Dragonfly, Copyrighted by Novalight

I’ve decided to keep a diary. This diary to be exact.
I think it’s the only sure fire way to prevent me from bottling up my emotions so much that I… explode. I don’t know how else to describe it, but lately I’ve just had so much piled up on me that I feel that if I don’t release some tension I will do something that I will regret very much. The last time I had this feeling and ignored it I ended up breaking my “teacher’s” pointer finger and then in detention for months. It’s an interesting story, but I don’t want to tell it right now. Opening up to others, even if they are just sheets of paper, has never been one of my strong points. If this whole diary experiment goes well I’ll write about it then, but for now I’m going to just stick with the basics. I am close enough to a few people here that I would feel comfortable talking to them, but there never seems to be enough time, or privacy, to talk and I always risk having them ridicule me for my thoughts. Not many people have them here, thoughts that is, and the few that do are extremely diverse, and to be honest, I wouldn’t want to be friends with many of them if they weren’t the only people in this prison that I could have an intelligent conversation with. It’s not really a prison, it’s a school, but it feels like a prison from what I’ve read about them, prisons that is. I hope that through my writings it will become clear why This Place is so horrible.
From what I’ve read and heard about diaries, your supposed to recount your activities and thoughts from the particular day on which you are writing, so I supposed I’ll start with one of the happier moments of my day, which, as I forgot to write at the top, is / / /. (I will be sure to put it at the top on later entries.) I’ll start my story, the life of this book, during the fifteen minute break I have each day. This is the only time I can remotely escape from This Place.

The willow bark was reassuringly solid against my back (Oh how few things are here). I sat in the grass, starring into space through my amber eyes and thick lashes. My hands, which were crossed neatly under my broad chest, rose up and down with my breath. One skinny leg was stretched out and the other crossed it at the shining metal band encasing my right ankle. Although the pose I struck was the picture of relaxation, there was a hidden meaning to it: to shield my eyes and mind from the collar connecting me to That Place.
That Place held some many memories (so few of them are good) for me and anyone else who could still remember the terrors of their pasts; the “professors” who caused me, us really, so much pain had pretty much torn all the hope and individuality out of my classmates, leaving them merely shells of humans (hence the finding it difficult to find someone to express myself to). The pressure of how awful it was to live day in and day out in the oppressiveness of the castle pressed down me. Eleven years of punishment and isolation couldn’t be held at bay in the mind for very long. I caved to the pressure and remembered the first time I realized what exactly they were doing to kids at Boltwood Academy, what they’ve been doing for longer than anyone could conceive of:

A small girl with large brown eyes filled with bright innocence. A little girl with golden locks, unknowing. She skips down the tiled hall, her flip-flops smacking the ground with every step. ClackClackClack. Shining new metal on her ankle. Around her other students chatter, excited for something new. Different voices, different colors, standing out against the sterile white walls. Ringing, running, a wave of four year olds pushing and shoving through the entrance to the classroom, clambering to take their seats. Sudden silence, then…
Tap. Tap. Tap.
The door creeks open: grey pants, gray shirt, grey jacket, gray eyes, grey hair, ashy skin. No gender, no identity. A collective shiver from the class, but anticipation is still heavy in the air. A monotonous voice:
“I am Ms. Smith. Watch and respond. You will be Disciplined depending on your response.”
From under her chrome desk she takes out a metal cage. A rat, squeaking, runs franticly in circles, foreseeing its fate and trying in vain to escape. Ms. Smith takes out a jug and pours the pungent liquid into the rat’s prison. A hiss, and a screaming rat is being eaten by flame. Two kids laugh, five do nothing, eighteen stand up and try to save the dying animal. One of them is the little girl. Searing thorns pierce from the shiny new anklet. Poison slithers into her veins. Hot pain. Falling. Hard floor. A little hand reaches out towards the charred corpse. Blackout.
Awakening, up-side down, red faced, dangling by legs and chains. Gagged shouts of furry and sorrow stick in her throat as she is forced to witness the burning vermin. Over and over. While the seven who didn’t run sat, watching her pain. Tears trickle down the golden hair. The bright innocence is gone from the large brown eyes.

