#School of Souls | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

stesierra · 10 months

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Maybe you'd like to see the first chapter of a different fantasy book? A YA one? This MC is also depressed. Sorry, that's life.

School of Souls

Chapter One

Friday, September 15th, 2023

After the funeral, after we had all wept and railed and gushed about how wonderful Dad was, Mom drove me home by herself. Grandma and Grandpa had offered to take me if Mom needed to stop by the office. She’d missed enough work as is, staying home with me while I sobbed and snotted all over her. But she didn’t go in, although the other bigshot lawyers were probably wondering what the problem was. They certainly hadn’t shown up to lay Dad to rest. None of them would stay home with their thirteen-year-old just because somebody died.

I should be grateful Mom put me first. But I wasn’t. I said, as we got off the I-10 ramp, headed home, “If you’d tried harder, Dad wouldn’t have died.”

She slammed on the brakes, and it was a good thing we weren’t on the I-10 anymore, because we’d probably both have died. “Excuse me?”

I rubbed the back of my hand across my nose. “I said, it’s your fault Dad died.”

“Juniper,” she said, enunciating my name like it was a secret code she had to say perfectly to get through to me. “There’s nothing I could do about your dad’s heart. I helped him get on the transplant list. I stayed with him after the surgery. I picked up his immunosuppressants and antibiotics and made sure he took them. But his body rejected the heart, honey. It was nobody’s fault, not even the doctor’s.”

I said, my tone far below freezing, the way Phoenix, Arizona never was, “If you’d just tried, you could have found a sorcerer to heal Dad. And then he wouldn’t have died.”

:readmore:

We were sitting at a light, with people honking behind us, but Mom didn’t drive on home. “Juniper, that’s ridiculous. You’ve been spending too much time on social media.”

I glared at her through eyes that still stung from all the crying I’d done. “Sorcerers are in the news. Sorcerers are on TV. Half the students at my middle school want to be one when they grow up. Don’t tell me you didn’t even think of it. Don’t lie to me!”

“Magic isn’t reliable. And sorcerers aren’t as common as the magazines would have you believe. It really wasn’t that simple, sweetie.”

“Tell me you tried,” I said through gritted teeth. “Tell me you wrote to the Circle and begged for Dad’s life.”

Mom didn’t say anything. She just pushed down the gas pedal and eased us back onto the road. Her silence stretched between us as we rolled past palm trees and the beggars who stood on the street corners with their cardboard signs. Usually I insisted on giving them money. But today I was too knotted up inside myself to think of charity.

Mom didn’t say a thing, and neither did I until we pulled in our driveway, where Dad’s peace roses waited for him to deadhead them. He never would. The roses would shrivel up in the heat and fall off to rot. Nobody would water them, either, and that was a death sentence in the desert. They’d die. Just like Dad.

I said, when Mom turned off the engine, “I’m never going to forgive you. Willow.” And I got out of the car and fled before she could say a single word.

Sunday, August 11th, 2024

The last time I spoke to my mom, I was on the bus to the Seramia Boarding School, bumping up a dirt road outside of the foothills. Her face contorted in a guilty smile on my phone screen, and her voice came out as a tinny little squeak. “You’ll enjoy the chance to get out in nature, Juniper. Really you will.”

I put my deadest expression on and just stared at the phone.

She forged on, her tone forced brightness. “There’ll be lots of opportunities to hike in between classes. They say the Bighorn Mountains are stunning. You packed your binoculars, didn’t you?”

“I’m sure they are, Willow,” I said bitterly. That’s Mom’s name. When I was born, she kept the tree theme going.

“Call me Mom,” she pleaded. “The way you used to.”

The way I had before Dad died. I lied, “You’re breaking up. I can barely see you. Oh no—”

And I jammed the “End call” button and shoved my phone into the patched backpack that sat at my feet.

I wasn’t the only kid on the bus who was using the last opportunity to talk to family. The school had no cell phone signal, not up in the mountains. It said so clearly in the brightly colored brochure my mom had shoved under my nose. No internet, either. The only way to stay in touch was by magic. And I wasn’t a sorcerer. Nobody I knew was.

A boy near me tangled twiggy fingers in his long ginger hair and said, “Dad, you can’t be serious about sending me away for four years. You just can’t. A boarding school? What is this, the eighteen hundreds? Is there going to be a schoolmaster who beats us with a ruler, too? How about nuns? Are there nuns here?”

I slouched lower in my seat, trying to keep to myself. It wasn’t a religious school we were going to. Mom had reassured me about that, with the most earnest expression on her face. She wouldn’t send me off to some Christian camp that would drum traditional female roles into me, not when Mom was a proud atheist and feminist. The Seramia Boarding School made good kids out of bad ones, but not through religion. So they claimed.

