CHSExVIHS

(10) Hiriya, Our Home

Good morning cupcake <3 It's Ruby. Sorry about the late update, but I've been super stressed about exams and didn't exactly have the time to write in between a tight schedule.

If you've been following The Ern Chronicles and CHSExVIHS so far, you'd have probably heard us mention Hiriya atleast once. I'm guessing that by now, you know the basics: it used to be our school, we still love it. So lemme fill you in a little more about Hiriya.

Hiriya was the school we studied in for eighth grade, and our freshman + sophomore years. We sat for our O'Levels as students of Hiriya. It's a girls-only private school, so this meant we had to stay in one class for the whole day: instead of us going to different classes for different subjects, different teachers would come to our class to teach different subjects. Oh, and being a private school also meant we had to wear a uniform. We actually had a decent-ish looking uniform for our first two years there, but then the school management decided they would prefer us wearing hideous fucking pinafores. I mean -- pinafores are pretty damn comfy to wear but they're, like, the ultimate Fashion Don't.

Hiriya had a very small student body -- we had less than 1000 students -- so everybody knew everybody. It's a young school too, still not even 10 years old. The school's colors are violet and white, and the school's motto is Excel and Exemplify. The school's logo is a four-leaf clover, standing for good luck -- and each leaf of the clover stood for each of the houses. Our four houses, named after flowers -- their names were Marigold, Hyacinth, Rose, Snowdrop. The colors of the houses were orange, blue, red, green respectively. Pretty cliché, ain't it? A girls' school having flowers as the house names? (Alf and I were Marigolds by the way. Scarlett was a Hyacinth, Aila and Hilda were Roses, Jae Mi and Ivy were Snowdrops. I don't remember Hazel's and Izzy's and Nella's houses.)

I think one of the most important things you need to know about Hiriya is that, its history is all fucked up to hell. Our very first principal was a great guy named Ezra Nolan. But then -- one day, there was a field trip to the beach, organized by the school's marine science department. On this field trip, some kids wandered into the deeper edge of the sea, and the strong current swept them right into the ocean. Principal Nolan had jumped into the ocean, trying to save his drowning students -- and he did save one too -- but as he tried to save the others, they all clung to him with all the fierceness of drowning people holding on to a life raft. He had gone down under the weight of so many students, and he had to fight a battle to get back -- but the current had been too strong, even without the dead weight of the kids he was carrying. In the end, we lost him. He drowned trying to save his students, and the four kids he'd been trying to save died with him. This was on a September 9th.

All the teachers who went on that trip pointedly Avoid Talking about this day. But on every September 9th, Hiriya holds an assembly in which one minute of silence is observed in honor of the principal and the students who lost their lives that day.

After that, the school management dubbed the school hall after our first principal, to honor him -- they call it The Ezra Nolan Hall now. And for us Hiriyans, Principal Nolan became as revered as a mythological character of some sort. Makes sense, really, he was Hiriya's founder and first principal, a hero who died trying to save Hiriyans from certain death.

After Principal Nolan, our next principal was Mr Ibsen Merritt. If you've been reading The Ern Chronicles, you know him as Pedo. Yep, Pedo became our next principal. He was really nice and friendly with everyone, and he had a great singing voice. He'd sing ballads for us on every children's day while we cheered him on. I loved him.

What no one ever talked about was how Pedo was -- well, pedo. Rumor at school had it, he was in a relationship with one of the kids at school, and it seemed that they'd even send "sexual texts" to each other. Exactly how explicit those texts were, no one knew.