Chapter One:
Beep. Beep. Beeeeep. Damn. My bleary eyes opened slowly, shocked by the amount of light in my bedroom. I was in a hazy stupor, still half living in that strange dream about the wolf. It was only strange because it felt like I was the wolf, but it didn't really matter in the scheme of things. I always had weird dreams, didn't I? It was shaping up to be beautiful morning but even so, why did my infernal alarm clock decide to go off today, of all days? I was already getting less and less sleep each night, mostly due to – "Rosa! Rise and shine sleepyhead, its exam day today! And the day after and after and after as well!" – that. My mother was starting the morning wakeup routine, which usually includes yelling at the top of her voice to wake everyone in the house up simultaneously. "Coming Mum..." I called, my voice cracking from lack of sleep. I had been studying non-stop for my various maths and other tests, and I was up at six o'clock just to cram a bit more in, and trust me, I needed all the help I could get.
"Come on Rosa, I know you're ignoring me, so get up and get out here. Breakfasts ready." Oh yippee, I thought, just what I need: some nice cold porridge to wash down my extreme anxiety. Mum was ... not the most normal of mother figures, but that was alright with me.
She was going through a phase where she ate nothing for breakfast but porridge, and seeing as it was high summer it would be impractical to serve it anything but cold. Yet, it had to be done, so I heaved myself out of bed, stumbling around drunkenly searching for my school uniform, tripping over various items of clothing that had misplaced themselves on my floor, as I passed. Eventually I got my uniform on and, looking less like a sleepwalking zombie and more like a living, breathing, thirteen year old, made my way across our long corridor to the kitchen. Shoving down my porridge (which promptly settled like a brick in my stomach) and cramming in some last minute geography study I rushed off to school in my dad's car on his way to work, as I had slept in too long to catch the bus like I usually do. On the way to school we talked about more study and then finally, I was there.
Bramble Oaks Intermediate High School, or BOH, as the students call it, was a selective high school that you had to sit a test to get into. In most ways it was exactly like any other high school, except that you had to be a little bit smarter than most to get by. It was a medieval castle of a place, with towering spires, vines and rusty old gates. When I arrived I saw among the streams of people flooding through the gates there were my friends. When I had moved to high school from primary, I hardly knew anyone except a couple of randoms from my old school and a tallish, auburn haired girl named Alexa, who was often obsessed with certain things at a time. Today it was dragons and she was roaring ferociously at anyone that came near. Since then I had made many new friends and they came to meet me at the gate as follows:
The first was a girl from Syria named Katherine, who was pale and pretty, with hair the colour of chocolate. She always seemed to me a bit conscious of everything she did, and she was very nice. She moved in for a hug, saying 'Hi Rosa!" into my shoulder. Next came Jade, the opposite of Katherine, a vivacious, olive skinned girl with black-brown hair. She always did very well in tests, and she went up to me brandishing a handful of study notes she had probably typed up last night. "Well, have you studied?" she asked me, giving me one of those stares that made you want to give a person the absolute truth. "Ummm… yeah?" I answered. "That's good," Jade said, "because guess who didn't?"
I pondered for a moment until a voice from the back of the group called, "I didn't!" Cassandra, Cassie for short, had said this, and by the look of it she wasn't panicking about it. Cass was a girl who took hardly anything seriously, but still did pretty well at school. She was pale and freckled, with a face that proclaimed that she had spent most of her life laughing. There then came a quiet giggle from my left. Sara was standing there, stifling her laughter at the sheer ridiculousness of the situation. Sara seemed to me to be a quiet person at first, but once you got to know her you would think otherwise. She had dark, honey-blonde hair and dark blue eyes, a darker version of my ice blue eyes and white-blonde hair, and was capable of being very hyper when she wanted to be. She had a knack for saying things exactly as they are, and exactly what everyone else is thinking.
After a bit of last-minute study and overall stressing about the tests, the bell rang and we filed into English class for our first test. It was writing so I wasn't overly worried, but even still, the first test of any exam period is daunting, and this was no exception. As the English teacher set the timer for our writing task, my stomach was alive with nerves, as though it was being invaded by hordes of insane butterflies. I wrote feverishly on the year 7 stimuli –a dark forest –as the clock ticked inexorably toward the finish. I created the story of a girl called May who was lost in a dark forest with no escape, which was fairly typical but all I could think of under the circumstances. Just as I was writing the last couple of sentences, where May finds out she's the long lost daughter of the reigning monarch, the timer went off and we were told by our teacher to put our pens down. I just hoped I did well.
After the test Katharine, Jade, Alexa, Sara, Cass and I all talked about our various responses to the stimulus (I was glad to find out none were like mine) and then ate recess together before proceeding to the next class, and the next test. And so it continued throughout the day, my group chatting together throughout. I walked home with Alexa and we talked about books we were reading lately, and I recommended one I had read that was really good. It turned out to be one of those perfectly normal days, just like any Friday afternoon I'd ever had, but little did I know, it was the last truly normal day I was going to have in a long, long time.