Where the Stars Align

Chapter 7 (edited)

Entering school that day, Val had ducked into the into the building with her jacket over her head as a makeshift umbrella, and partially covering her eyes when she had hit something hard. A first, she had just stumbled back, wondering when on earth a wall had been put in the middle of the hallway leading to her locker, and then a few seconds later, her brain had processed and she realised she had barged into someone.Lifting her jacket hesitantly, she prepared herself to apologise to whichever poor soul she had run into, only to find the shiny terrazzo floors and the near empty hallway in front of her.

Val wasn't dull, she wasn't an aloof girl. She didn't let things slip her notice, as much as she could help it. She was one of the few remaining people who believed knowledge was power. Not that she was power hungry, or wanted to be the female Trump.
So when she was sure she felt herself bump into somebody, she didn't just cross it off as a figment of her imagination. No. She categorized it as odd. Very odd.
If only those warning bells could have saved her from what was on her very near future.
Pushing those thoughts to the back of her mind, she walked towards the direction of the locker she was currently sharing with a poor, unlucky freshman, who had no choice but to say yes when the Principal has asked her to share with the new girl.
As if that wasn't enough, Val thought, she was stuck in school during the weekend to volunteer for the PTA fundraiser to support their annual camping trip.

To Val, there was so much wrong with that.
First of all, the whole idea of volunteering was that it was voluntary. Making her talk to people and bargain for a cause she doubted any of the students really cared about was a complete waste of time.Though she supposed it was better than the wide expanse of weekend detentions Rielle had gotten. A smile had fought it's way to her face at the thought.
After the locker incident, and Principal Morris had looked down at the new, already troublesome child, with the most disdain Val has ever had the misfortune to see.
The man was one of little patience. He wasn't very understanding and frankly didn't try to be. He didn't think of how it felt to be in their shoes or what it was like for him in his own high school days- mainly because then he would have to relive years of trauma he had managed to push out of his memory. So when he had seen the unfamiliar face of the pretty, bright looking  young lady-  words of his secretary - he wasn't particularly delighted in meeting his new student. 

He wasn't interested in seeing most of his students actually. 

To him, teenagers were little more than cruel, hormonal creatures with more wars waging between them than Hitler himself, they were spiteful beings that got off on making others miserable and indulging themselves in any promiscuous new trend the world was unfortunate enough to encounter. And yet, he found himself spending more time with the demons than he thought should be legally possible. If he wasn't half dead inside, he would have aspired to find a new job- happiness even, but he had lost his zest for life a long while ago, and didn't have the zeal or the willpower to move any further in his current state of living.

The bottom line was- Clayton Morris wasn't a very joyful man; and when he saw that the new devil, that had been added to the hellhole that was his school, was in-fact, another nuisance to society,  he was not happy to say the least.

Each time someone new came along, the little part of him left that still allowed him to dream, couldn't help hoping this one would be just a little bit different than the rest. So each time, he searched the eyes of the teenagers, for something past vanity and shallowness. He seldom did. Maybe a few tunes he'd come across some that grasped a little more understanding of the world they lived in, but it was never anything spectacular. 

Had he bothered to search Val for those qualities, he would have found that she was different from the others, that there was a sort of hinted sharpness about her that was unlike someone of her age. But he didn't. He saw an ignorant child bickering with someone well known amongst teachers for having an IQ lower than her body count.