Rule Breakers

"Nope," she beamed, but it was gone the instant he asked her his question.

With a goofy smile, Maddie answered with, "Lewis and Clark?"

She had no idea what the answer was, so she might as well have made her wrong answer slightly humorous.

"You're messing with me," she said, snatching at the book. "It was not pirates!"

"Oh my God, history is dead to me." She dropped the book.

"Fine, neither of us gets points. But I just thought of one of the rules of the game I forgot. People named Malvoes automatically have a deduction of five points." She shrugged like there was just nothing she could do about it.

When asked about her sleeping habits, Maddie slowly flipped through the history book, pretending to be veeeery interested in it.

"Around one a.m., I think, I had a nightmare, and I couldn't go back to sleep. So then I walked the halls for awhile. Then I went to the cafeteria because it's cool there when no one else is around."

And now she was sidelined by the cafeteria. "I even drank out of one of the fountains," she smushed her cheeks together, whispering, "'cause no one could stop me."

Maddie's smile fell again. She shrugged meekly. "Sometimes I have this one nightmare, but it doesn't come around often."

She hesitates, trying to find the words that might best describe it.

"It's like looking into an old photograph," she said, getting ahead of herself and speaking like he might know what she was even talking about. "It's just always this memory that I can't remember in conscious thought. I'm not even sure if that's how it really happened, or if my imagination got the better of me one night."

She wanted to pick at the edges of the book's page, instead she closed it to rid herself of the temptation.