Grave (Work in Progress)

Chapter 1.2-Kyrce-Outcast

Why? Why wouldn’t she help me? Was it the rumor mill? Probably. She knew about me, so chances were she had heard about my reputation and deemed me too much of a risk to be around.

I could hear Zanzibar scolding me. “Shut up and stop jumping to conclusions,” he would say.

What if it wasn’t me at all? She could have personal reasons for wanting to be alone, reasons I couldn’t understand.

Nonetheless, the rejection was still hard to swallow. Not that I was a stranger to it, but for the first time, I had thought, for a fleeting moment, that I might finally have had one friend my own age.

Well, besides Bastian. That bastard.

Tweeting, hooting, and the sound of flapping wings drifted down from the aviary. Birds were returning now that the Plague polluting the North Tower was gone. A small smile played on my lips.

I couldn’t have accomplished this on my own. And I wouldn’t be standing here right now if not for her. There had to be something to that. Even if we couldn’t be partners, that didn’t mean we couldn’t be friends.

I wondered if she could hear the birds chirping too, wherever she was.

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The final bell chimed just as I slipped through the classroom door. Immediately, I felt a hundred pairs of eyes boring down on me.

The Planetary History classroom was set up in a circle. The long student desks traced the perimeter, elevated at different levels like stairs. The professor, a shriveled old elf with ears twice as long as his head and round spectacles perched on his rather porcine nose, sat on a podium that stretched halfway to the ceiling. The fur collar of his robe was like an animal swallowing his bald head. In the center of the room, a projection of the planet rotated above a metal pedestal. Something about this globe was different, but I couldn’t place what it would be.

A black box on a wire protruded from the professor’s stand. He tapped it with one claw-like gray nail and cleared his throat. “Mr. Sirula,” he croaked. “Can you please find a seat? You are stalling my class.”

“Oh! Umm…y-yes, sir.” I glanced around the room. The other students whispered to one another, shooting hostile looks at me.

I caught bits and pieces of their conversation as I slid into the nearest available chair. “…Freak…Liar…Crazy…”

Every person sitting within a few spaces of me shot up and carried his or her books to the next table over. Once those spots were filled, the remaining few grabbed their seats and made new spaces for themselves. I thought that the professor would be angry at the disruption, but he stayed silent and just continued to leer at me.

Once the shuffling subsided, textbooks were passed out. I was surprised when someone handed me one. In the past, nobody would ever have given me anything, not even the time of day. I opened the front cover to record my year (not my name because anyone who used it later would think that I cursed them), and found a note wedged inside. It said:

“So how much tuition money did administration give you after you slept with them all? Don’t deny it. You’re too poor to afford this school on your own. I can tell because your uniform is so painfully secondhand. Go drown in the Abyss, man-whore.

PS: Seriously it's got all these rips in it. What did you do?”

So that was the new rumor. I attempted to hide the redness on my face behind my jacket collar until a sickening idea formed in my mind.

What if they knew about my past? What if that was why this rumor had started?

What if Bastian had told them?