Hi Friends,
Please enjoy the specificity of the homework organization system and the fact that I thought a fourteen-year-old girl would be the saviour of both the human and the fae world.
***
I started school two days later, which happened to be Monday. It was March, middle of the semester and I would be a novelty, the new girl from the big city.
Yippee. Mom insisted on walking me to the school the first day even though I'm fourteen! But even though it seriously ticked me off, I didn't complain. I knew that mom was just trying to adjust to the fact that dad wasn't going to be around much anymore. Come to think of it, he'd never been around much when he worked in New York.
The walk to school took about three minutes. You could see the school from our house. In my backpack I carried a packed lunch (the school didn't have a cafeteria, everybody ate their lunch in homeroom), seven binders in the colours of the rainbow, notebooks in the same colours, a big, multicoloured binder that had a, TAKE ME HOME sticker on the front, and a pencil case. The school building itself was small and built out of wooden boards, just like every thing else in Bethel. I guess it was pretty. The school was three stories but it sort of looked like it had been built in the eighteen hundreds. I would later find out that the first floor had been built in the eighteen hundreds. Eighteen twenty – seven to be exact. The other two floors had been added in nineteen seventy – one. But right at that moment, it looked small, depressing and foreign.
“Have a great day, honey,” mom said.
“Right,” I muttered hoping I didn't sound too sarcastic. I hurried up the front steps, determinedly ignoring the stares of my soon to be fellow classmates. Not as many people as I thought were staring at me. But there was one boy, two or three years older than me maybe, that was staring at me with keen interest, almost fascination.
I glared at him until he caught my eye and looked away, grinning.
Inside I looked around, located the office and walked through the open wood panelled door. A middle aged guy was busy typing on a computer. I waited a few seconds for the guy to notice me, when he didn't, I cleared my throat. He looked up.
“Can I help you?” he asked.
“I'm Rachel Jonstone,” I said. I saw recognition light his eyes. Great
“Oh, yes,” he said, opening a drawer and pulling out a few pieces of paper.
“Here's a list of your classes and a map of the school, although you probably won't need it, it’s not very hard to get around this school.”
I had no doubt that he was right. He handed me another slip of paper. “Your locker is on the third floor, with the rest of the freshmen. Here's your combination.”
“Thanks,” I sighed looking down at the list of classes. I had Geography first which was on (I checked the map) the third floor. A bell rang and kids started coming in the front doors. There weren't many of them but in the smallish school, it felt pretty crowded. I followed the kids heading upstairs, to the third floor. I took out the slip of paper that had my locker number on it. Number seventy – two. It was at the end of the long line of lockers. I carefully twirled the combination number. The locker popped open. I hung my bag on the hook, took out the pencil case, the red binder and the red notebook, hastily making a note on the inside cover that red equalled geography. (I colour code all my subjects in case you're wondering, yeah go ahead and laugh.)
The Geography classroom was tiny. Only about nine or ten desks, a black board at the front, teachers desk in the front corner. The left wall was covered in maps and the right wall a bookshelf was fit to the length of the wall. A globe, a shelf full of atlases and a couple of random books on different places in the world were resting on it. Every thing just barely fit.
I walked up to the teacher sitting at the teacher’s desk and gave her my name. In return, she gave me my textbooks and stuff. I sat down at the only empty desk
beside a freckled redhead.
“Hi, my name's Becky,” she said, smiling
***
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Thanks for reading and I'm sending lots of love to you in these uncertain times!
xxKathleen
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