The Gathering Storm Ch 2

Chapter 2: Torture

        Leaca was fourteen years old and in the ninth grade. After exiting the bus, she had a good distance to walk before she could make it to class, for the school was spread out across several acres, and she had to traverse its length multiple times each day to reach her classrooms. On top of that, she had to brave four flights of stairs (while carrying a titanic book bag, no less) to arrive at her homeroom class. By the time her trek was done, she was huffing and puffing like a victim of the black lung disease.
        Always the first to shuffle into class, Leaca was often forced to endure the awkwardness of making idle chit-chat with the teacher, Ms. Simmons. Since Leaca was a rather reticent and reserved girl, she often shied away from talking with people who didn’t know her very well . . . which was a category that included basically everyone. But there was no way to avoid a conversation like this.
        “Good morning, Lisa,” Ms. Simmons would say. Leaca had given up correcting her about the name.
        “Morning,” Leaca said dully.
        “How are you doing today?”
        “Great,” Leaca lied.
        “Nice weather out there, isn’t it?”
        “Oh, yeah. Really nice.”
        “So, how does my hair look this morning?” Ms. Simmons was one of the younger teachers and obsessed with appearances. “I put it in curlers last night, but I just don’t know if it really looks curly enough. I mean, what do you think?”  What did Leaca think? She thought she wasn’t the proper person to ask for this kind of advice, considering her own rumpled hair.
        “It looks perfectly curly to me,” she finally answered.
        “But what about this blouse? It’s red, you know.” Nod. “And it’s brand new.”  Double nod.  “Do you think it goes with my skin tone? I just know light red does, but this one’s more of an . . . apple shade, wouldn’t you say?”
        "Very apple,” Leaca replied. And so on, and so on. Finally, after an aggravating twenty minutes, a few more pairs of classmates scuffled in, so Leaca was no longer the sole victim. Seizing her opportunity, she whipped out a book to read, pretending to be too utterly engrossed in its pages to communicate with anyone. Her tactics were successful.
        To her credit, however, Leaca had attempted to converse with the other kids before. But since she had nothing in common with them—she didn’t even have a television or computer to speak of—there was nothing to talk about, which made chatting rather challenging. But even so, she considered it lucky that no one thought of her as being exceptionally “strange.” After all, she didn’t stand out in a crowd, and she always went out of her way to be kind to people when they addressed her. She wasn’t like those creepy kids who would stare at their classmates, smiling their ghoulish smiles and piping up to express their psychotic opinions on various subjects. No, she could be thankful that she was nothing like that.
        To tell the truth, she even got the feeling once in a while that the other kids observed her with a sense of mild curiosity. “How can that girl survive in the other half of town?” was the question on all of their lips. Some rumored that Leaca’s parents had been involved with some undercover work and that Leaca herself was in witness protection; the Old Half of town was the perfect place to go if you wanted to drop off the face of the earth.
        But for all Leaca knew, her parents could have been agents. She had been abandoned by them at a very young age and left with her blobish grandparents, so she didn’t remember her real parents at all. It drove her mad not knowing where they had disappeared to or if they were even still alive. Her grandparents had only ever grunted in response to her incessant questioning about them. Still, even now, she held a glimmer of hope that her parents might one day return to claim her. Perhaps one day, they would be a family again.
        As the bell rang to end homeroom, Leaca snapped out of her day-dreaming and zipped off for her next class, anxious to beat the rush of human traffic. On her way there, she stopped in the bathroom on the bottom floor. Inside, safely behind a locked stall door, she removed her grimy hand-mirror from her pocket and held it up.
        Still there, she thought, referring to the bold mark upon her neck. By now, it had spread to her left shoulder as well. If it hadn’t frightened her so much, she would have thought it an attractive design. But for now, she simply couldn’t stop pondering over its origins.
        Leaca was fairly sure she hadn’t sleepwalked into the New Half of town at night and waltzed into a tattoo parlor, requesting a symbol of something she had never set eyes upon before in her life. And she didn’t have money for that anyway, so the idea was totally implausible . . . which meant that this mark had to be occurring naturally. But how?
