The air in the short hallway somehow seemed ever so slightly cleaner and brought a calm to my mind that I was seriously in need of. I never had like small areas. Shaking my head I walked
to the row of chairs that I had seen earlier and sat down to put on the dry set of shoes and socks. The warmth of the for-some-reason-never before-worn socks felt great after standing barefoot on the cold tiles of the bathroom of doom. The shoes fit perfectly.
As I walked down the now empty halls of Angel Grove High on the way to put my still soaked clothes in my locker my mind wondered to Uncle Rob. I couldn't help but feel bad for him, even though I was still angry that he had re-enlisted. I could see it in his eyes when he told Mom and me that it wasn't something he necessarily wanted to do, but that it was a calling of his heart. The heart's call was something that always scared me. Seeing the whole thing play out in Uncle Rob didn't help any. I wondered if it was something that one could deny, and what would happen if they did.
As was its wont, my mind shifted to thinking about why I was thinking about these things and I began to ask myself what other kids were thinking about at that moment. For some reason, I had always thought of myself as different, set apart, somehow. I could usually see it in the eyes of others. I didn't know why, but I could almost always get a good idea about a person's capabilities by looking into their eyes. Most of the time I was disappointed, though not necessarily because I felt more intelligent than them, but because I could tell that the majority of people weren't thinking about the types of things that I was thinking about. That brought with it a sense of pervasive loneliness.
There was one memory that always seemed to stand out clearly. It was back during the sixth grade, a day or two after I knocked Bradan unconscious. He hadn't come back to school for a couple of weeks after that incident, probably because he was too concerned with what the other kids would think or say of him. His friends, however, had no qualms about confronting me. Four of them cornered me in an alleyway on my way to see Mom at the hospital after school. I guessed that they knew which way I would go because they were waiting for me as I passed. Two of them grabbed my arms and began pulling me back between a closed up coffee shop and an infrequently visited video rental store. I fought back, of course, and even landed a few good jabs, but they kept hitting and kicking me until I could barely get up off of the warm concrete. My body was bruised and bloody when I finally shuffled into the hospital an hour later. My vision was blurry and my left eye was swollen closed. Mom nearly fainted. It was a hell of a beating for a boy that age to take. That was the last one, though.
She had been livid when I wouldn't tell her who had attacked me. She didn't understand why I couldn't tell the police. I barely understood my own reasoning. I had only been in sixth grade for crying out loud. All I really knew was that giving the names of those boys to either Mom or to the police would have made things much worse for me. And I knew that I had lost a fight. Even if I was outnumbered, I still felt shame at that.
I reached my locker, just one in rows upon rows of navy colored metal rectangles lining the otherwise bare, white walls, and set the bag of wet clothes on the ground.
Thankfully drowning didn't make me forget my combination… The thought made me wonder if that sort of trauma ever caused memory loss. I doubted it.
My backpack was there, right where I left it. It didn't take but a moment to pull it out and replace it with the bag of wet clothes. The locker slammed shut, clanging loudly, with a flick of my wrist. I pulled the left strap of the plain black bag over my shoulder and clamped my fingers around it.
My footsteps echoed down the empty hall as I made my way toward the library to wait the last half hour or so before second period began. The library, one of the last parts of the school to be built, was surprisingly well stocked with books from every area of interest one could think of. There must have been some wealthy benefactor with a penchant for building giant libraries, because having a 100-foot tall library filled with everything from Carl Jung to Brandon Sanderson to Jesus Christ to, well, everything, wasn't all that common.
A few moments later I was stepping through the library's entryway. The architecture of the library always awed me. It had five levels including the ground floor, and each wall rose about twenty feet before butting up against the suspended walkway above it. Up there four marble platforms rounded the massive chamber, jutting about ten feet out from the wall and forming walkways for levels two and three. Looking up I could see the sun-lit sky above through the translucent tiles that had been used in place of a traditional, distinctly non-transparent ceiling.
Dark, mahogany bookshelves covered the expanse of the wall completely on each side of the great, circular room. The only breaks in the line of the bookshelves on level one were the entry, the escalator and a few hallways here and there that led to offices and storage and the like.
The floor was a deep black marble with lines of white striking across the surface like stray bolts of lightning frozen in time. A circular island sat in the open space inside the entryway. It held several computers that were used to check out books, movies and any other content that the library had to offer. The space in the center of level one was used for lounging and reading and was replete with the most comfortable couches, reclining chairs and a soft, crimson rug that spread beneath all of them. Each of the walkways above allowed access to a lot more bookshelves as well as several alcoves in the walls. Most of these were fitted with comfortable furniture as well.
