I Don't See Why: Chapter One- Fowl Play in Dreamland.

Every October the traveling circus nestles at Hash; which would be the appropriate name of the delinquent boarding school I am banished to. It stays for about a week and then all is packed up again into vandalized trailers to go else where. How they get anywhere with flat tires puzzles me. What stumps me even more is why they bring a carnival to a school like Hash anyways. No one here deserves any of the smiles forced upon us. We spend our nights dancing bare foot on broken Smirnoff bottles not scribbling faux answers. Why celebrate with balloon animals for skipping classes due to our hangovers? Why should we not be lashed instead? They whip us for talking back, and for cussing, yet still in the long run they end up rewarding us? For what? Not trying to improve ourselves at all? The faculty here must have inhaled too many fumes that escape from our toxic mouths. Nothing seams to make sense.

The pounding sound of the cabin door locking shut brings me back from my perplex thoughts just long enough to see my best friend Brier standing in front of me; bearing her perfect teeth into a caramel apple. Brier is one of those painted barbies that the boys get all chocked up around. She is the image of flawless. A porcelain doll with sleek auburn hair. Sugar, spice and everything nice. Too bad miss 'I had everything going for me' fucked up her life and got sent here. "Wanna bite?" she says as she holds out her crimson lipstick stained caramel apple towards me. I grimace at her for a while. She knows I hate those. The caramel is too hard and the apple its' self tastes powdery. She smiled evidently. "You still downhearted about Seb?" My stomach begins to rumble as the acidic vomit makes a test drive half way up my throat. I make a point by scowling at her once again at the mention of Sebastian's name.

Sebastian Lavigne. A product of precision. He was once my oxygen and I recall the shock that would penetrate my fragile heart every time he looked my way. Adrenaline. Though he looked right past me, straight though me. I was transparent. So once upon a time I did yet another moronic thing. I curled my lashes with an iron and laced them together with ugly tar; dressed up as a porn star. He ate me like the best damn banana split he had ever tasted but not ever made. What a foolish mistake. How could I think he would possibly want me more after that? My remorse led me to gargle Windex every night before I fell in a coma. My barely beating core had been torn at its seams then plastered back together with 887 bandages. I was inches away from free falling. Closer to collapsing. I shiver away the unwanted memories and rinse my mouth from the vulgar taste. I tell Brier that I am getting better but that doesn't satisfy her. "Must you keep pretending?"

I ignore the question. She pipes up again. "Do you wanna get some fairy floss while the circus is still here tonight?" I have been a burden on her and my friends for so long that the guilt is chiselling at my last nerves. A robot cannot function without any wires. I give in and we make our way down to the excitement. Many colour washed tents are affixed to the uneven ground. After wandering aimlessly around the festival for longer than I was hoping for, I notice that the haunted dungeon is stationed before us. Brier suggests we go inside. Beyond the cellar doors, skeletons hang by fine strings, trapped by the sent of rotten pumpkins; not a step up from the rotting oranges that lay under my bed. We begin admiring the plastic bats that dangle above our nitrogen compressed heads, when an ominous shadow strolls towards us and knocks Brier in the back of her neck with what seamed to be a metal baseball bat. She falls to her knees while I watch the silhouette fade bemused.