The Vortex: Prophesies

Chapter Eleven

You don't think about how weird it could be returning to a school like ours when the bliss of Summer holiday's is wrapped around you like a protective bubble, it's something I needed desperately.

It left too quickly despite the excitement and thrill that scatters up my bones and twines around my ribs, it creates a nauseous feeling that I seem constantly plagued with now. A curious mix of anxiety and joy, at a place that people have continued to trash on, I have learnt that after a certain point no one is wanting to attend a school with a reputation like that.

Grandmother Rosaline, the annoyingly senile lady she is, has continued down the road we all felt she would end up at. I stood in this exact spot last year, staring up at the old wood that would lead me into the next chapter of my life, thinking about her then as well. Though my then aren't wrong, I perhaps have a different kind of perspective now.

She's not a stellar lady, though is anyone? But her views on the things we disagreed on didn't move an inch, in the end it didn't matter how much time she spent around Jai. Having reluctant dinner's with his parents didn't nudge much either and I used to think that having her not saying anything made it better, but it didn't stop the look in her eyes.

It's hard, not to develop a kind of hatred for her when she treats someone, I consider my brother that way, it gets confusing when Jai brushes it off, but I have learnt to take his lead on some of these things.

Where she became quieter with Jai, which he credits to deteriorating eyesight and memory, she became more volatile with school. Sure, she was buried in newspapers and the radio at Christmas, but she is almost consumed by it now, and where my parents used to talk her down.

I had to sneak out the house this morning when Liylah's parents came to pick the other's up, I was practically a stow-away. It hurt a little not being able to say goodbye to Mum and Dad again, even to have to hide from Grandmother, for her I am assuming I will receive an angry and illegible letter from her someday soon.

It'll be illegible because she can no longer pretend her hands aren't shaking, Mum keeps saying that it's her age, but I can see the glimmer or worry in her eyes. It isn't something that has been progressing for a while, Thanksgiving last year she was the same, just as batty and pretentious as I have always known her to be.

Christmas came and she was paranoid, constantly listening to the radio and waiting by the gates for the morning paper to arrive, both magical and normal.

Summer though, Summer although a time I don't think I could ever replicate was consumed with looping arguments, screaming matches with her screaming that the four of us will never come home if we are ever let out the house again. It's hard to know just how I feel about it, knowing I am losing her.

But how do you see between the lines with something like that, because in an odd kind of way, one that disturbs me I wonder if I should take to heart her words.

Growing up, between the lectures and instilling me with lessons that I haven't wished to keep since the moment I stepped into this school. Lectures that tell me, what to wear and how to act, that pranks are childish and that studying to be intelligent is what matters.

I have resented them so much, that now I think back on everything, knowing the difference between thinking Grandmother has been around too long, and learning someday soon that she won't be. It's a grave kind of ache in my chest, clamped full of grief, relief, apprehension and resentment.

Grief that I am losing my Grandmother, she will be the first person I have ever lost, relief that I won't have to resent her and what she enforces, what she resents and apprehension at the small part of me that thinks maybe I should take a second look at what she's saying.