EPOCH: Corridors

Friday, March 26th

     Three boys marched through the halls of a noisy school building, bantering carelessly when suddenly one of them grabbed the other by the arm. Stopping him moments before colliding into another one of his classmates.

     The boy stopped dead in his tracks as he stared at a girl standing boldly before him.

     She glared at him with eyes of fire and an energy as rigid as steel.

“What, stupid?” the boy attacked.

“I’m telling the teacher about you playing in the road on our walk to school,” she angrily hawked.

“I wasn’t even playing in the road,” the boy tried to counter to no avail as the girl cut him off. “Yes you were, and you kept ignoring me when I told you to get back in line!” she barked.

     Infuriated, the boy yelled back with vengeance. “Why do I have to follow behind you anyways? I can walk to school on my own.”

“The teacher said you have to, so you have to,” her nearby friend, donning a pink hairclip shaped like a cherry blossom, annoyingly jabbed in a blasé tone.

     With a blatant sneer, the boy side eyed the two girls as he contemplated a way to avoid being scolded by their homeroom teacher. Something he’d grown all too familiar with.

“One time, someone got hit by a car after running into the street.”

     The two girls jumped back in shock at the sudden cryptic words coming from one of the other boys. Looking back over his shoulder, the first boy tagged, “My brother told me about that. It was a long time ago, right?”

The friend nodded his head in agreement.

     “Was it a student?” the first girl asked. “I think so,” the boy followed.

     “So, like, some kids snuck into an abandoned school, and when ghosts chased them all out,” the boy forcing his palms into one another, “SMUSH! one of them was crushed by a car.”

“Eek” the girl with the pink hairclip hollered as she hid behind her friend, who then asked, “What school was it?”

     Passing looks around at each other, they all traded the same clueless gazes and shoulder shrugs. That is, until the third member of the trio of boys finally joined the conversation.

“It was this school…”

     The entire hallway seemingly dropped to a dead silence as they all froze in place.

     The first girl quietly watched the boys, her qualms now a thing of the past. Her friend behind her seemed to be adrift. As if her mind suddenly slipped into another place for a moment.

The first girl then turned and grabbed onto her and began pulling her off to class.

“Come one Fuyu, we’re gonna be late.”