rich man's world; charlie dalton

[one] blueberry coffee cakes

She looked nervously at the crowd of birds in the courtyard as her father continued to drive through the rocky-road. It was only them two, her uncle had driven Peter Benjamin early to his ceremony, he always was neurotic about his seating chart. He had sat in the same spot every ceremony since the first he could remember.

Sigrid played with the bottom of the tray with a hesitant finger, the silence in the car was unbearable but she didn't want to make the effort to speak to her father. Nine times out of ten, she was speaking to a wall. An old, grunting, decaying wall.

She whispered to herself for the entirety of the car ride to Welton, mostly about how the goods were burning holes into her flesh and making up random lines to fit into a poem. She had her notebook on the other side of the seat but she didn't dare to reach over because her father would grunt at her to stay put.

He wasn't fond of the idea of her writing, doodling, and being vulnerable in a black-leather notebook when she could have been doing something important. Like getting her education and using her money to become a nurse, or a teacher, or even to marry into an even richer family. He was opposed to the idea of his only daughter becoming a writer, it just gave Sigrid more motivation to go against what he said.

He should've been smarter; for a lawyer, he father was horrible at convincing the people closest to him.

The car came to a full-stop once she began to open the bottom of the tray to retrieve a pinch of blueberry coffee cake, she was starving from the delicious smells mixing together in the backseat. Her father turned off the car, tutted his head, and then got out as if saying 'well, what are you waiting for child?'.

Sigrid opened her car door hesitantly while having to multitask, her father watched unamused with his arms across his chest and snarled. "How slow can you be?"

He was always in a hurry but never made an effort to help. Sigrid closed the door and nearly dropped the tray, "Sorry!"

She didn't mean it by the ignoble glare she gave the gray-haired man. He swiftly took the tray as she started walking into the building, she was slowly falling down from poor balance. Her hands were now free and she excused herself to go to the bathroom, her father opposed the idea, to which she grunted and continued walking anyway.

In the main room, all the boys in the academy were taking their seats for the first ceremony to start, Mr. Hall stood outside of the room as he waited for his daughter to come back. His plan was to walk in, sit on his side of the seating chart, and have his daughter wait outside with the burning tray in her hands. Headmaster Nolan always had negative thoughts about girls being at Welton. Sigrid was as girly as it came, to him, Sigrid was a walking disaster to all the touch-deprived, haven't-seen-a-girl-since-first-grade, disillusioned boys.

She went to the bathroom as quickly as she could because there wasn't a girl's bathroom and she would have been embarrassed to be caught by a boy. She washed her hands twice, one out of disgust by how poorly it was maintained and the second to wash off the germs from the sink. She grabbed a towel and opened the door with it before wiping her own hands and throwing it in the trash bin. Mr. Hall was already impatient even though she had only been in the bathroom for about five minutes. She gave him a superficial grin and took the tray in her hands. She got on the tips of her toes and kissed his cheek.

"I'll go wait in his dorm room so the Headmaster doesn't see me, don't tell him I'm in there. I want it to be a surprise."

Every single year was the same, Peter Benjamin wouldn't see her in the main room and he'd get anxious that she wouldn't come and then he'd jump on the walls when it turned out that she was actually in the dorm waiting with fresh food.