Volume 1, Flashback 3: Weaponizing Pretentious Pricks (Patreon)

Link to previous flashback: https://www.patreon.com/OneDropRain/posts/volume-1-2-style-168778641/

Seven years and five months before The Event

The Common Room of our dormitory was a fairly large space, with couches arranged along the walls and so overloaded with comfortable cushions that most of them had slid onto the floor—a surface covered with wooden planks resembling mahogany.

Only a small area directly in front of the fireplace was paved with sandstone-like tiles, as was the fireplace itself. The logs burning inside gave the room a pleasant, warm atmosphere that most of the boys at the school completely ignored, spending their time on tablets or phones.

I decided to sit in one corner of the room, where I could calmly observe every one of them, and in my large sketchbook I drew the way they had spread themselves around the room and how they were behaving now.

I intended to use every opportunity I had to develop my passion while I was here—even though Penrose had taken it away from me. My intentions weren’t entirely pure, however, because this time I planned to use the pretentiousness and self-importance of the boys studying here to get into the headmistress’s good graces.

“Are you stupid, Bobby?” A tall, skinny boy whose parents were both Broadway actors stood in front of a shorter boy warming himself by the fireplace, phone in hand, talking about how he could have any girl in our school if he actually felt like it. “With that attitude, you couldn’t even get a boyfriend!”

“Fuck off!”

“Can you guys shut up?” another boy shouted. He was wearing headphones and watching some video.

The truth was that every one of them could have been sitting in his own room, where at most one other person would have been bothering him, but they chose to come here because each of them considered himself important enough that everyone else should accommodate him. Which led to a never-ending struggle for status within the group.

While the rest of them were busy arguing, another person entered the room, wearing a hoodie with the hood pulled over her head and loose jeans. She glanced at the ongoing verbal fight, sighed while shaking her head, spotted me sitting in the corner, and walked calmly toward me.

“Julian.” Her husky voice made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, and even though I tried to play it cool, I still looked up at her pretty face, with its full lips and large green eyes. A strand of red hair had fallen across her forehead as she looked down at me, but she caught it between her fingers and gently tucked it behind her ear.

“Sasha,” I replied, dropping my gaze back to my sketchbook, drawing another line and glancing toward the situation developing in the room. “You’re not supposed to be here. I thought we already established that.”

“I told you, the girls are boring. At least you have some testosterone over here,” she replied, sitting down on a cushion beside me, crossing her long, shapely legs, and leaning back against the wall. “Of course, it would be better if it led to something more than verbal sparring.”

“You’d rather they actually fought?”

“Wouldn’t you? Arguments like this are pathetic. It’s just pretending to be someone, pretending you can actually do something. Relying on authority that doesn’t come from your own achievements, but from whatever our parents accomplished.”

“Is that why you’re here? You picked the wrong room, then. Despite all that testosterone you mentioned, the arguments here always look exactly the same, and everyone leans on someone else’s achievements because the truth is, they don’t have any of their own and probably never will.”

“Not everyone,” she replied more quietly than before, looking at me. Her breath was warm and sent another wave of goosebumps across my skin.

“I’m telling you. Every one of them is the same, just a different shade of fucking gray.”

“Show me.” She sighed and took the sketchbook from my hands. “Same thing again. People, rooms, gestures. Why do you always focus on the same things?”

“Did I do a bad job?”

“That’s not what I said. You have an eye for noticing specific behaviors, and a hand capable of putting them onto paper. I was asking why you don’t try something more abstract. Or open yourself up to nature.”

“My father…” I was thinking about both Mr. Penrose and Mr. Torque, not the fake father created for my role. The truth, however, was soft enough to be shaped convincingly in my favor. “My father,” I repeated with a sigh, “taught me to pay attention to what people do with their hands, how their faces and posture change, what happens in the corners of rooms, how things are arranged, where everyone is standing and where they might move next…”

“He taught you to look for threats?”

“He’s military. It’s in his nature,” I replied, taking my sketchbook back from her and continuing to draw.

“You know you don’t have to focus only on that. What you create is entirely up to you,” she replied. She pressed her palms against the floor, lifted herself, and settled back down closer to me.

“Let’s ask Julian!” one of the boys shouted, drawing my attention.

