*Watty's 2021 Shortlist*
Samantha Roberts and Ben Evans have one thing in common - they both attend Sir Robertson's School for the Gifted, an elite boarding school for the children of the world's wealthiest. Both scholarship students, they gravitate...
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They always tell you the odds of dying in a plane crash are low: 1 in 188,364. Which, in comparison to the odds of dying in a car accident (1 in 103) or drowning (1 in 1,117) are pretty low.
But what about that one person in all of those thousands who does die? That's probably not much comfort to them as they're plummeting to their death.
I'm not scared of flying. But I can't help thinking about that one person. The person who does drown, or gets hit by a car, or dies in a plane crash.
Let's just say that planes make me uneasy. I just don't really understand how they work—I know that the air resistance pushing under the wings lifts it up—but it doesn't seem logical. Planes are so big, so heavy. It just doesn't make sense to me.
I don't like things that don't make sense to me.
It's also not much of a comfort to me currently, gripping the armrests tightly as the plane I'm on goes through another bout of turbulence. I've been on this plane for about five hours, and we're less than twenty minutes from touchdown.
No way did I get any sleep, with the anxiety pooling in the pit of my stomach. My entire life is changing, and it will be at least a year before I go home again. Before I see my parents, which is a little sad, even if I am excited to be gone.
I never imagined attending boarding school. I mean, we never had the money. Winning a full-ride scholarship to one of the most prestigious boarding schools in the world was one of my wildest dreams, and now, somehow, it's come true.
The Sir Richardson Academy for the Gifted is unusual in both its location and attendees. The kids of the rich and famous, celebrities and royals alike. As long as you've got a ton of money (like hide-the-bodies kind of money) and the prestige to go along with it, your child is in. Most of them are legacies, anyway, third, fourth, or even fifth-generation students.
Of course, my family isn't rich, nor are we prestigious. No, every year, Richardson's offers two full-ride scholarships to the peasants. I'm not sure if it's to show how "kind and generous" they are, or to rub how insanely rich they are into the faces of us lowly masses. I suspect it's both.
And this year, I've won one of those scholarships. The academic one. They offer one for athletics, as well, but I am so far from sporty it's almost funny.
The plane jolts a little as the wheels hit the runway, and I look out to see the palm trees, heat-soaked pavement, and blue as all heck ocean of Puerto Rico.
I mentioned the location, right? Because, yeah. A little out of the way for one of the oldest and richest private schools in the world. If you look it up online, Google says that Richardson's is located in England.
Which is a lie. It's actually on an Island—and all of the brochures and welcome packages just call it that, the Island, capitalized—somewhere near Puerto Rico. Near enough to take a boat too, anyhow, but too small to have an airport.