My earliest memory, what a nice one it is, eh? Now, if the same exercise were repeated, there would only be three in my class who might try and save what ever animal was scheduled for the BBQ on that particular day. Of course in the entire grade it would be closer to about… 14 people. There are about 250 kids in my grade, tenth grade, proportions don’t really apply. If they did then there would be about 30 kids per grade who would still react, i.e. still think, but it all really depends on what teachers they’ve had or their friends. There are eleven grades here, four and five year olds in first grade, and fifteen and sixteen year olds in eleventh grade. The first grade usually has about 500 students, but around fifth grade some students “graduate”. No one here knows what you have to do to graduate, but by eleventh grade everyone is pretty much gone. In any case there aren’t a lot of people here that can think for themselves, and as I said not all of them are what you’d call “good kids”. Yeah, despite everything (the no thinking, the harsh punishments, the generically disgusting food), there are still bullies here at This Place. But I didn’t run into Chaos or his group today so I’ll write about them more when I do. Speaking of which, I should get back to what happened to me today.

I shook off the memory, this was the only fifteen minutes a day I had to be free of That Place and I wasn’t going to spend it remembering the bad things in my past.
Golden silky threads caressed my cheek, dancing in the zephyrs that were herding in the storm clouds from the east. The breezes tugged and teased the grass below me on the hill and the grass in the fields that surrounded me. Gradually the fields gave way to forests and mountains in the distance. The wind was a welcome change to the heavy mugginess that kept trying to swamp me.
I rested my eyes for a moment, then gazed through the tangled, curly net of sunlight that was my hair and through the swaying fingers of my protective willow to the approaching storm. The rumbling bellow of thunder echoed in my ears. In the distance the grey monster flicked out its blazing forked tongue to devour what ever it touched. Too bad the bolt was too far away for me to see what was eaten by the sky. I wished, no not wished, (you should always be careful you wish for), wanted to be the storm, though to be frank, being a banana slug would have been preferable to being stuck as I was in That Place. But of course being a storm was better than being a slug any day. I would be free to travel across the land, powerful and unstoppable for as long as I chose. The winds would chase each other in my vastness, weaving in and out. All the sights I would see! I could even give rain to a dried out town or destroy it on a whim! Not that I would ever hurt hundreds of innocent people. Yet the feeling of hope and freedom rang through to my bones.
And then, for a moment, I was the storm. Effortlessly floating along on the air currents. My spirit seemed to soared out of my body and into the heavens. Bellow me a swallow swooped in on a fly, unafraid of my greatness and glory. Power built up in my fingertips; I pointed, and lightning stuck a dead tree. And in the distance, under a willow tree, sat a girl in a pink shirt and blue shorts with crossed legs and poofy golden hair. She looked haggard, but at the moment she seemed to be at peace with the world. Then the metal band around her ankle buzzed and…
Suddenly I was back in my own body. Startled, I pulled my legs from the relaxed position to one of protection, closer to my body. From the collar emanated a monotonous voice.
“#734, return to room 871 for additional assistance in you school work or you shall be Disciplined.”
It may as well have said, “Come to detention so we can strip you of your humanity,” but there was now way I was going to let them do that to me. Someone needed to carry humanity into the future, and I was one to whom the task fell to.
“Nova,” I said to the lifeless shackle, “my name is Nova.” With that I turned and trudged back to Boltwood Academy in the rain.

