Untitled 13

August 13
The precipitate running off the shiny red exterior of the coke can.
The tapping of 17 feet: an out sync rhythm
Without saying a word we knew each other, we knew the smell of our sweat. Our fear.
We knew who cracked, who ran out of time, who time ran out of, who ran out.
We knew our competition, but now we were one, there was no point in hating.
It started with Twenty Two, we knew that, too. Two left before the test started, two ran out in the middle. One supposedly died, or so rumor has it.
There was a girl, I remember her clearly, blond hair, pretty, too. I would guess twelve, but that's just an estimate. Ran out an hour into the test, put down her pencil, said that this was bullshit. Left. Gone.
The other one was another girl, an Asian. Left three hours, sixteen, I'd think. Screamed something about spiders, said that there were spiders all over her. Stabbed herself with her pencil. Was escorted out.

I tip my Fedora down, my sneaker still tapping to the beat of my heart. The girl next to me pushes her glasses up against her face, too hard, they weren't falling down.
The boy across the room taps on his knee.
The tension is dying, people are wondering what the point is. But something holds us in this room like a magnet, a sense of purpose. A subconscious knowing. We got this far with our wits and cheats, with our study guides and answer keys.
We got this far.

Laughter now, coming from a boy, seventeen with white hair and a very beautiful face. It sounds like angels playing on their harps, but it's out of tune, wound too tight.

We feel the footsteps before we hear them, they enter before we realize that they're there.
"Cookies?"
"Goddamn it! This is bullshit! Just hand back the fucking tests. Just hand them back. We know you've got them. We know. Just give us our goddamn grades. FUCKING DISMISS US ALL. Kill us, for Fuck's sake. Just let us know." The boy with black hair speaks. Everyone pays attention, no one notices.
And another one bites the dust.
This is the place that produces geniuses. That is if we don't end up in the asylum across the road.
But we're all willing to take the risk, we don't have a choice.
Everyone stares at the platter of cookies.
The girl pushes up her glasses. The boy taps his knee.

"So it's us now, ain't it?" A boy's voice asks a rhetorical question. His voice is low and thick.
"Mmmmm." My answer is ambiguous, it doesn't matter.
"I'm Tommy."
"Angel, Angel Gregory. Gregory because it's normal and Angel because Snow White was too gay." The boy with white hair speaks, still in his soft velvet voice.
"Alize." A French girl doesn't look up from writing math problems on the table.
"Anthony Easton." That would be me.
"Mimi. Mimi Belladonna Krylov-Wolff" A girl with big brown hair and blue streaks murmured in an accent that I couldn't place. She had cut her finger open and was currently drawing a picture of a wolf on the wall with her blood.
"Edgar Von Miri." A man with a monocle spoke in an exaggerated english accent.
No one else gets to introduce themselves, the boy with black hair gets up and leaves without explanation.
No one moves. Ten seconds later the men in suits enter, they hand us back our tests.
No one makes a sound.


September 11
School. Finally. I meet up with the other new students, we can recognize each other by the smell of our fear.
Angel Gregory. Me. Mimi Belladonna Krylov-Wolff. Alize Beachump. Zachary McCallister.


January 9
It gets sickening after a while.
You go insane when you can see your whole world, everything you are and ever will be, from your bedroom window. Looking outside I can see all 23.4 acres of the campus of the school, we're trapped here. We're too smart for the outside and too sane for the asylum.
This is all we'll ever know until we know no more, until we're old and grown with tweed coats and suspenders, unless, of course, we die before then.

Gregory is gone, no one calls him that anymore.
He no longer allows it.
Angel, now. Born from the heavens, one day he'll fly away.
He failed to acknowledge the existence of his parents, he's convinced that he's born from the heavens, he's convinced that he can fly.
He spends his days staring out the windows now, he wont even see Alize.
He's trapped her, too.
He goes to therapy thrice a week, now.
He's going to jump, we all know it, no one cares, no one moves a finger to stop him.
I'm surprised he's lasted this far, not everyone has.
I fear for Alize, she's so beautiful.