– Broadripple Starters

While it wasn’t unusual for Gwen Prescott to fly completely off the handle at any given inconvenience, this was something a little bit different. Her episodes always came in waves, like a gushing of blood in her ears, drowning out all sound reason and rationality around her, drowning out all voices in the back of her mind that told her to stop, to re-think what she was going to say next. It drowned everything out from the warmth in her fingertips to any good feeling that remained in her chest, it all just drained out of her like sand spilling through fingers, grasping at granules. The hard part was knowing that it was coming. For days, weeks even, there were tells. Restless nights of broken sleep, no particular grand appetite, but these were just small things that could go amiss if you weren’t paying close attention and she hadn’t been. Now though, it was impossible to ignore. Her whole body felt like it was vibrating and rupturing, like building cracking in the foundation, causing it all to take a slow and inevitable crumble. She was losing it. Her chest was heaving and her breath was coming in rasps, eyes welling and glassy as she watched Damian’s back leave her in the hallway with nothing but her own yelling in her ears.

There he went again, she thought. God, what was it about her that made people want to always walk away from her?

Twisting around, Gwen sped in the opposite direction with no clue of where she was going, just that she needed to get out of there and she needed to breathe, or else she’d suffocate. Her palms hit a heavy wooden door and she blasted into her escape room with heaving sobs. Get a grip, she whispered to herself but her voice came out foreign and gaspy. Her spine craned forward and suddenly Gwen’s hands were on a surface, nails biting for stability as her lungs threatened to cave in on themselves. “I can’t.” She said to herself in response to her own advice. She couldn’t get a grip, she felt like her head was spinning and she was about to fall off the edge of a God damn void chasm. What she didn’t know, as she momentarily sunk into the heavy panic attack, was that this school was too small to not have an audience at every turn.

So she practiced alone, carving out time during the day when she knew no one else would be around. It was her speciality, knowing where one could hide in the school even though it could feel like all the students were packed in like sardines. She smiled, feeling like a spy as she snuck out of the dining hall and down the halls to the music room. Sometimes she felt as if she could blend into the walls, that was how good she was at sneaking. 

So believing that she was alone she happily practiced her solo, letting the sound of Beethoven fill the otherwise quiet room. It wasn’t until she got to the end of her solo that she realized she had company when she heard clapping coming from the doorway behind her. 

“Jesus Christ!” She shouted, practically jumping out of her skin. “How long have you been standing there?”

Parked among a sea of books he’d not even opened, his face lit up at the approach of somebody who he suspected wanted to share the space. “Hey. Ah. Sorry, my shit’s everywhere,” He jerked forward from the lounge then, lowering his phone for a second in order to shove a couple of textbooks aside ( mostly on top of the paper he was supposed to be researching, but whatever… ) and happy to make more room if needed. Heck, he’d put his work in the bin if it meant some good company. “I’m supposed to be working on an essay but I got super hooked on paint pouring vids. You ever seen them? It’s sick, I could watch them for hours, probably.”

If anybody should take the time to know her, they’d learn that dance was Gwen’s entire life besides being overtly difficult. She’d been dancing since she was small, all kinds of styles with all kinds of teachers. One day, she wanted to teach herself, she’d decided. But not before preforming in grand plays on Broadway, or alongside some famous LA artist or something. She wanted big things for herself, just like any other Rom-Com protagonist, but when Dance Class at Broadripple called on group activities, that’s where Gwen fell short of her A Grade mark. Or well, actually… it’s where Jenny Murphey fell short of remembering an easy fucking song cue, or somehow, someway, forgetting her rights and lefts. Truthfully, Gwen didn’t know. All she knew was that one moment, their small 4-some had been rehearsing just fine and then a moment later, Jenny’s elbow flew into Gwen’s face and her back had collided with the wall mirrors.

It was safe to say that should that girl come within even a one-mile radius of Gwen right now, she’d be turned to dust. So in order to spare Broadripple a bloodbath, Gwen had been sent to the nurse, and now sat outside the sickbay with an ice pack to her face, hating everything and wondering just how ugly she was going to look over the next week or so with an abdominal black eye.

When a shadow crossed over her, Gwen’s mood only darkened. Normally, she’d save face, as her reputation to the school faculty was everything. But right now, her face ached and her fuse was short. “If the word karma comes out of your mouth right now, I swear to God, I will find a way to make the rest of your year feel like what’s happening to my actual bone structure right now.”

He knew what his parents were thinking when they decided that boarding school was the best choice, but sometimes he still wondered if leaving Karolin was the best idea. She was so young, and he didn’t like the idea of her growing up without him. And on the more selfish side of things, she was the only person that had ever been able to make him forget everything bad and just be happy for while. Karolin’s happiness was contagious. 

He had gotten so focused on his drawing that he didn’t realize at first there was someone else standing near him and he startled when he caught sight of them out of the corner of his eye, jumping higher than he felt really should have been possible. “Oh!” he said quickly, pulling out the ear buds as he blushed. “I’m sorry. You just, just startled me. I was focused on, um, my drawing. I didn’t see you.” he said carefully, unsure if they had been trying to get his attention of if they had only taken notice of him when he jumped a mile and embarrassed himself. He looked back down at his sketchpad for a moment, trying to figure out how to make conversation. “I send these to my little sister. She’s, ah, she’s only eight. Sometimes it sucks being so much older then her. I miss a lot, being here.”

His board had been stored away for the winter, either resting against his desk or on his legs as he painted a new design on its belly. But now the clouds were clear enough to see slivers of blue cushioned between the clouds and the snow had melted away just enough to leave the playground of Broadripple’s back stairwell clear for skating. It was against the rules to skate on campus, but Ezra found that people rarely populated the back staircase. To anyone else, all it had was a pretty dismal view of a soccer field and the outcrop of trees behind a fence. But to Ezra there was a plethora of rails, stairs, and stretches of pavement for him to explore.

