Mr. Brunner, the Latin teacher, led the museum tour. Mr. Brunner was this middle-aged guy in a motorized wheelchair. He had thinning hair and a scruffy beard and a frayed tweed jacket, which always smelled like coffee. He told stories and jokes and let the students play games in class. To be honest Nell absolutely loved that subject, it was the only one that didn't have her reaching for her notebook and instead actually willingly participate.
He rode upfront in his wheelchair, guiding the class through the big echoey galleries, past marble statues and glass cases full of really old black-and-orange pottery, stuff that had survived for two thousand, three thousand years and that had Nell's fingers twitching and her eyes fleeting across every item.
The Latin teacher gathered everyone around a thirteen-foot-tall stone column with a big sphinx on the top, and started telling them how it was a grave marker, a stele, for a girl about our age. He told them about the carvings on the sides. Information that wasn't interesting to anyone with the exception of Percy and Nell it would seem, that was until Percy told the students behind him, Nell and Grover to shut up which earned a stink-eye from the other chaperone teacher.
Mrs. Dodds was her name, she was this little maths teacher from Georgia who always wore a black leather jacket, even though she was fifty years old. She looked mean enough to ride a Harley right into one's locker. She had come to Yancy halfway through the year, when their last maths teacher had a nervous breakdown. Nell didn't blame him, if she was him and had to teach that class she would have also had a nervous breakdown, with the only exception is that her nervous breakdown would have had quite a few casualties.
Nell's attention quickly faded as everything around her became blurry and sounded as if she was inside an aquarium, her hands quickly reached inside her messenger bag and pulled out her sketchpad and a pencil, flickering it open as she stared straight ahead with no emotion on her face and with almost lifeless eyes, there were two ways that the dreams that she had manifested, through words or through images and they came on so fast and randomly that usually, her body would instinctively react to it, grabbing the nearest thing to manifest her dream into.
However, she couldn't remember what she had seen after she returned to reality, no matter how hard she tried that's why her dreams manifested the way they did, so as she stared ahead, unaware of anything that was going on, her hand moved across the page with speed and precision, the tip of the pencil barely touching the blank page as she drew, shading, erasing and retouching.
She was brought back to reality when a hand touched her shoulder, a large hand that she had felt oh so many times on her shoulder, "Miss Bishop?" Mr. Brunner inquired, voice low and calm, concern even, "Everything alright?" Nell looked at him as though she was considering she should trust him or not, she knew she could, of course, she knew she could since she was 9 3/4 when her one of her dreams brought her to the camp she had dreamed about since she was a toddler.
Quite literally brought to the camp.
"I need to use the bathroom." she lied, closing the sketchbook before the older man even had the chance to see what she drew, this caused a frown to grow on his face and Nell knew why, in all the years that she had known Mr. Brunner she had never lied to him. Instead of pressing the matter like he would have normally done, Mr. Brunner gave her a solemn nod and pointed in the direction of the nearest bathroom.
