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Caffeine
A Novel by Ryan Grabow
EGrabow Media, October 2009

Copyright © 2009 by Ryan Grabow. Some rights reserved.
This work may be printed and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States license.
The full license may be viewed at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/legalcode

These text-only files (one for each chapter) are available at egrabow.com/caffeine. Please refer to the readme.txt file that came with them for credits and copyright information.

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Chapter One
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The question seemed to trap me. With each passing day, I felt more that I would need to face it, or that it would destroy me.

I ran my hand along the surface of the old poster: an advertisement for one of Thomas Edison’s famous inventions, one of the first devices to capture a moving image. I knew that its simple films were fantastic marvels to an older generation. I thought of their old sense of wonder, and how it was preserved in that place. I envied them.

I spent a long moment feeling the surface of the poster with my fingertips, wondering why it didn’t seem as real anymore. A small piece of card-paper scraped against my nose.

“You? Staring off into space? I’m impressed.”

I took the orange ticket from Vair’s hand and managed to smile. “I thought you hated musicals.”

“With a passion,” she said, glancing to what I had been staring at. “Vitascope,” she read, smiling as she tapped her finger on the poster. “C’mon, Brandon, we’re in Technicolor now.”

The sights and sounds that day were familiar and powerful. Sometimes it seemed as if the pictures were the only joy I had left in life, the only thing that could comfort me in difficult times. We all took to