A moment later, all three of them came closer, prompting Sasha to pull her hood farther over her face and move away from me. It was unnecessary. Every one of those boys was focused exclusively on himself.

That was a constant in this place, and something I had been counting on while trying for about a week now to maneuver myself into a situation exactly like this so I could take advantage of it.

“Julian,” the tall, skinny one began as he approached me.

His name was Cory. Behind him stood the shorter one—Bobby—and Timothy, whose headphones now hung around his neck. Timothy had one finger twisted into his curly hair and looked the least confident of the three, shifting from foot to foot.

“Tell me, please… buddy, don’t you think they’re acting like complete idiots? Aren’t they distracting you from… what are you even doing?” he asked, noticing that I was looking past them into the room while drawing more lines across the page.

“My assignment for Ms. Constanzza’s class tomorrow.”

“What?” Bobby asked, stepping closer, bracing one hand against the wall behind me, and glancing down at my sketch. “She’s going to fail you. It was supposed to be nature.”

“She won’t fail me. I’m so good I can draw practically whatever I want and she’ll still pass it.” With that simple, confident statement, I planted the seed of doubt, hoping it would soon sprout into an oversized beanstalk I could climb straight into the castle of my own personal giant—the headmistress. “And yes, I think every one of you is way too full of yourselves, considering there’s absolutely nothing behind it. Get out of my sight—you’re blocking the view,” I added, returning to the original subject so that the thought I had planted would come back to them later, when the darkness of night gave it more strength and allowed it to quietly rot inside their minds.

“What did you say?” Cory began, drawing out the words and immediately looking to the boys who had come over with him for support, glancing from one to the other. “Do you know who I am?”

“Hearing problems and memory loss can both be caused by realizing you have no talent,” I replied, making his anger rise another notch.

“I’ll kill you!” he shouted at me, pointing a finger and twisting his face into a snarl. “Hold me back, guys,” he told the others, bouncing lightly in place. “Hold me back, because I can’t be responsible for what I’ll do!” He repeated it when they failed to react the way he wanted and instead stepped away.

When Cory realized he had no backing, he withdrew slightly and calmed down, but he kept pointing at me and shouting.

“We’ll see who has no talent! I’ll destroy you for that insult! You’ll see who the talentless one is!”

Holding both my sketchbook and pencil in my left hand, I pushed myself up from my seat and stood.

The moment Cory saw me move, he recoiled so violently that if the boys behind him hadn’t been too startled to get out of the way, he would have landed flat on his ass. Luckily for him, he only stumbled into them.

I turned toward Sasha and held out my hand, tilting my head to show that I felt like getting out of there. Without exposing her face, she took it, and I pulled her to her feet.

With the shocked boys watching us, the two of us walked toward the hall leading out of the building.

“What was that?” she whispered, moving closer to me as we reached the exit, where the guard on duty—whose job was to make sure no girls sneaked into our dormitory—was watching something on a laptop sitting on his desk.

I wasn’t surprised by how lax he was about it. Aside from Sasha, who made an effort to dress as inconspicuously as possible, no other girl wanted to set so much as a little toe inside this place.

So we walked right past him as if nothing were out of the ordinary and stepped outside into the warm early-autumn air.

“It’s just an example of how little the boys here differ from the girls, Sasha. Your hopes of seeing a fistfight are going to come to nothing,” I finally replied, heading away from the courtyard connecting the two dormitories, where several girls were walking around taking pictures of themselves and talking, and in the opposite direction from the school.

Behind the trees separating us from the fence surrounding the entire estate, there was an old abandoned building attached to the stone wall, its windows and doors boarded up.

“That’s not true. I saw that you had control of the situation. Cory was practically shaking with anger, but he was too scared to make any move toward you,” she replied, lowering her hood once we reached the worn path between the trees.

The wind caught her hair immediately and threw it across her face. She gathered it in both hands, swept it back, held it together in one fist, then pulled a green hair tie with a plant pattern from her pocket and slowly tied the unruly strands into a high ponytail.

“Are we going to those ruins? Or do you have some indecent thoughts involving me?” she added, making me visibly flustered, a faint blush rising to my face as my eyebrows lifted.

“No… it’s not like that…” I began, scratching the side of my neck. “I come here from time to time when I want to be alone.”

