Chapter Text
My name is Andie Jackson.
I'm twelve years old, and up until a few months ago, I was a boarding student at Yancy Academy, a private school for troubled kids in upstate New York.
Am I a troubled kid?
Arguably, yes.
I could start at any point in my short miserable life to prove it, but things really started going bad last May, when our sixth-grade class took a field trip to Manhattan - twenty-eight "troubled" kids and two teachers on a single school bus, heading to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to look at ancient Greek and Roman stuff.
I know it sounds like torture, and most Yancy field trips absolutely were, but there was actually a decent chance this one, for once, might not be:
For one, Mr Brunner, our Latin teacher, was leading this trip. He was rather unexpectedly cool, what with his thinning hair, scruffy beard and constant frayed tweed jacket being off-set by his collection of Roman armour and weaponry and his tendency to tell stories and jokes in class, as well as tournament days.
For two, I was actually unexpectedly good at Latin, curtesy of the fact that Mom tended to fall into it when talking to me at home and having been told most of the stories that came up in class for bedtime: I was a D+ student on a good day in most other subjects, but I'd have had straight As in Latin if my struggles with English hadn't held me back there. Even then, I tended to be on a solid B at worst. I was usually decent at maths, too, or well - more decent than in my other subjects, but not with Mrs. Dodds as a teacher.
Speaking of Mrs Dodds: the leather-clad nightmare of an old lady was the other supervisor on this trip.
I hoped the trip would be okay. At least, I hoped that for once, I wouldn't get into trouble. Not like that time with the Revolutionary War cannon that I really, really couldn't have known was loaded or when the guide told me to hit a lever and our class took an unexpected swim and it really wasn't my fault he wasn't clear about which lever he'd meant.
This trip, I was determined to be good.
This really, really wasn't made easier by Nancy Bobofit and her charming habit of harassing my best friend, Grover, by hitting him in the back of the head with - ugh - peanut-butter-and-ketchup sandwiches when she knew he wouldn't do anything to get back at her and that I couldn't, seeing as I was on probation. At the time, I counted myself lucky that Grover held me back from doing anything, but in hindsight, it probably would have saved me from what followed after: my math teacher turning into something straight out of my bedtime stories - I'd never quite appreciated how terrified Orestes must have been - accusing me of doing... something, I had no idea what, me slashing at her, and everyone acting like she had never existed in the first place.
What followed were weeks of my best friend lying to me, and me losing my temper more and more often until Mr Nicoll asked for the millionth time why I was too lazy to study for spelling tests and I snapped. I called him an old sot too stupid to know the definition of dyslexia. I wasn't sure what old sot meant, but it sounded appropriate.
The headmaster sent my mom a letter the following week, making it official: I would not be invited back next year to Yancy Academy.
Fine, I told myself. Just fine.
I was homesick.
I wanted to be with my mom in our little apartment on the Upper East Side, even if I had to go to public school and put up with the way it was so empty when she was working and our obnoxious neighbour, Smelly Gabe, and his stupid poker parties that you could hear even in our flat and that went on waaaay too long in the evening.
Also, he always tried to flirt with Mom and was a major creep to me. I really, really didn't want Smelly Gabe for a stepdad, and I felt incredibly relieved Mom didn't seem to want him as a husband, either.
And yet... there were things I'd miss at Yancy. The view of the woods out my dorm window, the Hudson River in the distance, the smell of pine trees. I'd miss Grover, who'd been a good friend, even if he was a little strange and even if he'd been lying to me. I worried how he'd survive next year without me.
I'd miss Latin class, too - Mr Brunner's crazy tournament days and his faith I could do well; moreover, the feeling I could do well.
As exam week got closer, though, Latin ended up being the only subject I hadn't studied for, simply because it was the only subject I could pass without studying. Maybe I was a bit too confident, though, because when I started looking at it, well...
I knew I knew all this, so why did it seem like I'd forgotten everything I'd ever heard about all these people? It was the evening before my final, and I was frustrated enough I almost threw the Cambridge Guide to Greek mythology across my dorm room, but held myself back, instead letting it crash upon my table and letting my head fall atop it right after, groaning. Words had started swimming off the page, circling my head, the letters doing one-eighties as if they were riding skateboards. Right now, there was no way I was going to remember which one was Chiron and which one Charon, or Polidictes and Polydeuces, let alone spell any of them correctly. And spelling any conjugation of Latin verbs correctly? Forget it.
I paced around the room, feeling like ants were crawling straight inside my shirt. I remembered Mr. Brunner's serious expression, his thousand-year-old eyes. I will accept only the best from you, Ms. Jackson.
I took a deep breath. I picked up the mythology book.
I'd never asked a teacher for help before, but - I didn't want Mr. Brunner to think I hadn't tried.
Of course, that decision paid off with me overhearing a conversation that a) included my best friend talking about me to a teacher b) included my best friend talking about my possible death to a teacher and c) confirmed Mrs Dodds had actually existed and that I wasn't having hallucinations after all.
When the conversation was over, I waited in the corridor for what felt like forever, before returning to my empty dorm room.
My roommate, Ben (her real name was longer and I couldn't have spelled it for the life of me, but she'd been fine with being called Ben) had gotten kicked out of Yancy after like three weeks after getting into an argument with Mr. Nicoll about how he should not be throwing bottles into the river unless he wanted to follow them, which had included her demonstrating an impressive array of cursewords and me barely managing to keep Grover from getting expelled as well for decking the teacher.
In the aftermath, I'd felt sorry I hadn't gotten to know her more closely: She'd seemed a bit... well, kind of overly fussy and proper when we first met, but she'd stood up for her beliefs and could curse like that, so she might've been a good friend.
I took a deep breath, and opened the Cambridge Guide again. I was going to get an A on this exam, without any help, if it was the last thing that I did.
After the three-hour long exam, followed by the most humiliating conversation I'd ever had with a teacher I'd actually liked, the term was almost over.
On the last day, I shoved all my clothes into a suitcase.
The other girls were joking around, gossiping about their vacation plans, some of the more awful ones getting louder when I was near, as if they wanted me to overhear all about their skiing trip in summer or the shopping trips their parents would take them on. I wasn't exactly popular: I was poor, Nancy didn't like me, and I was best friends with a boy, and one who used crutches to walk at that, which led to rumours about my cripple of a boyfriend. Whatever I tried to say about this, it never worked: if I got upset about them calling Grover a cripple, they'd tease me about how my boyfriend couldn't defend himself, if I got upset about them calling him my boyfriend, I only got more teasing about how I probably liked him or about how that meant I agreed he was a cripple, when neither was the case.
Speaking of him, the only person I actually dreaded saying goodbye to was Grover, although - well, since we ended up on the same bus, that turned out to be a bit premature.
Of course, then we saw three old ladies cutting a thread, he freaked out on me, and despite my solemn promise that I was going to let me walk him home, which, he usually wasn't the kind of boy who assumed he could, should and had to protect me just because I was a girl and he was a boy - well.
I kind of ditched him.