First Days

by C. L. Stone

  “What did Danielle have to say?”

  Marie shrugged. “I wouldn’t hang out with them. They’re snobs from some private school.”

  “They’re not snobby,” I said. “They’re nice.”

  “They don’t talk to anyone but themselves.”

  “They talk to me.”

  “Yeah, well, you’re weird so go figure.”

  I let out a breath. There wasn’t a point to talking with her. When she set her mind to how a person was, she pretty much kept that opinion. Still, I wondered how she managed to make friends as she seemed so negative. We were never really close but sometimes I wondered what it would have been like if we tried to get along. It wasn’t that I was mean to her. We didn’t really have a lot in common and with our parents being the way they were, instead of becoming closer, we’d grown apart. I partially blamed myself. I let it happen. When I tried to take an interest, it felt like we ended up fighting. I didn’t know what to do.

  When we got back to the house, I tiptoed through the hallway toward my mother’s room. Putting my ear to the wall, I held my breath, waiting for signs of life. I needed to ask her about getting a violin. I knew how the conversation would go before I even started it, only I had a small hope the result would be she would call my dad at work and have him pick up a violin on his way back home.

  The drone of the news on the television played and rustling noises came from the bed. I stepped into the open doorway, peering in.

  She was perched on the bed, her arms crossed over her chest. I treaded forward, purposefully stepping in spots that creaked to get her attention.

  Her head snapped around. Her blue eyes were glossy. It made me wonder if she’d been crying. “What do you want?” she asked. Her tone erased my previous assumption about her mood.

  “I need to bring a violin to school,” I said quietly. “I need to go get one.”

  Her eyebrows scrunched together. “Since when do you play the violin?”

  “One of my classes is violin lessons.”

  “Shouldn’t the school provide one if they’re giving you the lessons?”

  “They don’t have one for me.”

  She frowned. “We can’t buy a musical instrument every time you want to piddle with something.”

  “I need one for class tomorrow.”

  “Did your dad approve of this?”

  “He signed the paper for my schedule.” What I’d said was true, he did sign my paper. What I was implying wasn’t true. He didn’t really know about my violin lessons because Dr. Green and Mr. Blackbourne changed it after.

  She sucked in a breath and slowly released it, scratching at a spot on her face. Her eyes focused in and out. Maybe the television was hurting her eyes. “I don’t think you should take this class. You’ll never keep up with it.”

  My heart plunged. No, please. Don’t do this now. “But I’m already signed up,” I said. “I’m sure it wouldn’t be expensive. It can be something cheap from a pawn shop.”

  “If we buy one for you, you’ll just quit.”

  “I can’t quit,” I urged. I was losing this. I had to come up with something. “I’m already signed up. I have to go for the whole year.”

  “You shouldn’t have signed up for it. You don’t know anything about music.”

  “Marie has her flute,” I said, feeling terrible about using my sister for this. I always did my best to keep my sister out of the middle of any discussion with my parents, even if she didn’t do the same for me. It felt like a betrayal of trust and I didn’t want to be that type of person. Still, my argument was weak and I knew what my mother would say before she said it.

  “Just go to the front office tomorrow and ask them to drop you. You don’t have any business in a music class.”

  That was it. If I asked any more, she’d punish me for talking back, or worse, she’d call the school. If she did that, I’d be at the mercy of her whims. My whole schedule could get reworked if she wanted.

  I swallowed and backed up to the door. It was a risk I didn’t want to take. I plodded down the hallway. I couldn’t stand to be in the house anymore. I shivered, suppressing the anger at feeling trapped. What else could I do? Tomorrow I’d have to admit to Mr. Blackbourne that my parents wouldn’t allow me to get a violin. I didn’t want to envision his steel eyes looking at me with pity or with resentment for wasting his time. The only student he took on the entire year was quitting.

  I sucked in a breath and shook off the thoughts. There was nothing I could do about it. I would do what I had to do and get it over with. Maybe it was better this way. What did someone like me do to deserve any time and attention from a talented Academy professor?