The architectural design of the library was completely different than that of the rest of the school, but the reason for this had never been explained to the students. The atmosphere of openness and scholarship made me comfortable and always stoked the fire within, but I still wondered why this room had been built in this way.
The best part about the library was that it wasn't open to the public. I had always loved going to libraries but I seemed to always arrive at the same time as everyone else in the city. Here, though, it was nearly always quiet. The selection of books here topped anything else in the city anyway, so there was really no need to go to any other library once it had finally opened up.
The school was really an enigma. It was a private school that was apparently made in the image of a public school, and it was affordable for middle-class parents, at least according to Mom. I hadn't even wanted to go to Angel Grove High, but Mom thought it would be a good opportunity considering that the education was supposed to be top tier. This being the first year that the school had been open, the quality of education had remained to be seen. I walked past the tables placed in neat order around the vast space whose wood matched that of the surrounding chairs and encircling bookshelves.
My destination was one of the smaller, single user alcoves up on the top level. The escalator took me up to the second level where I walked to the opposite side of the glossy walkway, admiring the ornate golden railing. The escalator on this level took me up to the third, where I repeated the back and forth twice more to get up to the top and fifth floor. Once there I found my favorite spot in the world.
For the last couple of months, this had been my fortress of solitude. Not many students made their way up this high, which was probably a consequence of the readily available eBook form of everything in this library. That and the students could request a book through Angel-O and have it delivered to any class for pickup. I knew one thing for sure: whoever named the Angel High app would get no points for originality.
I plopped down in the cushioned chair that matched those on the other levels and put my backpack on the table, pulling my tablet out. Angel-O was an all-encompassing app. Not only did it serve as a way to immediately communicate with any teachers, it also had sections denoting class schedules, grades, sanctions, and everything else. There was a tab for the purchasing of anything one might need or want such as lunch, school supplies and items from the school store. Angel-O was also a social media app for the students. It was supposed to foster friendship between us, but I had a feeling that it was more for the administration to keep tabs on us. It had been downloaded on every school-issued device and it was required that all students use it.
The most divisive part of the app is that it included a school ranking system. It was said that this was supposed to bring students together, but it made clear to every student and teacher in the school where everyone was on a number scale. It was all based on intelligence, grades, maturity, extracurricular activities and the like. There were about 1,500 students that attended Angel Grove High, and each one of those had access to everyone else's ranking. I was fortunate enough to be in the top 100, but higher-ranking students sometimes treated those toward the other end of the scale relatively badly. Bradan was also in the top 100, though I wasn't sure how he had accomplished that being the idiot that he was.
The Wi-Fi connection was top notch and it only took a second for the app to load up. My news feed was full of nonsense from all over school. The administration also thought it wise to make every student's posts visible to every other student. We could send private messages, though. I continued swiping up until something caught my eye. It was a simple black and white graphic, posted by the vice principal, advertising the upcoming freshman class field trip.
I had been wondering about the trip since I heard about it from Oliver a few weeks back. Apparently, the school had designed this simple graphic as an announcement. It appeared that the trip would be to Washington D.C. around Christmas.
I'll have to read more about this later.
Wanting very much to pick up where I had left off in the book I was reading, I put the tablet away and pulled it out. The cover was a rusty red with a big eyeball in the center. "1984" by George Orwell was a classic for sure.
I had been reading for about twenty minutes when I heard the class dismissal bell ring. A loud buzzing noise floated up to my perch as students filled the halls below. I knew it was time to get to second period. Putting the book back in my backpack I stood and prepared to head back down to ground level. Just then I heard something strange. My head popped up at the sound of three successive sounds; popping noises of some kind. The noise was loud but it seemed distant.
Suddenly, a long stream of the same noises, though noticeably louder, echoed up the library walls to my alcove. An unprompted vision sprang into mind: two people, a boy and a girl, both wearing long black trench coats and carrying heavy duffel bags. Something had been tickling at the back of my mind when I'd seen them that morning, but I was too distracted by the anxiety and the fear of letting myself fall into a delusion of drowning.
I studied this with Rob! I should have seen it!
One heartbeat.
Damn it!
Two.
What should I do?
Three.
What would Rob do?
Four.
Another string of bullets was fired in some hallway far below, in another world.
Five.
Then came the screams, filling the cavernous library like too much air in a balloon.