“And so, it is said that for a week beginning from the first and ending on the fifth of this month, their souls would again roam the grounds, yearning to finish whatever they left unfinished on that unfortunate day,”
Those were the only words I caught when I reached the classroom door. Upon opening it, I was greeted with surprised faces, almost as if I’d brought them out of a mystifying mind trip.
Whatever story the teacher was telling, it had the merit of capturing the attention of the entire class, one could hear a pin drop in that room.
Speaking of the teacher, his eyes had also shifted towards me at my arrival. Mister Walsh wasted no time to give me one of his disapproving looks behind his glasses, he was famous around the school for those, “Late to class, are we, Miss Langley?”
“Sorry…” I said sheepishly. Did my bag suddenly get heavier? Did Gravity instantly increase? Or was it just the sheer weight of the attention on my person at that moment?
I scurried between two rows of desks to get to mine and sunk into my chair as deep as I could, as soon as I got close enough to do so.
“Right, let’s move back to our usual curriculum then, shall we?” Mr. Walsh’s statement eased my embarrassment. Up until then, I thought that class had already begun, apparently, I was wrong.
He neared the board and wrote the day’s lesson title. It didn’t seem related to the story he was telling when I came in whatsoever.
That tale somehow sabotaged everyone’s spirit. As distant as I was with all my classmates, I still knew enough about them to notice that some were wearing foreign looks on their faces.
I shifted awkwardly in my seat. The overall atmosphere wasn’t pleasant for sure but, something else niggled at me, I felt an itch I couldn’t scratch.
So, I discreetly glanced around myself, all the students ahead of me were facing the teacher. To both my left and my right perhaps? Nobody was paying me any attention. All that was left, were those behind me.
My gaze stopped when I spotted the gorgeous pair of hazel eyes that bored into mine. Evidently, A story was not all I had missed that morning, an introduction was also on that list.
His stare was intense, but I managed to withstand it. The smile he wore was so genuine that I forgot to feel uncomfortable.
I smiled back before turning forward again, then I smiled again only this time, it was to myself, when I realized I hadn’t given such a sterling beam to anyone for quite long.
That morning, like every other morning, the bell rang three times every hour, to signal the ending of a session. In the duration of those three hours, teachers switched classes, but in the course of those same hours, I felt the same pair of eyes fixated on me, following my every movement, burning holes in my back.
Occasionally, I felt amounts of blood flee their usual course and rush up to my face, giving me a sense of extra warmth around the cheeks.
When lunch time came, I stood up and practically ran towards our small school dining hall, making sure not to turn around… Again. I thought I’d exhausted the quota for that action in such a short period of time, that I feared giving desperate vibes off.
Thing was, it really had been a while since fate put me in a similar position. I'd forgotten what the experience felt like, to be somebody’s interest, to feel attractive in the eyes of someone.
Maybe none of it was real though, maybe all of it was nothing but a figment of my imagination, because I liked that boy and I really wanted to believe that he did like me back.
As I sat down to eat my food, I briefly scanned the hall for his figure, trying my best to seem natural in the process. He was nowhere to be seen. Of course, I found it odd at first but then I thought, he could have been one of those students who enjoyed solitude to savor their lunch and who was I to judge?
I did my best to shove all of those thoughts and feelings into a closet in the back of my head, in order to focus on my extra-curricular activities for that afternoon.
A clearly futile attempt, the fruit basket in front of me that I was supposed to reproduce on my canvas, was completely eclipsed by the image of his remarkable facial features. He wasn’t even in that room at the time. Valentine was only a week away, the idea that it could be different for me that year escaped the closet. So much for not being desperate.
“Everything alright Miss Langley?” The arts guide asked me. Great! And so much for seeming natural, I guessed.
The next day promised to be more or less the same as the previous, I saw to be right on time for class in the morning. I also saw that the boy was already in his seat, wearing the same smile to my regards and the same clothes as well.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
I settled thinking, while wearing the same clothes two days in a row wasn’t an issue at all, those however, were some quite unconventional clothes for a boy his age. Most boys at school, in fact most boys in my age bracket all around GrayBird town, sort of dressed in the same fashion. Perhaps it was the trending style of wherever it was that he came from.
Once again, he was a no-show during lunch time at the dining hall, but I gave that the same excuse as I did the preceding day.
It was on the third of February that things began to take a sour turn.
The smile he was offering me was different. If I could describe it in one word, it would be ‘tainted’. Sure, it still seemed as genuine as before, that wasn’t the problem, but it wasn’t nearly as radiant as the one he gave me the very first time I saw his face.
And suddenly, as if I finally looked at him under different lights, things that I hadn't noticed before started to jump out to my eyes.
