Link pulled a face as he looked up at the huge building ahead of him. Boring, boring, rich people, capitalism. The building looked fancy, his rich parents sent their problematic child to a new boarding school to get him to feel gratitude for how rich they were, the school got money for suppressing his creativity and used the money to make the building look more fancy and attract more rich people to it. It went round and round and he knew it and he hated it. He hated rich people and their stupid standards and their stupid leg shaving ideas and their stupid stupid cis boarding schools.
"What do you think, honey?" His mother had this stupid sickly sweet rich person voice on because they were out in vaguely public.
'It's ugly,' he signed, and he sighed loudly for as long as he could while she took a long time to mentally translate what he'd said. Honestly, if she just took some more sign language lessons she'd make up the time almost instantly. But she didn't really care about communicating with him, so he had to put up with the internet explorer-esque delays.
"No it isn't, sweetie, you just don't like it," she said. She was starting to look irritated, for goddess's sake, it had only been ten minutes since she'd taken a break from talking to him for the explicit purpose of being less irritated. "Give this a chance. I know you're intelligent, and this is a good school with good teachers. I don't want to hear any more of this boy thing, you hear me?"
He sighed again and didn't dignify her comments with a response. He knew he was smart and he was sure this school paid its teachers a lot of money to do their jobs properly and not molest the students, but the latter definitely still happened so he doubted that the first would be done.
He put his shoes on to get ready to get out of the car. He couldn't wait to be out of here and into a place where he wouldn't have to tolerate talking to his mother. She just didn't have the parenting skills to understand him well enough to take care of him properly. It wasn't anything new, it was just a new wave of disappointment every second he spent in her presence. Now he was thinking about it, boarding schools probably were better than the alternative.
As soon as the car stopped, he got out with a very quick wave to his mother and ran round to the back to get his case before anyone could offer to help him. He wanted to go in by himself because he didn't want his mother or the driver trying to speak over him. That's what people did whenever they were in his presence, it wasn't just them. They liked to talk instead of him because they could do it better than him, even though they couldn't speak for him. They damn well tried to though, and they failed more frequently than he got As. And he got those constantly.
It turned out that dragging a big and heavy pull along case across a gravel driveway full of expensive cars was really difficult, and Link didn't know why he was surprised. It was like this basically every year. He could try, though. It was hard and people kept staring at him (they were probably staring because of the bright pink case though, courtesy of his mother), but he eventually made it to the doors of his latest bourgeois prison. There, an overachiever in an expensive suit offered to show him to his room so he could take his case up there before going to get something to eat. Link was tempted to be terrible and ask him if there was room in his bed, but he'd tried that one two years ago and he hadn't really liked it. It wasn't really any fun.
"What's your surname then, mister…" Link wanted to jump for joy, but he didn't, because here came about two thirds of the battle.
'I can't speak,' he signed, not expecting the slightly spotty boy to understand the sign language, so he followed up the blank look he received with a motion to his mouth before shaking his head.
"Ah, yes, okay." The boy looked uncomfortable and spotty now, and Link delighted in that. "Well, I have a list, if you could find your name?" That was a rather fast recovery for someone who looked like he had no sense. Link almost admired him for it.
He scanned the list, unsurprised to find the wrong name. They better not have gone against his wishes, though. He'd asked and he'd gone through a long email discussion for this. He sighed, took a deep breath mentally and then pointed to his name.
The change, of course, was instant. "Oh, I'm so incredibly sorry Miss Faron! I apologise, I didn't mean to mistake who you were…" He hadn't been mistaken, but it wasn't like he could correct the boy or anything. Right first time, but now wrong for the foreseeable future. It was infuriating and Link was really starting to wish he'd caved and resorted to pen and paper despite his pride. He had a damn language and it wasn't his fault that no one could speak it. It was their fault.
Link then had to stand through a stream of apologies as the boy just wouldn't shut up as he showed Link up to his rooms. With a heavy (and furious) heart and an incredibly sick feeling in his stomach, Link noted where the rooms split off with girls on the right and boys on the left. And he was on the right. He'd spent hours trying to carefully compose emails to administration about this. He'd explained his rights and his safety and everything and they'd just ignored it, probably because of something his mother had said. A thought briefly crossed his mind of never speaking to her again, and it made him laugh a little, though not out loud.
"Here you go!" He said, a cheerful smile pasted on his face. "After you've put your bag down you can go down the stairs at the end of the corridor for your tour with your roommates." Joy of joys, maybe he'd tag along with someone else because he didn't fancy talking to some girls right now, especially not rich stranger girls.