“Come on mane, you know the way.” Frank told him. He fiddled with his walkie-talkie, trying to hear that muffled voice being pressed through it. “Yeah, ten foe. I got him.”

  Damian was tight. Hunched forwards, hands in pockets. He really was doing so well up to this point. He hadn’t had a fight since the middle of last school year. And in that period of seeming clarity, he realized how much of himself wasn’t being used towards ‘the fundamentals’ his mom called it. Finishing homework, getting to school on time, not being on edge around teachers (this day aside, he’d come to understand some teachers take an angry demeanor as a sign of disrespect), and actually getting decent sleep.

  The state he’d found himself in before that period of seeming clarity, was riddled with fights, suspensions, detentions, and even a threat of expulsion. It’s not that he wanted to cut class and chill in the gym instead. It was unconscious habits that came with trouble. Damian, and a handful of other students at American Heritage High, are alumni (or survivors) of Rohan Middle: a notoriously bad middle school. As in it was an F school plagued with literal gang violence that was shut down two years after Damian graduated. These kids carry a stigma and habits that make their presence scary to kids not even in the know. Real local folklore figures.

  “Aye Damian.” Frank called out. He shot a glare over his shoulder without stopping. “Look mane, I know you been tryin, alright? I see the effort. Don’t let this slip up get you down mane.”

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  “… I ‘ppreciate that.” He really did. Moments like those still shook him. Being complimented for keeping on the straight and narrow was something he felt shouldn’t mean as much to him as it did. But it did.

  They’d made it out the hallway into the big blue roundabout- what upstairs in the main building looked like to them. There were eight hallways feeding into it, with tall blue walls, and an open staircase on both ends. One having a view through a large window of the front of the school, a breathtaking small parking lot and a main road. The other stairwell had a view of the first floor, which was more of the same but much more open. The walls in the roundabout had bulletin boards with either seasonal nonsense, or info related to the classes in each hallway.

  The seasonal stuff being ‘Spring Cleaning’ themed, with Spring break coming up. A print out of a duster above a big checklist with things like, ‘Have you started studying for midterms?’ or, ‘Do you have a tidy work area at home?’ Damian wasn’t the kind of kid to care for school-themed , clearly, but he came to respect what the messaging was getting at.

  He did love the glass panels on the ceiling of the second floor though. A dome-shaped ceiling with a seamless checkered pattern on it. Instead of black and white, though, it was glass, and an alternating pattern between white and red, with the blue tall walls making up the whole of the school colors. The rays of light hitting the floor, especially when the second floor was empty, genuinely made Damian miss skipping class this time of day.

  They headed downstairs. More of the same, except more plain. Standard tan walls, floor cleaner scent, trophy cases from all the different extracurriculars Damian would contemplate joining before keeping it pushing, more hallways, and today’s destination: the main office.