The Prodigies [First Draft]

Twenty One

After Tellie's nighttime disappearance, Kenny promised herself she wasn't going to venture on any more dangerous rendezvous, no matter what happened. If she heard someone screaming for help inside the restricted building or watched someone break their leg while they were skipping class, she would get someone else's help or inform an administrator about the problem. She swore to herself that she would never disobey the rules at the Academy for Gifted Children again.

Then Kenny broke this promise the very next day.

If the young girl could've, she would have blamed the entire thing on Tellie for not being in her room and causing Keny to go looking for her in the middle of the night. After all, that was the reason why she had been more sleepy than an armadillo and was too tired to do anything properly. However, Kenny knew the only person she could blame for what happened was herself.

Her first mistake was doing her Wednesday night ritual in her dorm room. Weekly, Kenny looked over her index cards and picked out ones that were no longer useful. This was a private act that Kenny usually did by herself in a quiet place. However, because she was too tired to walk back to the library after dinner, Kenny decided she would do it in her room.

It was especially troublesome this Wednesday as, earlier that day, Mrs. Page made the young girl create cards that she would never show to anyone. She irritably tossed ones that said, My favorite color is green, and, I prefer cats over dogs, into the box where she kept the rejected index cards. She wanted to do nothing but sleep, and because she knew she couldn't, Kenny was fitful.

Then came Kenny's next mistake: rather than lock the box in her closet like she usually did, the young girl placed it by her bed before going to sleep. She didn't expect much to happen to her box as the only one of her roommates who had been in the dorm while she sorted her cards was Metal, and the teen seemed to be busy with homework. The young girl thought her box would be fine, so she placed it on the ground next to her when she was done with it.

Briefly after Kenny had finished with her cards, Tellie and Jump entered the room. Metal turned off the light, and the bell pinged, signalling that the primary school children's curfew was in place. The young girl closed her eyes. It was barely five minutes before she was dreaming once again about the Darkness.

The painting sat in front of Kenny. It was similar to the one from her last dream, but this time, the yellow and white area was smaller. In fact, the black side of the canvas seemed to be growing, swallowing the light side inch by inch. Kenny watched as the yellow grew skinnier, and after a thoughtful moment, she quickly touched the pastel area. The whispers, which had been missing from the dream before, suddenly commenced. However, rather than the contradicting murmurs that the young girl expected, the whispers seemed to agree on this matter.

Kenny should not have touched the light side of the canvas.

The whispers morphed into yells and the yells into screams as Kenny was blinded by white. She fell backward, stunned at her sudden loss of sight and the loud din of the voices surrounding her. Rather than falling on the hard ground like she had expected, Kenny landed on a soft surface. Her vision cleared the second she touched the plane, and the screams slowly petered out to squeals of joy. Kenny looked around, trying to find the source of the child-like shrieks and figure out where her dream had taken her.

She was sitting on a brown and red rug in the center of a comfortable room. The lights were off, and all of the windows were open to allow sunlight to illuminate the room. Pictures were hung on the walls, but they weren't visible from Kenny's place on the floor. The young girl couldn't tell whether the room was incredibly tall or she had shrunk to the size of a small child.

Kenny tugged at the rug as she surveyed her area. The fabric felt as though it was real, and she could almost believe she wasn't dreaming if it weren't for the fact that she was much smaller than everything else around her. She willed herself to move forward, but her body stayed rooted to the ground. She tried once more. Nothing happened. It was as if she didn't control herself or where she could go.