Shattered Mirror [Rewriting]

Chapter 1 - Out of the Ordinary

School. It was the one thing Corliss hated more than being without inspiration simply because it was the embodiment of all things that killed inspiration. The stuffy classrooms, the monotonous red brickwork and the grey lockers lining the walls like faceless soldiers. Not to mention the teachers with their rules and regulations, the uniforms that made the students look like a sea of white and navy and last but not least the work. Piles upon piles of homework and assignments and tests on topics that could only be explained as irrevocably and unforgivably boring.

"And don't they just love piling us with this shit?" Corliss grumbled to the African girl seated beside her as she paged through a Chemistry textbook. The girl, Nomathemba, Corliss' best and only friend of two years, laughed heartily and nodded, her dreadlocks bobbing back and forth. Her almond-shaped eyes with irises the colour of espresso twinkled with mirth at the other girl's ranting. Since moving from Durban, South Africa, she'd had a hard time fitting into the school and making friends until she'd been seated next to Corliss in History at the end of a borderline horrible day. The two, both avid readers and writers, had clicked immediately and hadn't looked back since. "I mean, where the heck are we going to use this stuff?" Corliss gestured wildly to the nonsensical diagrams on the page she'd stopped on, her own emerald eyes rolling in exasperation.

Nomathemba glanced across and snorted, "When we become scientists, apparently."

"We? I ain't becoming no scientist," Corliss snapped the book shut and stuffed it in her bag just as the bell rang. Their home teacher, a scrawny, mousey man in his late forties with peppered hair shuffled into the room and straightened the thick spectacles threatening to slip off his nose. He was garbed in brown formal pants, a cream and yellow checked shirt and matching mustard tie.

"Good-," his voice became hoarse and he was forced to clear it, much to the delight of the eleventh graders. "Good morning, class, my name is Mr Finnegan! I will be both your home teacher and your History teacher!" the teacher was forced to yell over the guffawing students. As if his words were amusing, a selected few individuals in the class laughed even harder. The one, a bully with acidic blond hair and pasty skin, even dared to throw a scrunched up piece of paper at the scraggly Mr Finnegan who managed to bat it away just in time.

"Bunch of dumbasses," Corliss muttered under her breath, sneaking a glance sideways at her friend who was simply shaking her head and glaring at her desk. After several warnings from the teacher, he eventually picked up a meter long ruler from his desk and... hit it against the blackboard with such force the clang! echoed through the classroom several times. Even the bravest 'popular' kid shut his mouth, the whole class turning as one person toward the now stern-faced Mr Finnegan. One could have heard a pin drop in the eerie silence that had fallen on the room.

"That was enough of that, thank you," he spoke haughtily after several moments of glaring at the class, daring them to disobey again. When they didn't, he turned sharply to the blackboard and started scribbling out the year's schedule. Slowly but surely, everyone pulled a notepad out and copied it down. The rest of registration followed a similar pattern and Corliss decided she liked Mr Finnegan even if he looked like a drain-cleaning brush on stilts. An acidic drain-cleaning brush on stilts. The bell seemed to shatter the tense silence that had swallowed the room and the teenagers fought to get out the classroom. Corliss and Nomathemba, however, remained behind, waiting for the worst of the flux to flush out.

"What do you think?" Nomathemba asked, eyeing the teacher who was watching the students clamber through the door with a hooded expression.

Her friend smiled, cat-like, "I think it's going to be a very interesting year in History." And it was when the lesson eventually arrived at the end of a treacherous day. Despite being tired and more than irritable by the wave of Welcome-Back-To-School-And-The-End-Of-Your-Social-Lives homework, the two girls were ecstatic to find their normally rowdy class completely behaved for the hour and a half of the lesson and afternoon registration. Nobody wanted a repeat of the morning in case the ringing in their ears was intensified tenfold. The bell ringing at the end of registration had a different effect in the afternoon as compared to the morning; the tension increased substantially as the students watched their teacher, hopeful to be let out. Said teacher let his eyes graze up and down the rows, taking his time before he finally let them out with a dismissive wave of his hand.