Gyrus

Chapter One: History 101

“So…” Father Roberto drawled. “Here again.”

I resisted the urge to scowl and looked somewhere else. But trying to pretend I wasn’t intimidated by the old man was about as effective as drinking black coffee as a sedative. Everything he did made me flinch, but I knew the drill. The man specialized in mind games. I’d seen even the most hardened students – the types who could take stabs to the chest without blinking – come out of this office crying.  He shifted in his seat, drumming fingers lazily on the tabletop.

“With the number of times you are brought here, I thought we’d be more friendly by now.“

“We’re not friends. You’re my prison warden.”

“Oh, I’m hurt.”

I turned to face him, irritated.

“Look, what do you want? What else can you do to me? You’ve already put me in the tower with all the other freaks. You want to arrest me? For what? Going home?”

“The other students in the tower are not ‘freaks’. They have special needs, just like you.”

I looked at him, unsure whether to laugh at or be annoyed by his statement. The tower was merely a place for what the school considered to be high risk cases, the pedigree range of juvenile delinquents. It was fort with twelve floors, with two rooms on each floor in ascending order. The worse you were the higher you went.

“Yeah, ‘special needs’. That’s codeword for ‘shouldn’t be allowed out in public’.”

“You have your freedom within the confines of this facility. Nobody stops your movements here.”

“But you stop us from going out.”

“You’re not ready to go out yet. That is why you are here. Why do you keep trying to escape?”

“To get away from your ugly face.”

He smiled, obviously not rustled by anything I said. That’s what pissed me off the most about him. There was something about the way he talked that forced you to listen even if you had made up your mind not to. Like he could get into your head and knock down all your defenses and shove in all his grown-up philosophical crap that nobody really wanted to hear, especially not me. He looked away for a moment, but only to pull out a file from his desk. I spotted my name on the top corner of it. From the way he took it out, I knew he’d been looking into it recently. Not that I was surprised, I wasn’t exactly a saint here.

“This is your fourth attempt at escaping,” he drawled.

“Oh, so you’ve been counting. Good for you.”

“We alerted your parents the moment we noticed your absence. You don’t exactly have that many hiding places, Norman. And you knew they were going to bring you back here anyway.”

“Yeah,” I scoffed. “Nice to know they still have a common enemy. Can’t blame them; after all I did cause their divorce.”

“Do not take responsibility for that, the decision was theirs to make.”

“Whatever,” I hissed. He always had to act so annoyingly understanding. And what did he know anyway? It’s not like he was there during all the arguments and accusations, listening to each of them shouting about how much the other contributed to making me a generally fucked up human being.

“How are your living conditions? Are you getting along with your room mate?”

I ignored the question. Edwin was not the problem here, and he knew it. Sure, the guy was strange and I still hadn’t gotten him to say more than a few words to me, even though he seemed to understand me without asking anything. All I’d been able to find out about him were through the same rumors that passed around the students and the other freaks at the tower.  Three years ago – a year before I was admitted into Saint Andria – he went berserk one day and fought three guards, dislocated a security warden's jaw and vaulted over the incredibly high school gate, swam through the brackish water moat and walked into the forest. He returned a year later with half his original body weight and shaggy hair that fell down to his back. Some people say the hunger drove him back but I seriously doubted that. Edwin wasn’t some sort of wild animal, not the way I saw him anyway. And I had him to thank for helping me meet Alyssa, so he was always going to be in my good books.