Elysium's Love Triangle (2 page)

The school uniform isn’t helping.  I look down at my black skirt.  It is a lot shorter than the one most girls are wearing.  I glance around hoping that someone else is wearing it the way I am.

I find a girl wearing one a full inch shorter than mine.  I breathe a sigh of relief. 

She is standing in the middle of a bunch of boys.  In the moment I’m paying attention she laughs loudly and says to one of them, “Oh Greg.  You’re so funny.  You know that.”

He looks confused, “I wasn’t joking.  That really happened.”

There is a silence.  I would pay good money to know what he’d said before.

I am about to look elsewhere but something about the boy’s voice keeps my attention.

I allow myself to look again.

I can’t believe it.  It can’t be.

The blonde hair.  The dark green eyes.

Greg Harshaw.

My mouth practically falls open.  He begins telling a story about something that happened on the bus ride on his way here.

He has a roundabout way of telling stories.  I recognise the nuances, and pauses, the slight fabrications that are his trademarks.

I still can’t be sure.  It’s so unlikely.

Then he does that sideways smile that I knew so well when I was young.

There is no doubt left.

Complete joy fills me.  My smile returns.

My tone betrays my happiness, “Greg?”

He stops mid-story and looks over. 

At first he doesn’t seem to recognise me.

I guess I have changed, as has he.  He didn’t look like an athlete when we were young.  Now he has a perfect six pack and is perfectly toned.  I am rather dazed. 

I didn’t expect him to grow up so ‘perfect’ after all.  It’s the only word you could use to describe his body.

He studies me for a moment.  Then he does a double-take, “No way . . . Katy Darkwood?”

Delight swells up in me.

He remembers me.

I nod.

He is over beside me in a shot, every bit as excited as I am.  “How have you been?  I can’t believe we haven’t seen each other! What are you up to these days?”

We have a lot to catch up on.  This we do in the following few minutes.

He and his Mom moved around a lot after they left my hometown.  They could never really settle anywhere.

His Mom got into ‘a bit of trouble’ when he was eleven.  He’s been living with his Uncle Andy ever since.  Andy won the lottery last year.

This is the extremely shortened version he gives me of how he ended up here today.

We begin remembering the old times.  There was a cave
,
near the beach
,
which we said we’d live in when we
were older.  He wants to know if
I remember it.

I do.  When I was five my whole future lay in that cave.  There would no nasty grown-ups and Greg and I would do whatever we wanted.  Life was going to be great and fun when we were big enough to live alone, just the two of us.

He also remembers the time that we ran away together.  We didn’t even get as far as the end of the beach before my Mom noticed that something was awry.

Still, it was a major act of rebellion then. 

“You were always trying to get me to break rules,” I remember aloud.  “I was good before you put all those crazy ideas in my head!  My Mom used to go mental!”

He answers smoothly, “Being good is over-rated.”

The tiny hint of flirtation in his voice isn’t lost on me.

I am so happy to be here.

*

Berchmont Academy is strict in everything, even decor.  The outside of the school is in-keeping with the rustic red brick features found in the town it’s situated in.  The windows are constantly being cleaned by a man named Bill.  He has a ladder; he never seems to be off of it.  The inside is just as patterned.  At every corner there is an inspirational quote painted, neatly.
  Pictures of past Principal
s cover the wall.  The school has been around for hundreds of years, being ‘excellent’.

There i
s a mess hall where we will
eat o
ur food.  We shall not eat food
in our common rooms, or in our dormitories, unless we are sick.

The girl’s dormitories are on the left side of the building.  The boy’s ones are on the right.

Sneaking into the opposite genders dormitory will get you suspended.  If you do it twice you will be expelled.

There is no drinking and/or debauchery allowed
on these premises
.

This is a centre of excellence, not a haven for immorality.  Our theology teacher Martin Krein tells us so
, while giving us a
tour of the school. 

The rules are set in stone.  They will not be bent, or changed, for anyone.  He assures us of this.

I look at my Greg.  There is a mischief in his eyes.  I recognise it from when we were young.

This is one boy who is planning on breaking all of the rules.

It was late
by the time our crazy Principal
let us into the school.
  The tour only ends at midnight
. 

Professor Krein tells us that it is way past time for lights-out.  It is an exceptional case tonight though, so he will let us away with it.

He doesn’t look as strict as he has proved to be.  He is a round little man wearing a formal black suit and
a
buttoned up white shirt.  The last wisps of hair that he has are combed over.  I can imagine him being a lovely butler if he didn’t have this job. 

He gives each of us a key-card; it will open our particular room.  We were told our
room
number earlier
,
when our luggage was taken from us and sent there.  I have been assigned room thirty seven.  It’s on the third floor, on the left side of the building of course.

Krein tells us to get to bed immediately.

We all leave but before we do Greg asks him one last question.

Is he sure that
the boy’s dorms are on the right
side of the building?  It would be a terrible travesty for him personally if he
accidently
ended up in the girl’s one.  He is being extra vigilant and making sure this doesn’t happen.  He is prone to
mistakes
after all.

