Makeshift | Chapter Three

(I'm having such a block with this story right now. Nothing comes out as it should, and I can't seem to forward the plot at all and just urkkkkkkk. Warning: This chapter is just as abysmal as the previous -which I haven't finished redoing yet, either. D: Any and all critique is more appreciated than I can articulate -it might help lift me out of this writing rut.)

Golden morning light spilled into the bedroom, touching everything but illuminating nothing. Hannah forced her eyes open, looking blearily at the window. Someone must’ve come in earlier and opened the curtains, she realized sluggishly, sitting up on her elbows. Her eyes felt swollen and dry, and her stomach ached dully. It let out a deep growl, and Hannah was suddenly and shockingly aware of the fact that she hadn’t had anything to eat since lunch yesterday (that sent a pang of melancholy through her; she’d been in the cafeteria, goofing around with her friends, eating the high school slop that she had bemoaned having to live through for the next four years). Not anymore.

            Casting a glance at the clock seated on her beside table, Hannah slid reluctantly out from under the covers. A chill ran through her as her feet brushed the cool floor –the temperature was dropping, the rapid approach of winter becoming an undeniable fact. She crossed her arms, hugging them tightly to her chest as she made her way to her bedroom door.

            Making her hesitant way down the stairs, Hannah was greeted by the various noises of clattering pans and dishes, presumably emanating from the kitchen. Her stomach rumbled again in response, taking part in an unintelligible conversation with the food being prepared. She halted a step from the bottom, casting her gaze in the direction of the kitchen, where her father’s back was just visible. Hunger and exhaustion warred for supremacy within her, and she moved forward, toes recoiling inward against the icy tiles as hunger was crowned victor.

            “D’you want pancakes, or would you rather have eggs?” her father asked as she stepped through the doorway, still facing the stove. Hannah felt a tiny, quavering smile quirk the corners of her lips quite against her will; when she was younger, she had solemnly sworn her father had eyes in the back of his head. His knack for guessing who was standing behind him was uncanny, to say the least.

            “Pancakes,” Hannah slipped into her seat at the table, giving her father a reflexive smile as he set the dish in front of her. He returned the expression.

            “Bet you’re hungry, eh? Shouldn’t have skipped dinner yesterday –we had pizza.”

            Yesterday. Such a casual word, spoken with such flippancy, yet the gravitas of it was not lost in her father’s eyes.  Hannah felt her fists clench by her sides. For a moment there, just a moment, she had entertained the buoying, impossible hope that it had all been a dream. A terrible nightmare. She focused on the pancake in front of her, cutting it into bite-sized pieces and inserting them into her mouth one by one to sate the ravenous beast in her stomach (and now lurking, not so metaphorically, just beneath her skin).

Silence reigned in the kitchen then; the only sounds those of clattering cutlery and rapid chewing. Hannah looked up and to her right, to see her father leaning against the linoleum countertop. Their eyes met.

            “How’re you feeling?”

            Hannah shrugged, focusing on her plate, intent to cut her pancake into squares so small their molecular structures broke down and she was left with individual subatomic particles.

            “We don’t mind, Hannah. There’s nothing shameful about being a Changeling –you’re the same kid you’ve always been.”

            Abandoning her attempts at atomizing her pancake, she began to spear the pieces with her fork, shoveling them in her mouth so she wouldn’t be obliged to reply. Her father had no right to lecture her –standing there, assured in his humanity. There was no beast lurking under his skin.

            With a small nod, Hannah’s father acknowledged that this one-sided conversation was going nowhere. Turning off the stove, he placed the frying pan in the sink. “Don’t forget to clear your dish away when you’re done, okay?”

            Hannah parroted back his nod.

            Back in the solitude of her room, Hannah cast another glance at the clock on her bedside table. 10:04, it read. Right now, she should be in class –in Math, struggling to decipher the lines of numbers and equations set in front of her, whilst Katie shot her piteous glances from by her side. Gritting her teeth, she grabbed clean clothes from her dresser, and headed to the bathroom for a shower, hoping to cleanse the invisible stains she saw all too clearly.

