I rolled my fingers through my chocolate brown hair, lightly separating any tangles or kinks in my curled hair, which was drawn into a ponytail on the back of my head. Sighing, I pulled over my green sports jacket, reaching down to my toes to barely yank on my white socks, which crawled up my ankles. Pushing open the door with one hand, a tan book bag in the other, I exited the dorm, roaming the vacant halls, my roommate nowhere to be seen.
It was quite a normal day at Brunnic Academy, silent, contained, and dreadfully monotonous. I couldn't stand the place, just being in the very classrooms I despised made my blood boil. It's not that I'm an awful student, I actually maintain decent grades despite my English, it's just the fact that I can't read English very well, nor can I even put enough focus into doing my own work; there's just so many more important things to do than to listen to some old geezer talk about the mitochondria!
I'm what adults like to call 'troubled' or problemed'. I'm the antithesis of every value to them, to everyone. I'm not the straight-edge, overachiever like the rest of them. No, I'm the chubby foreigner who gets picked on for their accent. Oh how much I wish we could have stayed in Italy.
My green shoes clicked against the ground, my supplies pressed against my rounded stomach as I picked up the pace in my tread, darting across the corridors. Opening the wooden door into the classroom, I was relieved to find I wasn't late as usual. Slapping my stuff across my desk which was strategically placed right in front of Ms. Declan and her glare like a hawk, I lowered into the desk, my head rested on my hands in boredom. My eyes drifted across the room, gazing straight through the window, seeing into the vast of blue and orange of the dawn's early sky. I could only think of how great it would be if I was drifting off into the expanse of the sky, set free from the weight collapsing on my chest from just the daily life of a student.
"Adrienne Belmonte! Respond when I call you for roll", she snarled, a menacing glare diverted to me from her circular lensed face, snapping a yardstick across my desk. She trotted over to the blinds, and snapped them shut. There goes my future I thought, as my green eyes glance up to the chalkboard, a jumble of letters and numbers scrawled across the black surface. I suppose it's arithmetic. My fingers drummed across my desk in a repetitive fashion , tap-tap taptaptap. My efforts to scrawl a line of script that was even similar to the one's displayed on the board were futile; my writings were never as good compared to the other students, I never could read properly in Italian or English, I just couldn't form the right words with what I was presented; I was diagnosed with Dyslexia and ADHD, and shipped here, because my other school wanted nothing to do with me. At least I think, I can't remember much of my old boarding school, and the oldest memory of myself I can recall was me sitting at a desk and looking at a scar along my arm, which I couldn't understand how it had formed.
I heard the distinct clang of the school bell, and I feel up for my stuff at the end of my desk, until I felt a snap of pain shoot across my arm. Looking down, my arm had a long pink welt on it. Just above it, was the long meter stick and the demeaning face of Ms. Declan.
"Adrienne. Stay after", she snarled, her sagging face forming a wolfish pucker, her lips the only bulwark from her grinding teeth. Defeated, I slumped into my seat once more, my toe tapping against the wooden flooring of the rickety ground. I waited until the last of my classmates left, none of them paying much attention to me, for this was just another occurrence to them. I'm not very well liked here. In fact, it's hard to be when teachers criticize every move you make, whether it be the one they wish or not. I'm pretty much the plague of the school.
I can't stand it, to be honest. I just can never comprehend why anywhere I go, I seem to push away people. I don't ever remember even having a friend but my current memory only extends to about two years prior. Ah yes, two years of eternal solitude and shuffling my way through school systems, before being kicked once more for poor performance.
I heard the shut of the door, and quite strangely, a lock after it. Looking backwards, my sight was met with Ms. Declan's scowling face, her eyes glaring at me from eye level.
"So.. Miss Declan, I'm confused. Why did you want to hold me back", I asked. I was met with no response. "I know my grades aren't the best I mean I can try and get them up I'm just not very good at this subject, I guess with the dysle-"
"Silence", she barked, sending a glare towards me.
Her menacing glare was quite nerve wrecking, and she looked as if she could pierce my throat in that moment. Her nails, lacquered in a dark ebony shade and filed to points, made faint scratches on her desk, vertical lines dicing the wood with indentions.
I looked up at her, confused greatly, as she smoothed back her neatly coiffed bun. I swear I could see dental floss on her desk.
"Enough with my stalling, I've been waiting to do this for the first of the year", she hissed, her face turned into a devious smirk. Raising her arm upwards, smoke billowed from the corners of her lips, her fingers black and smoking as darkness spread like plague over her skin. Her eyes were beady yellow and crimson, staring me down as if I was a meal. A gulp sliding down my throat, I could only stare in awe as she morphed into a fragment of my nightmares.
A bony finger reached for me, and I quickly slid out of it's path, feeling the rip of purple talons against the air from behind me.
Raising a now purple arm, her figure more closely resembled a ghost-witch rather than a math teacher. A mist of smoke shrouded her fingers, more closely condensing and become opaque, taking on a dark purple shadowed look. Leaping from my seat, I backed away slightly, noticing she wrenched the orb towards me. Snapping down, I pressed my hands into the ground, the orb absorbing into the wall, a black of smoke appearing on impact. I braced myself against the desk, cowering in fear as the smoke would hopefully distract her momentarily.
