Chapter 2

A Rude Awakening

Catherine

On Friday morning, I woke up to the sound of screaming. Not the “I’m going be eaten by a monster” scream, but the “I just found the cure for all disease” type of scream. I groaned and turned over, away from the light streaming through my window and toward the center of the dorm room. There, by his desk, was one of my dorm-mates, dancing around the room in triumph.

I have two dorm-mates, William Carlson (commenly known as Willy) and Jack Gorman. We live on the third floor in room 19C. Well, actually, the dorm is made up of two separate rooms, a kitchen/dining/living area, and a pretty large bedroom that is split in half. One side is mine, while the other belongs to the boys. Since I share my room with two boys, there is a magical curtain that separates my bunk bed from the rest of the room. There is an enchantment on the curtain so it pretty much acts like a door. As long as there is someone on the inside, the curtain may not be opened by someone outside of it. But the curtain was open, so I could see, from top bunk, the commotion that was taking place in my dorm.
“What the heck are you doing?” yelled Willy. “It’s barely 4 o’clock!”
“Sorry. I just got a bit excited, that’s all,” mumbled Jack.
Well, at least now I know what’s going on, I thought to myself. That’s just so typical of Jack. I doubt he even got any sleep because he was so absorbed in his schoolwork.
“Did you have to yell?” exclaimed an exasperated Willy. “I mean, I know you’ve been working hard on this project, but unlike you, us normal people like to get as much sleep as possible, considering our first class is in two hours!”

That’s when I made the executive decision to get down from my bed and stop this fight before someone got punched, kicked, cut, or turned into a frog.
“All right, all right! At this rate, you guys will wake up the whole building!” I said to them as I climbed down from my bed. “And anyway, what’s the point of this? We all know that you two can go back and forth like this for hours and still not make any progress.” The two boys looked at each other and shrugged. I had made a pretty valid point.
“Sorry, Catherine. I guess at least we have a head start at the day,” mumbled Willy halfheartedly.
“Exactly. So how about we start getting ready for the day?” I scolded teasingly.

Willy scowled but didn’t bother arguing. “I’ll get the books.” he mumbled.

“And I’ll get the coffee!!!” shout Jack a tad bit to inthusiastic. Oh, and some snacks I suppose.”

On that note, we each went our separate ways, all of us working together to get ready like we did every morning before school. Jack went into our little kitchen and started the coffee maker and fixed some early morning snacks while Willy searched the room and got out all of the books we would need for our first class. I took the job of finding some clean clothes for the three of us, which was easier said than done. Since we do the laundry on Sunday and today was Friday, the boys only had one pair of clean shirts each. But eventually I scavenged what I could for our clothes, although I couldn’t find any clean socks for Willy.

When all of our chores were done, we got dressed and used the extra time we had to clean up the dorm. It was just a perfectly normal start to a perfectly normal Friday. It was the least likely day for anything special or out of the ordinary to take place. Yet this Friday was special. It was when all of my troubles began.

○○○

I was just barely listening to the Mythology teacher, Mrs. Mason. The bell had only rung a few minutes ago, and we were just reviewing the quiz we had just taken yesterday. I knew I had aced it, so I wasn’t paying much attention. My day was off to a very normal start, and I really didn’t expect it to get very exciting. At least, not in this class. But when the door opened with a bang and a girl hugging a huge stack of books (none of which appearing to be textbooks for the school) sprawled in, I knew it could get interesting. She was very short and thin, petite even, and wore a plain white shirt and worn jeans. She looked like the kind of person that spent most of her time reading, because she had large glasses that didn’t fit very well on her face and pale skin. I shook my head. This kid was definitely a new student. The girl asked breathlessly, “Is this Mythology?”

There's the end of chapter 2! It's a bit short, but we figured it was good way to introduce Catherine, Jack, and Willy.