Other Echoes

  *****

  Staley School was intimidating.

  It wasn’t just the sprawling bucolic campus or the hundreds of designer-clad teenagers that bothered Charlotte. Everything was different. Even her class schedule was confusing.

  Charlotte wished Emi were here to explain everything, and that they had at least one class in common. Emi was taking mostly honors courses, and Charlotte was, apparently, in the “remedial” group. The only time they shared was an hour lunch period at 1:30.

  Charlotte had so many questions about her classes. Her English teacher, Mr. Gephardt, kept talking about a “syllabus,” and she had no idea what that was. It sounded like some kind of rare disease. It took her fifteen minutes to figure out that “syllabus” was a fancy word for “a list of things we will do in this class.” Mr. Gephardt explained that they were going to read only plays and poems this semester. The only author Charlotte recognized on the list was Shakespeare.

  After babbling on about the importance of some mysterious thing called “office hours,” Mr. Gephardt looked at the clock and said, “Well guys, I hate to say it, but it’s time for convocation.”

  Before Charlotte could ask what that was, everyone started leaving the room with their backpacks. Charlotte didn’t know what was going on, so she grabbed her bag and followed the crowd across campus. Hundreds of students were walking en masse, like a giant game of the Blob. She noticed that all the students were pretty attractive in that well-groomed, sporty, prepster way.

  Apparently, the crowd’s ultimate destination was one of the school’s grassy fields. There were hundreds more people already congregated there: teachers with umbrellas, security workers in golf carts, high schoolers like Charlotte, and lots of younger students from the lower school.

  In the middle of the field was a marching band along with cheerleaders and teens dressed in military uniforms with rifles resting against their shoulders. Charlotte looked for Emi in the sea of faces, but there were thousands of people there.

  Her attention turned back to the field. The band struck up several songs. The cheerleaders waved their arms around while the school mascot came out: a big orange fish, bearing the sign “The Scaly Staley’s Noble Koi!” Then there some people came to mumble into the microphone. A trustee guy or principal or something was addressing the crowd.

  “The level of intelligence and dynamism that Staley students bring to bear never fails to impress me,” the man was saying. “I know there is not one student here today who does not have a unique gift to offer our learning community…”

  Charlotte felt pretty sure she had no unique gift to offer Staley, unless it was to boost the esteem of the other students’ with her comparative lack of intelligence.

  The senior class president went to the microphone next and the twelfth grade section of the crowd gave a roar of support. The president was a girl with curly black hair.

  “Without much further ado,” she said. “Let’s welcome in another fantastic year at Staley. We love it here – it’s Staley, the place that’s better than school!”

  The crowd went wild. Charlotte had never known kids to love their school so much. Frankly, it was a little bit creepy.