The Last Year of Innocence

Chapter Two

Kara:

When her alarm clock went off at six the next morning, blasting her from a deep and peaceful sleep, Kara forgot she’d decided Bernard wasn’t a bad place to be.

“You better get up girl, or there won’t be any hot water left in the showers,” Shirelle warned when Kara still hadn’t moved.

Kara cracked her eyes open and pulled herself to a sitting position. “How come your hair looks so perfect?”

“That’s the beauty of braids,” Shirelle answered, shaking her head from side to side.

“Where’s Irina?”        

“She got up at the crack of dawn. Sun wasn’t even up yet.”

“How do you know?”

“I heard her. She got up and got dressed in a jogging suit of all things.”

“That’s good.”

“It wasn’t good. Bitch woke me up at five this morning.”

“I mean its good she came home.” 

“Good would’ve been her not coming home. Me and her are gonna have to talk ’cause I can’t take getting waked up that early every day.”

“Glad I’m a heavy sleeper,” Kara said, finally dragging herself out of bed.

The bathroom was at the end of the hall. It looked like a gym locker room, without the lockers, and was as crowded as one too. As soon as she stepped inside, Kara was greeted with a wall of steam, scented with shampoos and soaps, and the sound of girls shouting to be heard over their hair dryers.

“You know, if it’s gonna be this packed every morning I might have to start taking showers at night,” Shirelle called not long after they stepped into side by side shower stalls.

“Yeah,” Kara agreed.

With the warmth of the water streaming over her, Kara began to wake up and become energized. Suddenly she couldn’t wait to get to her classes. Her schedule was filled with interesting sounding courses like Musical Theory and its Applications and Vocal Enrichment and Understanding. There were also the standard classes like English and algebra. It was this combination of academic and artistic classes that made for an eight hour school day and was definitely one of the things she liked least about Bernard. At least she and Shirelle would be in this together. When they compared class schedules the night before, they’d been thrilled to see they had almost identical schedules.

After she was dried off and dressed, Kara joined the other girls at the mirror, jockeying for the best position to get her hair and make up done.

“It’s about time,” Shirelle said when Kara returned to their room.

“Not all of us are born with natural beauty.”  

“Don’t hate,” Shirelle laughed. “You ready to do this?”

“Yep.”

They shouldered their backpacks and headed to English, their first class of the day.

                English class at a special school turned out to be pretty much the same thing as the one Kara had at regular school. The teacher spent most of the class going over the syllabus and expectations before she handed out their textbooks. From English class they moved on to their algebra class where they went through a similar routine.

For as much joking as she and Shirelle did yesterday about how huge Bernard was, Kara wasn’t laughing today. Bernard was a school in the mountains, which meant climbing up and down small hills to get where they needed to go. After two classes of this, Kara decided she was probably going to have huge calf muscles by the end of the year and maybe even sooner than that.