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It is 6:35 AM.
It is always 6:35 AM.
Sometimes the world gives the appearance of it being not 6:35 AM--being, for instance, 6:36 AM, or 3:45 post meridiem--but you're wise to its tricks. Any non-6:35 o'clock you see is a ploy to trick you into lowering your guard. You hear a noise in the bushes, you go to investigate, and bam, it's 6:35 AM again.
There's no rest, no respite, there is only 6:35 AM.
Day after day after day.
Plummeting across the sky at ludicrous speed and a three degree angle comes Malachai Hanson in his goggles and bicycle helmet. He lands out on the oval track, shouting "heads up!" to the no one around and jogging to slow down.
That can't possibly be good for his knees.
Malachai would have left home after 7:36--or maybe on that exact minute. You don't like your odds of making it to the cafeteria before it closes.
Sundew Meadow Middle School, like an ogre, consists of concentric layers.
First come chain link fences--topped with barbed wire, to deter egress. (Like the Iron Curtain, the machine guns point in.)
Tracts of grass and dirt for student enrichment, most of which was marked off with paint and declared out-of-bounds. A big dirt square and an oval track.
Tumultuous parking lots--precarious Celtic knots made of asphalt and paint and special cases and Byzantine procedure. One of these days someone's going to get off their bus and get flattened by a car. (Also there's a juvenile t-rex, seven feet tall and twenty-odd from tip to tail. It's fine, she's a student here.)
The portables: a city of drab white buildings in the parking lot, two classrooms each, drafty and unheated, hauled--like trailer homes--into position; a temporary solution become permanent fixture. A tangle of stairs and elevated metal walkways grow like cobwebs betwixt and about them.
And Sundew Meadow itself, the antlion in its pit.
Hulking, gray, prison-like, with bars in the windows, steel security doors within and without for your protection.
After decades of detaining recalcitrant teenagers during the years they're likeliest to develop their gifts, there's much more to SMMS than concrete and linoleum.
The anomalous Zone from Roadside Picnic is lethal to the ill-prepared, where Hogwarts from Harry Potter is a harmless--if inconvenient and confusing to the uninitiated--eccentric of a genius loci. Sundew Meadow sits somewhere in between them. It's impossible to deny the hand of a cruel intelligence at play, but the school does at least seem reluctant to utterly break its toys.
It's possible that SMMS is held in check by that same mysterious optimization process that connects human brains with superpowers they can use and make sense of.
...You feel compelled to add, for the benefit of any ride-along phantoms from centuries past or from the other timeline, that the last sentence was a joke.
But don't get in the habit of expecting you to clearly sign-post these things--it's your internal monologue, by Jove, and you'll spin your wheels whatever way entertains you most in the moment.
By the light of flickering plasma rods you walk the grimy linoleum, dodging cheerful clumps of loiterers and a centaur wearing a horse blanket en route to confirm that the cafeteria is closed. You're not entirely unrewarded; every complete breakfast comes with a bottle of milk, and not everyone cares to drink theirs. There's a designated table for unwanted dairy--to divert what would otherwise be tossed--and you scoop up both palatable chocolate-flavoreds on it.
You head for your locker--you need a textbook from it for second period, and won't have time to open your locker between classes--, dodging loiterers and PDAs and a big bipedal turtle who is walking very slowly.
You put the combination in carefully.
These old lockers can be picky.
Oh-six, three-oh, oh-five.
Oh-six, three-oh, oh-five.
Oh-six, three-oh, oh-five.
Oh-six, three-oh, oh-five.
Oh-six, three-oh, oh-five.
Oh-six, three-oh, oh-five.
Oh-six, three-oh, oh-five.
Ripping the locker door off its hinges would be as easy for you as opening a cardboard box of cereal.
But then you wouldn't have a locker.
You have to remind yourself not to destroy the locker by accident.
Oh-six, three-oh, oh-five.
Oh-six, three-oh, oh-five.
Oh-six, three-oh, oh-five.
Oh-six, three-oh, oh-five.
Oh-six, three-oh, oh-five.
Oh-six, three-oh, oh-five.
The five-minute bell rings. You're increasingly alone in this hallway.
There is a dark calm on the far side of frustration, and you've reached it.
Life will continue to happen and there's nothing you can really do about that.
The chemical gradient says to continue with what you're doing. Either it'll eventually work, or it won't. Either way, it's out of your hands.
You step to the side and gesture--with a sweeping arm--that she's free to make the attempt.
...Wait, how could she "take a try" without your combination?
Someone failed to think this through and it might have been the both of you.
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