            Hair wound tightly up in a towel, but still managing to send rivulets of water coursing down the back of her neck to soak the back of her shirt, Hannah grabbed a book from the shelf on the wall opposite her bed, and settled down on it to read. It fell open with no effort from her whatsoever, already bent out of shape, pages dog-eared and slightly loose. She scanned the pages more than read them, so familiar with the tale already that she hardly needed the words on the page to recall it. Weak sunlight shone in through the window, offering light but no heat. She felt the chill, goose bumps rising on her exposed flesh, still slightly damp from the shower. Fleetingly, Hannah contemplated getting up to fetch a sweater, or at least a long-sleeved shirt, but the dresser was all the way on the other side of the room, and she couldn’t be bothered.

            About twenty pages in, Hannah became aware of the fact that she wasn’t paying any attention at all to the book –she should’ve picked something new, so that she was forced to concentrate. Her mind was wandering, venturing down dangerous paths, and her ears were straining for any sounds from her parents, wondering when they’d sit her down, and expound upon the subject her father had began to touch upon at breakfast. When would it be time to choose a school? Hannah felt her stomach clench, and she closed the book. She couldn’t concentrate on anything right now.

 There was no way she could have anticipated this –no way anyone could have. Her biological mother had been human –or at least she’d written that on the form. And her biological father, well, she didn’t know. Given the events of yesterday, Hannah would place a very firm bet that he’d been a Changeling as well (that sounded strange in her mind, off-key and discordant).  Hannah remembered lying awake some nights when she was much younger, thinking the exact same thoughts as now –except those thoughts had been threaded through with a sort of buzzing dread, fear that she, too, was a Changeling. Then came her fourteenth birthday, and Hannah finally felt secure. Safe, and certain in the knowledge that, no, she was not a Changeling –she was human, completely and undeniably. Closing her eyes, Hannah slid down the wall until she was lying horizontally on the bed. She wondered if, when her parents had contacted the adoption agency, they’d inquired after the child with the highest probability of being human (most did). Had they-

A knock on the door startled her out of her thoughts.

“Come in,” she called, sitting up straight and reaching for the abandoned book to make it look as if the last thing she had been doing was dwelling on the events of the past day.

The door creaked open, and her mother stepped into the room. “It’s cold in here, Hannah! And your hair is wet –you’re going to catch a cold or something! D’you want a sweater?” The spiel began, and, for once, Hannah was grateful for her mother’s notorious motor mouth. It was a welcome distraction from her thoughts.

“No, mom. I’m fine.”

Her mother sat down at the end of her bed, making it dip slightly. “How are you feeling, honey?” She reached out her hand, wrapping it around Hannah’s and giving a gentle squeeze.

“Fine-I’m okay,” Not, she added silently afterward.

“Do you want to come down for lunch now? Dad made grilled cheese, though I don’t know if we have much ketchup left –we should probably have checked that beforehand. Dry grilled cheese is no fun at all. I suppose we could always-”

Hannah smiled weakly, and nodded. “’Kay,”

Dipping the edge of the sandwich in the veritable ocean of ketchup that threatened to take over the rest of her plate, Hannah watched her parents on the other side of the table with guarded eyes. Her father reached for a napkin, and wiped the ketchup off of his greying stubble.

“The school was quick to send in the brochures,” he ventured, gesturing to a small pile of paper pamphlets that Hannah had paid no notice to until that moment. She stiffened involuntarily, insides turning to lead. “I don’t think we’ll exactly be able to send you abroad, but it looks like there’re a lot of good options here in Canada.”

Hannah took another bite of her grilled cheese, as an excuse not to make a reply.

“We should probably take a look at them after lunch. Is that all right, honey?” Hannah’s mother smiled in her direction.

She shrugged half-heartedly, “Sure,” she answered, though what she was thinking ran more along the lines of no way, no, it isn’t- I don’t want to be shipped off to some stupid school full of… people like me.

“Great!” Her parents beamed.

After another, much slower bite (Hannah was resigned to drag out her meal as long as possible now), she nodded faintly, feeling slightly nauseous at the prospect.

The sandwich disappeared far too quickly, and Hannah was left staring despairingly at her plate. Exhaustion rose in her like a wave –the last thing she wanted to be doing right now was finding a new school to attend. But, it had to be done –Hannah recognized that she had to get back into school soon, or she’d be completely lost. There was no moping about for weeks (however much that option appealed to her), or breaking down and clinging to her parents and begging them to let her stay (which she would probably end up doing anyways). She had to keep her chin up, and learn to adapt. It would all turn out okay, in the end -she knew it would. (She also had to stop lying to herself).

