Bree’s words shook me out of my reverie. “Huh?”

“We’re thinking of going to the auditorium after school,” Vik explained. “To actually read from the Necronomicon.”

“Wait, you have it here?” I asked.

“Mother and Father won’t miss it. They’re not getting home until seven tonight.”

“I bet Vik a good five bucks that nothing’s going to happen,” Bree smirked confidently. “And no matter what happens, I bet it’s going to get interesting.”

My life’s been divided into one hour chunks, I thought. Class, class, class, forty minutes for lunch, class, class, class. Go home. Do homework. Eat dinner and try not to talk to my parents as they try not to understand me. Then try to amuse myself by reading or countless other empty activities before going to sleep. Then wake up, go to school, class, class, class…

It would do me good to mix things up a bit. Even if it meant staying at school longer than I had to.

“Why not?” I decided nonchalantly. “Right after school?”

“Yeah, I’ll see—” Vik was cut off as the shrill ring of the bell crashed into our conversation.

He sighed laboriously and glanced down the hall. “I’m sorry, I’ve got to go. Spanish… ugh, we’ve got a quiz on the perfect tense. I’ll see you guys in third period, okay?”

“See you there, Vik!” called Bree as he disappeared around the corner.

We had to hurry, too—English class for us, and I didn’t want to miss a minute of it. I knew a lot of people my age hated reading, but I’d always loved getting lost in the romance of the old days.

~*~*~*~

I’d read A Midsummer Night’s Dream a million and two times. Every time I read it was just as magical and strange as the first. But that day, in English class, I found myself drifting off. Faeries and magic, love and destiny… it was all so wonderful, yet all so distant from me. So unlike my own dull world. It was a sweet dream, like the one that kept fluttering around in my head with the gumption of a newborn butterfly.

Absentmindedly, I pulled out a clean sheet of paper and tried to imagine the boy from my dream on it. It was harder now, hours away from the land of sleep. The image came back to me, though, when Mrs. Phillips started rambling on about mythology in Shakespeare.