Chapter 3
Once the coffee and tea are ready, I find a comfortable seat on the couch in my living room and take in my last few moments of peace. I unlock my tablet and get back to whatever I was using it for last night before falling asleep.
Only minutes later, a black sedan rolls into my driveway. Sun glares off the tinted windows of the car, and through the blinds of my living room I watch a back door open and a tall, unshaved and uncombed thirty year old step out. He’s holding a thick file folder and sporting unnecessarily dark aviator shades. It’s Tom.
I let him open the door himself. Selfish, sure, but it’s important that I am allowed to relish my last moments of undisturbed quiet before having to listen to his ramblings about how weak the tea is and that we have to hurry on our way.
Click. The door swings open and Tom is heading to the kitchen counter before I even have a chance to hand out my fake gestures of morning greeting.
He plops the thick folder down onto the counter with a thud and pours the dark, steaming liquid out of the kettle.
“Hey, take off those shades!” I say before going back to my device.
“Oh, is there a problem?” Asks Tom, sipping the drink, and then wincing—the heat catching him off guard.
“Yeah, they look dumb and you’re inside and it’s ten in the morning.”
“So?”
“Screw it. Good morning, your superiority. Are you enjoying the drink I prepared for you?”
“It tastes like crap but I’m still gonna drink it because we’re short on time, and, hey—here’s something you should look at.” He picks up the folder.
He walks past the couch and tosses me the folder before sitting down on the seat on the opposite side of the coffee table. It’s heavy and filled with loose papers and sticky notes jutting out of its sides, corners rounded and beaten after suffering many falls and careless treatment. The folder is bound shut with a blue rubber band, surprisingly strong enough to hold everything together.
“What is it?” I ask.
“Details... stuff about the court appointment, most of it is useless. There’s a blue folder in there, I think it would be best if you read it yourself. It has nothing to do with the rest of those papers, thankfully, and I think you would be very anxious to see it, were you to know what it is.”
Without asking any further questions, I take out the thin, blue folder and set it away from the rest of the papers and loose notes, and set them all on the coffee table and push them towards Tom’s end.
I take a long moment to stare at the blank folder. There aren’t any markings on it, no scribbles of pen or hurriedly written memos or titles in black marker ink—nothing. Just one piece of paper inside, folded, I can see the it peeking out through the top of the folder.
“You know,” says Tom, “you could probably learn more about that thing if you opened it.”
“Oh, yeah.”
I’m shaken from my daze I lift the cover of the folder and pick up the paper inside. It’s folded into thirds. I unfold one lip, and then the other, and set the flat paper face-up on the table.
I suspect what the letter may be about before reading the document, and as my eyes scan through the lines of text my suspicions become closer to validation of truth.
Wesley Thatcher,
Thank you for expressing your interests in attending the Dyson Bradley Institution of Law and Government to further your education. Along with our many other hopeful applicants, we have reviewed your qualifications and thoroughly considered your ability as a potential student here.
Nearly a twelve months at the beginning of my twelfth year, I had applied for a few schools. Two were close-by mid-standard schools in which at least one of the two practically guaranteed me a spot. The third was a high-end school for engineering sciences, something that I was never really interested in but guaranteed me a secure future. None of these however, are the school from which I have received a typed letter, in my name, notifying me of the results of my application which now sits before me on my living room coffee table.
“Um... what is this?” I ask Tom, confused.
“Didn't you just read it? It’s a letter to confirm that your school application has been accepted.”
He laughs. “I thought you would’ve been excited. Had I known you don’t care, I wouldn’t have built the tension of opening that thing by stuffing it in this useless pile of junk and making you fish it out.”
“But Tom...” I say, slowly. “I didn’t even apply for this school. It has to be a mistake or something.”
And then a lurking suspicion begins to seep in.
“Did you make an application for me?”
He raises his eyebrows and pulls them in at the middle, creating a crease in his forehead just above his nose. He looks like a dubious, sinister frog-like creature, who also happens to be appalled and shocked at the accusations made towards him. A dubious, sinister... and victimised frog-like creature. One that wears shades indoors and carries unnecessarily heavy folders around to look important.
“No! Why the hell would I do that? You probably just applied for this school and forgot about it.”
I can somehow tell that Tom is being genuine and is caught totally off-guard, yet somehow the story doesn’t add up. An ivy-league institution like this would require very high grades for me to even be considered. I finished secondary school with a totalled average of eighty-three percent. Okay for some mid-standard school around the corner, but not at all for this joint.
I read the last few lines of text;
...we are happy to congratulate you on your acceptance to out institution! Compulsory attendance is effective starting August 15th of this year. Thank you! See you soon.
E. Byron, Institution Minister and Coordinator of Affairs
This can be no mistake, the letter is addressed to my name personally. My home address, 45 Lyall Drive, Sector C East, is printed on the top of the document. Next to it is the address of the school that sent me this letter. It’s signed by E, Byron, too, who I suppose along with coordinating school affairs, also personally signs hundreds of letters to applicants both accepted and rejected.
A thought crosses my mind...
“What about my other applications?” I ask.
“I never got them.” replies Tom, with a slow shaking of his head, showing a concerned look. “They would have been in by now, anyways.”
Instead of going into further discussion, I fold the letter back into thirds and place it inside the folder, closing it with the blue outer face up. Tom picks up his unnecessarily thick folder, we leave my living room with the tea cup and the blue folder still on the coffee table, and I shut the door to my house behind me. The black sedan door opens and I get in, soon engulfed by the darkness within the vehicle, the world outside tinted an odd turquoise on the other side of my passenger window. The car reverses out of the driveway.
Soon, we are being whisked away from my home and Lyall Drive, and we take a ramp onto the highway, a distance from my house.
The thoughts swimming in my head seem to bounce from that strange letter to the court hearing about to take place in half an hour. My thoughts seem to always go back to those two things. When I realise that I cannot ignore the thoughts jumping about in my head, I decide to look out the window of our cruising vehicle. I hear the sound of jet engines above, and I notice that we have come near the airport. On the horizon in the nearing distance that I see between the many other cars soaring next to us on the highway, towering buildings that reflect the sunlight with millions of blue windows scrape the clouds overhead. We've almost reached the Metro Sector.
We're almost there.
