The Demiseer Saga 1: Limitation

New Habits

Sophie had been right about almost everything.  I had found the yellow door with absolutely no problems, and Mr. Vernon was incredibly dull.  He had a sort of monotone voice that droned out over the classroom as he took attendance.  However, his lack of flair and friendliness caused him to slide right over my name without any sort of fanfare or insisting that I stand up and tell everyone where I was from, and for that I was thankful.

It would have been embarrassing.  ‘Oh, hi, I’m from here.  I’ve lived in town my whole life, I’ve just been moved from public school because my mom thinks I'm a freak and a I need a change of pace.’

Anyway, she was also right about him having a new teacher’s assistant.  However, that was where her presumptions ended.  He was definitely not a she, and he absolutely was not cool.  At all.  Despite being young and sort of attractive in a stern kind of way, he seemed like a jerk.  He just quietly sat there, glaring at everyone.  Maybe he just hadn’t had time to come into his own as a teacher.  He did look pretty new to the whole thing, maybe twenty-two or so.

Point was, he didn’t really make the half-hour I had in home room any more comfortable.  Even if he was easy on the eyes.

When the bell rang that dismissed us to our first class, I couldn’t get out fast enough.  I was eager to get settled in one place and stay there for a more significant amount of time in effort to blend in and not worry about being out of place.

Sophie’s directions were easy enough to follow; Coach Carlyle’s room was maybe a quarter of the way full when I slipped into a seat in the middle, near a window.  It was weird to think that I would learn anything from a coach, but here I was.  Maybe McGregor was different in their policies.  Maybe Coach Carlyle was a teacher first, and a coach second.  I had no idea, but I was definitely hopeful.

I was sure my mom wasn’t paying a ridiculous amount of tuition for a second-rate education.

The room filled bit by bit, until every seat save for one was taken.  I glanced around, trying to determine how this class would go by those in attendance.  I knew that at Roosevelt, a remedial class was always filled with slackers, stoners, dumb jocks, and skanky girls who missed way too much school.  We may have been a pretty welcoming bunch there, but we still had our stereotypes. 

This class looked pretty good, though.  In fact, it looked almost preppy. 

It turned out that Coach Carlyle’s class wasn’t half bad at all.  He was a genuinely good teacher, and he was fun to boot.  There was something about his easy-going manner and his ease of laughing and talking to his students that really made me like him.  And while it was earth science, he managed to make it sort of interesting.

He also didn’t make me stand up and give a ‘Hi, I’m new’ spiel, just like Mr. Vernon.  The day was shaping up to be pretty good!  That is, until I set foot in American history.

I should have known, by merely looking at the classroom, that I was in for a bad hour and a half.  The place looked like the inside of an Easter egg – there were pastels and cutesy cartoon-looking pictures everywhere.  The bulletin boards were even done up in those squiggly borders and seasonal art like they used in elementary school.  What sort of high school teacher decorated like this?

It wasn’t long before I found out.

Miss Gerhardt.  She was a young teacher, looking to be about the same age as Mr. Vernon’s TA.  On closer inspection, though, I realized she was in fact older.  She seemed to be stuck in some earlier phase of her life; I had envisioned a whole backstory for this odd woman that involved her being a kindergarten teacher who was fired unjustly and just cracked. 

There was an eerily chipper mood about her, but it wasn’t a genuinely happy feeling.  It was forced, fake, and saccharine sweet.  Nauseating, to be honest.  She, unlike the previous teachers I’d encountered, did force me to stand up and introduce myself to the class.  No one really seemed to look remotely interested, which I was mostly thankful for.

I’d have died of embarrassment if it had turned into some lame question-and-answer session.

“Lovely, lovely!  Thank you, Madeleine!” Gerhardt oozed as I finished a very short and to the point explanation of my move into McGregor.  She even clapped.  Like I’d just finished playing a concerto, the woman actually clapped.  Annoyed and a bit baffled, I sank back into my seat and endured the remaining hour-and-fifteen minutes as best as I could.

Which was not easy, because she continued to make life ridiculously hard by assigning us seats, and making us sign up for ‘groups’ in which we’d do various projects with for the remainder of the semester.  That was easily the worst part of the class; I'd already given in once and struck up the beginnings of a friendship with someone.  I really didn't want to endure nightmares for the next few weeks as I learned more names and found out more about these people.

As we finished the class by taking turns reading aloud from the syllabus, I was pretty sure that my day could only get a little better from here on out.