Chapter 2: A Extraordinarily Bad Day

Having the wind knocked out of me snapped me out of my analysis of how I seemed to exist invisibly around the school. When I got my breath back, the full force of the deep sense of foreboding hit me like a ton of bricks. I’d been feeling it all day long.

I can’t remember being jolted out of a dreamless sleep like happened this morning. I woke with a feeling that something terrible was going to happen today, but I had no idea what it could be or even why I felt this way. It never occurred to me before. From what I heard the other kids say, they also woke up in cold sweats from nightmares about a test they were sure to flunk or getting busted for something my teachers said at a parent-teacher conference. They even had the same dreams about forgetting to take the trash to the curb just as the truck was going past.

The feeling I had when I woke up this morning was something completely different. I’d never felt anything like it before.

All through the day at school, the bad feeling kept getting stronger. By lunch, it was so bad that I could not eat my lunch and gave it to a grateful kid who the bullies robbed earlier. I kept looking all around me to find out what was bothering me. It was like when I was in fifth grade watching everyone as I tried to stay away from the bullies. I even ignored my teachers as I racked my brain going over everything I had done recently. Surely there was something about to get me into a huge mess of trouble. By recess, the stress had drained the energy from me. I took to analyzing the types of clouds I could see to distract myself from racking my brain any more, at least until I became an obstacle with a heartbeat.

I shivered as a cold breeze blew over me. That caused me to be hyper-alert to everything going on around me. Hearing the flag flapping in the stiff breeze pulled my eyes to the seventy-plus-year-old flagpole sitting on top of a small hill. The wind seemed to be trying hard to rip the flag free from the metal clips on the line. I welcomed the distraction from the bad feeling as I tried to remember the story about the flagpole.

As the story goes, no one can remember who donated it to the school, only that everyone at that time considered him prominent. Not long after they erected flagpole, the wooden school burned completely. My grandfather said the only reason it did not burn then was that the wood used to make it was still green. Dad thinks maybe it was made of wood from the Crossopteryx Febrifuga trees that live through fires.

Some popular mayor decided it was good to spend a lot of money to tear out the middle of the almost finished replacement school to build a courtyard with that flagpole in the center. Fifteen years later that school burned right down to the ground, with the flagpole being the only thing that remained untouched. They had a lot of people making theories about why each of the schools burned, but in the end, everyone agreed to build the next school on the site of the football fields.

Chapter 3 »