Tin Soldiers

Chapter 1: Perfectly Normal

Chapter 1: Perfectly normal

My feet pound against the lino floor to the beat of the clock, they try to outrun the seconds it counts down, but it’s fruitless. I don’t why I’m still running; my time will be up at any moment. But I still speed down the obnoxiously bright corridors. My inner stubbornness won’t let me accept defeat, even from time itself. I’m almost there. I can see the door closing; I have to stop myself from shouting at it to stay open. I’m so close, so close I can hear people talking on other side. Then the bell screams its shrill cry.  I stop right in front of the door. Time’s up.  I’m late.

I stand there for a second to catch my breath, which is uncontrollably heavy after my run. It takes a minute to convince myself that I haven’t blown my second chance yet. They’re not going to send me back to Reform just for being late. But still, it’s another little stain on my shiny new record. Slowly I open the door and try to avoid the stares of mild amusement at my flustered state. Mr Collins tuts at me as he pushes his glasses up his bulbous nose.

“Late again, Miss Reilly.” He states the obvious fact in his usual gruff-yet-superior-sounding-voice.

“Only by a few seconds,” I murmur resentfully, just about biting back an insultment.

“Well if you really valued your learning you’d be early. Now take your seat, we don’t have time to debate the school rules, we’re behind enough as it is.”  He answers, waving a dismissive hand at my little challenge.

I internally groan as he writes “Astrid Reilly” on the board under the title “detentions” in the top-right corner.  It’s used to be a familiar sight, but this is the first time it’s appeared there in months. The councillors at Reform would not be happy, luckily I waved goodbye to six months ago, and won’t ever be seeing them again. That is unless I go back to my old ways, but there’s no way that’s going to happen.

“That’s so unfair. I swear he’s been putting the clocks forward by a minute just so that he can give us more detentions.” Lily mutters as he tries to get the class to quieten down, who’ve now gone back to their talking and shouting.

“No he hasn’t,” I say quietly with a bit of smile, barley heard above the racket. I keep my eyes firmly fixed on him, maybe if I give him my undivided attention he’ll change his mind about the detention.

“Yes he has. Didn’t you see the smirk on his face as he wrote your name? He gets a kick out of watching us suffer, the old dick.” 

“Shh!” Repressed laughter bubbles in my throat, battling with the worry lightly tugging at my stomach. I search his face for any signs that he heard that. But he just mutters irritably at his Net pad.

“He’s not gonna hear me. Wow, are you afraid of him?” She says it in a jokey tone, but when I glance at her she’s not smiling.

“No way!” I quickly shake my head. “I just don’t want to spend any more of my lunch time with him,” I say breezily, hoping to dismiss the topic. Luckily the hologram finally beams out of Mr Collins’ Net Pad before she can say anything more.  The four-note chime of its creator, Net Corp, silences the class. The company’s logo, a circle divided into a grid of hundreds of squares each showing a symbol of the things Net Corp produces and runs, appears on the screen, with an open book in the centre. It fades out, replaced by the title of our history lesson: The fall of the United Nations.

“In 2024 it was determined that the United Nations were ineffective in dealing with the Global Recession, and their economic sanctions were as effective in fighting dictatorships as a hamster pulling a carriage. What was the solution?”  He asks us in a voice sounds just like the droning of the network of old pipes below us. No one answers: most are just staring at him with puzzled looks, whilst others are texting on their phones under the desks. “Well?” He narrows his eyes at our ignorance. “Come on, we’ve studied this, or have your tiny attention spans forgotten it already?”