“So you want me to get lost?” she replied, stopping, drawing her brows together, and pouting.

“No, Sasha. I like you… probably more than anyone else in this whole place. I thought you wouldn’t mind seeing it with me.”

My answer clearly brightened her mood.

“Are you kidding? Of course!”

We walked a little farther, both of us staring at the yellowing and reddening leaves of the trees, slowly drifting down here and there onto the forest floor, while rays of sunlight broke through the still-dense branches, giving the whole place an almost magical look.

When we reached the old two-story building, its white paint peeling away and its windows boarded up, it looked out of place in what was otherwise a completely natural setting. And yet, in some way, it was clean and untouched. Despite the damage caused by time, there was no trash lying around, no loose boards torn away—only plants that had decided to reclaim it as their own. Grass grew from the cracks between the broken concrete slabs leading up to the building. Moss covered the walls, making them look more green than white, and vines poked out here and there from between the boards.

“Why did you humiliate him?” Sasha stopped walking. “Was it because of me? Were you trying to show off in front of me? I was thinking about it the whole way here, and it doesn’t seem like you.” She tapped her finger against her lower lip, and when she finished, she stopped and looked at me with her eyes wide open.

“I wanted him to realize that he’s at a school for the talented, and that maybe he should try once in a while. It irritates me that they spend so much time on pointless arguments instead of focusing on their work,” I answered, partly telling the truth about what I thought of those people, but hiding my real purpose. I was hoping to turn one of their pretension and self-importance against them, and that one of them would also try to paint something that didn’t fit the assignment.

“I get it,” she nodded, then turned her eyes to the building. “How do we get in there?”

“Come on, I’ll show you,” I said, and grabbing her by the wrist, I pulled her toward one of the side walls of the building, where a long plank leaned against the wall, leading up toward a window whose boards were loose enough to push inward and make an opening big enough to climb through.

I let go of her and quickly demonstrated how I climbed, gripping the plank with both hands and jumping the last bit to catch the outside windowsill, then pulling myself up, shoving the loose boards inward with my head, and slipping into the room.

Inside there was only a ruined white floor, once-white walls partly stripped bare by the claws of time, and a cracked ceiling from which water still dripped. The only door leading outside was blocked from the other side by something very heavy, something I had never managed to loosen or move despite my many attempts.

I grabbed the rope I’d managed to steal a few days earlier from the supply closet of the groundskeepers and bring here. I tied it around my waist and walked over to the window, intending to toss the other end down to Sasha, when she suddenly burst through the loosened boards, repeating the maneuver I had used earlier and crashing into me with full force.

I landed flat on my back with her sprawled across my chest, grinning from ear to ear.

“You thought I couldn’t jump that far?” she asked in a breathy voice that made the hair on my neck go erect along with something else much farther down my body. Then she rolled off me and got to her feet.

The moment she stood inside, she started looking around with her mouth slightly open, while I sat, waiting for the emergency to pass.

“This is an awesome spot. You’ve got so much wall space—you could paint them a little.”

“With what?”

“What do you mean, with what? Haven’t you heard of graffiti?”

“Of course I’ve heard of it,” I answered, scratching the back of my neck again. “But I’ve never done it.”

“No problem, I’ve got a few cans with me, back in my room. Next time we’ll bring them here and I’ll show you what to do with them.” She finished spinning around and stopped, her gaze landing on me, finally standing up with a rope dangling between my legs. “Unless there won’t be a next time? You’ve got that cord or something, and we’re out in the middle of nowhere, locked inside an abandoned building… did I make a mistake coming here with you?”

“I don’t know,” I answered. “Earlier you mentioned indecent thoughts. Maybe I’m reading the signals you’re sending me wrong, but would you want me to have them?” I asked directly.

“Julian, this isn’t exactly a romantic place to be asking questions like that,” she replied, walking back over to the window. “I don’t feel safe with my answer.”

“So, that’s a no,” I said, stepping back to give her room and create some space where she wouldn’t feel cornered.

“That’s not what I said,” she looked at me. “There’s something about you that I like, but I don’t think that it’s enough to risk whatever might happen here.”

“In that case, nothing will happen,” I said, pulling out the sketchbook I’d been carrying folded inside a deep pocket and holding it out in front of me together with a pencil. “Will you help me design that graffiti?” I asked.