“Okay, so there are five schools based in Canada. There’s one out in Alberta-“ her father paused, handing her the brochure. Cambury College, it proclaimed, in fancy navy-blue lettering. Underneath, there was an inscription in Latin –presumably the school’s motto, and a sentence reading ‘Second oldest school in Canada!’. Hannah wondered which was the first. She flicked through it absently, catching glimpses of old brick buildings and blue uniforms. With a grimace, she set it down. “-there’s one in New Brunswick –Almertin Academy, one in Quebec; Collège D’Orean-“ he handed her the brochures for those two schools. Hannah spared them only passing glances; there was no way she was going to school in New Brunswick, and she didn’t know nearly enough French to attend a school in that language. “Then there’s one out in BC –St. Michael’s College, and one here in Ontario –Petrichor Academy.”

Hannah took the two brochures, flicking through the one for St. Michael’s first, taking note of the pretentious red lettering on the front, and the rather decrepit state of the buildings, before picking up the final one with greater care. Before even looking through it, Hannah accepted the fact that this was the school she’d most likely be attending; all of the others were inconveniently far away. They could’ve been based in Germany, for all their accessibility to Hannah’s family. Her parents couldn’t spare a road trip to any of those places, and they certainly didn’t have the money for a flight to even be an option.

The brochure for Petrichor Academy was made of a thinner paper than any of the others, so much so that it was slightly transparent. The lettering on the front was maroon in colour, and underneath it was a simple crest; two diagonal lines splitting a shield into half, the top half home to a silhouette of a maple leaf, and the bottom harbouring three raindrops aligned in a triangle. Below it was the school motto, another string of what she presumed was Latin, and then an image of a stone building, with uniformed students of a whole range of ages and ethnicities walking around in the courtyard in front of it (it looked staged). Underneath it was printed, ‘Oldest school in Canada | established 1887’. That almost elicited an eyebrow-raise –that sounded old. Her high school had been built in 2001 –Petrichor was 114 years older than it, if her math was sound (which it rarely was). She flicked through the rest of the brochure, not feeling all too compelled to study it in any greater depth. Chances were, she’d have the next four years of her life to examine the actual school up close and personal. The thought made her stomach plummet uncomfortably.

Hannah set it down on the table gingerly. “Okay,”

Her father leaned forward. “Okay, what? Do any of them appeal to you particularly…?”

She leaned backward in her chair to counter her father’s movement, lips pursing into a thin line, trying to restrain herself from shooting back something biting. “Like I really have a choice,” She tried to keep most of the bitterness out of her voice, but failed miserably. Her mother’s brow furrowed down towards her eyebrows, and her father’s lips pursed into a thin line.

“Granted, but-“

“But, what? But, what?” Hannah felt her resolve dissolving; she made no move to fight it. “I don’t have a choice, so don’t make it seem like I do!”

“Fine,” her father answered calmly, anger at her outburst visible only through the tenseness of his shoulders, and the slightly cold inflection of his voice. “Okay, fine. We don’t have a choice, Hannah. You’re right. You’re going to Petrichor Academy, and you’re going to be boarding there, because that’s a worldwide policy. Apparently the parents of Changelings don’t have the capacity to care for their own children.” The anger in his tone became more visible as he continued speaking, the suppressed rage in his voice pinning Hannah to her seat.

She didn’t know how to respond. Tears began to well up in her eyes, spilling down over her cheeks, dripping off her chin and darkening her shirt. They were warm against her skin, salty against her lips. She made no move to stop them, didn’t even acknowledge their presence by reaching up a hand to wipe them away. Staring down at the table, she traced the grain with her eyes, following the dark spiral until there was nowhere left to go. She was backed into a corner with the world at her back, and there was nothing her parents could do about. This whole time, she hadn’t stopped to consider how they were feeling beyond what would directly affect her. And in that moment, Hannah hated herself, with a violent, burning passion. Hated herself and the entirety of the Changeling race, hated the beast living within her, threatening to crawl out of her skin and claim her body for its own.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, voice small. Never had she meant it so sincerely.