Sarah Benadine is Dead

Chapter V, Part I

Allison had kept her word; at the commencement of the first day of school, she was standing at the foot of the front staircase, waiting for Shannon. All of the second years had their classes together. There weren't enough teachers to go around for anything else. It just made things easier; Shannon stuck to Allison like glue all day long, and she got around just fine. Just like Allison said she would.

Briargate was sprawling, much larger than Shannon had believed it to be. All of her classes were either on the first floor or in the basement, but hallways twisted off from the entry hall in each direction, looking to confuse her. Her spatial awareness was constantly in confusion; some hallways and rooms didn't even seem possible. Briargate seemed much bigger from the inside.

She adjusted well enough, though. There was a kind of surreal feeling to not being in school with Toni Guaraldi and Robbie Edwards. She'd been with them since kindergarten. But there was Allison, who'd stuck around after that first day (a little bit to Shannon's surprise), and Caleb, who showed up sporadically between chumming around with the red-haired girl and her friends. (The boy Shannon had recognized at the banquet was Dexter Bradbury—he lived in Clearwater and she'd seen him around a few times, but he had not ever been in her class at school, despite being the same age as her.) She spent the first weeks with the two of them, getting to know them better than she had at the banquet. The gaps were filled, but in different ways.

The old school scared her, though.

She hadn't said the words out loud to anyone—hadn't yet, at least—but the building gnawed at her. She told herself it was its vastness, how easy it was for her to get turned around and confused. So much bigger on the inside. Empty, too. Not enough students to fill it. It was still new enough; she was intimidated. Deeper down, she knew that that was not all. There was something else, something abstract. A strong trepidation hung over her, a constant expectation that something was coming, something she could not name.

It was likely present since Sarah Benadine's death, but it had grown within the walls of Briargate into something much bigger. Something...real.

It was no help that on two different occasions, Allison had asked her what she could do. Bewildered, Shannon had never had an answer for her.

That, Shannon decided to talk to Caleb about.

Shannon liked Caleb; she liked Caleb a lot. He was easier to talk to than Allison was, less temperamental. There was something else about him too, something wise; talking to him felt like she was talking to someone considerably older, with all kinds of memories and experiences to draw off of, not just the life of a recently-turned-twelve year old boy. Perhaps it was his eyes—he had his grandfather's eyes, knowledge Shannon was, of course, not privy to, but they were the same. He had the same understanding in his eyes that his grandfather did, an interesting quality for a twelve year old boy.

She'd gotten to know Caleb pretty well in her time at the school. She trusted him, perhaps even more than Allison. She didn't know, when she first went looking for him, what was going to unfold in the conversation, but perhaps it was this that really got things started; this discussion paved the way for everything that was going to come.

She caught him in the library at lunch a few days later. He was with Dexter Bradbury and the red-haired girl, and the short, gawky boy and the sweet-faced, dark-haired girl that they were always with. She hadn't caught any of their names except for Dexter's, but she felt she knew them; it would stand to reason that they all came from Clearwater, but she didn't know why none of them had ever been in her class at school. There was only one of each grade level at the grade school and the high school. There weren't nearly enough people to have multiple. But she'd never spent a day with any of them.