Nightmare by Bonnie Bryant

clock. There was something wrong with the clock, too! It said it was after four o’clock in the morning. That was impossible! Stevie pointed the light at her wristwatch. It said exactly the same thing.
    She knew then that there was nothing wrong with the clock or the book. There was something wrong with her head. The reason the words were all messed up on the page was that her eyes were all messed up in her head. They wanted to sleep! Staying up all night to read wasn’t a smart move, especially on a school night. She clicked off the flashlight, put the book on her bedside table, and closed her eyes.
    “I’ll finish it tomor …,” she muttered to her darkened room. She didn’t finish the word, however. She was already asleep.

“I’ M TOTALLY BEAT ,” Carole confided to Lisa and Stevie when the three of them met up at Pine Hollow the next afternoon.
    “Me too,” Lisa said. “I had this awful dream last night.”
    “Maybe you had the same one I had,” said Carole. “Was it in a desert?”
    “No, in school,” Lisa said.
    “I thought I was the one who had nightmares about school,” said Stevie.
    “Well, you
look
as if you’d had a nightmare,” Carole teased.
    “I didn’t. I was just reading about one. It’s this great book, see—”
    “I know, I know,
The Path to Freedom
, by Elizabeth Wallingford Johnson,” Carole supplied. She’d heard a lot about that book over the past few days.
    “You’re going to love it, both of you,” Stevie said.
    “You already told us,” said Lisa.
    It was easy to chat with her friends most of the time, Carole thought. And it was good to chat with them, too. When the three of them were together, things seemed to go right, especially when what they were talking about or doing had to do with horses. Today they weren’t talking about horses, yet, but they were about to ride them.
    Each of them was acutely aware that a large dark cloud hung over Pine Hollow and would for a considerable period. It wasn’t going to help to talk about it. Very soon they’d start getting some of the blood tests back. Then, if everything was okay, maybe they could talk about it. Now, however, it was best to chat about books and nightmares they’d slept through rather than diseases and nightmares they might have to live through.
    “Class begins in fifteen minutes!” Mrs. Reg announced over the PA system. That didn’t give the girls much time. They dropped their books in their cubbies, yanked on their riding clothes and boots, and ran to the tack room to get saddles and bridles for their horses.
    “Last one at the good-luck horseshoe is a rotten egg!” Stevie declared.
    Twelve minutes later all three girls met at the horseshoe.Stevie was the closest to it. Lisa and Carole were right next to each other.
    “So who’s the rotten egg if there’s a tie?” Stevie asked.
    Lisa and Carole decided to be much too cool to race each other.
    “Very childish,” said Lisa in a superior voice.
    “Definitely,” Carole agreed with a sniff. Both girls grinned at Stevie.
    “You can both be rotten eggs,” Stevie suggested. “But if you guys are both rotten eggs and I’m not, I won’t have any fun. So let’s all be rotten eggs.”
    The three girls touched the horseshoe together and then rode into the ring.
    It was fun to be able to joke about things like rotten eggs with her friends, but Stevie knew, and she knew that both Lisa and Carole knew, that what was really on their minds that afternoon wasn’t rotten eggs. It was swamp fever.
    They’d all sensed a tension at Pine Hollow the minute they’d arrived. The place was not the usual beehive of activity. There were no vans pulling in, no horses being loaded or unloaded. There was a notice on the door of the stable explaining the reason for and terms of the quarantine.
    Everyone looked at the horses with an awful curiosity. Were they okay now? Would they stay that way? The facts of EIA were known to everyone. It was a dreadful, deadly