Heidis Welt

Chapter One: Wake me up when September ends

It was 7 AM sharp. The alarm went off waking Heidi up with her usual smile and special glow. She then had a bowl of cornflakes and milk for breakfast.

"Bed made check, breakfast eaten check, dishes done check, teeth brushed check, braid check... now time to dress for success!", she said to herself as she approached her closet.
For the first time in forever Heidi got dressed in the blink of an eye. She could no longer stay there, as she had always felt loathed by her very own parents, so she left as soon as she could. 

The clock struck seven-thirty in the morning. She opened the door carefully so her parents wouldn't hear her and she then left for high school. The journey took about a twenty minutes. She arrived at the Fermata stairway at about five past eight. She sat on one of the upper steps headphones on and there she listened to ABBA Gold until the concierges opened the door at about quarter past eight. Then Heidi went upstairs to her assigned classroom. There was no one but her new academic tutoress: a seemingly nice old lady of dwarf stature and short straight blonde hair. Classes started at half past eight, and until that time came more or less the rest of the students, her future classmates, were arriving like crazy.

Once everyone was in class, Mrs. Roxanne introduced herself, took the roll call, and gave her students her new class schedule and the pertinent indications for the upcoming school year. Apparently, the students had to remain locked in that claustrophobic classroom for the next three hours until the bell rang signaling the start of recess. So they did. Once the shrill noise of the out-of-tune bell was heard, all her classmates left the classroom in a hurry, as if a fire had started inside the classroom. As usual, that was not the case with our Heidi, who gathered her belongings with her usual parsimony and left the classroom with a calmness that for her was completely normal but for anyone else would have been totally out of the ordinary. Well, after all, Heidi had been labeled by her classmates as a "weirdo" all her life.

Once the belongings were all in her pale pink backpack and having left the classroom, Heidi waved goodbye to her new tutoress, once again, with a smile on her face. Then she slowly descended the two flights of stairs that separated her from the school library and entered it, trying not to make too much noise. Heidi expected to find her friend Val, short for Valentine, there, but to her surprise Val was not the only familiar face in the room: Miss Embeth and Mrs. Edna were there too. She tried to pretend that nothing had happened, as if she hadn't seen them, but it was too late: they had both spotted her as soon as she had crossed the wooden door.  Heidi sat down at the table where Val was, sat in front of her, and pulled out her folder, exquisitely decorated with pictures of her favorite actors, all over 40, printed out and taped there by her. Val seemed to love it, but it didn't seem so to Beth and Edna once they approached the two friends.

"Heidi, honey... What the hell is that over there?", Edna asked with her eyes wide opened.

"My folder," Heidi jokingly replied, eliciting Val's chuckle and her own.

"Don't you mess with me, young lady," Edna said surprisingly in a joking tone as well, trying to hold back her laughter, and winked at Miss Beth.

"I think what my guildmate meant is that what on earth do you have stuck all over the folder, mademoiselle...!?", Beth said smiling, trying to help her fellow teacher.

"Oh, I see... these are called pictures", Heidi said amidst laughter.

"I think you, miss, know exactly what I mean...", both teachers said in unison, trying to hold back their laughter again.

Heidi winked at Val, looked at her pretty mature crushes, and prepared to answer. "Oh man, you should've said it sooner! I'm just continuing this awesome trend that emerged a long, long, long time ago, at the end of the last century... why did I even say of the century... of the last millennium!", she blurted out with her characteristic quasi-harmless sarcasm.