'd survive next year without us.

We'd miss Latin class, too - Mr. Brunner's crazy tournament days and his faith that we could do well. He was the only one who ever believed in us.

As exam week got closer, Latin was the only test we studied for. We hadn't forgotten what Mr. Brunner had told us about this subject being life-and-death for us. I wasn't sure why, but I'd started to believe him, and I knew Percy had too.

The evening before my final, I got so frustrated I threw the Cambridge Guide to Greek Mythology across my dorm room. Words had started swimming off the page, circling my head, the letters doing one-eighties as if they were riding skateboards. There was absolutely no way I was going to remember the difference between Chiron and Charon, or Polydictes and Polydeuces. And conjugating those Latin verbs? Forget it. Useless.

I picked up my book and made my way to Percy's dorm room.

"You too?" he asked.

I nodded. "Yeah. I was think- What are you doing?"