“Everyone, this is Milanka. She’s new to this kind of school, so let’s make her feel as much at home as we possibly can, alright?” Chuck bounced on his toes and heaved forth a hearty smile.
“Sure, Chuck.”
“Yeah, Chuck.”
“Whatever.”
Soulless eyes gaped at her, swiveling around in their shrunken sockets, looking for a place on her tiny frame to heap their troubles.
Chuck was clean, bright, smiling and shiny. His pupils were dirty, sick, prematurely aged, too fat, too thin, with lines of hatred gouged into their sunken faces. They were arranged in a half-circle around her, grinning darkly with eyes full of wistful hunger, and Milanka gripped her bag before saying quietly, “Mimi. Everyone calls me Mimi.”
“Not at Jeremiad’s School for Distinguished Students we don’t. I’m sorry Milanka, but your name denotes respect for yourself and commands respect from others. Mimi just isn’t acceptable.” But his serious face broke into a smile of kind compassion as he spoke aloud to the class.
"Well, Milanka, since you’re new to this kind of learning, let me briefly explain what we do here. At Jeremiad's School for Distinguished students we take all children ages fourteen to eighteen who have tested to be highly intelligent but have some... social problems that detain them from reaching their full potential. As you'll soon learn firsthand, we take these teenagers; some would even call them delinquents, and mold them into upstanding members of society, using a special mix of teaching and therapy that is unique to this school..."
As his voice droned on in a well-practiced monotone, Mimi nodded numbly and shuffled to her seat, the furthest to the left of the half-circle, and tried desperately to be invisible. She already knew that she was going to hate it here. The “teacher” was a prick and the students, well, they all had Jeremiad’s disease (also known as “a special mix of teaching and therapy that is unique to this school.”). It moved through their bodies like a phantom, evading all attempts to be eradicated, and sat like an incubus; sucking away with ravenous thirst at their energy and leaving them hollow, listless, careless and ultimately hopeless. Then the “therapists” would get to work; beating you down with provoking questions that have no answer; "helping" you by dragging out the darkest moments of your past and flogging them until they stopped writhing and lay, motionless and expressionless, beneath your feet.
Mimi surveyed the room. A queer, six-sided thing with all sorts of inspirational posters adorning the walls- the kind that relate life journeys to sports and the life cycles of animals. There was a projector in the front, and behind that a very standard white-erase board. It didn’t look like a place for felonious teenagers; a place where they confiscated sharp objects and your doors locked from the outside. It didn’t look like a cheerful child mental asylum.
But that was the point, wasn’t it?
“Milanka, did you hear what I just said? Would you like to talk about why you came here?” Mimi turned and faced the exuberant man with his kind smile; and saw for the first time that day the cruelty shining in his eyes; the harsh lines that crawled over his tan jaw line and over his defined cheekbones. He wasn't just a jovial rule-monger, he was the driving force behind the mummification of adolescent delinquents who were sent here as a last restort. “Bubonic Chuck,” she murmured to herself with a half-smile. Another virus at Jeremiad’s School for "Distinguished" students.
“I came here because I was forced, Chuck. A higher authority decided that I needed help.” Chuck snapped his fingers as though the sound would encase the brilliant thought that was fluttering desperately away from him.
“Help. That is why you came here, Milanka? Do you admit that you need help?” Mimi felt the irritation building in her throat. If she admitted she needed help, then they started the healing. And the “healing” in this institution would just be a healthy dose of Jeremiad’s disease; countless hours of a woman with glasses and a pseudo smile stretched across her plastic face and a framed Yale diploma on her wall asking Milanka what her progress was this day, week, month, year. What he was really asking was “Do you want to become a premature corpse? Join the club!”
“No.” Mimi’s voice was soft but fierce. “I don’t think I need help, Chuck. The world I live in is full of sickness, corruption, violence, hatred, but no one ever demands that society go to rehab; that society start afresh on the path of healing? No. I was sent here, Chuck, because I dared to be all that I could. Because I wanted to descend.”
“Descend? Are you talking about purposefully taking the wrong path, Milanka? Choosing to go down the road that will ultimately lead to misery?” Chuck's voice lost it's singsong tone and his dark eyes flashed with irritation.
Mimi smiled; a sadistic, derisive grin that would have frightened the Cheshire cat. “I am talking about ambition; a taste for life. There’s a reason that hell has nine levels and heaven only has one. There is so much more sensation to vice than there is to virtue. At least, that’s my philosophy. And apparently, it’s the kind that gets you confined to places like this.” With a flourish, Mimi gestured at the juvenile sayings emblazoned on the childish posters adorning the six sickly walls. Chuck turned slightly pink and pursed his lips.
“I agree completely.” The voice came from the far right, from a person Mimi could barely see, and hadn’t noticed previously. He was tall and tan, with a head of chestnut hair and the eyes of a hungry wildcat—a green that was nearly yellow; and seemed to reproduce the glare of the harsh fluorescents in the room. Not an attractive face; but interesting and full of—what?
Mimi looked at his shining eyes and lanky frame, and conjured the image of a puppet master; pulling just the right string at the exact moment of tension—making the marionette’s crooked dance last longer than eternity, their warped bodies constantly in a state of frozen agony.
“About your philosophy, I mean. New sensations, new experiences, that is what life is all about. And the most memorable ones are, of course, the ones that some denote as unholy, or …wrong. We’re always wrong, aren’t we? Our ideas our wrong, our image is wrong, the way we go about living is wrong… I say everyone mind their own goddamn business and let us live our life however we see fit. I’m not hurting anyone, and I sure as hell am not hurting myself. You know who is inflicting pain on themselves? Nuns. Priests. People of clergy who define themselves to systems of obeisance and chastity. Just because it’s self-righteous agony doesn’t mean it hurts any less.”
He regarded Milanka with a mixture of respect and understanding.
“I’m Priyesh, by the way. Priyesh Jahiim.” He smiled with a set of dazzling white teeth and ceased to say anything else.
After several rather uneventful minutes when both Mimi and Priyesh simmered over their words, the bell finally rang and the students were herded to a spacious cafeteria and served tasteless gruel. Mimi and Priyesh ended up sitting next to each other at a secluded table. After some awkward glances and stifled questions, Priyesh finally asked, “So what did bring you here?”
Mimi ate a few bites of writhing pasta before replying, “I killed a boy name Jason and nailed his beautiful, cinnamon-tanned, perfectly freckled arms above my bed. I didn’t think he’d need them six feet under my basement.”
Priyesh grinned and said, “So you’re taking the fifth?”
Mimi frowned at her lettuce, which was sliding rapidly down her perfectly level plate. Which meant that either one side of the cafeteria was very slightly tilted, or her salad was running away from her. “Is that what I’m doing? It’s only because you’re giving me the third degree.”
Priyesh chuckled slightly and said. “Hardly. More like the first degree. And what do you have to be defensive about? If you want to hear my story--” But he stopped as another student seated herself at the table.
Don't worry though, people are rarely going to say you have no hope...
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