        At first, Leaca had feared she had been stricken with some sort of a cancer.  After all, she had been born with a prevalent black birthmark on the left side of her neck, and what if it was beginning to mutate into a tumor? But, as she reasoned with herself, no tumor could be shaped so elegantly as to echo a swirling, airy gust of wind. So it had to be something else; she just couldn’t fathom what. Still, as a precaution, she had taken to wearing a jacket each day to cover it up. That way, the other kids wouldn’t see it and really start the gossip pumping.
        Stowing the mirror back in her pocket, Leaca exited the bathroom and slouched into her biology class. As a general rule, she didn’t mind learning about subjects that interested her, but that was the downfall of most of her classes: the things she learned were utterly useless and incredibly boring to boot. And then there was the school work. Even Leaca, who had more or less no life, felt she was wasting her time doing pointless, tedious, and stale busy work.
        In biology that morning, Leaca tried to listen to the drone of the teacher’s voice, but it merely made her eyes droop. However, she couldn’t have fallen asleep no matter how much effort she devoted to the task, for her mind was rather preoccupied with what was sitting right beside her. It was unfortunate for her that she been assigned the seat directly next to the cage in which resided the teacher’s pet tarantula, Ms. Piggy. She had apparently been named Ms. Piggy because she could devour five crickets at once. Leaca’s eyes couldn’t stop following the eight-legged menace as it crept around the edge of its cage, and her biggest fear was that she’d turn in her seat one day to gaze upon an empty tank before feeling the hairy legs of the tarantula on her skin. . . .
        Not surprisingly, Leaca’s mood was lightened considerably when biology came to a close. She was free then to migrate to her history class. She had to admit she was very fond of her history teacher, which was primarily due to the fact that he tended to spend most of the class time spinning yarns about his Irish cousins.         Everyone loved him for that. Leaca never grew tired of his stories, even after hearing them for the twenty-first time in two days.
        Leaca’s remaining teachers, however, were not so lovable. For example, there was the teacher she thought of as the “undead” one. Really, the woman was just a plain zombie. She didn’t teach, so Leaca supposed the woman assumed her students would learn the material through osmosis. She would just sit at her desk and do . . . well, Leaca really didn’t know what. Bet on Fantasy Baseball? Read entertainment magazines? Who knew? The point was that she never actually watched the class, which was all well and good until test day rolled around. That was when the more brainless students would take to whistling annoying tunes during the exams and tossing wads of paper at the backs of unsuspecting kids. All the while, the teacher did nothing. Leaca was beginning to think she really was a zombie.
        But, as Leaca hurried her way to lunch, she was reminded that just walking to her classes could be far worse than enduring the classes themselves. Transitioning to the next class was like being in a ninja training exercise where it was anyone’s guess who might leap out in front of you or try to trip you up. The best solution was just to dodge everybody in a fleeting hope of survival.
        Inevitably, though, Leaca would always find herself stuck behind the most sluggish slowpoke in the school, like some ant trapped behind a snail. But the sloths were only the tip of the iceberg. As Leaca pushed past the throngs of students on her way to the lunchroom, she found herself being knocked around like a ball in a billiards game. People bashed into her from all angles, none of them sparing a thought for the bruises they were dishing out. It was easy to get slammed if you weren’t paying attention. But even when Leaca managed to reach the lunchroom’s double doors at last, the challenge didn’t come to a halt; next, she was forced to squeeze through the gap against the tide of kids tearing past her, practically suffocating her. Only after she had successfully plowed her way to the other side could she take a seat and catch her breath.
        Lunch, though surely everyone else’s favorite time of day, was in no way pleasant for Leaca. All she wanted was to eat her food in peace, but the lunchroom was so crowded that a pack of loud, obnoxious kids would pile next to her no matter where she sat. One time, a group of these offbeat students had decided to amuse themselves by offering Leaca a cookie from a snack bag. Though she had told them no thanks, they desperately begged her to eat it. They even placed it on the table and stared at her until she finally took the bite, prompting them to erupt into cheers like she was some kind of idol whom they’d made a sacrifice to. From that point forward, she had kept as far away from that group as possible.