I yanked the crumpled brochure out of my backpack. The front showed smiling teenagers, about my age, with perfectly brushed hair and smart blue uniforms and genuine joy in their eyes. Behind them, pine trees obscured most of the horizon, except where the naked peak of a mountain jutted up above the green.

The brochure said, “Guaranteed results! We take troubled teens and turn out model citizens! Does your son or daughter steal, lie, do drugs or bully others? At the Seramia Boarding School, they’ll find a new way of life. By their eighteenth birthday, they’ll be glad they came! And you’ll be glad you sent them.”

I wadded it back up until I couldn’t see those smiles any longer. Mom was already glad. She was tired of my defiance, tired of trying to deal with my problems, and she’d taken the easy way out. Some feminist she made.

Another girl slid onto my bench, adjusting the dozens of plastic bracelets that hung from her chunky arms. “Got a smoke?” she asked me, peering out from beneath long blonde bangs. “You look like a smoker.”

I shrugged bony shoulders. “Do I smell like one? Bug off.”

She nodded approvingly and pulled out a blunt from her little sequined purse. “Astrid,” she said. “You?” She lit the blunt with a neon-pink lighter and stuffed the edge into her mouth.

“Juniper,” I said, opening my window for fresh air. “What are your parents banishing you for?”

Astrid smiled mockingly. “Arson. You?”

“Pill-popping. What did you burn down?”

“My grandma’s barn. What do you pop?”

“None of your business. Go sit by yourself and inhale smoke until you die.”

She sprang up and blew in my face. “Suit yourself. No one’s going to want to be friends with you, you know. Dumb bitch. And there’s no pills in the mountains.” She flounced back to her seat, leaving me to stare out at the foothills as we bumped up Red Grade Road.

No pills in the mountains. I felt for the hard little pill bottle at the bottom of my bag. The precious contents wouldn’t last me very long. Not with how often I took them. And there were no pills in the mountains. Mom was counting on that, and I hated her for it.

The bus jounced and rattled up miles of dirt road, alternatively hemmed in by crowded lodge-pole pine trees and edged by open meadows. Then we trundled across an even bigger meadow and into a clearing in among the trees. A wooden sign declared, “Welcome to Seramia Boarding School! Your life changes today.” A beaming face smiled out at us, and I hated it immediately. But we didn’t stay to look at it. We rumbled on into the midst of what looked like a village from a hundred years ago. I didn’t see a single car or even a golf cart. Five big buildings circled a central lawn that was more weeds than grass. Smaller cabins trailed off into the woods, interspersed with more pine trees. The central buildings were too big to be called cabins—maybe lodge would be a better word—but everywhere I looked they were built out of smooth logs, stained reddish brown. The pointed roofs, made of tin, were colored the same red. A hand painted sign on the left building said Freshman. The other buildings were labeled Sophomore, Junior, Senior and Dining.

A boy with dreadlocks the same color as his dark skin leaned against the window and said, “They won’t let us mingle? This place is going to suck.”

The bus ground to a halt, and the doors opened with a screech. I rose from my seat and grabbed my backpack. “You thought a place that only lets you bring one bag—and won’t let you leave—would be great? You’re not an A student, are you?”

He glowered at me and tossed a dreadlock over his shoulder. “They don’t send A students to shitholes like this.”

That wasn’t entirely true. I’d been an A student once. Before my dad died and I started sleeping through class. Before the pills. But I didn’t say that. I tromped down the stairs and off the bus before any of the others could beat me to it.

Cool air struck me immediately; this place was twenty degrees colder than the prairie that surrounded the mountains. My shorts and t-shirt wouldn’t keep me warm once the sun went down. I hadn’t even packed winter clothes. They’d be provided, Mom had told me. I rubbed my arms as the other teens disembarked and managed to squish a mosquito. It left a smear of blood on my palm. Wonderful. And Mom thought I would enjoy nature.

From the bus window, the place had looked abandoned. But the door to the senior building swung open, and ten teenagers marched out in perfect single file. They lined up in front of us. Despite their rainbow of skin colors and different heights and noses, they looked identical: athletic, in matching blue uniform pants and shirts and with welcoming smiles on their faces.

I took a glance at the other new arrivals. There were ten of us, half male, half female, all a mixture of different races, and we didn’t look anything alike. Half the girls wore tight leggings or jeans, and the rest wore short skirts. I was the only one in shorts, and they were khaki boy’s shorts that came down to my knees. Not fashionable at all, but what my mom liked to buy for me.

The boys wore a mix of khakis and jeans, both long and short, and half of them didn’t fit right. Half the boys had longer hair than I did. I looked back at the seniors. The boys all had buzz cuts, like soldiers, and the girls had their hair neatly trimmed at the shoulders.