The way he was sitting, it was straight, almost too straight. Never did he bend for a second, not by a fraction of an inch.
Could it have been something he was accustomed to do? trained to do since very young? I personally couldn’t consciously keep an upright stance for more than a minute, not even if my life depended on it.
I did pick up on something else… It was like, there was nobody in class but me to his eyes, never did he glance at anyone else. He made me think of a doll or a portrait painting following me with their eyes.
The next day couldn’t have come any slower and couldn’t promise to go by any faster than the previous one. I charged through the classroom door towards my seat like a thunderbolt, stomping all urges to look in his direction.
I didn’t need to, I knew he was there, I felt him staring daggers into my back, only this time it didn’t have the same effect on me. I didn’t feel any warmth around my cheeks, I didn’t have any butterflies in my stomach. Instead, a chill ran through my entire body, it froze me to the bone, I slowly wrapped my hands around my arms to fight the shiver.
Around 10 o’clock, our math teacher took more time than usual to get there. I had been debating since I had arrived that morning whether I should talk to him or not, at least get a name? let him know in a way that he wasn’t as smooth as he may be thought he was?
I finally plucked up the courage to push my butt off that uncomfortable chair and snapped around his way.
As I walked closer to him however, my heart kept sinking further into my stomach. I was at last able to put a finger on what was wrong with his expression. Skin drier than the Atacama Desert, his traits seemed aggravated, but somehow not by anger, if it was even possible to describe it as such. But the worst were his eyes, I could’ve sworn that they were of a beautiful and clear hazel tint, I could’ve sworn they weren’t as dull and faded as they looked at that instant.
It was like staring into the eyes of a barely alive replica of the boy I saw three days before.
“Hey… I am Alexa, Alexa Langley,” my eyes fell on his clothes as I spoke those words; I realized they were the same ones as those of the first and second day. Only, they looked… dustier, as though he crawled through an underground tunnel type of dustier.
The lack of any response from him made me raise my eyes back towards his face. There he sat, still as a gargoyle and stiff as a board, he just gaped at me with apparently no intention to respond.
The next words I’d planned to say, just died in my throat. I traveled back to my seat with a bigger mass in the pit of my stomach, deepening the feeling of sinking and dread.
The first words uttered by Mr Walsh on the 5th day of that week were, ”Alright people! settle down. today we’ll have a small test about the content of the week’s lessons, I hope you all got ready for it,”
True. By the end of every week, Mr Walsh made us take a test relevant to whatever we studied with him. It had completely escaped my mind. The matter with the new student took a lot more from me than I wanted to admit.
The teacher walked between rows and handed each of us a sheet of paper. My eyes caught a glimpse of the first question. I was supposed to complete a paragraph from a certain story.
It read as the following:
“On the first of February 1972, at exactly thirty five past seven in the morning, GrayBird town suffered a harrowing tragedy. A violent earthquake shook our grounds for fifteen seconds continuously. It ravaged almost everything in its path. It rendered once upright standing constructions into crumbling piles of rubble.
The aftermath however, lasted much longer than that for the inhabitants. It left them digging through the ruins of their own dwellings for their belongings and worst of all, for their loved ones.
At the GrayBird hospital, ……... [ Fill in the blank please] ……...
Many facilities shared a similar fate, the local school up the hill was not spared. Those who had the misfortune of arriving early that day met a rather gruesome end.
According to the official records, 12 people were on the third floor at the time, 17 on the second and 25 on the ground floor.
The bodies of the twenty five souls trapped at the lowest level remained buried until the end of that week. Some of them were only dead for eight hours, which meant they had lived their last days in that pit of darkness, probably in utter despair.
And so, it is said, that for a week beginning from the first and ending on the fifth of this month, their souls would again roam the grounds, yearning to finish whatever they left unfinished on that unfortunate day. “
I gulped as I read the last sentence, “Today is the fifth of February,” I thought, “This is the school up the hill,” I considered, “I am on the ground floor,” I pondered, “And this boy is…”
Something within me just clicked, I simply knew without understanding.
I could amount to nothing but wait for the end of the hour, to do what I should have done days ago, that thing that I was not very fond of doing.
I leaped out of the chair as soon as I could, and dashed towards the student I’d exchanged the largest number of words with since the beginning of the year, ”Alice, can I ask you a question?”
“Long time no talk. Sure, what is it?” she said.
“The new student there at the back, what’s his name?” I asked.
“Wha… We don’t… Have a new student…,” She looked at me confused and quite possibly concerned.
My head reluctantly turned his way, his eyes still on me. Yeah… Utter despair, that was truly the expression he was bearing. Taking my time to gaze at him, I noticed one last detail. His chest wasn’t moving in the slightest. He never took a breath in, never let a breath out. He was dead… Dead as a doorknob.