And then it happened. The drip. (With apologies to Being John Malkovich)

    Sometime during my daydreaming in class I'd noticed that the ceiling wall was discolored. But on the way out of class, Miss Helen (her real name) asked me to stay behind I was worried she was going to ask me about my project but that wasn't it. She pointed to the tile. It was dripping water pretty fast. 

    "You're tall, Paolo-can you stand on a chair and reach that drip-let's see what's going on if we take the tile off." 

    I was happy to do something physical-maybe it was sitting around all the time that was getting to me. So I got on the chair. Stretched out my arm. Popped the tile and whoosh I was gone. 

    I was in someone else's mind. I guess I was in her body too. I'm still not too sure how it works. I know it was a she because she was writing in her diary and when she closed it said her name "Margie Jones" But here's the weird thing, as if being in somebody else's brain wasn't weird enough. She started her entry with a date and the date was-2155. Man, I'd be dead by then, I thought. Way dead, since I was born in 1984. 

    I could read what she was writing just like she could I guess. But I could also think what she was thinking-I could read her mind. What she wrote was "Today Tommy found a real book." That's all she wrote. Her thoughts were hard to keep track of. They came in a big rush. What I could sort of pull together and remember later went something like this. It's not so much the way she thought but the way I remembered her thinking: 

    "Wish I'd read the words instead of just turning the pages. Yellow crinkly pages. Words stay still, don't change, don't move, don't do anything. Just sit there. What do you do once you have read them? Throw away the thing? But this thing wasn't wasn't thrown away. Tommy says it was in his attic. So someone saved it. In a box or something. Had to start school. Mother wouldn't let us just sit and look at the thing. Even though it was much more interesting than school . Well, anything would be but this was really really interesting. It was mega! It was warptime! It was the first time I'd ever seen anything like that. Why do I always have to start school at the same time? Because Mother says so is why. Because she says little girls learn better if they learn at regular hours. As if I were still little at age eleven with my boobs showing already." 

    Then it was whoosh and I suddenly found myself on my rear end in a place I didn't recognize at first. There were shelves on either side. Shelves of books. So I knew at least it wasn't 2155 any more. I was sitting on a carpet. It smelled a little dusty or musty in a vaguely familiar way. I got up and walked to the end of the shelves and there I was in the school library where I never go except when some teacher drags us there. I was dazed and confused all right but not like the movie.  More like some other movie, a science fiction one.

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