I can’t help smiling.

Krein doesn’t look amused, “Mr Harshaw?”

“Yes,” Greg does a good job of sounding innocent just now.

“We’re not going to have
trouble
with you are we?”  Krein is good at having a hint of a threat constantly in his tone.

“Oh no, sir,
never,
” Greg replies. 

He glances at me, for a millisecond, and I get a glimpse of his smile. 

I notice that his eyes scan the room-number of my key card. 

I shake my head, my grin unwavering. 

I’ve got a feeling that Greg Harshaw is going to be a whole load of trouble.

I will probably not get a lot of sleep tonight. 

This is the thought that hits me when I see how full of energy my new roommate is.

She is positively full of the joys of spring.

Angelica.

I nearly fell flat on the floor when I walked in, a few minutes ago, and found her unpacking my stuff for me.  She’d already unpacked all of her own, she explained. She was at a loss for something to do.

The fact that she’s been through my stuff freaked me out for a few moments. 

I get over it now.  I wasn’t looking forward to unpacking after all.

I thank her and tell her that I’ll do the rest.

I ask her if she’s seen my diary.  It’s a more urgent question than I let on.  I am so afraid that she has read it.  I wrote some things about her brother that I’d really rather she didn’t see.

She sits on her bed and crosses her legs, looking very content.  My diary is under my bed.  She hid it there.  You can’t trust some people, she tells me, it’s best to keep these things out of sight.

I study her, amazed.  She is a bit of an enigma, this girl.  Figuring her out will be quite the job.  She has various posters hung up on her side of the room.  I look at them now.  The pictures are of a clown, a spider, a view from the top of a high building, various insects, a big needle and the Grim Reaper himself.

She notices me eyeing them and looks pleased.  She still has to put up one of a germ magnified a million times.

I just smile and nod.  Of course she does.

I study the posters again.  I’m thinking that perhaps there’s some sense, some pattern, to the whole arrangement that I’m not seeing.  All the different pictures, they just seem so random.

A weird thought hits me then, a connection.

They are all things that people are commonly afraid of.

Insects, spiders, clowns.  Heck, even death himself.  There is at least one thing up there that will make anyone who comes in here just a little freaked.

My room-mate is humming as she puts on black nail-varnish.

I empty out the last of my clothes as she tel
ls me about her first impression of our school.  She loves it. 
She never thought she’d get to come somewhere as nice as this.  It’s a dream come true, really.

She wonders if I want to stay up all night
and
watch girly movies.  We should so totally bond, she thinks, now that we’re room-mates and all.

She seems so incredibly excited that I don’t want to burst her bubble.  I agree.

We both sit on her bed and put a romantic comedy on the television.  Before long we are both laughing.  She offers me some of the sweets she bought earlier.  I take one, feeling awfully comfortable in my new school already.

She won’t be a bad room-mate, despite her various quirks. 

I move back to my bed during the second film.  I do this because I am falling asleep.

The last thing I hear before I fall asleep is Angelica’s voice.

She wishes me sweet dreams.

Sweet dreams are definitely not what I get.

I am standing in a golden room.  There is a red curtain. 

An old man dressed in black, with a crooked grin, pulls the cord and opens it.

He disappears.

I see what’s behind the curtain.

A large aquarium tank, full of water.

It contains my worst fear.

Great White Sharks. 

There are twenty of them, maybe more.  The number seems to be growing.

I back away in terror and shout for someone to help.

I need to get out of here now.  I am suffocating.

The old man appears again, he says it’s time for a swim.

Suddenly I am dangling above the tank on a rope.

I scream and scream.  My terror and fear are multiplying by the moment.

No one is hearing my screams.  I am going to die.

I cannot see the sharks.  A lot of the time they are invisible beneath the surface, people don’t know they are there until they attack.

One of those monsters will jump out and grab me.

It will tear me to pieces.  I will be helpless.

The rope begins to be lowered.

“No!” I scream so loud that it hurts my throat.

The rope keeps on lowering, only slowly.  The terror I feel is so complete.  It is in every pore of my body.

The rope disappears.

I am in the tank with the sharks.  They attack.

*

I wake up
and just about stop myself from screaming.

There is a dark, cold feeling pulsing through my body.  It is fear.

I have another strange feeling, or maybe it’s an idea.  I just can’t shake it.

It’s the sense that someone, or
something
, wicked just had their hand across my head. 

It has
just left, quickly, as I woke up.  It
s
cold presence is still here. 

I shiver as I sit up.

The lights in our room are out now.  You can no longer see the comforting pink paint.  My room-mate is asleep in her bed, turned away from me.

I take a few breaths and lie back down.

I know that I will never, ever, learn to surf. 

The early light of dawn streams in the window and illuminates our room.

There are two new posters on Angelica’s wall.  One is of a lightning bolt on a dark night; the other is of a vicious looking snake.

They are in keeping with her theme of pure horror.

She must have hung them up after I fell asleep.