CRACK! The sound of splintering wood filled my ears, as fragments of the shattered door lined the floor. Peering from the floor I was laying against, I briefly caught sight of a distinctly male figure, burly knuckles cracking as he looked across the room.
His sight twitched from the witch of my maths teacher, to me, allowing me to get a better view of what he looked like. He was almost certainly a tad older than me, with scruffy red-brown hair. I hadn't spoken to him before, but I had seen him in the halls before, I believe his name was Hudson.
He unfurled a long bronze blade, sliding its massive length out from his pocket, from what I believed to be watch box. Ms. Declan's eyes narrowed in anger, as she lunged for Hudson.
Hudson slid to the side, narrowly avoiding her talon like fingers, and brought his thin blade to waist level. Slashing at the air, her talons clashed with the blade, Hudson buffered back by the recoil. Leaping on top a desk, he pointed his sword to her face,a small smirk at the creases of his mouth.
His blade burst through her abdomen, skewering through her ghastly body. I could hear her anguished screeches from my spot on the floor. Peering over slightly, her body looked like a flash of light, as if it were melting and cracking like a piece of a pottery in the sun. And then, she was gone, her body no more than a fading shadow against the ground.
I don't think I could comprehend the sight at the time, one of the few things I could remember, was my hands reaching in front of me, shaking slightly, as Hudson watched. The boy extended his hand, me latching on to it as the weaker kid I was.
Shaking slightly, I could hear him say, "We have to leave fast, follow me." I gladly followed him, as he maneuvered me through the cluster of fog shrouding our vision. FInally, I could see once more, the doors to a stairwell that was regarded as off-limits where we had entered. Shaking my head, I shrieked, "We can't be down here!"
"It doesn't matter! We need to go now!"
I followed him down the abandoned staircases, a dim flickered bulb our only light source for our journey. Finally, we were met with what could be called a mini parking garage, only fit for about six cars. The only car present was a maroon Camry, sitting idle in the garage. Hudson pulled out a pair of keys, the engravings "CA" cut into the gold keys; I'm pretty sure it didn't mean California.
I opened the doors into the car, the smell of fresh, ripe, leather wafting into my nose. I would have reached for my perfume, but what belongings I had were still at the school, the only things on me my iPod, my signature sports jacket, and an old bracelet. The bracelet looked like a friendship bracelet, pink and blue rings sitting on a tie-dyed string spelling out the words "ADDY." I could only guess that Addy was a nickname for Adrienne? I couldn't be too sure though, I can't ever recall having friends to give me the bracelet.
Hudson jammed the keys into the engine, spurts of exhaust kicking from the pipes behind the car. Rolling out of the garage with a lurch, I turned to Hudson, sighing as he realized an explanation was due.
"Okay this is going to be a really confusing so I'll let the director better explain to you when we get to Camp. Okay so Ms. Declan, that purple ghost witch thing, your algebra teacher? She's what we call a Dweller, a Mismagius to be specific. They're creatures that escaped the distortion world full of vengeance and hate and discord and feed off of Demimon like us", he explained, his eyes not leaving the road.
I snorted in response, "So we've come to the day were apparently I'm now an amnesiac demi-whatever the hell you said thing, and you expect me to think you're not a schizophrenic."
"Pretty much."
"I mean it's obvious you planned out your facade earlier. You might as well give me coordinates to your white van."
"I'm being serious. I've heard about you in school; you've got ADHD, Dyslexia, am I right?"
"Yeah but what's your point? English isn't my first language, so of course I'm not as good at it."
"It's more than that; you're not meant to be still in a desk all day, you're meant to be fighting, it's your battle impulses acting. And your mind is hardwired for Ancient Sinnic, not English and Spanish."
"It's Italian", I said quickly, chuckling. "Besides, that makes a little sense but was abducting me absolutely necessary", I whined, my gaze staring out the window. All I could see was a vast expanse of green, no trees or anything just flat and prairie against the horizon.
"Hudson, right?", I asked, my face smashed against the windows.
"Yeah, that's me."
"If you're so positive that all of this is real, where are you taking me?", I asked, my eyes perked with curiosity.
"Can't tell you that yet", he responded, a small smirk on his face, as he itched his red-brown hair.
A felt the car lurch to a stop, a wave of nausea making my stomach flip round me, as I hunched forward in my seat, clutching onto the seat belt.
"You really drive like a 16 year old", I groaned, before unclicking my seatbelt. We had stopped in the middle of a field, a large portion of the foliage swept away, only dust remaining.
Hudson locked the car, motioning for me to follow him to the dirt.
"Stay near", he warned, as he bent down to place a stone into the debris. Unsheathing his long sword, he proceeded to inscribe glyphs into the ground, drawing circular formations into the ground, surrounding us in a formation of designs.
"Oh my god. Are you abducting me to join a cult and sacrifice me to Satan", I shrieked, sticking my tongue out jokingly, to which was responded with a small grunt. sliding the thin fencing like blade back into its retreated state on his finger, Hudson clasped his arms around a vibrant pink stone. A blinding white glow escaped his palms. Eruptions of fuschia shot out from the glyphs scribed into the ground, and I could see the warpings of the world around us swirl into the distance, my mind slowly fading black, as my vision faded.