She lies on top of the bed, back propped up on a pillow, her bare legs splayed before her, and balancing a book on her stomach, absorbed in some other world.

The small room is stuffy, even for the night breeze that causes the curtains to flutter slowly. A lamp stands on the far side of the room, battered and tilting precariously, it casts a more golden glow on the pale yellow walls. Books decorate the floor around the edges of the bed, with slightly bent pages and also carrying other miscellaneous signs of neglect. 

The girl on the bed shifts, and raises the pages of the book closer to her face, as if by doing this she could devor them quicker. Her eyes flick from sentence to sentence, and paper scrapes against paper as pages are turned. Caught in her own little world, trapped in her own little world – she sits here until she has eaten every last sentence and savoured every word.

At last her head falls back into the pillow, her eyes shut and her hands relax – causing her book to drop to the floor. To join the others.