A senior stepped forward. The bridge of her hawklike nose tilted sideways from an old break, and a tattoo of leopard spots marked the line of her throat. If she’d worn leather, I’d have called her a bruiser, maybe a biker chick. But her voice matched her uniform and smile perfectly. “Welcome to Seramia Boarding School! I’m Ember Saint James, the senior valedictorian. We’re so happy to have you here. I hope your journey wasn’t too long.”

All us new arrivals stared at her. Astrid said, “Are you kidding? You bused us into the middle of frigging nowhere. I came all the way from Oregon.”

I nodded. They had bused me in a thousand miles from Phoenix, Arizona, where it’d been 105 F. This mountain was frigid in comparison.

Ember’s smile didn’t fade. “Then I’m sure you’re looking forward to seeing your new cabins and getting a nap. You’ll pick your classes tomorrow, so for today you can just get settled in.”

“We get to pick?” the boy with long ginger hair said, screwing up eyebrows that looked like caterpillars. He paced a few steps. “I thought my dad decided all that. You know, before he shipped me here.”

The senior cocked her head. “Do you think you’ll be more motivated to become a model student if you’re given a choice?”

The boy grimaced. “I guess. I don’t really plan on becoming a model for anyone.” He fidgeted with the straps of his backpack. Since I first saw him, he hadn’t held still.

“What’s your name?” Ember asked.

Astrid said sourly, “Aren’t we all on a list somewhere?”

“You are, but it’s polite to ask.”

The ginger boy rocked back on his heels and said, “I’m Kye Wells. What’s your accommodation policy here?”

“Accommodations? What do you need accommodation for?” Astrid asked, grinning at him. “Are you an idiot? Is that why your parents didn’t want you around anymore?”

Kye’s freckled face turned tomato red. “Nothing! Just—Never mind. Forget it.”

Ember’s smile turned sympathetic. “The teachers work with each student as needed. I promise, whatever problem your parents felt they couldn’t solve, it’ll disappear by junior year.” She looked around at the rest of us. “And that goes for all of you. The founder of this place promises it. To you, and to your parents.”

The brochure in my backpack said Beatrix Seramia had founded the Seramia Boarding School thirty years ago, to help troubled youth. “What did you do wrong to get sent here?” I asked Ember, folding my arms across my Gila monster t-shirt. “What was your problem?”

“I was a graffiti artist hooked on crack,” she said, still smiling that perfect smile. “But my parents knew this place could help me. Just like it’ll help you.”

“Bullshit,” one of the new boys said. He towered above the rest of us, and his nose could’ve sliced bread. “You can’t just fix people like that. There’s no way you’ll get rid of my problems without me becoming a totally new person.”

Ember’s smile broadened. “Then maybe you’ll become a new person. But don’t worry. It won’t hurt much.”

But it sounded like a lie.

The seniors split us freshmen up and directed us to the smaller cabins. I was in the obnoxiously named Jackalope Cabin, on the far left of the campus, near the trees. As I trudged towards my new home, a whisper of sound intruded in my gloom. It grew louder and louder until I realized a noisy stream rushed by right behind my cabin. The sound of it would lull me to sleep at night. But I refused to be pleased or grateful. Mom had banished me to this place to get rid of me, and one nice feature didn’t make up for it.

The stairs that led to the porch creaked as I tromped up them. Four rustic rocking chairs sat at the corners of the porch. I guessed I was going to share the place with three people. I kicked a chair. We were teenagers, modern teenagers, and our parents thought we’d be willing to live without internet or phone service or television? They thought we’d be fixed if we just sat in old-timey chairs and rocked, like stereotypical grannies? They were nuts. The whole lot of them. Mom especially.

A wooden jackalope leered at me from between the two doors. Its antlers were twice the length of its long ears. I grabbed the handle of the rightmost door and yanked it open.

The hinges squealed as I yanked open the door. A monster lay in the middle of the floor, bat-like wings spread.

I screamed and stumbled back. But the monster didn’t leap up to pursue me. Its long tongue stuck out between its fangs, motionless.

“Hey, it’s dead,” a deep voice said. “I killed it.”

I looked up and came face to face with a boy two years older than me. He was trim and athletic, with the muscle of a runner. He crossed long arms and smirked at me. His hair was a buzz cut, just like the seniors, and he wore the same blue uniform. Were we all going to dress like that?

I took another look at the monster, and the shape of its head and four legs registered. “Is that a cow?” It was definitely dead, now that I looked closer. Its brown eyes stood open, dulled and unfocused, and blood stained its muzzle and dripped onto the wooden floor.

“It was,” the boy said. “Before the heal-transformers got to it.”

I staggered into the room and plopped down on one of the small beds that framed the freakish winged cow. My legs wouldn’t hold me up anymore. “What’s a heal-transformer, and why would anyone do that to a cow?” Its fangs better fit a sabertooth tiger, and its wings belonged on a dragon.

