I am so scared I could scream, but when I open my mouth nothing happens, and I wonder if you fall forever and ever and never touch down, is it really still falling? I think I will fall forever. A noise punctuates the silence, a thin bleating growing louder and louder until it is like a scythe of metal slicing the air, slicing into me— Then I wake up. My alarm has been blaring for twenty minutes. It’s six fifty A.M. I sit up in bed, pushing away the comforter. I’m covered with sweat even though my room is cold. My throat is dry and I’m desperate for water, like I’ve just been running a long way. For a second when I look around the room everything seems fuzzy and slightly distorted, like I’m not really looking at my room but only at a transparency of my room that’s been laid down incorrectly so the corners don’t match up with the real thing. Then the light shifts and everything looks normal again. All at once it comes back to me, and blood starts pounding in my head: the party, Juliet Sykes, the argument with Kent— “Sammy!”
