Eunoia

Prologue

Most of my memories growing up are here. At Charlotte Brontë Institute. No, not at home with my family. I only spent every few birthdays there. It had been so long since I had seen my parents by the time I was 17, I could hardly remember their voices. Not at my house as a little kid running around and playing with the people in the walls.

No.

Here, at school. Some people hate school. I never did. Some people felt it was like a prison, I saw it as freedom from getting dressed in tight dresses and going to fancy parties with my parents. School was freeing. A way for me to learn, to move on. School was my home. Not home.

This has never angered me, well, if I said that I would be a liar. What truly angered me the most, was the new students. Every year there were a handful of kids from ages of 10-18 showing up and attending the classes I had been trying so hard to take since I was 8. Yes, I started at the Institute very early but back then, they allowed that back then.

But these students took the classes I had been applying for for years and got them on their first try. I understand that my anger toward these students is irrational, and believe me when I say that I tried to get rid of this anger and finally make a friend, I walked up to one and when I try to talk the only thing I ended up wanting to say is not very 'polite'.

It was the first day of the term and a boy, James Luther, had just run up to me, knocked all my books out of my hands, and ran back to his friends laughing. James Luther was in the same year as me. It was his second year attending. He was already so comfortable. I didn't understand how the kids were so relaxed while roaming the halls. I never was.

I was wearing my uniform. I don't know why, maybe I had wanted to get used to the habit of wearing it again. Or maybe I just found it comforting. Maybe I was so used to wearing the rough blazer and tight tie that I found comfort in it like so many people found comfort in their favorite blankets or books.

James, though he ran back to his friends across the courtyard, I was still able to hear his laughter bombing over and over like a dying toad. He was that one-class clown. I hated him with a fury that could not be explained. I would just black out and get angry.

I might have said plenty of dumb things to him, trying to get him to shut up for one. It never worked. He would laugh at me as I spewed every insult that I could think of at his stupid face until I saw red.

I had seen red while looking at him every time since.

I sighed and bent down to pick up my books. All 8 of them. As I picked up one by one, I turned the cover over and read the title.

A Lesson In Vengeance by Victoria Lee

Frankenstein by Mary Shelly

Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare

The Women In White by Wilkie Collins

Dracula by: Bram Stoker

Gone With the Wind by Margret Mitchell

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

Then, my all-time favorite: The Secret History by: Donna Tart

I have read it 100 times over. It was my comfort. I first read it when I couldn't have been younger than 13. When I turned to the last page I shut the book which had caused a soft thud to fill my eerily silent bedroom. I stared out my window onto the beautifully endless ocean. Then, not long after I opened the book again and started from the beginning. After so many years of reading it, the spine was torn and the cover held wrinkles and spots where the ink faded.

I stretched out my back as I stood up again, and pulled the books to my chest. I found myself staring across the courtyard. A girl was walking through. I didn't recognize her. She looked my age, so she must be new.

I watched her closely, she looked different from everyone else at school. Her skin was too different colors, both light but it made her look different from me, as I had some of the darkest skin in the entire school. I guess that is what happens when you go to a boarding school started by rich white men.

But most of her skin looked tan like she had spent most of the summer in the sun. but there were spots on her skin, one large one covering her left eye that was so light, and if her entire skin looked that way, I might have guessed she was a vampire.

Maybe she was.

From what I could see from my distance was that she had two different eye colors. The left gray, the right blue. She had curly sandy blonde hair that was in two short braids. She was stunning, and as I looked at her, I felt calm. Like she was the eye of a storm that I didn't even know existed.

I didn't know it at the time, but I know now, she was the eye of the storm. She was warm in a comforting way, she never put pressure on me or anyone else. She matched all the characteristics.

As I watched her from across the loud courtyard I felt everything go quiet. The boy's laughing was muffled and my eyes locked onto her movement. She walked as if she were an angel floating gently above everybody else there.

She had a huge brown sweater and dark jeans, maybe they were even black. She had black, blocky, Mary Janes that made her even taller than she already was. She looked like a character out of a movie, or a book.

She must have felt me staring and glanced in my direction. Her silky eyes landed on me and I felt my cheeks grow warm and tears pricked in my eyes. I bit my lower lip to keep it from trembling, the only thing about the situation I could control.

I didn't break eye contact with her. I was never the first one to break eye contact. It was one of my rules for myself. But from over her shoulder, I saw the headmistress walk up and start talking to the girl. I watched from a distance, my books held tightly against my chest. My knuckles were clamped tightly shut around the books like a hydraulic press.

I couldn't have smashed the books with my hands if I tried, but if I could have, they would have been shreds on the misty ground. I felt something hit my head. It wasn't hard. I turned to look at James Luther and his gang standing there, laughing hysterically, and the muffled sounds of my classmates faded and my anger built up again.

It was a burning rage in my soul. I could have just marched over to him and stabbed him to death with a pencil and had no guilt. But no, I never would have done that in my right mind. Never.

I hate blood. It's sticky, it's awful.

Blood had always been a trigger that I never understood. I never saw blood until I started school. I started to see boys running around, crashing into each other. It gave me the icks from the start. I would watch the boys pick off their scabs and I would watch as they slowly started to bleed.

I never forgot the feeling of watching a 10-year-old boy pick at his skin until blood was gushing down his leg. I thought about this a lot. More than I should admit because I never wanted to be seen as a psycho, but I have always known that if I was to kill someone, I would snap their neck or maybe hang them. Something without blood.

But sometimes I thought doing the opposite would throw the cops off my path.