Hager's Boarding School for Troubled Youth

Chapter Six

It was three-thirty in the afternoon, which meant I had some time before dinner to go back to my room and work on assignments that were due the next day. Mrs. Torres, the English teacher, announced a ten-page story that was due a week from today, but that was the last thing on my mind. The dream last night fluttered into my mind all day, I needed to find out what it meant before I lost the little sanity I had left. I decided to head for the library outside the girl's dorm to find out as much as I could about it, but there was no guarantee there would be books available on that particular subject at a school library.

I wandered down the hallways until I saw the red door. It had the same keypad as my bedroom door, I thought my room code might work here too, so I punched it in, and the red light turned neon green. If my code worked, did that mean everyone else's were in there too?

I took a deep inhale; the smell of old books and stale coffee wrapped its bitter arms around nostrils and held tight. It reminded me of the public library back home, all the old books from Shakespeare all the way to Plato smelled the same way. I smiled at the thought, the librarian there knew me and had a cart ready with tons of old history books and philosophy books. I sat there for hours gently leafing through each book to find things I didn't know before and wrote them down. I had at least forty notebooks filled with just facts about different cultures and their histories.

I glanced at the shelves; they were a light oak wood packed tight with every kind of book imaginable. They were lined against the four walls plus a dozen lined in the middle of the room. Each section was labeled on the side according to which genre was in that shelving unit along with a number and letter code for easy put-back. There was a section labeled "Dreams", but the next section on the right caught my eye more. "Our School."

I ran my index finger along the tattered spine of each maroon and gold book in that section the two colors alternated, each one was titled with a different name or event that happened at the school along with the approximate year. The amount of dust layered on each one told me they hadn't cleaned that whole section in a couple decades. The second to last book on the top shelf was a shabby, maroon leather-bound book, the gold writing on the spine read "Bartholomew R. Cook (1989-2009)." I grabbed it from the shelf and cracked it open to the index. The sections were labeled as: About Bartholomew, His Life, His Descendants, His Function at HBSTY and some small random sections in between, but the last one took me aback. My jaw dropped as I read the title, "Xenia Rose Cook."

What? Why was I in a book about him? I thought.

"You look like such a nerd sitting there with your nose in a gross-looking book..." Sabrina scoffed, her hand on her hip as she stood in front of the door and a glare painted on her pale, freckled features.

My brows knotted together, my stomach clenched, why did she care if I read or not...? "Why are you here? Shouldn't you be trying to get service on your phone somewhere?"

She huffed, her body fell on the loveseat across from where I sat on the four-person sofa, "I wish...that thing is useless at the moment. I came here to see if there were any computers, but looking around," She scanned the entirety of the room. "I'd say that's a no on that." She sighed and threw her head against the back of the chair.

"Well, whatever. Just keep it down please, I'm doing research." I shifted my gaze back to the words in the book, the pages about me were five hundred thirty-three through five hundred fifty.

So many...

I leafed through discolored pages until I got to the title page when Sabrina threw herself beside me on the green sofa. She craned her head over the book and tried to read it over my shoulder, but she gave up after I shifted in the chair away from her. She smelled like coconuts and apples, it wasn't unpleasant which surprised me, but it was pungent. Her long blonde hair tickled the side of my neck as she moved closer again, I pushed her away, but she just came right back. "Did you need something?" I gritted my teeth and moved my eyes in her direction, but she didn't say anything. Her features drooped and she sighed. I closed the book, put it on my bag to put away later and stared at her.