Fairytales

Chapter 3

Reinton Heights High School is not your average public school. And, when I say that, I don't mean in the way all those Disney special teen movies say their schools is not average. Reinton heights has all the normal clicks—jock, cheerleader, nerds, goths—with a cafeteria that serves barely ingestible food and has mandated school activities. We have the basics down. It's when you get into the details that you start to notice just how different a small town high school can get when it's isolated from the rest of the world.

For one, the high school is housed in a building I like to call Castle Complacency. With its grey walls, high, pointed steeple-like roof and badly lit hallways, the building looked very much like the person who designed it had quite a thing for medieval architecture, but only the kind you saw in movies like Camelot or Monty Python. Worse, the bright orange and blue decorations, our school colors, tended to make it look more like a cheesy ye old castle ride at a Renaissance Fair rather than a high school.

Second, Reinton Heights has no football team to be heard of, an absolutely unbelievable choice on the administration's part if any of those cheesy teen movies are to be believed, especially considering we were right in the smack dab middle of Texas football country.

Which probably explains why the track star, not the whatever-back, was one of the most popular guys in school.

And finally, and probably most importantly, Reinton Heights High school didn't subscribe to what I'd always assumed was the "normal" public school curriculum (though, considering my only other school experience had been a 100 year old catholic school in downtown Chicago, maybe I didn't have such a great grasp on normal curriculum anyway). Sure, we had Calculus and Chemistry and Literature like anyone else, but our electives included something a little more interesting than European history. Things like the philosophy of death and immortality, the psychology of human motivation, and even the study of magic in literature are just normal classes to be had around here. I distinctly remember staring at our course selection sheet that month before freshman year, wondering just what I'd gotten myself into.

Partial to actually useful information, I'd stuck to the most normal subjects, like art and that one semester I'd tried, and failed, to play the bassoon. By my Junior year, I'd run out of options. Normal ones anyway

It was thanks to this that I was stuck in the very back of Mr. Harding's Forgotten History class every weekday morning, trying very hard not to fall asleep, or worse, be noticed. Class, like every other crazy elective at this school, was held at the far corner of the building, in a stuffy little room just big enough to house the six students dumb enough to think any class taught by Mr. Harding would be easy.

Like any other day, Mr. Harding's voice rang out like a bullhorn in the confined space, loud enough to keep most of us on the edges of our seats. He was a big man, six foot at least, with leathery brown skin and the kind of eyes that looked just a little too small for his face. Still, his voice, as loud and grating as it was, had the innate ability to keep me, and everyone else, at least mostly awake.

"There were, of course, many factors that inspired the revolution."

Usually, my notes for this class were a mess of doodles and incomprehensible scribbles, maybe even a word or two from the lecture here or there. Today though, the white paper was conspicuously empty except for three words, the same words that had been haunting me since I'd blinked my eyes open that morning.

See you soon.

So simple, yet there was an implication behind them. A calculation, a suggestion of familiarity. Of coming events. The thought made me shiver.

I was used to nightmares. Since coming to Reinton heights I'd had to get used to functioning on five hours of sleep or less, to waking up gasping for breath and covered in sweat. I'd seen my parents' faces, gashed and bloody from broken glass, felt that stomach dropping feeling of a car sliding across ice that I couldn't possibly remember, felt that bone wrenching cold over and over again until I thought I might not be able to take it anymore.