  I climbed the stairs to the landing. I was about to enter my room when I noticed Marie’s door was ajar. She never left it open and I edged over to it to take a peek.

  Marie’s bed was unmade. The black ceiling fan was on, the window’s curtains were open. Clothes cluttered the floor, some spilling out from the closet. A diary sat haphazardly open on the floor. Papers from the day of school sat in a pile near her door. No Marie.

  I quietly closed her door and backed away from it, thinking. I padded through the house. Marie wasn’t around. My mom already saw me and dismissed me so she wouldn’t likely ask for me again. My dad wouldn’t be home for hours.

  I grabbed my bookbag and the cell phone and was out the door before I could second guess myself. I wasn’t going to waste a moment if I could get away.

  I took a longer route through the woods behind my house, coming out around Nathan’s house and out into the street. I didn’t want to take the chance of anyone in my family paying attention and seeing me. It also gave me time to cool down from my mother’s resounding rejection.

  Max, Kota’s golden retriever, padded over to me as I crossed the yard to Kota’s drive. He panted happily and nosed at my hand. I pushed my fingers through the fur on his head. He followed me into the garage and sat next to me when I used the doorbell.

  Jessica, Kota’s little sister, answered the door. Her pink rimmed glasses slid down her nose a little as she looked up at me and smiled. “Hi Sang.”

  “Hi Jessica. Are the boys still here?”

  “Yeah,” she said. She opened the door wider for me and I slipped inside. She unhooked Max’s lead from his collar. Max raced through the house and disappeared into the living room, sniffing at the air. “They’re up in Kota’s room.”

  “Thanks,” I said. I closed the door behind me. Jessica ran off back to her bedroom, Max followed behind her.

  I opened the door to Kota’s room and suddenly realized I probably should have knocked. It seemed awkward to simply run up the stairs. Would he even hear me if I tried knocking?

  I opted for calling from the bottom of his stairs. “Kota?” I called up. “Gabriel?”

  Creaking and paper shifting noises drifted to me. Kota and Gabriel poked their heads out from over the rail barrier.

  “Hey!” Gabriel said. He’d removed his dress shirt and tie. He left on a white ribbed tank shirt that he had worn underneath. While he was lean, he had some definition to his chest and arms and the look was still stunning. “You made it. How did you escape?”

  I finished climbing the stairs. “My sister ran off somewhere so I thought it’d be okay to come over.”

  Kota’s collared shirt and tie had been replaced by a green t-shirt. He tilted his head toward me. “How long can you stay?”

  “I don’t know. If we spot her walking back, I’ll go. Or before my dad gets home.”

  “Are you sure it’s okay?”

  “Aw, come on, Kota,” Gabriel said. His slim fingers encircled my arm and he pulled me into the room. “If it were up to her parents, she’d never leave the house. If she doesn’t break out, we’d never see her.”

  Kota shifted on his feet as if he was trying to decide if this was a good idea. It made me wonder if he felt guilty for the day before when I got into trouble. I searched for the words to help calm his worries,
but nothing seemed right. I didn’t want to go back so I tried my best to smile warmly at him, hoping he’d understand. He hesitated but took a step back, relenting.

  I sat down at one end of Kota’s bed, dropping my book bag on the floor. Gabriel crawled onto the bed, crossing his legs and pointed to the pile of papers that he had collected in the middle. “We’ve already got homework. Can you believe it?”

  “I’ve got a lot, too,” I said. “What are you doing for the English assignment?”

  “I’ve already finished that,” he said. He shuffled through the papers on the bed, picking one out. “It’s more like song lyrics than a poem.”

  “Can I see?”

  He passed the notebook paper to me. “It’s not good.”

  His poem was about a lost princess in a tower and a prince pining for her from the ground. He threw apples up to her every day hoping she would eat them and think of him. One day he hit her in the head and she fell from the tower and she died. The prince felt so bad he took her to a mountaintop where he held on to her until he froze to death in the night, binding him and her together forever in ice.

  “It’s sad,” I said. “Tragic.”

