"No!" I scream, hurling my pillow at my attacker. She catches it and I jolt up in bed.
"Sakina, its only me," Ellie whispers, "You were screaming again." My sister is always the one to calm me down when I have my fits at night. Our room is only so big, and I was having an apparent one-sided war with myself at night.
"I'm okay... I'm okay..." I chatter nervously, glancing at my alarm clock. 5:00. "Sorry Ellie, I didn't mean to wake you up early--"
"Don't worry, you're my sister!" At least, she's my adopted sister. She and her twin brother Nathan have never considered me to be anyone besides a sister, but I still feel bad about harming the Greens at all. "We'll just watch some TV for a bit," Ellie decides, "there's no use in getting up in an hour." She climbs into bed to hug me and reaches for the remote I usually have on my nightstand. Our TV is in the middle of the decent-sized bedroom we share, so we drag ourselves over to the couch and flip through the channels. "What were you dreaming about anyway?"
"Um..." I stammer as she passes a cooking show with bright red crabs," a, uh, one about a goddess with a great life but tough choices." Ellie doesn't actually know my true identity, just that I have a knack for mythology and a really good sense of geography in northern Europe. "Nothing, really," I add, watching some girl fall off her chair. Why do humans even watch this crap?
"Nothing but those girls who terrorize you every month at least? I mean, you were screaming about them since you... came." We didn't talk much about my messy adoption process. Essentially, I was sitting alone in the rain in the middle of a forest here in Minnesota. The Green family took me in and had to go through this whole adoption/fostering process that was way longer than it should have been because I wasn't even registered as a human being. I also had to keep my mouth shut about any "parents"; since I never had human ones, I couldn't reveal anything. This was all a good six years ago, yet I still haven't told the Greens that they adopted a mythological being from Norway. Trust me, it is really hard to try to fit that into a day-to-day conversation. The more I lock it up, the more awkward it gets to try to bring up.
"I'm fine, I'm fine," I chatter, faking a smile and scratching the back of my neck. "I just have flashes of them sometimes. Honestly, I'm not psycho!" After what seems like hours, Ellie nods her head and turns back to our TV. She settles on Project Runway, which reminds me of something Verdanti would like. Seriously, she makes clothes out of dust; I don't get how she does it. After a while, the sun starts to peek out from behind the clouds and the misty Minnesota morning has arrived.
"Can I borrow your striped sweater?" Ellie calls from her closet ten minutes later.
"Why?" I shout back, "don't you have one?"
"Um..." she stalls. Ellie has an extremely bad habit of losing her clothes. She hardly ever comes back from the pool, school, or her boyfriend Carson's house. Luckily, her credit card has an almost non-existent limit. Her parents barely blink an eye when she hits the $2000 range.
I sigh heavily. "I expect this back by six this evening," I say in a voice of mock-authority, which just makes her laugh.
"No later than five."
Finally, after hunting through our closets for half and hour, we find ourselves in front of the mirror in our shared bathroom. Ellie apparently NEEDED my black-and-white striped sweater to clash with her pink and blue floral skirt and navy tights. I guess she did go easy with her heather grey heels, though. "Nice shirt," she comments, attempting to put on her red lipstick while looking at my outfit. I decided on my green polka dot blouse, which is almost the same color as the leaves of Kggdrasil. That dream is still fresh in my mind as I apply my nude lip gloss. I've always been more of a chameleon next to Ellie, mostly because I spend a lot of my time trying to be human. I think it might be too risky for me to flaunt every color of the rainbow in one day.
"Ready?" Ellie asks.
"Duh!" I reply, finishing the braid running from my left ear to my other shoulder. Throwing my paisley backpack over my shoulder, the two of us practically run down the stairs so that our brother Nathan doesn't bug us about being late again.
