From the Journal of William Kidd

Entry #2

Journal,

Today was the first day of summer training and I always forget how sore it makes me.  I sort of can’t feel my legs.  Training at Blackthorne is one thing, but Hughes pushes us so much harder in the summer.  It’s like he knows exactly how many times he needs to run each drill in order to make us pass out or something.  It’s great though.  Sometimes when I’m working hard enough, I can forget who I am.  I love that feeling.  If I could live with that feeling all of the time, I would.  I completely would.  

Luke Collins used to be our Captain.  He was pretty good at it, as he should’ve been.  He held the position for years, so I guess you could call him well practiced at the very least.  But he graduated last year and Hughes hasn’t assigned another guy to take the lead.  Usually the power would defer to our Junior Captain—which, coincidentally, is me—but these guys don’t listen to me.  They never did unless Collins told them to, but now they’re especially ignorant because, the way they see it, they’ll be over my head once they get promoted to Captain.  So basically the past day has just been a living hell.  I mean, it’s like watching a reality show or something.  Coming soon to television screens across the nation: Blackthorne’s Next Top Captain.  Tune in.

All jokes aside, it really is pretty awful.  Hughes wasn’t there for the whole second half of the day, which is pretty standard.  He always tells us that we need to figure out how to lead ourselves.  But I don’t see how we can do that without a leader.  There were six different guys trying to call the shots, none of them agreeing on anything.  Even Bill got caught up in the whole thing for a while.  Not that I can blame him.  It’d be nice to be in charge for once.  If he wants to go for that, he’s got my vote—huh.  Maybe we could put it to a vote.  Then again, they’d all probably vote for themselves, the bunch of cocks.

Long story short, I spent most of the afternoon sparring with Maggie.  She’s not caught up in all this Captain business, which is weird, because I think she usually cares about that sort of thing.  After all, she is the Cap.  But really, I think she’s just looking to fight.  She probably just wants to get a few hits in, and she’s never going to wait for some power-hungry loser in a Captain position to tell her when she can and can’t do it.  I like that about her.  She’s a doer.  I wish I were a doer.

But by the end of the day, Hughes came back and we were running drills like there’s no tomorrow.  I mean, at this point, there might not be a tomorrow for me.  I might just die in my sleep I’m so beat.   Bill’s always getting on my back about how much smaller I am than him.  It’s not really fair though because Bill was born bigger than me.  It’s like the guy came out of his mother’s womb with a six-pack and an ability to lift two hundred pounds. 

I guess I just needed to tell you how hard the first day is.  Or how hard all of this is.  Is everything supposed to be this hard?

Regards,

Will