  He grinned. “Girls love that shit.”

  “I like happy endings.”

  He pulled a face, leaning back on his elbows against the bed. “Life isn’t always happy.”

  “It should be.” I moved to sit back on the bed far enough to where my ankles were hanging over the edge and my back was up against the wall. Kota huddled over his desk. “Did you finish yours, Kota?”

  “Working on it now, actually.”

  “How’s it going?”

  He sat up, turning in his chair and holding up his notebook. “I don’t know. What rhymes with formaldehyde?”

  My eyes widened. Gabriel laughed, rubbing his fingers against his forehead. “Dude, what kind of poem are you writing?”

  Kota blinked at us. “It’s about a doctor.”

  “Does the doctor fall in love?” Gabriel asked.

  “No.”

  “Does someone die?”

  “Not in the story, technically.”

  “What does he do?”

  “He performs an autopsy.”

  I glanced at Gabriel, sharing a smile with him. I held out a palm to Kota. “Can I see it?”

  Kota’s cheeks turned red and he handed the notebook to me. The poem had a lot of long words describing the procedures of cutting up a dead body. It was more like a set of instructions with every other line rhyming. The gruesome details made my stomach churn. Was this accurate? How did he know how to perform an autopsy?

  “Kota...” I said, not sure exactly how to phrase it.

  “I’m not very good at this,” he said. He fiddled with the edge of the arm on his desk chair. “I’m not very creative.”

  I thought about the lines. It wasn’t bad work. It was just too formal. “May I see your pen?”

  He handed it to me. I replaced a handful of words and added in a few more phrases at the end. When I finished I handed it back to him.

  He looked over my notes and smiled, shaking his head. “It’s a horror piece.”

  “You already had most of it. You just needed a change of perception. A live patient being operated on by a murderer.”

  He laughed, pushing his glasses up his nose with a forefinger. “You’re going to make me sound smarter than I am.”

  “What are you talking about?” Gabriel said. “If anything, this school is going to dumb you down. I’m surprised you went along with this going in to the public school thing.”

  Kota shrugged, sitting back in his chair and using his legs to rock himself back and forth. “You guys were going. What was I going to do?”

  “Personally,” Gabriel said, “I’m regretting we ever started. This school seems hopeless. I mean you saw the classrooms.”

  “The trailers are kind of unusual,” I said, for a lack of a kinder word.

  “And the library,” Gabriel added.

  Kota rubbed at his chin. “There isn’t much to the library.”

  “And don’t even get me started on lunchtime,” Gabriel said. “I mean come on. You saw that. There were still kids in line for lunch when the bell rang.”

  “Something doesn’t add up,” Kota said, rubbing a palm at his cheek and folding his arms over his chest. “And with the problems from the principal today, I don’t think Mr. Blackbourne and Mr. Hendricks are on the same page about what they want from us.”

  I hadn’t thought about it before but now that they were talking about it, it did seem unreasonable to put such a thing on the shoulders of seven students. “Who made the arrangements?” I asked. “Who asked you all to come into the school?”

  “The whole thing was designed by the school board and some of the administrators,” Kota said. “Technically the principal had the final say, but he was under a lot of pressure to allow us in. It was basically do it or it meant his job. He claimed he couldn’t guarantee the safety of ‘spoiled students’. The school board thought if we could help improve the school overall, the state would develop a second school nearby to split the population. They won’t bother to spend money on a school that looks like it might be a waste of time.”

  “But isn’t that what they need?” I asked. I was surprised they were telling me about this. Then I realized it really wasn’t about the Academy, but about my own school. It didn’t count so much as an Academy secret. “Wouldn’t you give money to a school that needed it?”

  “You would think,” Kota said. “The only way a school gets attention is by the quality of the grades and curriculum for the entire student body and financial interest from state officials in control of school spending. They’ll only help a school that seems worth investing in, because that’s what it comes down to. They focus more on middle and high income neighborhoods. It makes a bigger impact than these poorer districts. Not as many registered voters here. However, there was a deal struck by a state official. He’s documented that if Ashley Waters can improve, he’ll give the go ahead to start building another school.”

