Disclaimer- the whole idea of the latches and Ryter and all that belong to
Rodman Philbrick, but the new characters and this particular story belong
to me.
A/N- You really have to have read The Last Book In the Universe to understand this cuz there are so many terms and names and stuff that nobody could ever possibly understand without reading The Last Book In the Universe first. Sorry.
1 MY NAME IS SANDPAPER
Kind of a weird name, I know. Sometimes people just call me Sand girl. It because of my asthma, everybody says it sound like sandpaper when I cough. And this may be stupid, but I think what Ryter's having us all do is kind of cool. I mean, I know Shadow thinks it's stupid (can you believe what she wrote up there!) and the rest have this attitude like they're just doing it to humour Ryter, as though they think he's zoomed. I don't think he's zoomed at all. Neither does Mouse, but then again, she loves everybody, so what's the difference? But I think this was a great idea. Even if nobody will read it for a while.
So, anyways, my story. I've lived in Lotti Getts' latch all my life. In fact, I don't really feel the need to go anywhere else. Not like Shadow, who can't seem to stay in one area for more than a day. No, me, I like to stay in one place. And despite everything, where I live right now feels like my home, I feel safe, even with Lotti Getts' Vandals crashing all over the place on their jetbikes and Vida Bleek's cold, deadly assasins (actually, never mind, Lotti killed almost all of them). But still, as crazy and totally zoomed as it may sound, I wouldn't want to live anywhere else. Well, maybe Eden, but that doesn't really count, because everybody wants to live in Eden.
Besides living here with Lotti Getts as latchboss, I've also been an orphan all my life. I have no idea who my parents were, they left me when I was just a baby. I'm not sure how I survived but now and then I have these strange whisps of memories of a man and woman, and though I'm quite sure they weren't my parents (don't ask me why I'm sure because I really have no idea), I can't remeber anything else about them. But they must have left me, or I must have left them, when I was about three or four, because that is when I can remember living on the streets. I never had a stackbox or anything, I just sort of wandered around, begging and stealing when I could. It wasn't that difficult, since nobody was really any better off. The only thing that made it hard was my asthma. If someone caught me ripping them off or something, I would have to run, and more often than not that would bring on an asthma attack.
Finally, when I was around, six or seven (I don't really know when I was born; no one does, but I know I'm somewhere around eleven, twelve, thirteen years old, something like that) I was ripping this man off and he saw me, so I had to run, but I had a really bad asthma attack. The man caught me, but it turned out he was something of a healer, so he took me back to his home, this little apparetement thing, and he examined me and told me I had asthma, and said he was very dissapointed that I hadn't got proper treatment yet when I told him I had had the sand cough for as long as I could remember. When he said this I asked him how was I supposed to get anything when I didn't even know what this "asthma" was called before now. So he went out and didn't come back till the evening. He tossed me this little thing looked like a bent pipe and told me it was an inhaler and that if I went to Traderville I could find the proper medicine for it and then he handed me a little bag with some powder inside. He explained how to use the inhaler with the medicine and showed me.
That doctor saved my life, because I heard that sometimes, when you don't have an inhaler and you have an attack, you can die from lack of air. When I left I was thanking him over and over again. I also gave him back his stuff, which he thanked me kind of stiffly for. As you can imagine, I mean, I was ripping him off.
A/N- You really have to have read The Last Book In the Universe to understand this cuz there are so many terms and names and stuff that nobody could ever possibly understand without reading The Last Book In the Universe first. Sorry.
1 MY NAME IS SANDPAPER
Kind of a weird name, I know. Sometimes people just call me Sand girl. It because of my asthma, everybody says it sound like sandpaper when I cough. And this may be stupid, but I think what Ryter's having us all do is kind of cool. I mean, I know Shadow thinks it's stupid (can you believe what she wrote up there!) and the rest have this attitude like they're just doing it to humour Ryter, as though they think he's zoomed. I don't think he's zoomed at all. Neither does Mouse, but then again, she loves everybody, so what's the difference? But I think this was a great idea. Even if nobody will read it for a while.
So, anyways, my story. I've lived in Lotti Getts' latch all my life. In fact, I don't really feel the need to go anywhere else. Not like Shadow, who can't seem to stay in one area for more than a day. No, me, I like to stay in one place. And despite everything, where I live right now feels like my home, I feel safe, even with Lotti Getts' Vandals crashing all over the place on their jetbikes and Vida Bleek's cold, deadly assasins (actually, never mind, Lotti killed almost all of them). But still, as crazy and totally zoomed as it may sound, I wouldn't want to live anywhere else. Well, maybe Eden, but that doesn't really count, because everybody wants to live in Eden.
Besides living here with Lotti Getts as latchboss, I've also been an orphan all my life. I have no idea who my parents were, they left me when I was just a baby. I'm not sure how I survived but now and then I have these strange whisps of memories of a man and woman, and though I'm quite sure they weren't my parents (don't ask me why I'm sure because I really have no idea), I can't remeber anything else about them. But they must have left me, or I must have left them, when I was about three or four, because that is when I can remember living on the streets. I never had a stackbox or anything, I just sort of wandered around, begging and stealing when I could. It wasn't that difficult, since nobody was really any better off. The only thing that made it hard was my asthma. If someone caught me ripping them off or something, I would have to run, and more often than not that would bring on an asthma attack.
Finally, when I was around, six or seven (I don't really know when I was born; no one does, but I know I'm somewhere around eleven, twelve, thirteen years old, something like that) I was ripping this man off and he saw me, so I had to run, but I had a really bad asthma attack. The man caught me, but it turned out he was something of a healer, so he took me back to his home, this little apparetement thing, and he examined me and told me I had asthma, and said he was very dissapointed that I hadn't got proper treatment yet when I told him I had had the sand cough for as long as I could remember. When he said this I asked him how was I supposed to get anything when I didn't even know what this "asthma" was called before now. So he went out and didn't come back till the evening. He tossed me this little thing looked like a bent pipe and told me it was an inhaler and that if I went to Traderville I could find the proper medicine for it and then he handed me a little bag with some powder inside. He explained how to use the inhaler with the medicine and showed me.
That doctor saved my life, because I heard that sometimes, when you don't have an inhaler and you have an attack, you can die from lack of air. When I left I was thanking him over and over again. I also gave him back his stuff, which he thanked me kind of stiffly for. As you can imagine, I mean, I was ripping him off.