There's a monster roaming around Ravenwood Advanced Academy-his unbound cruelty awaits for the next prey eagerly.
His victims sulk around the school with the truth choking them at a slow pace. Their girlhood has been disrupted and all that it's left...
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Ravenwood Advanced Academy prided itself on the excellency of their alumni. Every student who had walked through the halls of the institute, with its grand flower stained glass windows from where the sunlight poured in, went into the world to become a highly respected member of society.
Politicians with long speeches full of empty words that swore equity and long claws ready to sink into skin of the poor, lawyers with rows of triangulated upper teeth and pointed incisors who could put words into your mouth and flip the tables in their favour and appeared at the sight of money—like a shark when it smelled blood, businessmen that howled at the moonlit opportunity to buy lands, install fabrics in the developing world and steal the sources that mother nature bestowed upon that region after just a few conversations and some financial transactions to those that ruled in the third world, those in power willing to sell their countries for capital that would never reach the common man.
Politicians, lawyers, businessmen, bankers, doctors, real estate moguls and the like were the byproducts of such prestigious institution.
What the school board would never showcase was the monsters that lurked in the hallways, the putrid legacy of certain boys who never became men, those protected by the status quo.
And when one of those boys got you, the nightmare began with him starring as the monster who pulled the strings of your life.
I kept that thought in my mind as Alexandre Baudelaire strolled into the schoolyard with his two best friends—Justin and Monty—standing side by side.
I was sitting on the designated bench that my friends and I picked back in Grade 9 because of a willow tree that shielded us from the hot sun. I was anemic hence my proneness to sudden falls and low blood pressure.
I gazed at Alec, the nickname he had chosen for himself ever since he could speak. He was like the sun, reflecting warm rays of sunshine. Always glowing. Tousled chestnut hair, almost black at the roots, and dark hazel eyes with a hint of warmth. The embodiment of everything good and honest, our golden boy.
He blinded everyone with his light to conceal the truth.
My willow tree couldn't protect me from him.
I had learned that lesson the hard way.
During the day, I had my willow tree—the stars were mine for the night. Neither of them were able to restrain the monster from catching me.
Alec sauntered like he owned the place, well, he kind of did. There was a wing with his family name but the same applied to one of my best friends, Mina—short for Wilhelmina—or Daisy like her parents preferred to call her because of her middle name: Marjorie.
You could tell she came from old money with a name such as Wilhelmina Marjorie Fairbanks. You knew a name like that came with a trust fund big enough to pay a developing country's debt to the IMF and not even make a dent on it.
