*Watty's 2021 Shortlist*
Samantha Roberts and Ben Evans have one thing in common - they both attend Sir Robertson's School for the Gifted, an elite boarding school for the children of the world's wealthiest. Both scholarship students, they gravitate...
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Going to the gym daily is as natural to me as breathing, now. I started going back when—well. Back when I wasn't in a good place, going to the gym felt like a lifeline. A way to center myself. My life might have been full of cracks, failing at the foundation, but I could still be strong. Perfect.
Then, it served as a way to stay in shape for basketball. A way to impress girls. A way to assure myself that I wasn't slipping backwards—that I had succeeded in pulling myself out of the hole I was in.
Now, it's a way to let off steam. A way to get out of my head, a place where I don't have to think. A calm place.
I like to go in the mornings, when I'm not meeting Sam. Sometimes I'll wake up extra early and go beforehand, using the pool as a way to wake up. Since Sam and I don't brave the jungle on the weekends, I'm headed to the gym now—it's seven-thirty in the morning, and it's beautiful out.
The sun has already come up, but the chill is just beginning to burn off, the dew on the grass a barely-there presence against my ankles. My sneakers crunch against the gravel, and I nod at the few other students up this early.
Hungover partiers, over-eager geniuses, and one kid that just looks lost. I smile at all of them and ask the kid that looks lost if he needs help; he just stares at me dazedly and mutters something about Avogadro's rule and the tenth digit of Pi.
An Academic, then. I'm familiar with how they can get: John, one of the boys in my dorm, needs to be reminded to eat when he really gets into a project. He never leaves his door locked, and we take turns checking in on him.
He scares me, sometimes. He looks at you like he can see everything you are made up of, every atom, every person you've met and things you've wanted and dream you've thrown away.
He looks at you like the sum of your parts is not what he thought it would be, like this world is simply a stopover to somewhere better, somewhere bigger.
Maybe it is.
I'm not religious. I don't have anything against it: I just don't like the idea of someone else having control of my fate. Of someone else having made me.
My mum used to go to church, though, and the whole family would go on Christmas—it stopped when I was teen, when I was old enough to realize what it meant and realize I didn't want it.
Still, the look some of these kids get in their eyes reminds me of that—the faith, the knowledge of something more. Some of the people in those church pews looked like that.
Rapturous.
Is there really a difference whether it's from science or faith? In the end, they're both knowledge. And they both look very similar from an outsider's point of view.
I don't know.
My thoughts are a whirlwind, slightly melancholic and a lot pitying, and it's hard to shake myself out of the stupor. I just have a feeling that nothing's right, lately, a feeling back by an utter lack of proof, of course.
