Monument 14 by Emmy Laybourne

Author:Emmy Laybourne [Laybourne, Emmy]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2012-06-05T06:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

MY FOOD AISLE AT NIGHT

Josie and Brayden worked hard all afternoon and by the evening free play period, they had new sleeping quarters for us all.

Josie led the little kids over. They rushed in to the dressing rooms. There was hooting and hollering from inside, but Niko and I stopped to look at the area right outside the dressing rooms.

Josie and Brayden had made it into a living room.

The floor was carpeted and they had laid down a bunch of throw rugs over it. They had brought over the beanbag chairs from the Media Department and added some more furniture. There were two futon couches, a fake-fur butterfly chair and two coffee tables and a desk. A lava lamp gently oozed on one of the coffee tables. There was a mini-fridge and a case of water bottles next to it. They had tricked it out to an absurd degree.

Right next to the furniture, there was a small clearing, with three card tables and seven folding chairs distributed among the tables. A table lamp stood on each table and two bookshelves had been stocked with what looked to me like one each of every book in the Book Department.

It was a kind of work area. Like a library.

“Downright homey,” Niko said to me.

Was that a joke? I glanced at him. Couldn’t tell.

So I just repeated him. “Downright homey.”

The kids were going berserk, so I stepped inside to see what all the racket was about.

Brayden had neatly removed the wall between the men’s and ladies’ dressing rooms so it was now one big bunker, with a hallway running down the middle and berths off to either side.

Josie and Brayden had Sharpied the names of the kids on the doors.

Chloe grabbed my hand.

“I found your bedroom,” she said. “I’ll show you.”

Chloe dragged me down the hall to one of the dressing rooms in what had been the men’s side.

Sure enough, it read “Dean” on the door.

Inside it was smallish. Four by eight. A hammock had been slung end to end. A locker stood on the floor. On top of the locker, a small lamp.

Above the hammock, running along the wall, there was a shelf.

And on the shelf were books.

An assortment of the paperbacks from the Book Department. Some mysteries, some cyborg fiction, five cookbooks. I laughed at that.

“Do you like your room?” Josie came up behind me.

“I really do.”

“You can, like, customize it any way you want. I just put some stuff here because I thought you’d like it.”

“I like it,” I said.

“If you don’t like the hammock, you can stick with your air mattress, though I’m not sure it will fit in here.”

“I like it just like this,” I said.

From the hallway outside my door I heard Max and Ulysses speaking. Ulysses said something and Max laughed.

“What’d he say?” Chloe demanded.

“Ulysses says it’s like a train!” Max announced.

“It is just like a train!” Chloe declared.

Our bedrooms, the dressing rooms at the Greenway, had just been given their new name: the Train.

* * *

The Train and its architects, Josie and Brayden, were all the talk at dinner.

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