Wild Fires

Chapter 1 | Hadley

Chapter 1 | Hadley

"If I had known this was going to happen, I'd rather crash and burn."

"You're actually joking, right?" I say, my fingernails digging deeper into my legs. If cartoons were only made to show me the fictional, the inspirational, and the creativity that someone has used in order to create a feeling within the watcher itself, then I'm clearly lacking in that department. I chose to think that reality is crueler than the belief in something that will never ever happen, especially to me.

Nothing good ever happened to me if I believed it would. No matter how much I prayed and wished.

To think negatively in my situation is quite common. To stay positively happy, to have a smile plastered on your face knowing that the one thing that you had left is being taken away is the cruelest feeling ever.

After all, my department, the 'Undefined Arts Category,' seeing I'm the only student in it, is being demolished. I look at myself in the mirror and wonder what I did to deserve this.

Something inevitable would always strike me in the least expected way.

Then as I over-thinked about thinking, I realized that my pure existence itself is the reason as to why my life has gone downhill. Since the day 'Hadley Park' took her first breath, her life was already planned.

Sr. Francis raises his calloused hand, hovering over mountains of paperwork stacks in search for mine. Until recent events, I had always looked up to this man. Proud, endearing, and a better father-figure that he was towards me than my own father. But the frown in-between his brows were quite noticeable.

He swears under his breath, "Hadley, please refrain from using that kind of language. I understand that this is hard to hear-"

I was nervous and he could obviously tell. I start to rub my temples, my voice becoming hitched as my shoulders shake immensely.

I frown, "Why am I the one apologizing? I'm getting kicked out for no apparent reason!" I could feel steam pouring out of my ears, my cheeks tinting red to the point it matched his red-sequined car out back.

He sat back in his seat, calmly resting his shoulder blades against the rim of his leather upholstery chair. Besides his unkept table, his room was enticingly clear and neat. Plants were watered, windows were cleaned that it nearly glistened against the lights and I was the odd one out.

Clearly, I was making quite the ruckus as his secretary from the room beside him came rushing in with a messy bun and a chewed up pencil stuck through her brown hair. Unfamiliar and familiar faces came pouring in through the corridors door.

I took a deep breath as if I had forgotten how to breath properly, trying my absolute best to keep my cool, to avoid being sent to anger-mangagment classes but this was embarrassing, and it was was getting more embarrassing by the minute. And the clock just kept ticking louder and louder yet there was no silence to break it.

Surprisingly, today was actually a good day. I had gotten my daily dose of caffeine, I wasn't late to my classes and I was told that my brother would be coming back from being overseas for a year. I missed him.

Today was good, and then it came crashing down. Like usual. But truthfully, I never really expected this to happen.

The immediate hesitation was deathening, cold sweat running down my back. I choked, "So what does this mean? What's going to happen to me? I don't have anywhere else to belong to and you know this, Francis."