~ My Life, My Story ~: Reading Day 1

I called Ben into the room.

“Nothing,” I told him. “And I checked . . . everywhere.”

“What about her throat?” Ben said quietly. He could hear the residual rage in my voice. He got that he was talking to a crazy person and had to tread lightly. “Right before she fainted, she said her throat hurt.”

I nodded. “I looked. There’s no pellet in her, Ben.”

“Are you positive? ‘My throat hurts’ is a very weird thing for a freezing, malnourished kid to say the minute she shows up.”

He sidled over to the bed, I don’t know, maybe because he was concerned I might jump him in a moment of misplaced fury. Not that that’s ever happened. He gingerly pressed one hand to her forehead while prying her mouth open with the other. Stuck his eye close. “Hard to see anything,” he muttered.

“That’s why I used this,” I said, handing him Sam’s camp-issued penlight.

He shone the light down her throat. “It’s pretty red,” he observed.

“Right. Which is why she said it hurt.”

Ben scratched his stubble, worrying over the problem. “Not ‘help me’ or ‘I’m cold’ or even ‘resistance is futile.’ Just ‘my throat hurts.’”

I crossed my arms over my chest. “‘Resistance is futile’? Really?”

Sam was hovering in the doorway. Big brown saucer eyes. “Is she okay, Cassie?” he asked.

“She’s alive,” I said.

“She swallowed it!” Ben said. The Idea Man. “You didn’t find it because it’s in her stomach!”

“Those tracking devices are the size of a grain of rice,” I reminded him. “Why would swallowing one hurt her throat?”

“I’m not saying the device hurt her throat. Her throat has nothing to do with it.”

“Then why are you so worried about it being sore?”

“Here’s what I’m worried about, Sullivan.” He was trying very hard to stay calm, because clearly somebody had to be. “Her showing up out of the blue like this could mean a lot of things, but none of those things could be a good thing. In fact, it can only be a bad thing. A very bad thing made even badder by the fact that we don’t know the reason she was sent here.”

“Badder?”

“Ha-ha. The dumb jock who can’t talk the Queen’s English. I swear to God, the next person who corrects my grammar gets punched in the face.”

I sighed. The rage was leaching out of me, leaving me a hollow, bloodless, human-shaped lump.

Ben looked at Megan for a long moment. “We have to wake her up,” he decided.

Then Dumbo and Poundcake crowded into the room. “Don’t tell me,” Ben said to Poundcake, who of course wouldn’t. “You didn’t find nothing.”

“Anything,” Dumbo corrected him.

Ben didn’t punch him in the face. But he did hold out his hand. “Give me your canteen.” He unscrewed the cap and held the container over Megan’s forehead. A drop of water hung quivering on the lip for an eternity.

Before eternity ended, a croaky voice spoke up behind us. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

Evan Walker was awake.

Question:

1. What are Ben and Cassie looking for in Megan’s body?

a. A grain of rice

b. Tracking device

c. Water

d. The cause of her sore throat

2. How many times Ben made grammatically mistake?

a. 3

b. 4

c. 1