He wound up for a kickflip, board spinning beneath his feet before the wheels clapped back down on the pavement. He careened, nearly tipping over before he righted his balance. Ezra laughed for what felt like the first time in ages.

Damian Fitzgerald’s downfall was a ladder to his own success, and he was already eagerly plotting his next move of ascent. Maria was a challenge he had yet to tackle. She’d beaten him out for the position of student council president, and although he acknowledged they worked well as a team, he was reminded of his resentment at every meeting when she sat at the head of the council table, this afternoon included.

He’d just begun to head back to the dorms in order to change for practice when a heavy clatter pulled his attention. Just across the hall, a student’s book bag appeared to have snapped at the straps, plummeting to the ground and spilling the contents across the floor.

There was nothing Tristan wanted to do less than waste the sparse, precious time he had in between student council meetings and cross country practice, but he had an image to upkeep. Tristan crossed the hall, shifting his bag behind him so he could have a clear reach as he knelt to gather the scattered items. “Are you alright? I have a spare bag in my room if you need one.” He gestured to the broken strap of the bag.

“So. Plot twist. He stood me up. Like, just completely didn’t show.” Ella dropped her purse on the table in Broadripple’s dining hall. It was the only one she’d brought to the Academy with her, the only one nice enough to be deemed worthy of going out. But instead of a promised Friday night escape to one of the local restaurants just out of town, Ella was left waiting at the gates for a ride that never showed up. If she was being honest with herself, the first of many red flags had arisen when Brent kept trying to slide their texts into the realm of sexts. And optimism was always an excuse she fell back on when she knew she wanted something unrealistic. “Just so you know, the guys from Somerville High are lame. I swear, this guy didn’t even know Sappho was an actual person.” She definitely wasn’t bitter about it. She totally didn’t care. Even though she’d wasted an hour trying to recreate a make-up tutorial and slaving over an outfit that looked effortlessly cute. An hour that she could have spent on something meaningful. Like practicing lines or reviewing Griffin’s latest edits for Broadripple Uncensored.

Instead, she’d spent her open afternoon rifling through drawers, switching out her earrings, and trying on nearly every article of clothing in her wardrobe. Gwen would have a mouthful to say about the pile mounted on Ella’s bed when she got back to the room, but Ella considered that an issue to suss out later.

   There was a certain pep in Cassidy’s step as she wanders through the academy. She weaved through groups of students, edging through the dense population with her vintage backpack swinging from its place precariously hanging over her shoulder. It doesn’t take her long to get her destination, the cloisters. For months now it had been too cold to study at her favorite place on the Broadripple campus but it had finally started to warm up enough to risk moving her study sessions outdoors once more. As she settles herself against the wall the brunette can’t help but notice the fragrance of reawakening vegetation perfuming through the air around her. Her hair caught in the perfect post-winter breeze. The ghost of a smile subconsciously places itself against her features while busy fingers take to rummaging through her bag for a biology textbook.

Still, it had been worth it for a few comedic Snapchat stories, he decided as he strolled out of detention with his backpack over his shoulder, having almost fallen asleep at least six times in the past hour.

It was just as cold that afternoon as it had been that morning and he popped the collar of his blazer to shield his neck on his way back to the dormitory building, only to be distracted by the presence of a classmate not too far off in the distance, “Yo,” he called out to the student a few yards ahead of him in the school quadrangle, “You dropped your shit,” he expressed, bending over to pick up the item he’d watched fall out of their backpack.

“I don’t know if somebody did or something did,” she confessed a moment later which made the story slightly less exciting, she would concede. “How good are you at tracking?” not tracking but poop identification, more specifically. She wanted to know who the culprit was before she attempted to back out of the school parking lot, praying that she didn’t run right over the criminal dookie.

“You know- it’s not that our extra duties are even that hard,” she had the easiest of the jobs, arguably but she still spoke for students who spent all afternoon scrubbing graffiti or mopping the dining hall, “- it’s just that it takes up our free time and it’s effort too, like it gets tiring,” she announced, “If we were getting paid, it would be better- that would encourage people to work harder and be better volunteers,” she hadn’t noticed that paid volunteer work was actually just a job, nor had she remembered that this wasn’t voluntary at all, they were being punished. Instead, she thought she’d come up with a wonderful solution to Nighmore’s volunteer drought…just pay people to do work! Duh! “If I was in charge, that’s how I would make it better,” she decided, not that she would ever be in charge of such a thing.

Now, he was slightly older, slightly more mature. He was a little taller (but not much), he’d discovered working out and had stacked on a ton of weight in muscle and he’d even discovered that putting deodorant on was a necessity, rather than a preference and that showering at least once a day actually felt pretty good. It wasn’t that he didn’t like spending time by himself or that he didn’t play computer games anymore, he did, it was just that he played them a whole lot less and had started to value face-to-face human interaction a whole lot more. Japan had been a real eye-opener for the teenager and he wanted to continue on the path he had started paving there by making new friends at Broadripple and making the best of his high school years before they were over.

“Hey,” he greeted another student in the common room with a smile, tugging at the strap of his backpack. He didn’t know if the other student remembered him or even cared to learn that he’d attended the school during freshman year and part of sophomore year too but either way, he was going to treat them like a pal. Confidence. He reminded himself. “So, I guess pool parties are off the table for the foreseeable future, huh?” he joked lightly, making use of recent events to get in tune with the rest of the student body.