Detention (Axium)

Her steps resounded from the walls in the half empty classroom. She hated this room. She had been here too many times. Mort times than she was able to count. Blaire didn’t even know what caused her to be here this time. Honestly, she just couldn’t think of the thing that would have caused her teacher to punish her. She had just been plain honest and she had tried to step in for her friends. Well… maybe… just maybe she shouldn’t have called the history teacher an old hag who just wanted to boss around. But the teacher had been the one who started it. She had been the one to provoke Blaire. The brown haired girl sighed. Why couldn’t she just keep her mouth shut? Why couldn’t she just let go and let her teacher say whatever it was that she wanted to say? Blaire shook her head thinking about it. No actually there was a totally different question to be answered: Why couldn’t this old hag of a teacher just leave her alone? She had just been standing in the corner as always. She didn’t cause any trouble, she wasn’t disturbing class and she must have already explained for a million times that she just couldn’t sit down. She couldn’t and she wouldn’t and that was the end of the discussion. She had never sat down for at least two years and almost everybody surrounding her knew about this by know and more or less accepted it. Almost everybody… except for her history teacher.

It was supposed to be a regular school day. Blaire had managed to get through literature and math without any further problems when she made her way through the halls for her last class: History of Panem wasn’t exactly what Blaire would call her favorite subject. She thought it was plain stupid to hear about the past Hunger Games over and over and over. Wasn’t it enough that they were forced to watch other kids die in front of the cameras for everyone to see? No, apparently not, because during this class, they were forced to talk about every single Hunger Games there ever was. They had to talk about every single death and every winner and the mutts they used during these specific games and how the gamemakers designed the arena and so on. The teacher even had them make a model once of one of the arenas big enough that it would just barely fit into the classroom. There they were supposed to reenact the games with little dolls. Sick! That’s what this whole thing was. Sick! Who could blame Blaire, that she hated this class and that she hated this particular teacher?

It wasn’t the class or the subject that had caused Blaire to explode this time. It was that her teacher kept making these little remarks about her, standing in the corner. Just little words or short sentences woven into what she was saying. Little hints that just pissed Blaire off. She should have kept it together for five more minutes. Five more minutes and the bell would have ended the class and the torture and she would have been free to go. Free to go and leave this classroom for another week. But then, five minutes before the bell, the teacher looked at her, straight at her and said “You know, class, in the arena it’s the crazies that die first. Always.” What was Blaire supposed to do after hearing that? All of her friends were crazy in some way. Like Alta and her fear of time and clocks and her fear of injuries. She couldn’t even stand to see a paper cut on her finger without freaking out. Or April who couldn’t stand the figure 8. Math was hell for her. So in some way or another, all of Blaire’s friends were crazy. And there this woman was standing in front of the class, smiling big, telling them that it was Blaire and her friends that wouldn’t even stand the slightest chance in the arena. It wasn’t just the reason that she said it but the way she said it. The teacher was looking at the class the whole time but by the time she said crazies, her eyes were locked on Blaire. She was looking right at her, telling her that she and her friends would die the instant the Games began and that she, the teacher, would be kinda glad about it. Well, at least she wouldn’t care even the slightest bit. Maybe Blaire and her friends wouldn’t stand a chance, maybe she was right about that, but what were the odds when you were up against twentythree others, some of them trained to kill. The old hag of a teacher wouldn’t need to have said that. But she did and that was when Blaire lost it. She had started yelling and screaming… and eventually called her teacher an old hag.

So that was the story why she was in the half empty classroom pacing from one side to the other waiting for the time to pass so she could eventually go home. Blaire was just hoping that it was before nightfall, because if the stars would light up in the sky before she was allowed to leave and go home, she would have to hide in school. Not the nicest thing to look forward to.

Word count: 899