𝔐𝔬𝔦𝔯𝔞𝔦𝔬 - 𝔉𝔢𝔪𝔒ℭ𝔵𝔏𝔢𝔬 𝔙𝔞𝔩𝔡𝔢𝔷

2. I watch knitting with my life

I was used to the occasional weird experience, so was Percy, but they usually were over with quickly. But this twenty-four/seven hallucination was more than we could handle. For the rest of the school year, the entire campus seemed to be playing a trick on us. Percy was the only other person who was there when it happened, and remembered Mrs. Dodds. The other students acted as if they were completely and totally convinced that Mrs.Kerr— a perky blond woman whom my brother and I have 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 would spring a Mrs. Dodds reference on someone, just to see if he could get them to mess up and confess. But that would end in them staring at him like he was psycho.

It was so bad, I almost started to believe them— Mrs. Dodds had never existed.

Almost.

But Grover couldn't fool me or Percy. When either of us would mention the name Mrs. 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.

We didn't have much time to think about it during the day, but at night, visions of Mrs. Dodds with talons and leathery wings would haunt me. I'd wake up in a cold sweat.

The weird weather continued, which didn't help my mood. One night, a thunderstorm blew out the windows in my dorm room and Percy's.  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 was the weird and unusual amount of small planes that had gone down in sudden squalls in the Atlantic that year.

I started feeling tired and angry most of the time. I could tell Percy was feeling more and more upset as we continued the school year. While my grades slipped from all As to As with Bs, Percy's dropped from Ds to Fs. We got into fights with Nancy Bobofit and her friends more often than before, it seemed like my anger issues seemed to get worse the farther we got through the year. Meanwhile I was yelling at Nancy, Percy was sent into the hallway in almost every class.

Finally, when our English teacher, Mr.Nicoll asked my brother for the millionth time why he was too lazy to study for spelling tests, Percy snapped. He called the teacher an old sot. I didn't even know if Percy knew what the word meant. I on the other hand, knew the words I called Nancy, they were not something a twelve year-old should not be saying.

The headmaster sent our mom a letter the following week, making it official; neither of us would be invited back to Yancy Academy the next year.

Fine, I told myself. Just fine.

Percy seemed to do the same.

We were both homesick.

We wanted to be with our mom in our little apartment on the Upper East Side, even if we had to go to public school and put up with our obnoxious step-father and his stupid poker parties.

And there were some things we'd miss at Yancy. Percy said he'd miss the view out of the Hudson River in the distance, I said I would miss the view of the woods out my dorm window and the smell of pine it emitted. We both agreed we would miss Grover, who had been a good friend to us, even if he was a little strange sometimes. I wondered how he'd survive next year without me.

I knew Percy would miss Latin class too— Mr. Brunner's crazy tournament days and his faith that we would do well.

The evening before our final, Percy got so frustrated that he threw our study book Cambridge Guide to Greek Mythology across my dorm room. I knew the words has started swimming off the page for him. He started to pace the room, he was claimed get he was feeling like ants were crawling around inside his shirt.