[Excerpt from Just Like Me]
That little purple bean had become my best friend. I was looking at it just before dawn on the morning of the day I met you.
It was quiet. We knew that if there was any indication that we were awake, then our commanding officer would lay into us, especially on the morning of a battle. Naturally that meant it was going to be quiet, but, if anything, the quiet was an indication that most of us weren't asleep at all.
There were a lot of things going through my mind. Most of it was just random stuff that I was trying to bring up just to avoid having to think about what was going to happen that day. I thought about how cramped my bunk was. I thought about how there wasn't a lick of privacy in the whole damn barracks, and how it always seemed to smell like old socks in there.
I thought about how we would all tease my friend, Pepper... [more]