Jim Armstrong and the Goblet's Curse

Chapter 8: I Become Road Kill

The sun was filtering in through the blinds, making stripes on the floor. It reminded me too much of the nightmare I just woke up from, so I got down and fully closed the blinds. Noah was still asleep so I silently crept over to my suitcase, which was still beside the bedside table. (I hadn't unpacked yet, because, duh, I'm lazy.) I unzipped the smallest pocket again and withdrew the picture from within it, then climbed back on to my top bunk.

The picture was small, a Polaroid taken on her 7th birthday, about sixth months before the nightmare took place. She still had her long, wavy brown hair, but still had the same big hazel eyes and freckles around her nose. I missed her. A lot.

I jumped as a loud bell rang through the room and I could hear it echoing through the hallway. Noah jerked awake and I quickly stashed the picture underneath my pillow before pretending like I had just started awake too. The sound of the bell disappeared as randomly as it had come on.

"What was that?" I asked, my ears ringing.

"Wake up bell," Noah answered, rolling out of his bed. "It rings at 8:00 every day, except for weekends, and it makes sure that we don't keep sleeping and we're not late for breakfast and class. It does its job very well." Noah headed into the bathroom and shut the door, leaving me sitting on my bunk.

We took turns in the bathroom and changed out of our pajamas. We packed up our duffle bags with our armor and books, then headed down to the Dinery for breakfast, along with a whole bunch of other students. Enzo joined us and we met up with Cecily and Sandra once we were on the Main Wing.

We entered the Dinery and sat at the same table as yesterday. I had started to think of it as "our table" even though I knew technically, there were no seating arrangements. Platters of toast, pancakes, waffles, and Danishes were placed in front of us along with oatmeal and toppings for it. We all ate quickly, for classes started at 9: 00 and we didn't want to be late. After breakfast, Noah, Cecily and I headed to our period one class, Boxing.

We entered a gym of sorts that literally looked like a high school stereotype of a gym: red and blue foam mats strewn along the floor that had a slight odor of sweat. Unlike high school gym stereotypes though, some mats had dark stains that looked disturbingly like blood stains. Other students started filtering in and soon after a women entered with them too. She was short, but that did nothing to make her look less intimidating. She was strongly muscled and had a hard look to her face that told you she meant business. About everything. Noah leaned over and whispered to me,

"That is Electra. She's the boxing teacher. Don't cross her."

"I'm getting that vibe from a lot of people here," I whispered back to him.

"Alright kiwis," Electra started. I leaned back towards Noah and asked,

"Kiwis? What's with that?"

"It's sort of her thing. You know, kind of how in stories, teachers call their students cupcake."

"Okay, then why doesn't she just call us cupcakes?"

"Because she always tries to be healthy, and doesn't really like sugar, so she replaces 'cupcake' with fruits." We ended our whispered the conversation and tuned back into Electra's instructions.

"For the last couple of months we've been doing a lot of work with dummies and simulations, but today we're going to be just doing some one-on-one combat in partners to see how you would do in actual attack situations," Electra continued. "We're actually going to be stretching this over a couple of weeks to get you more accustomed to fighting in close quarters with actual people."