The Girl in The Museum

2 | Trinity

 My brother Mason died a month ago. I felt like I had already forgotten him.

I was a mystery to most people in this town. My parents and I moved to Enbury from Boston after Mason died from sudden Stage 4 cancer. We found out a week after his senior year of high school and two weeks later, he was gone.

It had been hard enough having to leave everything I grew up to in Boston. My parents were guilt ridden after Mason passed away. They needed a fresh start. I needed my life back in order. I lost that game.

We'd lived here for two months, and I hadn't adjusted one bit. The cardboard boxes still littered my room. I hadn't even put up the bed frame; my mattress lay on the floor, blankets thrown over it haphazardly. My parents, still demanding that I get a higher education so that they can send me off to Yale or Stanford as soon as I graduate, got me into a private school called Leighton Hall Academy.

I had walked past it one day when I escaped from the stuffiness of the new house for a bit of fresh air. It was broad and pretty in the way that old architecture always is. It had thick, wrought iron gates with ivy and shrubs creeping up around it. It was three stories tall and composed of three different buildings, all facing inwards to a large courtyard that had a grand water fountain in the center with several stone benches surrounding it. The school campus itself looked like they had placed it in the middle of the woods with the giant oaks and chestnut and cherry trees. In a slightly sadder reality, however, it was a short, five minute walk from my house.

We tried to meet some new people in the first few weeks that we lived in Enbury. My parents got me to go to three different social events, either raising money for the new city park or a meet and greet hosted by the mayor who had realized that there had already been seven new families that had moved to Enbury in the last few months. All three social gatherings were highly awkward and unnecessarily intrusive. For some reason, Enbury was becoming a bustling town; both the academy and the robust beauty of its nature were both highly appealing.

It was late July now. I had to start at Leighton Hall in exactly twenty three days. I wasn't exactly dreading it, nor was I all too in favor. It was blurry. Everything had been blurry since Mason died.

I had to get through two more years of school and then, whether my parents liked it or not, I could go and do whatever the hell I wanted to. I just had to live through the next two years and then I could escape. 

It was going to be a wretched two years.