        When not being distracted by cookies, Leaca would spend lunchtime reading a book or observing the line of kids at the vending machines. Eating lunch itself never took too long, since the meal was nothing to brag about. Leaca was glad she hadn’t gotten sick from it, to be honest. First, the bread rolls were about the same density as rocks. Leaca would literally bang them against the table, and they would come away without even a dent. Likewise, the main dish was some lumpy meatloaf thing with brown slosh on it. It looked very dead. It was soft, yes, but too much so: it fell apart on Leaca’s fork like a soggy tissue. Not surprisingly, the meager scraps of food she forced down never amounted to much, so it was no shock she’d be starving for the rest of the day. But that was nothing new: Leaca was used to hunger. She had learned to live with it.
        When the bell rang to signal the end of lunch, Leaca dumped her tray and stepped outside into the sweltering heat. It was August—school had just begun a week before—but the heat was nevertheless intense. Regardless, Leaca relished in it, for she knew that sweating in the warmth was much preferred to what would soon be on its way: winter. But who could tell what day the harsh, chilling air would decide to blast its way into town? In this city, nature was prone to dramatic temperature mood-swings. Typically, the days were either scorching, freezing, or riddled with rain and wind. That was it. Period. No in-between. But Leaca hated the cold more than anything, so she was thankful for the heat at the moment.
        The next couple of classes were uneventful. The fire alarm was pulled for about the eighth time that year, likely by some block-headed prankster. But since the ringing alarm was so frequently a hoax, no one even bothered to leave their classrooms anymore. It was like the story of the boy who had cried wolf. Leaca was guessing that if a real fire ever were to erupt, they’d all end up barbequed thinking it was a practical joke.
        Only one more class after this, Leaca tried to console herself as she twirled her pencil around her fingers, wishing she could escape to the library. But hurrying off there now was not an option. The librarians ran the place like it was an internment camp for convicted felons, for that was apparently the status at which they viewed the student population. Entering the media center was like stepping into a graveyard, only without the mystique; the place was deserted day in and day out because everyone was too terrified to dare cross its threshold. The second a kid mustered the courage to enter, they’d be immediately bombarded by the librarians, like moths to a flame: Did the student have a hall pass? What teacher had signed it? Were they absolutely sure about that? They had to be positive the signature wasn’t forged, of course. Wouldn’t want a kid “sneaking” in illegally or anything. Guess the librarians never got the memo that most kids’ first choice for a skipping destination would not be the library.
        Riiiiiinnng!
        At last! It was time for the day to grind to a close. Regretfully, the torture was far from over. Usually, Leaca would ride the bus home, enduring a new set of seat-mates each week—like Wacko-girl, an outlandishly spoiled kid who loved to obsess over her loopy boyfriends. Oh, and even more recently, a new girl had begun sitting with Leaca—or rather, squashing her. This Jumbo-girl was so round that she had to practically sit on top of Leaca to fit in the seat, and she elbowed her every time she moved an inch. Leaca found it considerably difficult to breathe in such a position.
        While being squished, however, Leaca would inadvertently overhear snippets of the garrulous kids’ boorish conversations behind her, though she had to admit herself torn while listening to such chit-chat. On the one hand, she almost wished she could be a part of the kids’ group. Although she hated their shallow ways, she recognized that ignorance was bliss. Were she a part of their group, she wouldn’t even realize her own foolishness, would she? Perhaps she’d simply be blissfully unaware.
        Then again, such people never did seem very content with their lives, despite their luxuries. So I guess I’m stuck the way I am, Leaca would think. And she would have been fine with it if not for the fact that she still felt undeniably like an outcast. She still yearned to uncover the place where she belonged. She still yearned to uncover a way to be happy.
        Incredibly, however, happiness was not as far out of reach as Leaca believed it to be. That afternoon, she rode the bus home as usual. But that day would turn out to be far from typical. That day would turn out to be miraculous—a day that would change her life forever.
        That day, she would discover the picnic basket.