☾ ❂ Sticks and Stones ☾ ❂
Annatha was a good girl. Or, she tried to be.
She did mostly as her mother and father said, listened intently and took up little space. But that couldn’t change
some things.
‘Children ought to have an education.’ That was the underlying thought here, but because their family was of modest means, because of their lineage, and a number of other factors, they didn’t have all the same options as were available to other similarly aged children in the area. Mama hadn’t wanted them to have
no education, but nor was it economically feasible to attempt sending her daughters to an Oban private school. Their only visible connection to the land was a genetic inheritance that had nothing to do with their current life situation. But home schooling was another matter entirely, and even if they had arranged for it, it wouldn’t have offered the same exposure and chance to
see if either of them flourished in an academic environment.
Anna didn’t know much of any of that.
She knew Lori was going to a special school. She knew that, while she got the
sense it was supposed to be something coveted — like the pretty hair and gowns, set aside and meant only for
certain people — she wasn’t sure she felt anything but concern and private offense on Lori’s behalf. Though she didn’t understand the specifics, she knew that while she and her sister generated looks of all varieties, Lori and her mother — and her own daddy — were subject to a
different and equally preposterous and unfair breed of assumptions that Obans placed on them for being what they were.
And Lori was in their
den.
Like this, but nicer, Ani imagined. With rows and rows of children who didn’t like you or want you around all dressed in that stiff little uniform Lori had needed to get. Perhaps it was good Lori went at least, so she could show she was cleverer than they. But she didn’t envy her the position, and it might have been nice to have more company here, particularly when it didn’t seem very
useful to send Lori anywhere else when they wouldn’t like her to begin with. But that wasn’t her say.
She was sitting at a desk in a two-room schoolhouse, sided to the middle left. All of its attendees had been split into two age groups, she of course being in the younger half, though it didn’t much look like there was a great deal of distinction in the experience
other than the age of those seated immediately around you. A single teacher worked both of the rooms, conjoined by an open door. At first, it had been chaos — and it was still to some degree not the most organized of experiences — but it seemed to be that the older children would be set to work first, and then the teacher would speak and work with them until they, too, had a task to manage. In theory.
In practice, on their first day, most of the time seemed to have been dedicated to keeping children in the classroom, tending to wailing, and accurately splitting the groups. The classrooms were mostly compiled of Oban youth, predominantly low class, with a healthy scattering of Matorian children in the mix. And very few of them seemed interested in actually learning
anything.
After the first week, Ani had taken to ignoring them as much as could be managed. They had stared, of course, and jabbered, but that diminished enough after persistent lack of acknowledgement that all that remained to be done was attempt to make
something of her time there. A great deal of copying was apparently involved in learning. It wasn’t
interesting, but it wasn’t so thick and foreboding as Lori’s schoolbook, and even if her classmates were not especially intent on it she did want to take something away from it all herself—to read and write, surely, if
nothing else.
So she set herself to that goal and would hold her things near to herself when she walked to and from school, leery of them being snatched at otherwise, and she would keep her arms and legs tucked close inside the space of her desk when she did arrive, as though its outer corners were armor against invasion into her space. And she would pay focused, exclusive attention on the shape of the letters and numbers she copied and on her teacher’s words over the rest.
If she only paid mind to that, she wouldn’t have any attention
left for—
“
Hoi.”
Something lodged itself in her hair, and Ani’s chalk paused where it was on her writing slate, eyes narrowing at its tip. She reached back, fingering her hair gingerly just to
see—her fingers touched something sticky, and froze.
Immediately, heat swam for her cheeks. She hated her hair. She
had been writing. It was all she’d come here to do; it was the only useful thing she could do in the room; she didn’t bother
anyone. But someone had made their problem hers, despite
every effort of her own to pay everyone around her no mind.
She gripped the side of her writing slate and turned in her chair.
The boy behind her was dumb. Oban, her age, with muddy brown hair, pale red eyes, and a missing tooth that always showed like an obnoxious tunnel in the middle of his smiles. It didn’t help that the words which moved past his teeth were most often just as irritating. At this particular moment, however, he looked wide-eyed — ‘caught’ — and fairly genuinely surprised. His fingers were dipped in—was that
food? Her eyes narrowed.
His cheeks flushed.
“Uh…” His gaze flit from hers, to her hair—and his lips stretched back, baring
that hole, and though there might have been guilt present at first in his expression due to the ‘accident’, amusement far too quickly set in after. “Whoops. That might take a bit to get out, huh? I was aimin’ for someone else, but if you need me to help cut part off-”
She whirled, gripping her writing slate, swinging, and cracking it flat against the side of his head. Some degrees of chaos were permitted, clearly — inevitable, even — but assaulting one’s fellow students was not, apparently, on the list of things that could occur without interruption. It did, however, take some concentrated effort to wrestle the two of them apart, and she insisted fervently all the while — in shrieks at first, and then more muted repetitions later — that it was his fault. He put
food in her hair, and threatened to cut it off—she hated him.
Her teacher did not care. She was a wild, ill-mannered child of disreputable origins who did not
belong in this classroom to begin with, and she ought to have been
grateful for every moment, not attacking her peers, what could have possibly been going through her mind? She was to sit outside until class was dismissed for the day, and it would remain to be seen whether she’d be permitted back in.
Other children had gotten into fights.
But, Annatha knew as she propped her back to the side of the building, that didn’t matter. First, she really likely oughtn’t have hit him — even if he
did deserve it and it
was his fault — and of course, she and her sister were not ‘other children.’ Different rules applied. Still, she held her fingers bunched in small fists at her sides, shoulders stiff, eyes forward, and ears attentive. It was possible, if she were quiet and the noise in the room diminished any, for her to listen to the lesson and steal glances through the window if she cared to.
After a time, however, she sank against the wall to a crouch, and reached forward to trace in the dirt.
A B C D E… a b c d e… She didn’t know how long she waited outside, other than that it felt far longer than normal class periods, and by the time mid-afternoon did come and the class stirred to rise, the
only person she wanted to see was her sister. Instead, when she rose to a stand and dusted herself off to look, there he was. His fingers were clean. A portion of his cheekbone looked as though it might be sporting the first signs of bruising, and there was a
dusting of chalk in his hair just beside his ear which must have been hers and missed any brushing away.
Her chest hurt, and she wanted him to go away.
“I’m…sorry I stuck your hair,” he said.
Her fists bunched.
“I was aimin’ at someone else. It wasn’t ‘cause…” He eyed her, “…you’re weird or nothin’. You’re not
that weird, and I’m sorry the teacher got mad just at you…” He glanced to the dirt where as careful of a replication of the alphabet as she could create from memory was scribed out, several letters missing. “You write nice-”
“Why were you throwing
food.” She shook her head, throat tight. Clearly he didn’t care, he didn’t understand, and didn’t think before just making
messes for other people. “I don’t care. I don’t like you. Stay off or I’ll hit you again.”
When she strode past him to look for her sister and get the day
over with, her departure was not quite quick enough to miss: “I’m Teshji! If you care…”
It was the most frustrating way to remember a name. When you didn’t
want to, but it buried itself like a small seed nonetheless.
Word Count: 1,679
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