Every morning I ran through the park. One morning, I met a nixie who lived in the dog pond. She had— Simon Lewis paused to consult his Cthonian/English dictionary for the word for “blond”—there was no entry. Apparently words relating to hair color were a nonissue for creatures of the demon dimensions. Much like, he’d discovered, words relating to family, friendship, or watching TV. He chewed his eraser, sighed, then bent over the page again. Five hundred words on how he spent his summer was due to his Cthonian teacher by morning and after an hour of work he had written approximately . . . thirty. She had hair. And— —an enormous rack. “Just trying to help,” Simon’s roommate George Lovelace said, reaching over Simon’s shoulder to scrawl in an ending to the sentence. “And failing miserably,” Simon said, but he couldn’t suppress a grin. He’d missed George this summer, more than he had expected to.