  “Which is why this is stupid. There’s not a lot worth saving. They might as well build two new schools. And the mismanagement is terrible. I feel like we’re wasting our time,” Gabriel said. He stretched out a leg over his homework, tipping his foot to nudge my leg. “If it weren’t for you, I’d be asking Mr. Blackbourne if we could drop this whole thing.”

  His attitude surprised me. They could leave if they wanted? Would they if they were pushed out at all or felt it was too much? “You don’t have to stay for me,” I said softly. “I mean, if you feel it’s that bad.” I didn’t want to be so demure about it. They were my only friends in the school. Even so, it just seemed silly to stay because of me. If I had the choice, would I have stayed? I could only imagine what the Academy was like but I knew it had to be better than Ashley Waters.

  “We’re in for the year,” Kota said. “We promised we’d do our best for the school and that’s what we’ll do. We agreed to this. We’ll stick it out. We don’t get to give up just because it’s complicated. Mr. Blackbourne’s plans weren’t made lightly, so there must be something we can do.”

  So it was Mr. Blackbourne that was officially in charge. Mr. Blackbourne made the arrangements. Did he call Victor out of the class? I bit my lower lip, talking about Mr. Blackbourne only reminded me of secrets I couldn’t ask about and what I had to do tomorrow. “Maybe we should make something for lunch tomorrow so we aren’t stuck with vending food. There might not be anything left tomorrow.”

  “I think there’s a loaf of bread downstairs,” Kota said, standing up. He held out a hand to me. It took me a moment to realize he wanted me to take it. I sucked in a breath to summon some courage and put my hand in his. He grasped it as I stood up, letting go when I was standing. A passing thought in the back of my mind was somewhat sorry he released me. “Unless you mean you want to cook something.”

  “I suppose I could,” I said, putting a fi
nger to my lower lip. It seemed kind of weird to make something and I couldn’t imagine what to fix.

  “Hold up. Are you telling us you can cook?” Gabriel said. He swung his legs around and stood up next to me. “I have to see this.”

  “Who doesn’t cook?” When it came to my family, unless I wanted dinner from a can every night, my sister and I learned how to cook. I couldn’t remember not being able to at least make scrambled eggs or spaghetti as needed.

  “Luke and North can,” Gabriel said. “It doesn’t happen often.”

  “If you can read, you can cook.” I crossed the floor, heading to the stairs. I glanced over my shoulder at them. “Ready?”

  Kota shot a look at Gabriel. Gabriel smirked. “I might be able to use the can opener.”

  Within a short amount of time, taco soup simmered in a pot on the stove. The boys managed to cut onions and opened cans. They stood back and watched as I cooked up ground beef, added beans and vegetables and different spices and put it all together.

  “There,” I said, wiping my brow with the back of my hand as I stirred the pot. “Kota, you’ve got dinner for tonight. What you don’t eat, stick into a thermos. We’ll take some plastic cups and spoons and bingo. Lunch.”

  Gabriel hovered over my shoulder. He stuck his finger into the mix and yanked it back to put into his mouth. “He might not have leftovers,” he said, licking his finger. “I’m gonna stay for dinner.”

  He attempted to reach into the pot again and I playfully swatted at his hand. “You’re going to eat it all before it’s dinner time.”

  He pouted and the way the bottom lip curled melted my heart. It was adorable. “Don’t be so cruel, Sang. You didn’t tell us you could cook and now that you’ve made something and it smells really good, you won’t let me taste it.”

  “You’re going to burn your fingers,” I said. “It’s hot.”

  “I’ll live. It’s just a finger.” He threaded his hand around my side with a pointed finger aimed at the pot. I pushed his arm in a panic, worried he really would burn himself. He grasped my wrist. I laughed, dropping the large wooden spoon into the pot. I tried to wrestle my arm away. He captured my other hand, and collected my wrists together against his chest. “You’re in trouble now,” he said, grinning.