Raven Feathers

Chapter Three

Chapter Three

Waking up Tuesday morning was an absolute horror, to be put simply. The night before I had spent hours unpacking the final boxes in the house, and then it was another hour of staring at the ceiling in bed before I actually fell asleep. Therefore, when my alarm began screaming at me at just past five in the morning, I just rolled over and pulled the pillow over my head. The pillow didn't do much to block the noise, but it did enough to let me slip into sleep for another five minutes until the alarm became unbearable.

With a tired groan, I sat up in bed and turned on the lamp next to my bed. Yellow light flooded the room, illuminating all of my furniture and band posters up on the walls. The light also told me I was a few inches from kicking a sleeping Norma and sending her across the room, again. I yawned and inched out from underneath my covers, and I jumped out of bed and ran over the freezing floor to the black rug in the center of the floor. My next target was my small dresser where I kept socks and undergarments.

If anyone was to see me at that moment, I would mortified. I looked completely ridiculous running to the dresser just in time to open a drawer before running back to the rug to keep my feet from freezing. It didn't help that I had to go back five times- two for each sock, a bra, a pair of underwear, and finally to shut the drawer. The first thing I did was pull on the socks so I could walk around like a normal person.

Next came a task I had come to hate over the three days of living in the house. It included going into the closet to get clothes. The dark room reminded me of the attic too much, and I nearly had a panic attack every time I went inside it. I had a flashlight on the floor next to the door to help me see, but it did nothing to calm my fears. If anything it made me feel more vulnerable.

With all my articles of clothing, I could finally get dressed. For the first day of school I was wearing one of my most comforting outfits ever. The outfit consisted of a white cotton tank top, a blank and purple striped hoodie with car ears on the hood, and a pair of black skinny jeans with white seams. The final piece wasn't special to the outfit as I wore it all the time except when showering, and it was my necklace. I never really cared about the style of shoes so I pulled on a pair of tennis shoes before going to the bathroom to brush my teeth and hair.

Once I was done eating breakfast, it was fifteen minutes after six, and I had to leave or risk being late on my first day. “Why does this place begin at seven in the morning?” I groaned, walking to the car. As usual, Mom left it unlocked, and I climbed in and turned the car and heaters on simultaneously. I didn't bother waiting for the car to warm up before backing out of the driveway and making my way for the school. Driving, it took fifteen minutes to reach the school, and I seemed to be arriving at the same time as the rest of the student body. I found an open parking spot next to jeep with its paint chipping at the very back of the parking lot.

I hurried into the building, only taking a second to notice its grey cement blocks and black tile roofing. It looked almost like a prison on the outside of the building, and it wasn't much better on the inside of it. The top half of the walls were white while the bottom section was a dark blue. The tiled floors were a light grey with blue tiled linings. Automatically, I figured out the school colors.

The door I entered was labeled 'F', and it was the door closest to the gymnasium. The gymnasium was at the very end of a single hallway that stretched through the whole school, and the school itself was split into two sections. The section I was in only had the boiler rooms, the gymnasium, the band/choir room, and the cafeteria. The other section had the offices, a hall for art classes, a hall for math, a hall for science, a hall for English and other languages, and a hall for social science. Along the long hall were several computer classes while the very end of this side of the school was a large library and lab.