Kill-marnock Academy

The Night It Began

          The night of prom in 2022, the athletic center of Kilmarnock Academy in Kilmarnock Virginia. This normally looked forward to event became the night of a disaster on the beautifully decorated campus. Kilmarnock Academy was a non-religious boarding school with extreme academics, extreme athletics, extreme arts, and extremely sneaky kids. 

          With it being such an intense school both academically and athletically, it was incredibly difficult to get in. You either needed talent or money, which most of the kids had both. A select few got in on scholarships for an extraordinary amount of skill in certain subjects, like art and football. Then there were the snobs who just got in because their parents had money. Most of those spoiled pricks were legacy kids; no surprise there. After all, if you were a legacy, there was no doubt that you would get in.

          Like any high school, there were always groups of stereotypes. For example, the jocks, the nerds, the artists, and the theater kids. All these groups stuck to themselves, not wanting to branch out to other peers in fear of reject, intimidation, or loss of brain cells (mainly the nerds thought that if they hung out with the jocks). 

          Then there were the "outcasts," as some people called them. Alex Martinez, Ryleigh Davis, Louis Williams, and Madison Brown, a group of friends that had all the stereotypes. Alex was the starting quarterback for the Kilmarnock Red Devils as a sophomore in 2021 and had already been scouted by colleges. This scouting didn't matter, of course, because he had already made up his mind to play at Duke. Everyone in the school knew who he was, particularly because he had one of the highest GPAs in the entire academy. This set him apart from other jocks, as he was the only one of the team who truly cared about his grades. He was different than the other jocks. In fact, all the outcasts were different than the external stereotypes they got stuck with. 

          Ryleigh was the school's most talented visual artist: she had already sold some of her pieces to art shoes in the area and her paintings had been put up all over the school's campus, not to mention she already accepted a scholarship from the University of Pennsylvania. Her specialty was painting people in abstract ways, so she was paid and asked to draw and paint others every week. She was used to getting compliments on her pieces, but no one really understood them except Alex. 

          He had gone to one of her art shows (a dare given by a teammate, thinking that he would hate it) and he fell in love with her work. He was amazed by the complexity and yet simplistic shapes used to create the portrait he was looking at. She took noticed and walked over to him, asking if he liked what he saw. While she expected a snide comment, she received a thoughtful, "I love it. You really captured how complexity and simplicity can work hand in hand." She thanked him and introduced herself. One thing led to another and they exchanged phone numbers at the end of the event.

           As they started hanging out more outside of school and classes, they introduced each other to their best friends: Louis Williams and Madison Brown. Louis was a nerd, as true as they came. This boy had looked like a nerd, but acted more like a jock: he was the most notable class clown of their grade. Whenever something even remotely dirty-sounding came out of a teacher's mouth, no pun intended, he would find a way to make it dirty and have the whole class burst out in laughter. Even though the teachers at Kilmarnock weren't the biggest fans of his comments in class, to say they didn't like them at all, they couldn't deny how good the kid was with a computer. He was accepted into Stanford with his 4.0 GPA and was going to major in computer science. He was academic smart, but not very street smart; Alex remembered the more-than-couple times that he had to step in and save Louis's ass after sending a comment towards a jock. The incredibly smart and incredibly tall stick with the glasses had a running mouth that was difficult to keep under control. Madison had witnessed it first had during a musical the school had put on their sophomore year.