R.A.S.P.

Chapter Three.

            I stood up and sped-walked to the large glass door waiting for me ten feet away. The sound of the jostling students behind me caused me to speed up, trying to avoid another crowd at all costs. As I neared the doors the sounds got rowdier, and I could feel a swarm of them coming. I reached my arms out and shoved the doors open, letting a gust of outside air hit my tired body. I stepped outside, and for the second time that day began to walk without direction.

            Surely there’ll be a map somewhere, I thought after a minute of walking. I pulled out my schedule from the back pocket of my blue jeans and reread the name of the building I would be living in. Kloh Tower-222. I figured 222 must’ve been my room number, but the location of Kloh Tower remained a mystery.

            It was dark outside, probably eight or nine at night. Looking around uselessly at the compilation of steel buildings enclosing me, I thought about Hawns and how the people there would’ve reacted to seeing a school like RASP. The school back home was a field of grass the size of two or three lots from our neighborhood. They divided us up by age and skill, unless you were particularly good at one skill in which case you might’ve taken one or more of that class. The town needed good workers, and school was the only place to learn anything slightly useful. The teachers distributed the groups throughout the field where they either lectured us or had us practice whatever it was we were learning. There was no structure, no classrooms. Rainy days were especially bad because both the students and the teachers were in bad moods. Often on rainy days, Kane and I would skip school and walk around the empty town. When rain hit Hawns, everything seemed to shut down. People didn’t leave their houses, unless to go to school, and the farmers took the day off. Rainy days were my favorite; it was as if everyone had died and left Kane and me there to live freely.

            “This place is gunna suck when you leave.”

            It was raining, and Kane and I were walking home from a day we’d pretended to be at school. My hair was drenched, as were my clothes, and the muddy road we had been walking on was giving my legs a workout.

            Between dips in the road, I looked at Kane, sporting a concerned face. “What?”

            Kane looked up and opened his mouth slightly. I could tell he was trying to hide his emotions. “I don’t know, it’s just…make sure to come back and visit.”

            It was the day after I’d received the Acknowledgment, and the news hadn’t hit anyone harder than Kane. For a week, that was all he was willing to talk about. A sense of guilt filled my stomach.

            I looked at Kane, nodding. “Of course.”

            It was odd to see Kane so upset. For all the years I’d known him nothing had ever troubled him; not when he fought with his stringent parents, not when the unapprised teachers from back home gave him a bad grade. Even though school was always his first priority, it never fazed him when he didn’t do so great. He just sucked it up. I had a hard time adjusting to the new Kane. Our conversations had diffused into gloomy reflections of our past and grave predations of the future.

            We had almost reached home when I noticed Kane leaning down, focused on something within the mud. He appeared concentrated on something. I walked toward him, looking down to see what he was so focused on. Sticking up from the muck beneath us was a feather of bright, sunny yellow. The feather was about a foot in length and was as wide as a small tree branch. 

            Kane picked it up and wiped the mud off of it on his jeans. After some cleaning, he held it up with his arm stretched for both of us to look at. “That’s neat.”