Ever Read Online Free PDF

mouth open in another huge yawn in the mirror. It was past four in the morning. I crawled into my bed, snuggled under the covers and fell into a dreamless sleep.

CHAPTER FIVE
    Energy Smoke
    W hen I woke up, just a few hours later, I felt energized, as though I had slept for days. I noticed that again, I had awakened exactly three minutes before my alarm was set to go off. What was it about 6:47 a.m. anyway? I took a good look at the palm of my hand and was relieved to see that the shimmery glow was nearly gone. I was relieved. Maybe I had flipped out for no reason.
    I went through the usual motions of getting ready for school. As I pulled on my leggings, I took special care to avoid brushing against the bruise on my knee. Here again, was something strange. I could have sworn I had a huge bruise on my knee after banging it on my car door yesterday afternoon. But now, as I inspected both of my legs, there was no trace of an injury.
    For a moment, I was reminded of a story I read. The main character experienced blocks of missing time and confusion when things did not appear to be as she had remembered. It turned out that she had multiple personality disorder. Great. It would totally make sense that I was developing some kind of psychological disorder. How else could I explain all the weird things that were happening? I had conveniently blocked out my math test and maybe I was hallucinating or something.
    I guess it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if I was going crazy. Being psycho would catapult me into automatic popularity among a large faction of the student body—the Goths. They were a few steps ahead of the Outcasts, even though they idolized suicide and carried around copies of Final Exit and lethal doses of their antidepressants in their backpacks. But…if I didn’t have a mental illness, what else could account for the unexplainable things that had been happening to me lately?
    That morning, as I drove down the hill to school, the thought of smoking my morning cigarette made me ill again. I rolled down the window and noticed the hint of pine and ocean salt in the air. When I got to school, I discovered that changing my morning routine wasn’t the only thing that was different this morning—I walked into class without a trace of anxiety.
    MacFarlane liked to hand back our graded exams the very next day. He organized the stack of exams by score, highest first. This way, everyone in the class knew who scored the highest…and the lowest. The practice was humiliating for those of us who struggled with math.
    I was usually riddled with nerves the day after one of MacFarlane’s tests. Today, while I did feel a strange undercurrent of energy humming through me, I couldn’t really label it as anxiety. In fact, I couldn’t really label it at all, but it wasn’t unpleasant. Perhaps it was because I knew my score—I had failed right? I still had no recollection of finishing the test. All I had to do was wait for the humiliation that was sure to come.
    Mr. MacFarlane strode to the center of the room, brandishing the stack of tests like a weapon. “Let me start by saying that I am extremely disappointed in the midterm scores,” he droned. His eyes lingered on me as he scanned the sea of worried faces. I knew my name wouldn’t be called until the end.
    Probably last.
    I leaned down to rummage in my backpack while Mr. MacFarlane cleared his throat. Yep, distracting myself was a fabulous idea at this point. I reached for my special pen, a rollerball ink pen in medium. I had one of these in every color. Today, I felt like purple was a good choice. I loved purple. The image of a tall, stately tree with a huge branch popped into my mind. That would be a fun doodle. Trees had such different personalities.
    As I shuffled around, my body draped to the side across my desk, I became aware that the obnoxious Cheerleader across from me was glaring at me.
    “Psst!” she said.
    I looked back at her, taking in her perfectly