Augustine's Sanity

c h a p t e r. 4

"Maybe I'd always been broken and dark inside."
― Sarah J. Maas

chapter 4

Like any well mannered, intelligent, and respectful high school student, Augustine was ditching class.

Usually, he'd never miss English class-- since they were doing a whole marking period devoted to poets-- but he couldn't stand the way his teacher was absolutely butchering Shakespeare.

She wasn't getting the quotes right. She wasn't saying the correct themes, using the right dialect to explain the characters motive, and didn't even have the scenes in the right order!

He couldn't take it.

So-- as soon as his teacher's back was facing him-- the broken boy just left the room, sneakily grabbing the hall pass as he did so and thankfully not getting caught.

"Who does that bitch think she is..." Augustine mutters angrily to himself. "She can't just mix quotes from Hamlet and Macbeth without making a clear distinction between the characters! Ugh, she didn't even correlate the death scenes and the systematically repeated schemes or phrases. They were so obvious! Why did someone like that become a teacher-- how was she even allowed to become a teacher? Bullshit."

Augustine was... a little smart, even he knew that.

Normal people can't remember full Shakespeare plays word for word, along with sonnets and poems. Normal people didn't even want to do that-- that's where the crazy part joined in.

But that didn't justify the way his teacher had practically made his ears bleed with her rendition of the two plays.

The broken boy continued to grumble to himself as he made his way to his locker, displeased with the day so far.

First, his alarm didn't go off on time so he was rushing to get ready-- he even managed to get a bruise over his forehead from where he fell onto his dresser after slipping on a sock.

He was a tall guy with muscle but, unfortunately, was rather clumsy.

Then his mother berated him the entire time he was trying to find his backpack about how he was a forgetful lunatic.

And finally, after a mentally exhausting test in his psychology class, he made it to English only for one of his favorite things in the world, poems, be disrespected.

Stupid high school.

Stupid teachers.

Stupid life.

Augustine cuts a left down the hall and quickly walks over to the slabs of metal, finding his locker easily among them.

Sticking out his tongue to focus, he puts in the combination.

No luck.

It takes another three times for his locker to open-- for some reason, it always got stuck, even when he put the right numbers in-- and when it did, a folded piece of paper fell out and fluttered down to his feet.

Frowning, Augustine just blinked down at it for a couple of seconds before picking up the note.

It was the fifth time that he got one and he was starting to notice a pattern.

The writer always put it in his locker before school, or maybe it was after school when a lot of the halls were empty, and it was always on a Wednesday.

Either it was going to become a common occurrence or the person who had a supposed crush on him really liked that day.

The broke boy was still finding it hard to believe that someone liked him.