Admission to the damned

The library door swings open a bit too aggressively, causing a few heads to turn, some with mild annoyance. Lavina strides into the room, her cropped black hair freshly streaked purple-green bobbing up and down as she dramatically sets a half empty bag on the desk occupied by someone familiar.

Her dramatic entrance yielded an equally dramatic gasp from the wide-eyed desk-occupant, accompanied by the thunderous downward clattering of a million pens resonating off the blank, bleached walls. As though suddenly aware, her exaggerated posture shrinks as she mutters an apology to the fuming librarian staring daggers at them both.

"You have no idea what joy it is to see you here!" Beatrice bounced up and down, her red curls shaking in excitement. “How’re you- how did you- weren’t you?!” She exclaimed, completely baffled; her half-formed phrases a reflection of her muddled thoughts.

"I'm as surprised as you are. You'd think after wasting a month of holiday stuck slogging through Hakimdar Sir’s lectures for a head-start, I’d spend the rest of the year with him too. But.” She takes her time building up the suspense, as she often did because of her supposed ‘dramatic flair’.

“Disaster struck. It was only on the very last day of school, the very last moment, that poor old me realised Nurrekh ma’am had assigned this mammoth of a maths task we had to submit first thing in the morning. Naturally, I followed the only possible course of action, and came here. Methinks this school would do much better without such merciless deadlines." Lavina pants, almost out of breath, but manages to finish her story with a melodramatic “woe is me”.

“Methinks you’d plan much better without all the late night binge-athons,” Bea said matter-of-factly, head held high patronizingly. Though she couldn’t be one to talk of productivity, with nail polish smeared rushedly all across her fingers, each one a different colour, from the scene earlier that morning when she realized she had had one too many Chaplyn Rowe karaoke sessions before the bus left.

“Sarcasm doesn’t suit you, my dear friend,” Lavina manages, rolling her bright amber eyes, "Where are we supposed to go, again?"

 

The two girls take their seats around a small, awkward white roundtable occupied by two strangers.

“Hi, I’m Clara,” said one of them, sitting up straight. Her long, wavy blonde hair was noticeably pulled back into a perfect high ponytail. Her dress was meticulously neat, no wrinkle in sight. She spoke in a clear-cut tone, with an air of professionalism. Her entire person screamed ‘model student’.

A few awkward moments passed by before she stated, “this is my friend Greta.”

Greta was a curly brunette, and she smiled warmly before shifting her gaze away indistinctly, as if she didn’t have a care in the world. The silence continued, only interrupted by Lavina’s fidgeting and Bea shifting in her seat, clearly waiting for someone to say something.

Lavina cleared her throat. “So, uh… are you gonna miss your old classmates or ---"

"No.” Greta blurted out the word, cutting through the air like a knife.

Bea side-eyed Lavina, getting a bewildered "what did i do?" look back before Clara launched into a passionate rant.

"Oh, absolutely not. They were utterly insufferable, whispering and giggling at who-knows-what. All. The. Time. And don't even get me started on--" She paused, suddenly aware of the lengthiness of her monologue. “Uh. Anyway, I’m… really glad to be done with all that.” She looked down and awkwardly sipped from her water bottle.

The ticking of the clock suddenly became incredibly deafening.

Bea blinked. "Okay… uhm, when do you think we’re meeting the teachers?"

As if on cue, a lady heaving a mountain of handbooks trudged towards the girls, miraculously uncrushed by their weight.

“Hello students, I am Miss Marabad, and I will be your HRE” said the teacher. The four students stared back, blankly.

“HRE?” Clara questioned

“It stands for Home Room Educator. Apparently, that’s what you call a class teacher internationally.” The teacher sighed. “Here are your handbooks, keep them safe. Soon, we’ll be taking a class photograph, after which you’ll be addressed by the principal”

“Are there any other students, miss?” Bea asked.

“No, fortunately or not, you four will be the faces of this new wing of our school. The four ‘pillars’, as your principal would put it. Now, we expect you to–”

She would have gone on and on to the dismay of the four ‘pillars’; but, at this moment, a rather hefty man, with superfluous energy and a military gait decided to interrupt. God? Were you listening? Had you sent their way an angel, a savior, to rescue them from the deep pit of boredom they were pushed into?

“Good morning, sir.” The girls scrambled to their feet and chorused.

“What kind of greeting is this?! Did you not learn how to properly greet a superior at your old school? Why do you all look so pale and tired?! Have you even had your breakfasts?” The man scowled, adorning a revoltingly disgusted expression on his face, which the girls would later find is one he adorns too often.

Bea and Lavina exchanged a glance as they looked upon the apparent principal. Perhaps god is dead.

“ ‘Good morning’ ” he repeated, tasting the words for blasphemy. “Who says good morning in this age?! You students, as the faces of the international curriculum, should learn to be innovative!” He paused, scanning all the students intently, ensuring they were listening to his sermon, before resuming, “happy morning students, you may sit down”

Bea was biting her tongue, forcing herself not to giggle. For some reason, seeing Lavina choke on air and Clara almost slamming her face on the desk did nothing to help her. Only Greta managed to have a completely straight face, indifferent to the principal’s pantomime. She looked rather bored with the proceedings, so to speak.

“As you students are well aware, Autumn Ridge Academy is a well established school that wanted to expand its reach. And so, the ISEB wing was born—the first international school in the entire district."

