Flickering Flames
By: Aoife O'Regan
Thanks to illyna16 for the amazing new cover!
A/N: I just updated some things in here; the tense has been changed to present, and some more stuff has been explained. Thanks so much to RMCage for all of the advice, it was much appreciated! But please, point out any mistakes I've made. I promise to change my errors (unless they don't turn out to be errors...)
CHAPTER ONE: THE BEGINNING
“Nice to see you again, Mrs. Doeringer.” I smile sweetly at the wrinkled student counselor as she scribbles down some notes on a paper on a clipboard, her clearly dyed blonde hair falling in front of her face.
She sighs. “Nice to see you again, Miss Oakley.” She sounds even more unenthusiastic than most times I’ve seen her. Which just happens to be many; usually once a day.
I sigh too. “I told you before, call me Ember. Ember. Can you say that?” I sound like Dora the Explorer.
She looks up from the paper and gives me a blank stare, and also plays with the pearl necklace adorning her neck. I smile and wave to lighten up the mood. “Did I ever tell you how much I love your last name, Mrs. Doeringer? It reminds me of—”
She rudely interrupts me. “The dream you had when a deer came up to your door and rang the doorbell. You’ve repeated yourself every time we’ve met.”
I stare off into space and ‘hm’. ‘Hm’-ing is when you make a sound that is kind of like a laugh, but it’s inside your mouth, and it’s just this little tiny noise. Mrs. Doeringer has expressed her distaste for the word ‘hm’, ‘hm’-ing, and ‘hm’-ed, saying that there’s some other word for it and that I should remember what it is. I don’t.
“So how have you been Mrs. Doeringer? Myself, I’m doing just dandy these days. You know, the other day, the cat Skitty—”
“Ember, I don’t need to hear about your cat. I already know that he weighs sixteen pounds—”
“Fifteen now.”
“Don’t interrupt me. Do you not understand we’re here to talk about—” She stops herself, probably because I’m waving my hand in the air and making ‘oo’ noises. Those are the ones where—
“Ember, do I need to bring Ms. Beecher into this?” she declares sternly.
My eyes widen. “No, no, of course not! She’s— Wait; did you say Ms. Beecher? So it’s true! Because Daniel told everyone that she got divorced, but no one believed him, but I did, because she’s so boring, I don’t understand how she met anyone in the first place! You, Mrs. Doeringer, I am not at all surprised are married. I bet you were popular when you were in high school. Did you like high school? I bet you did, you were like so popular! I bet Mrs., I mean, Ms. Beecher was some loser everyone hated, and— Mrs. Doeringer? Are you okay?”
Mrs. Doeringer has her hands clasped around her face, and generally looks stressed out. I’m about to say something else, but she must see my lips starting to move, so she quickly stands up, towering over me. She looks kind of mad.
“EMBER SABINA OAKLEY, YOU ARE HEARBY EXPELLED FROM RAINWRIGHT HIGH SCHOOL!” she shrieks at me. I am rather taken aback. Her madness decreases after a second. “Remember the time I was with you, your parents, and Ms. Beecher and we talked about all of this? Well, Ms. Beecher has concluded that it would be best for all of us if you left.”
“H-How do you know my middle name?” I ask, truly interested in the answer to my question.
She makes one last ‘arg’ and storms out of the small office. I turn around, brush back the dusty off-white paneled curtains to see her fuming down the hall, though surprisingly, instead of entering the main office’s door to get Ms. Beecher, she rounds the corner, and goes out of sight. I’m pretty sure I hear the front door slam.
While turning back around, I notice someone out of the corner of my eye. It’s a freshman by the look of it, and he has a hall pass in hand. His eyebrows are intensely creased and he looks sincerely confused. He also looks in another direction, which is towards my face, which is sticking through the curtains. He also looks terrified, and then turns tail in the other direction, jogging down the hall, back to his classroom. I then sit back in my super-special chair; it’s the one I sit in every time I come to the counselor’s office. To my right is a stack of magazines on a light brown side table.
“Ooh,” I say as I picked up a National Geographic one with a cute little lion kitten being adorable on the cover. I talk to myself as I skim through the pages, only looking at the pictures. “They really need to make one of these that doesn’t have any writing. Yeah, just pictures of baby animals.”
I don’t know why it takes so long, but finally I hear Ms. Beecher’s heels clomping down the hallway. She angrily twists the doorknob and opens the door. She looks extremely furious, and then sees me sitting in my super-special chair. I give her a small, awkward, smile.
“I heard you got divorced.”
“For your information Ember, my husband died.” Her voice brakes a bit and I see her choke down a sob. “But more importantly, what happened to Mrs. Doeringer?” She says the second part through clenched teeth.
“Um, well, you see, Mrs. Doeringer is a little, um, crazy, believe me, I bet I spend more time with her than you. So, uh, yeah.” I swirl my finger to the side of my head and mouth ‘cuckoo’ as well. “Oh yeah! She also suspended me or somethin’. Oh, wait, no, it was expelled.”
