Tales From Heller

Blessed Are The Meek

CW: Sexual harassment

August 14th:

This has been my worst first day of school ever. Typically my extracurriculars are the stressful part of my day and school is easy, but it's going to be the reverse this year. At least that means I get a break at the end of the day. The issue is that while I was doing useful things like writing for the Insight and trying to get into a good college, all of those club people I tried ignoring for the last two years have been convincing the administration they should be running the school, and guess what, Mr. Kurtz and everyone else listened to them.

I'm going to wear out my pen nib if I write everything that bothers me every day, I can tell, but here I am, showing up to leadership class assuming that I'll be doing something important as class president, and here comes Ms. Foster telling me without any trace of consternation that Frank—why is he making this decision anyway?—has appointed me the official envoy to all school events. All of them where I don't have existing commitments, which is still way too many. My "boundless enthusiasm" made me the perfect fit for the role, Ms. Foster said. I thought she liked me, but clearly I'm just another leadership pawn to her.

So besides taking away my ability to support representative student government, Frank has implemented some sort of caste system where we get Greek letters and that gives us different responsibilities. I'm an Alpha, which means I get really good school lunches and other privileges, but even though I have these things I still feel very controlled. Jason is to blame. My leadership period isn't the same one as the losers in charge of this entire scheme, but there are still a lot of people from the club, and Jason is one of them. He told me that he's my supervisor—I thought Ms. Foster was, but clearly she can't be bothered to do her job. He said this so creepily, too, that he's watching me, and he pointed to my phone and to the security cameras. I don't think he's truly trying to supervise me: I think his job is to make sure I don't rebel.

I'm writing this before my first event, some sort of Alpha meet and greet. Like a cocktail party without the fun. This is going to be such a strange year, I can already tell.

August 15th:

I think Jason's been looking at my phone. I had more unread emails earlier today than I do now. That TigerTalk app they made us all download must be malware, but it's not like I can delete it. I'm getting a new tablet for sheet music anyway, so I think I'll use that for secure communications. I'm writing this on the tennis courts, where I'm mostly out of range of the cameras. They can't see what I'm writing anyway. The cameras, I've noticed, swivel erratically, sometimes like someone is manually controlling them—sometimes it's like they're tracing people's steps. I think that's on purpose so nobody can tell if the cameras are being manually controlled.

This is a gross violation of privacy, Jason looking at my emails, if it's really him. It could be any of the people in charge, or even one of the administrators. I'd go to the police, but they wouldn't believe me, and my parents would think I'm crazy. There's another meeting tomorrow, some sort of parent Q and A with Mr. Kurtz that my dad is going to. Maybe then he'll see what's wrong with all of this.

The Alpha meet and greet was interesting, but it felt very segregated in a creepy way. There were some of us who clearly didn't buy into any of the club stuff in our own corner talking about normal things, some underclassmen I hadn't met before who seemed nice (I never like these sorts of mixers, but they might help keep my sanity), and then the people involved with the club went to their own corner. Some people tried convincing us to join the club, but I saw right through them.

August 16th:

That was an interesting meeting with Mr. Kurtz. He literally stormed out of the room in anger, it was that bad. He clearly doesn't like me much, and I think it's because I was being so sarcastic with him—I guess we can't all be teachers' pets. My hope is that people don't see me as endorsing any of this business just because I attend all the school events. My dad asked me afterward if this was normal, but all I said was that this was going to be the new normal. I don't think I want him to know everything that's going on at Heller, even though he knows there's something very clearly wrong.