Fragmented Dreams

Chapter 3: School Days

One train ride down the mountain and a short walk later, I arrived at school. As I passed through the large iron gates I showed my ID to the guard in the small booth and it was scanned, a record of my near tardiness. Most everyone else was heading inside or was already in class with only a few stragglers in the halls, still chatting with friends. My scheduled train always left me just enough time to power stroll to my locker, exchange my books and then head to class. If I was lucky I would be able to catch up with all the morning gossip before homeroom began. When my Grandfather first suggested I attend Royal Queen Academy, I complained, as the idea of a long commute into the city did not fill me with joy. After the first few months, I relented, deciding the train ride through the mountain was actually kinda nice. It would often give me the chance to doze off and listen to music or sketch an idea for a new painting.

Royal Queen Academy was housed in an old building that used to be a hospital back in the early 1900s. When a new hospital was built in the center of the city, the building was sold and turned into a prestigious boarding school. The main building looked old-fashioned at first but the inside was fully renovated, with all of the state-of-the-art electronics and nice comfy amenities that rich kids desired. Although, sometimes we still had problems with the air conditioning in a few of the upstairs rooms.

As the years went on the school eventually moved its live-in residents off campus to a more modern apartment building, deeper in the city. The school had a fancy fleet of vans that would bus kids to and from their dorm rooms and also into the city for shopping at the local mall. They tore down the old dorms and in its place built a large swimming pool, tennis courts, and a beautiful garden that sat just behind the main building. I spent most of my time in the art room, located adjacent to the gardens, as I was an avid painter in my spare time. It was a hobby I'd picked up as a way to help process my dreams. I honestly wasn't keen on sharing my dream artwork with anyone besides my friends or Grandfather, who always declared all of my work 'fantastic' despite the subject matter.

As far as the students went, since our school was so renowned for its amazing teachers and top-tier education, we ended up with a lot of the children of diplomats or rich business people. It created a strange divide between the hardworking overachieving kids and the rich party crowd. These were kids who have lived all over the world and have experienced more in one year of their life than I could hope to see in several lifetimes. I found myself admiring how independent most of them were. The campus seemed more like a college than a high school at times. A lot of the kids had parents who were either incredibly overbearing or simply uninvolved. The smallest group of kids were the few locals who could afford the tuition but not much else and I fell into that category. My Grandfather never liked to talk about money, but he assured me that he could afford my tuition. I remained unconvinced of this fact after I saw a bill from the school that he had tried to hide from me. I knew how much he made selling apples and it honestly never added up despite his side job as a consultant. At one point I insisted that he should track down my wayward aunt Mary, who was related to me on my father's side. After my parents died she took possession of a lot of their valuables, claiming she was holding them for me for 'safe keeping'. Since then she has denied ever promising to store anything and I doubted I would ever see the money or items she took, leaving me somewhat bitter. Grandpa told me he had a handle on it, including my tuition expenses, and insisted I focus on other things.

My face must have soured while I was thinking of my aunt, because Elizabeth, the queen bee of our class, was giving me a look. I had just stepped into my homeroom, pausing as I processed the emotions flooding over me when I caught her eye. She was always stunning, with perfect makeup, smooth, silky blond hair, and a haughty look in her eyes. It was no wonder she worked as a model on her off time and had thousands of followers on social media. Her outward appearance was always flawless, but that was just a shell. Behind that coy smile was a hateful, racist, and selfish child. Elizabeth smiled and I could almost taste her disdain from where I stood. We were not friends, that was for sure, especially after I yelled at her in the library for being rude to my soon-to-be friend Sunita at the end of our freshman year. I came back next summer blacklisted from most social groups, which didn't bother me much. Fewer humans interacting with me meant fewer emotions I had to deal with.