Your (Daughter’s) School

The school was unique for its location. It was purchased from an abandoned office building. Unlike most schools, the design focused on height not width. The school held its green space for PE on the roof of the building. With a drive through lobby to drop off students on the ground floor. Of course, it wasn’t enough that the school’s edifice was built strangely, the internal dynamics had to be strange too.

Top school performers were on the top floor, labeled the first floor. While the worst performers were on the floor above the ground floor, labeled the fifty-first floor. The elevators always idled at the top so when trying to leave top performers got to leave first. When trying to get to your floor, you’d scan your student ID; you were allowed to any floor below the floor of your rank. Of course, with your daughter having been held back twice, there were two floors you could access with your daughter’s ID: the ground floor and the fifty-first floor.

The ground floor was unique in its design with two car lanes going right through it similar to a fancy car maintenance front. There was a small kiosk between the two lanes selling black cold brews and nothing else. It was definitely supposed to sell other coffees and pastries, but every time you asked for them you received the same answer: “the machine broke”.

Taking the stairs up to the fifty-first floor was part of the daily routine since the elevators were often too packed to get anything useful out of waiting. This floor was often pejoratively referred to as “the gifted and talented” floor. It was hard to describe a consistent look to the floor when it would go through a cycle of repair and destruction. There were two types of individuals on this floor: punks and the intellectually disabled. Your daughter fell into the first category{if Inbred} and a bit into the second{endif} while her new best friend, Riley Montane, fell squarely into the second.

Riley and Arya had started becoming friends in Arya’s first senior year (this now being her third) and Riley’s sophomore year. They were a classic short-tall duo. Riley was over six feet tall, skinny, pale and flat as a board. She had a long hooked nose to match her tall face which was peppered with freckles. Her hair was straight, long, and black with bangs that she maintained herself. She was largely unkempt; her legs, upper lip, and arms had noticeable hair and she smelled as though showers and deodorant were an infrequent occurrence. She dressed at school to hide her silhouette, wearing an XXXL shirt and vest with the long variant of the skirt that went just above her ankles, though you had seen her in a one piece suit when she came to your house before swimming. Riley would be graduating this year with all Ds, she excelled at any form of schoolwork where she could write her thoughts out. But the minute that a teacher assigned a presentation project though, her GPA would tank. Riley struggled with anything involving communication or social cues. She talked about what she wanted and she didn’t care who listened. As far as you could tell, Arya had started becoming friends with her because she enjoyed having someone to talk to, and Riley became Arya’s friend because Arya had more social capital. Though Riley always seemed to observe social events from a distance like when you were chaperoning and she just stood in the corner, watching your daughter and her boyfriend, Norton, dancing.

Norton Valley was the neighborhood’s peeping tom when growing up. Shielded from consequences by his dad, a notable scientist in the community, he continued until one day when you smacked him upside the head. Maybe the slap upside the head had straightened his thoughts out because he stopped the peeping. Though he then started dating my daughter sometime later. He’d always come over to the house and talk about how similar me and my daughter were, how he “thought we you guys were sisters”. They were the same age so when Arya got held back, he stuck around by becoming a substitute chemistry teacher at the school even though he had openings in prestigious organizations. Norton had a similar build to Riley; tall, pale, skinny. His paper white skin dotted with tattoos of the logos of various punk bands. Though, unlike Riley, Norton can make eye contact and has begun to ask questions as though he suspects something going on…

You had three classes you needed to get As in:

• Chemistry taught by Norton since the actual teacher got cancer or something at the beginning of the year.
• PE taught by Coach Tanaka, a fat man with a gross mustache and a limp.
• Government taught by Dr. Halforth who is severely overqualified to teach this class.