He paused, as if expecting applause. None came.

“My name is Mr Veles and I will be your most enigmatic principal. The teachers we’ve hired are carefully selected from the SLC faculty and have spent an entire month learning the international ways.”

"An entire month? Oh, how reassuring. It’s not like they’ve spent their entire lives teaching for SLC. Of course, thirty days is more than enough to unlearn decades of practice using ‘traditional ways.’ " muttered Lavina.

“Yep, we’re screwed.” Bea whispered back

“What was that? Didn’t you learn how to pay respect to your elders? This is the first step in pioneering a new method of education. As trailblazers, forgetting such revered and protected ideals is sacrilegious, it’s obscene!” He stared fiercely at each of them, attempting to drive the message home.

“Moving forward,” his initial passion completely diluted, “you might have heard about the supposed extreme subject flexibility you have.” The principal spoke proudly.

“Yes sir,” Clara spoke up enthusiastically, “I wanted to take up Business Studies and Food and Nutrition for my course.”

“And I was hoping to drop maths and physics, sir” Greta joined in.

Mr. Veles puffed up his chest, broadened his shoulders, and raised his perfectly shiny bald head- a ritual before he blasted.

“How can you even think of dropping your CORE subjects, students! Have you no integrity? No shame?!” He calmed down slightly, regaining his professional demeanor.

“I have taken the liberty of registering all of you for all the three sciences, maths, english and a second language. And if you must know all of you are studying the extended version so that you might achieve 6 A*s. As pillars of the school, you must be nothing but the best.”

“But sir, I thought we had subject flexibility,” Lavina stepped in.

Bea whispers, “by ‘study core subjects’ methinks he’s trying to imply ‘we’re too cheap to afford teachers for four girls’.”

“You know what, my friend? Your deduction isn’t completely unperceptive” Lavina snarks, as quietly as she could.

“How can you even suggest such a thing?” shrieked the principal “I was under the impression that you would not behave like animals and take your core subjects.”

“And blindly follow your orders without question,” Lavina said under her breath, “why didn’t we think of that?”

“Now we have all that sorted out, I have a priceless gift for each of you.” Mr Veles continued, completely ignorant of the four baffled faces staring at him. I’ve gotten each of you a papaya tree, and I expect you to take care of them well.”

Four of the school’s gardeners, dressed in unusual uniforms complimentary to the principal’s donned colours, handed them the small plants in mud pots.

“No other school, none I say, would have a principal so generous. But alas, here I am, no need to thank me.” He continued, almost shedding a humble teardrop from his eye.

“I think you’ve misplaced the trees sir, this doesn’t look like a papaya tree” said Lavina, eyeing the plant suspiciously.

“More like a Guava tree,” Clara agreed, “my mother grows some of them. Papaya trees have large, deeply lobed leaves that spread out like an open hand, while Guava leaves are smaller, oval-shaped, and have a tough, leathery texture with deep veins and–”

“I know leaf anatomy, Clara. In fact, I have a degree in it.” The principal puffed up, raising his shiny head once more, it reflected the cheap fluorescent overhead lights perfectly. “These are definitely papaya trees, the blind old man who sold it to me was very particular. As I said before, you should have respect for your elders, what is this elementary behaviour?”

“A degree in leaf anatomy?” Lavina whispers. “He probably has one in the arts of narcissism too,” Bea mumbles.

Lavina narrowed her eyes on the plant and decided to be a model international student pillar by carrying out an experiment– by casually letting go of the pot.


“Whoopsie” Lavina says offhandedly, eyes shining like an innocent 5 year old who just snacked on too much candy, as the pot plummeted to the ground, splattering into a million pieces and spreading mud all over what was an impeccably clean library floor. “Did anyone notice?” she questions, batting her eyelashes.

“That’s one way to plant a tree,” said Bea, barely containing herself, her hand planted firmly over her mouth.

The room went dead silent.

Clara quickly scrambled to pick up the pieces with shaky hands before their principal would notice and go on another rambling. In her attempt to diffuse the situation, however, she accidentally knocked over her open water bottle, toppling the pile of handbooks off the roundtable and completely drenching them, sending splashes of muddy water all over.

“Great, now there’s mud all over my nails!” Pouted Bea.

“Wow! This experiment was a success” Lavina roared hopelessly in laughter,
“Can this get any worse?”

“OH NO, MY EXPENSIVE LEATHER SHOES?!!” screamed Mr Veles, before taking an unconscious step backward and slipping on the wet mud. His enormous body made a huge ‘thump’ as it almost shattered the floor tiles.

“Oh yes it can!” Lavina squealed, bursting with joy.

“Definitely worse,” admitted Bea, ”way, way worse.”

“Do you think we should make a run for it?!” Lavina asked, contemplating reality.

“Forget running, I doubt they’d catch us even if we walked” Bea said, laughing at the pitiful state of the HRE and Clara scrambling to their knees trying to lift the discombobulated principal wallowing blankly in the mud, while Greta smirked, amused.

Remembering her duty, the librarian jankily jerked the four students splattered in mud aside, and pushed them out of the room. “That’s quite enough,” she managed, attempting to assert herself; though it was evident she wasn’t very good at hiding a smile.



“Well, ladies,” Lavina sighed dramatically, observing the damage and havoc they left behind. “I think it’s safe to say, we’ve truly cursed this curriculum!”