They gave me the wrong address when I was sent to boarding school this year.
Maybe it was the receptionist’s scaly hands that shook a little when she wrote it out, or the skies pouring out their sorrows onto my head.
Nevertheless, I’ve definitely been at the wrong school.
The boy at the end of the hall is always playing with fire and smells of ash, dark cedar and benzene, but he’s never burnt himself once.
There’s a set of twins, upstairs in another dormitory, who always flood the bathrooms, and all their clothes smell vaguely of salt and mildew and pebbles, and I think I can almost see the ocean in their watery blue-green eyes.
On the rare occasion that I find myself wandering near the lake, I can’t help but feel watched, not from above or behind as would seem natural, but from below and ahead
All the first year students I know swear on their lives that the walls and stairs move to trick us, or bring us to our destination faster depending on one’s luck.
My rhetoric professor’s eyes droop and film over during lectures and he scarcely moves millimeter from his statuesque place at the podium; yet he never fails to catch the slightest indiscretion or misplaced gesture from a student.
Meanwhile, the choral director’s ears are said to be as pointed as her canines, and her hair to be of the deepest black and violet.
I’ve growing suspicions about the gardens in the back of the kitchen, all tangled over and wreathed in what seems to be an ancient species of briar, though I’ve never seen a rose bloom, nor the gardener cease from his endless pruning.
Sometimes, I’ll catch a glimpse of insect-and-birdlike creatures flitting around the windows, and the moths around here seem rather foreign, though I’m assured the difference in flora and clime requires differences in adaptations.
The older students oversee the halls with the kind of aloof confidence built from familiarity and practice, and laugh easily about missing articles of clothing or assignments, as though a mischievous spirit or creature had nicked it. They, too, seem to disappear around twelve o’clock, not to be seen again until tea time.
There’s a section of the library which seems to positively seethe with darkness and cold, and only the bravest and boldest dare ask for entry.
And oddly enough, after a rather jostling ride by rowboat to the gates at the beginning of the year, the headmaster greeted us all by name and only drew a blank once, at mine.