Marion – or Mrs Elstwick - has every single name and face in the class memorised. I mean, who does that?
During recess, some children remain in the classrooms to eat and the majority go outside. From the window, I can see students playing ball games on the concrete squares and partially bald oval. The children there, all appear confident and some of them look . . . kind of snobbish.
Well, to be fair, every one inside doesn't look all that open to conversation either, and keep to themselves. Feeling a vertical cloud of coldness from the glass, I move away from the window and find a seat in the corner, behind the heater. The heater is a tall, vertical, cream-painted, metal structure fixed to the wall. If it were a coffin, it could have fit me inside, with room still to spare.
"Hey, the seat next to the heater's mine", a tall, lanky boy whinges. I don't pay any attention, until I realise that he's talking to me. Feeling annoyed and heat-deprived, I point out that the seat I'm sitting is in actual fact, behind the heater, and not next to it.
"So? Same thing. So stop being fussy and just move over, brat", the lanky kid says as he leans in threateningly.
"Ack",I almost fall off my chair, when I see his hair. It's bright pink! Does the school even allow that? Well, at my last school it wasn't anyway.
"What, are ya scared?", the lanky kid leers, noticing my surprised expression.
"Well, I'm not the one with a blushing rose, for a head", I mutter. I hear a few sniggers in the back. Tch. I spoke too loud. If I had spoken a little quieter I might save my self some trouble –
Too late.
The lanky kid gives me a slap powerful enough to really knock me off my chair this time. But I don't give him that satisfaction. With a bruised cheek, I stand up, pushing the chair out and shoving the table just below his stomach. In one swift movement, I pick up my bag and push the chair back in, letting its momentum push the table into the lanky kid again. He's too busy cursing at his stomach, to stop me from leaving the room.
Where else was warm, that I could go to now? I was kicking myself for acting too rashly. Maybe I could have just went ahead and given the kid the seat, and still found a spot close to the heater. But he really shouldn't have slapped me. If he hadn't leered in my face the way he had, then maybe he wouldn't be feeling a guy's greatest pain right now. It was entirely his fault for annoying me like that. And I may have ve even done the world a small favour, if he can't have kids that'll just end up like him.
The library is quiet. And well-heated.
Nobody looks up or asks me anything when I walk in. It's like a place where everybody just happily ignores each other. I like it.
I look around for a way to pass the time and before I know it, I've walked into the picture-storybook section. I plan on backing out of the section, when a black and red-striped cover catches my eye. Curious, I pull it out of the shelf. It looks a little strange for a children's storybook, with a cloth-bound cover. It's when I notice that the book doesn't have a protective layer of plastic film or at least a library sticker-label on it, that I realise that this must not belong in the library at all. Even so, under the pretence of finding the owner of the book, I open to the first page. I'm half-relieved when the page I'm looking at is not someone's private diary entry.
Or maybe not.
Instead, there is a black fine-liner sketch of a figure with an overly toothy grin, like the students in my nightmares. His eyes were rough circles holding nothing but the lined grain of the paper. But what was most grotesque about him (it had haphazard triangles of short hair sticking out) was the way his back was arched painfully backwards, with his clawed hands splayed outwards. Those claws were dripping with something dark and viscous. Presumably parts of the three slack corpses scribbled at his feet. They had straight streams of tears coming out of eyes, like the splayed figure's, stopping only at the ends of their faces. The corpse closest to the figure was smaller than the rest and had been slashed in half. I then realised that the corpses must represent a family. A father, a mother and a small child. All dead.
And the monstrous figure? He had strange, sharp, tentacle-like extensions sprouting from his back, that took up half the page and were probably as long as he was tall.
I was startled into dropping the book, when I heard a voice behind me, "Hey, what are you doing with my book?".
I really hope no one took that chapter-title the wrong way . . . I had to stop myself when I automatically thought of using the word 'peeping'. I blame manga for almost always using the word in a negative context _^;