Ms. Beecher’s eye starts twitching a bit. “Ember, are you sure that you weren’t the reason that Mrs. Doeringer went, ah, cuckoo?”
“Hm. You know what; I think I’ll get back to you on that one. I need to ponder it for a while.” I nod and turn away from her, then start pondering if I was the reason that Mrs. Doeringer, let’s say, has a straitjacket in every color.
“Ember. Look at me,” she blatantly states. She has pretty blue eyes. “Ember, you are expelled. Your parents agreed on it last night.”
I’m shocked. “But, Ms. Beecher, I can’t be to blame for Mrs. Doeringer’s declining mental health! Did you know that for the last two years, she’s grown more and more susceptible to annoyances? We’d have to go back to the point where it started deteriorating and then figure out the cause! Plus, my parents would never agree to that! I’m not quite sure who you talked to, but I believe that you should track them down and arrest them for being imposters!”
Ms. Beecher seems to dismiss my last statement. “Ember, I think you very well know the cause! It was you; it started when you came to this school.” I think she’s planning on saying something else, but a glacial breeze blows in through… I’m not sure where, actually. I look around the room to find the source, as does Ms. Beecher. Then I find a small silver air vent in the far right corner of the room, but it couldn’t possibly have blown that much air into the room at once. In fact, it wasn’t just one sudden gust; the office seems to be getting cooler, but at a much slower pace.
But suddenly, the air blowing in becomes so intense that I could actually see it gusting through the vent. And not only through the vent, but flying towards Ms. Beecher and I. It’s like the wind was intentionally soaring directly to us…
And in the blink of an eye, literally, the wisps of wind transform into two men, probably in their thirties or forties, though maybe older, considering their hair is pure white. By the look of their suits, they’re professional.
While Ms. Beecher looks like she’s about to throw up, I put the puzzle pieces together.
“I knew it!” I exclaim. The air-men looked confused. “I knew that I wasn’t expelled! This is just a dream! Mrs. Doeringer would never go insane like that! And my parents wouldn’t have me expelled! Ha! Take that everything!”
“Um, E-Ember, this isn’t a dream,” stutters Ms. Beecher, her eyes still fixated on the guys that arrived through the air vent.
I laugh. “Of course you would say that Dream Ms. Beecher! Those deer that came to visit me said the same thing!” That last statement seems to confuse her just a teensy bit more.
The air guy on the left, the taller one, clears his throat and finally says something. “Ember Sabina Oakley, I am sorry to inform you that this is certainly not a dream. This is you sixteenth birthday, correct?”
“Mm hm. I got this t-shirt this morning!” I showed him my white shirt with two blue turntables and a microphone on it. “It’s like that Beck song, ‘Where It’s At’. Do you know it?”
“Ember, we don’t have time for pointless blather. We need to get you to Linlea Peaks immediately.”
“Come again?”
“Look, we can explain later. You just need to come with us,” the second guy states.
“Are you trying to abduct me or something? Because I’m smart enough to know that the guy in the car with the tinted windows does not in fact have candy. He surely has some other stuff though…”
The first guy sighs, much like almost every person has done in the last five or so minutes. “Ember, we appeared out of thin air. Is that not enough to convince you that this is important?”
“Okay, okay, you do have a point there. But do my parents know about this?” I counter.
“We can call them right now, if you’d like.”
“I would like, thank you very much.”
So the second guy pulls a flip phone out of his pants pocket, presses only one button, and presses another button, but not a number, probably the speakerphone thingy. Does he have my parents on speed dial? I think. The phone on the other end begins to ring, and then someone picks up.
“Hello?” I hear my mother on the other line.
The second guy holds the phone closer to his mouth. “Mrs. Oakley, this is Linlea Peaks’ messenger.”
“W-What?” I barely hear Ms. Beecher whisper.
My mom takes in a breath on the other line. “Okay. Let me say goodbye to her.”
I am seriously confused at this point.
The air guy hands me the black phone. “M-Mom? What’s going on?” I’m starting to think that this isn’t actually a dream.
I faintly hear her sniffling. “Ember, darling, go with the men. You need to; it’s for your own good. I will talk to your father later, but you won’t have time to contact him. Goodbye.”
“Mom?” I try to communicate with her, but she has already hung up. I turn and glare at the two men. “This better be good.” Then I turned to Ms. Beecher. “Uh, bye. Have fun coping with you husband’s death.” She’s too disordered to comprehend my sarcasm, sadly.
The first man clutches my wrist. That’s when everything goes black and I feel myself being sucked through the air to appear in another location.
And that’s when I find out what the term ‘elemental’ really means.
A/N: Thanks for reading! Please leave a comment and/or a vote, that would mean a lot to me! Bye byes!