That’s another reason I started this diary; believing that you are a storm is crazy, right? I don’t want to go insane and I hope that expressing myself will help prevent future episodes.
I went to detention but, as that is not a pleasant memory, I will not go into detail. Instead I’ll explain my name, Nova, and naming in general here.
When students first come to Boltwood, they are given a number. Mine, as I have written, is #734. Teachers only acknowledge students by number. By second or third grade the new students have pretty much divided them selves into the Thinkers and the Think-nots. Thinkers, including me, usually chose their name based on some characteristic of themselves that matches the material we are studying. The Think-nots, as their name suggests, don’t think and do not find names for themselves. I chose Nova as my name because the textbook definition of a nova is: a star that suddenly becomes thousands of times brighter and then gradually fades to its original intensity. Well, by my thinking, a nova is only a nova while it is an extremely bright star, because after it fades to its original intensity it is just a regular star. Even from an early age I could tell that I was much more intelligent, or “brighter,” then my peers, and I liked astronomy, so Nova seemed perfect as a name for me. In the old books in the back section of the library people are called, “Bob, Jill, Sally, or Fred,” and they are named by their parents at birth. This seems silly to me because a name should describe who you are, and how can anyone know who they are going to be at birth? Anyways we don’t get that option. No one here knows their parents. I guess that aspect of the way things are done here worked out well.
Anyways, it isn’t guaranteed that you’ll keep your chosen name. Two things can happen which will make you change it. The first way is that you lose your ability to think. The dullness and regular “movie nights” can brain wash you if you aren’t vigilant. Many people are on the edge of Thinkers and Think-nots, and cross over to the Think-nots. At this point a name is not important to the person and they revert to their number. It is the general consensus here that that is what “They” (who ever they are, again, no one knows who is in charge here) are trying to do here: turn everyone into a Think-not for what ever reason. It’s about the only think the Dreamers and the Schemers agree on, which leads to the other way your name can be changed. Around fifth grade the Thinkers split into two groups: the Dreamer (fairly peaceful Thinkers who hate the school and just want to escape with their minds intact) and the Schemers (the bullies who think that their intelligence should make them rulers of the student body and who use physical and mental harassment to hurt the Dreamers and the Think-nots). Generally Dreamers keep their name, but Schemers feel that they are too good for their old names. They change their names to natural disasters or conceptual evil, such as Chaos, who I believe I mentioned earlier. Chaos is the leader of the Schemers because he is the oldest of them. When ever the lead Schemer graduates, the leader ship is passed to the next oldest. Chaos is also in tenth grade, but other than that I’ll let his actions describe him. I have no doubt that I’ll run into him and his lot sometime soon and be able to recount the encounter here.
It’s getting pretty late and I’m getting tired. The sun hasn’t been in the sky for six hours. Dragonfly’s come in, and he’s sitting on my bed purring. He always comes in just before I go to sleep and keeps me company during the night and disappears just before I wake up. I guess I should mention that I am writing from the desk in my room, which I share with my friend and roomy, Sparky. I’ll tell you about her later, when it’s not so late. I really am sleepy because I forgot to mention that Dragonfly is an orange tabby cat named for the way he walks freely into anywhere a teacher is not. He has no restrictions what-so-ever, just like the dragonflies that soar around the grounds during summer. Now I really have to go to sleep. G-night.
Nova

whoa, that's pretty powerful. i'm really looking foward to hearing more. the part with the names is rather obvious. but i love that fine line you created... it's obviously not real, especialy with the lightning bolt from the finger thing, yet it holds a deeper meaning that's so real.

This post has been edited by Sea Tiger on Aug 29 2007, 12:54 PM

Thanks, I don't know what you mean by

or

. Do you mean I should leave out the name part? or that her imagining being the storm wasn't real, or that the entire story isn't real??? Also I'm thinking of changing Schemers to Nightmares... What do you think?

i meant that obviously there would be no lightning coming from fingers in real life, but it fits with the story, so it works. and i like Schemers better.

It was a mental finger... like in the circle of magic books where their spirits leave the body when they have to do deep magic. That sort of thing... Detaching one's self from one's body... But yeah, she is keeping the diary for a reason. Who wants to go insane in an evil place?

Name opinion duly noted...

I really liked it I can't wait to hear more. I'm so excited. *waits very bored*.