You Must Remember This

Chapter 1: The Prison-Door

Heller High School stood proudly in a bourgeois residential district about half an hour south of San Francisco, where among streets of flowerbeds and faux Gothic facades a remarkably modern building was situated across a major road, helpfully insulated from the surrounding community. Next to the street were a few grassy fields at ground level, which were just a bit too marshy for common use besides a few people playing with their dogs early in the morning. A roughly paved path, not unlike a bike trail, wound between one of these fields and the athletic track, which was situated on an ivy platform; the groundskeepers had long ago abandoned the fight to keep the terrain surrounding it, and many of the facilities on the far corners of the campus, free from that green menace. The path twisted and turned slightly as it gained elevation, as the entire campus was built on a slope, a slight one just enough to let despondent students stare out windows and dream of freedom in the city below. When the path passed the chain-link fence and gate that too many PE students recognized intimately, the final destination became more clear: a set of concrete steps that led to one of the many entrances into the school proper.

To the right lay a flat expanse of gray with a basketball court that was rarely used and a shed that only a few truly understood. These were somewhat of a backyard for the theater, which one could enter if they took the side staircase up a level and then acquired a copy of the key. Sometimes the dance team would practice here, and the coach would bark orders from above. A few students chained their bikes to the fence here, and bolder ones abandoned any sort of precaution and trusted in the universe to do them a favor and not allow anything untoward to happen. Thanks to the omnipresent security cameras, which were placed craftily to grant students the feeling of freedom, these naïve students were rarely punished.

The path forked into two here, taking a lazy arc to gain some further elevation that most ignored by walking across the wood chips, but this was once again the sole domain of PE students, many of whom knew the uncomfortable feeling of having one of those wooden shards stuck in their shoe when trying to run laps. If one were to keep going, they would appreciate their semi-forested surroundings (most of the greenery being ivy), the tranquility, and the absolute uselessness of this path—who really needed to get to the teacher's parking lot? Aside from those exceptions, most proceeded up the thin steps, a recent addition heralded by many as a sign that the school was beginning to value convenience and modernity, and walked through the ponderous glass door that tended to rest ajar into the central courtyard.

The central courtyard was no inventive marvel of design that would make Frank Lloyd Wright blush, but it certainly was effective. In the middle of the enclosed area was yet another lawn, this one less marshy and thus suitable for students to soak in the sun while they ate. It was ringed by a concrete path, which also enclosed the school's swimming pools. Students who chose to eat lunch outside could walk down and easily spectate whatever festivities were occurring down there; of course, nothing ever happened during lunch periods, but when the pools were not covered by blue tarps (presumably chosen as a hint to the viewers that there was in fact water present), they could appreciate the water's stillness and block out the scent of chlorine and memories of pain and suffering.

Picnic tables and flowerbeds of all sorts were scattered around this central area, spaced apart enough for each clique of students to comfortably ignore the others. A few semi-fortunate teachers also had their classroom doors open up into this common space, who generally appreciated the sunlight but disliked the rowdy kids. The other teachers had their classrooms located in the grid of hallways inside the school buildings. On the side of the central courtyard opposite the administrative offices, which stood in their own building and thus were infrequently visited casually, was a dual walkway, one path dipping down, and then up, to enable students to get to the lower levels of the school, one remaining straight so they could admire the beauty of the lunchtime hubbub. These were shielded from the sun by an overhang, and when viewed from the pedestrians' side had a peculiar mesh that protected a maze of pipes. Sometimes pigeons would peck holes in the mesh and roost among them, at least until somebody took enough initiative to chase them out with a broom.