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Description
Sitting in the familiar Starbucks in the back of my favorite Barnes & Noble, I notice many things.  The pleasant smell of books and coffee hangs in the air.
The customers are usually pretty quiet, especially when in the main part of the store, but the two women behind me are chatting loudly about the days’ purchases.
“And that purse I showed you?  Only nine dollars!  And it used to be fifty-seven!”
“Really?!  Where did you get it?  It’s just darling!”
There are shelves extending beyond my vision, all full to bursting with book.  There must be thousands of them, possibly a million.  Yes, this is my favorite place on earth.  The place I imagine when something scary is happening, or something horrible.  Imagining
Barnes & Noble has gotten me through many a rough interrogation at school, scary situations, and embarrassing moments at the mall.
Now though, as I come back to reality, I realize that it won’t get me through this.  It can’t, because I don’t even know what this is.  I’m standing on something slightly translucent but with a blue tinge.  All around me are tiny figures floating through the air.  At first I thought they were similar to snow or rain, but when I caught one for closer examination, it began to yell at me in plain English.
“What do you think you’re doing?  Grabbing hold of some innocent Graeople.”   Okay, so maybe Graeople isn’t plain English, or even English at all, but I took it to translate like people would on Earth.  Or was I on Earth?  I didn’t know where I was, so I decided to ask one of the floating Graeoples.
“Excuse me.  Um…where am I?”
“Do you mean what region, what quadrant, or what planet?”  The Graeople, who I assumed was female by the way she spoke and dressed, answer very abruptly as though she were late for something and it was my fault.
“Um…all of those.”
“I don’t know what this ‘um’ business is, but you’re in Melfo, 42, on the planet Zrigoli.”  I hadn’t realized until then, but the woman I was talking to had stopped floating around and stood in one place directly in front of my nose to have this conversation.  So I gathered that floating for the Graeople was like walking for humans.  Or were these a sub species of human?
I pulled myself out my thoughts and remembered my manners.  “Thank you.”  I said to the perfect miniature of a woman, but she had already floated away.
I decided to explore Melfo 42 Zrigoli, but soon discovered that this would be extremely difficult due to the fact that I was about 50 times bigger than the Graeople and could just as easily inhale them or smack into them as I could blink.  So, I sat down, and I found that only the shabbier looking Graeople were down at my eye level now.  So, they had class rules, just like the ancient Romans.
How was I keeping my cool while I was there?  I’ll never know that.  It must have been from the shock.  I had been in my bedroom, leaning against my mirror, wishing I could be anywhere but there, and suddenly, I was.  I was somewhere that wasn’t there.  My wish had come true.
Let me give you a little background info on myself.  I have lived what one might call a rough life.  I have been shunted back and forth between several foster homes, none of them able to afford the additional child that I was, and most of them not really caring.  I had been abused by several of them, and none of my pleas to the foster agency did much good in getting me out of there.  My peers made fun of me for being poor and always having low quality things.  I was taunted for not having a real home or parents who loved me.  So, in short, my classmates were no nicer than my many sets of foster parents.  I’ve witnessed many more things than the average fifteen year old girl.  Yeah, it pretty much sucks, but now that I was here, being a foster child seemed to be the least of my worries.