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Two ♰ Will you take a moment? Promise me this— that you'll stand by me forever.
THE TWENTY/FOUR SEVEN hallucination that ensues proves to become more than Aileth can handle.
It occurs to her once that it might be the Mist. But Aileth underestimates the magic of the veil between the mortal world and. . . the other one, so for the rest of the school year, it's like the entire campus is playing some kind of trick on her and Percy. The students act as if they're completely, irrevocably and wholly convinced that Mrs. Kerr— some perky blonde woman Aileth swears she's never seen in her entire twelve years of existence— has been their pre-algebra teacher since Christmas. (Aileth begs to differ. So does Percy, which she's glad for.)
The one thing that keeps her sane is that either Grover isn't a part of said campus-wide prank, or he's simply a bad actor. Whenever either Aileth or Percy mentioned the name Dodds to him, he hesitates, and then proceeds to claim she doesn't exist. (Gaslighting 101!) But his voice catches on Mrs. Dodds' name every time, which Aileth takes as a sign that he's lying.
Something, Percy tells her, is going on. Something had happened at the museum.
At one point, Aileth borrows her roommate Piper's phone to call her dad and tell him about the situation, but all she gets is a you know how regular mortals are, followed by you're okay now, don't worry about it. And that's the end of the phone call.
She doesn't have much time to dwell on it during the days. But in the darkness of her room at the dead of night, the hoodie in the corner looks like a ghoul's face, and she swears she can hear Mrs. Dodds screaming in the distance.
Her night vision, by the way, is not helping. (Her father says it's a side effect of having the Sight, but it doesn't make sense because he has the Sight as well, and he's had so many near death experiences coming into her room in the dark that she's fairly certain her night vision has nothing to do with it.) Sometimes at night Piper gets up to go to her bathroom, and the sight of her eyes flashing in the mirror is far too reminiscent of Mrs. Dodds for Aileth get a good night's sleep.
The freak weather carries on, which doesn't do anything to improve the bruises under her eyes. Several nights in a row, thunderstorms jolt her out of her sleep, shaking the dormitory buildings with a vengeance as blurry residues of light streaked across the grim sky. (It's almost as if the sky itself is angry.) The biggest tornado ever spotted in the Hudson Valley touches down only fifty miles from Yancy Academy, and one of the current events they're studying in social studies class is the unusual number of small planes that had gone down in sudden squalls in the Atlantic this year.
Percy jokes that maybe another tornado will show up and wipe him out of existence, so he'll never have to return to school. (Aileth finds that there is nothing funny about a world without Percy.)
