Echoes of the Past

Chapter 4: New School

"Echoes of the Past"

Chapter 4: "New School"

Lincoln dreamed of his former school again. This time he didn't remember the school in Royal Woods, but the one in Toronto, as it was the closest Canadian city to Michigan, their home state. After starting to attend the local middle and then high school, the lives of Lincoln and his sisters changed dramatically. And at first, all this was so unusual, because Toronto is a city of contrasts with a population of almost three million people, against which Royal Woods simply fades away with its total population of twenty thousand, which would not even make up one block of Toronto.

It's also a city where more than half the population is made up of residents of non-Canadian descent, making it a cosmopolitan city where more than 160 languages are spoken. Such diversity would be easy for an unpretentious person who doesn't care where he or she lives. But the Louds were not like that. Having lived in Royal Woods all their lives and having grown accustomed to it with all their hearts and souls, a crisis forced them to leave their homeland and move to a large city where they knew no one at all and had to rely only on their own strength.

This move almost immediately affected their well-being, there were even times when they wanted to give up, put their hands down and wished that they would dissolve in this huge metropolis, that they would get forgotten. However, the will to live, faith in the future and general optimism, (including the young comedian Luan, who always tried to cheer up the family and who did not feel sad at all), never let them lose heart.

Lincoln saw a memory in his dream that he and Lucy were walking towards their new school with backpacks on, and suddenly he experienced a feeling he hadn't felt since he was seven years old: fear of the unknown. Remembering it for the first time in such a long time, he was even surprised to find himself back in almost the same problem he'd had in first grade. He tried to push the fear away from him, comforting himself with the fact that even back then he was able to make new friends and fit in without getting into any trouble, bullying, or fighting. So, he thought, it would work, it just had to work the second time! All one has to do is push away the excessive bias and prejudice.

He took a deep breath, took in more air, and exhaled. He calmed down and started mentally preparing himself for both the best and the worst outcomes. Then he reassured Lucy with words:

— It's all right. Maybe it's not as bad there as we think! Soon we'll be friends with everyone and live like in the good old Royal Woods.

— It will never be like in Royal Woods ever again, Lincoln... — Lucy said in her usual pessimistic tone that everyone, Lincoln included, was used to. She had always looked so sad, and when they had been forced to move out of their home, and then permanently to another country, to another city, she had wilted and become even less social than before. «She may have a mental breakdown there!» Rita sometimes said to her husband.

Well, it probably had already started there and took its roots deep into her soul. And since Lincoln was closer to her than any of her relatives, he always tried to reassure her, saying that everything would soon be all right, that everything would pass. But she didn't believe it.

— Let's at least give it a try, will we? — Lincoln offered her a step into this frightening but attractive unknown and held out his hand to her.

— Let's... — she replied and took his hand. They entered the school together and set out to explore it before the first class started.

The hallway was full of their peers, as well as younger and older kids. All of them were completely different in speech and face, but each socialized only with «their people» and stuck to «their» group. Each group communicated in its own language: some in French, some in Chinese, and it was problematic to recognize other speeches, because they had never heard such or at least similar speech before, and therefore it was impossible to even try and guess.