He shrugged and took a seat on the other bed. A door led to the other half of the cabin, but it was closed. “The students who pick healing and transformation as their focus. They’ll transform anything. How else are they going to practice?”

“Their focus?” I said, my voice too shrill. “You’re talking about magic? Are you telling me this is a magic school?”

He gave a lopsided smile. “Didn’t it say that in the brochure?”

I jabbed a shaking finger towards him. “No! The brochure went on about how this place was going to fix us all. It said nothing about making us real sorcerers!” Mom would never let me study to become a sorceress.

“Surprise,” he said.

I took a deep breath, trying to shove down excitement. “You mean tomorrow, when I pick my classes, I’m going to choose classes on magic?” This sounded too good to be true. It probably was.

He laughed at me. “Nope. They’ll mostly be ordinary high school classes. Math, history, etcetera.”

I grabbed that mostly with both hands. “But some of them will be magic?”

“Some of them will prepare you for magic,” he corrected. “You won’t learn to use actual spells until you’re a junior, like me.”

I glared at him, feeling the thrill I’d felt at the idea of becoming a sorceress—which was admittedly partly to spite my mother—drain out of me. “That’s stupid. I want to start now.”

He shook his head and grabbed the flying cow by one wing. “You’re, what, fourteen? You don’t know enough. If you want to break the laws of physics, you have to know what they are. If you want to heal, you need to know anatomy and cells and DNA. Not that I know much about that. I’m not a heal-transformer.” He tried to drag the cow towards the door, but the wing stretched out and the cow didn’t budge. “Help me with this, will you?”

I stared at him. I hadn’t seen a whole dead cow in my life. I didn’t even eat hamburger because the thought of eating something with soulful brown eyes made me sick to my stomach. “Where are you taking it?”

He grinned at me. “The kitchen. Don’t you want steak?”

I lifted my chin. “I’m a vegetarian. I don’t believe in killing animals to eat them.”

The boy tilted his head. “What about killing them to save your life?”

“You mean if I was starving? Maybe if I had to.” People justified all sorts of things when they were starving. Even cannibalism.

His lopsided smile reappeared. “I guess that’s one way to look at it. But help me move the cow, even if you won’t eat it.”

Gingerly, I rose from the bed and grabbed the cow’s other wing. It felt nothing like leather; it was soft and furry and still warm. When I hauled on it with all my strength, it stretched out, revealing a membrane so thin I could see the floor through it. “If you’re not a heal-transformer, what are you?”

He hauled on his wing and I hauled on mine, and slowly we dragged the cow towards the door. He said, “I’m an entroper. Violating the laws of physics is my specialty.”

“And your name?”

We got the cow out onto the porch and began bumping it down the stairs. “Declan Finch,” he said. “You’re my new freshman roommate. I assume you have a name, but no one told me what it was.”

“Juniper Fellows,” I said. “Are you my only roommate?”

“There’s a sophomore and a senior in the other room, but you’ll be bunking with me. I hope you’re not shy.” The words could’ve come out lecherous, but instead, they just sounded like a friendly joke.

I glared at him anyway as we dragged the cow towards the dining hall. “The school expects me to share a room with a boy? How do I know you’re not a sex offender? Maybe that’s why you got banished here.”

Declan’s regal face grew serious. “Every freshman gets placed with a junior or senior roommate, and I’m afraid there’s no extra girl to put you with. And don’t worry. Even if I had been a sex offender, which I wasn’t, I’m a junior. Whatever problems I had as a frosh are long gone.”

I bit out, “You’re claiming you’re perfect? That you’re totally fixed? A brand new person, like that brochure promised? Fat chance. You’re probably a pervert who’s gotten better at faking it.”

I won a grin from him. “I am a brand new person. You’re right. Soon you’ll be a brand new person, too. Are you excited?”

I dropped the wing of the cow and said coldly, “Take your kill the rest of the way on your own. And leave me the hell alone. I’m going to sleep.”

His elegant brow furrowed. “It’s three in the afternoon.”

“I don’t care.” I turned on my heel and marched back to Jackalope Cabin. Once I reached it, I threw my bag down on the bed that wasn’t covered with a boy’s pajamas and fumbled in the bottom for my pill bottle.

I shook four zolpidem into my hand—four times the prescribed dose, but one pill didn’t put me to sleep anymore—and dry swallowed them. They tasted bitter going down.

“I hate you, Mom,” I said to nobody as I counted how many pills I had left. Enough for a month, maybe. When Mom wasn’t looking, I’d gotten multiple prescriptions filled at different pharmacies.

I tucked the bottle away, careful with its precious contents, and threw myself down on the bed before the zolpidem could make the world dizzy and unreal. I don’t remember falling asleep. With a high enough dose, I never remember anything.

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