Starshine, Sky, and the Power of Rock

Evening Announcements

The dreams are getting worse, somehow. This one gets me so bad I hit my head trying to escape my casket. I make it halfway out before reality catches up with me and I sink to the floor, trying to calm down some.

"Is this going to be a nightly thing with you?" a voice hisses from the other side of the room. Gossamer Glade, face lined in moonlight, is sitting up in her own bed. Her lacy eye mask is pushed up to reveal big green eyes that glare at me with pure fury.

I feel around on the nightstand for my CD player. "Can you at least wait 'til I'm wearing a bra before you start getting on my ass?"

Gossamer throws herself back on one of her many silk pillows, her arms above her head in the most dramatic pose I've ever seen. "I don't appreciate having my internal clock thrown off because you can't handle bad dreams. Do you realize I've been getting tired while the sun is up? My body thinks it's nighttime while I'm at school. You're confusing my body and if this keeps up it'll affect my grades."

Ignore her. Ignore her. I rummage through my treasure trove for the right CD. Blood in the Ducts? No he introduced me to that one. Chains on Bone? No he whistled track four all the time...

"But I imagine you're not one to care about grades, are you, vampire?" Gossamer says. "My father says you're doing very poorly in his class."

I could say something right now but... No, keep looking, keep looking... Grave's Dust... Black Morning... No Answers —  What?

The clear jewel case shakes in my hand. A once-blank CD stares back at me, the name No Answers scrawled in marker on plain white in my handwriting. We made this song together. We made a lot of songs together. They'd almost joined the bonfire I'd built for my Band of Darkness uniform but I have this thing about destroying art. Plus I hear the fumes from doing that are dangerous and I didn't need any of the animals near me getting hurt. So I'd settled for leaving them all at home. At least I thought it was all of them.

"This has been the worst month of my life. How am I supposed to spend four years living like this?" Gossamer whines into her pillow.

"The feeling's mutual," I say, finally picking a CD and sliding my earbuds in place.

Assigned seats make sense in this place. I normally hate them but I get it here. Bands should sit together so all the teachers have, well, sat us together. Mr. Glade basically did this too. Almost.

Alright so first day of the first "Academic Week" was already gonna be a bummer because we get no music classes. Not to mention I wasn't thrilled to meet the guy halfway responsible for the demon spawn I've been forced to room with. But then I finally walked into his class, only to find out my seat was nowhere near anyone else's in my band. I didn't feel like starting a conversation with him so I waited for everyone else to sit and found the only empty seat was all the way in the back. And it had my name on it.

I went up to his desk. "Mr. Glade?"

"Yes?" he asked, his back turned to me.

"I can't sit back there."

He chuckled. "What makes you say that?" he asked, then turned around. His smile snapped into a scowl the moment he'd realized who he was talking to.

"I, uh, have albinism," I said. "It makes my vision real bad. I'm supposed to sit near the front in all my classes-"

"Oh, you're 'supposed to,' are you?"

Instincts told me to stop but I kept going. "Yeah, I put it in my application and they said there'd be accomoda-"