Mind Labyrinth, Book 1, Chapter 1 (Part 1)

Mind Labyrinth

Book 1: The Nightmare of St. Michael

Chapter 1: Innocence

Notes: This is largely unedited! I'm posting these to stay accountable for NaNoWriMo. This is mild at first, but oh boy, prepare for it to get worse and worse. I'll add appropriate warnings when it does.

Abandoned! That was the word young Vincenzo, armed with nothing but a pocketful of English words and an Italian-English dictionary, chose to describe his current lot in life. I am abandoned, deserted, stranded, and forsaken. My sadness is never ending.

***

"I know things have been hard for you, Vincenzo," the principal said. The steely tone suggested that he didn't know though, and that he was only saying so to get Vincenzo to stop crying.

Vincenzo continued to cry out of spite. He felt very small in the principal's office made of finely carved oakwood, with barely any rays of sunshine peeking through heavy emerald curtains. The chair he was sitting on was hard to get comfortable with. Although it had some plush padding, it was stiff, an illusion of comfort. Almost everything in this office was designed to let him know he was in trouble, and that the man behind the intimidating wooden desk was here to punish him.

"I know things have been hard for you. You just came from Italy and you miss your father, right? But here in St. Michael's Academy, we expect our students to adhere to a certain standard of conduct. You can't just go around skipping classes. What were you thinking?"

"I was thinking... Mr Romero very scary."

"Excuse me? What did Mr Romero do?"

"He said, Vincenzo, you English homework very bad, and then he read my bad homework in front class and said I was very stupid and no good at all. Everybody laugh at me! I don't know English very well. I don't know."

"So you skipped class because Mr Romero made fun of your English homework in front of everyone?"

Vincenzo nodded gingerly.

"Vince... you can't do that."

Oh. Vincenzo's lower lip wobbled. He knew the principal wouldn't understand, even if he told him. He sunk into his chair and let the principal finish.

"Now, listen. I know you're probably thinking... This is unfair. Why would he just let my teacher make fun of me like that? But that's real life, Vince. We're preparing you to take on real life. If you don't know how to handle a little teasing, what are you gonna do when you leave this school, huh? There are much, much worse people out there, Vince, and they're gonna eat you alive. If you just keep snivelling like that... fuck, I don't know. What do you think is gonna happen to you?"

Vincenzo simply looked at him with wide, teary eyes. 

"Answer the question, Vince."

"I will be... nowhere. If I no take jokes, I will end up in bad places, because everybody outside school will hurt me. You are very correct in everything you have said, Mr Bailey. Thank you for teaching me."

"You're just saying that to get out of this, huh?"

He was. Vincenzo frowned.

The lectures continued. Eventually, the principal ran out of steam and dismissed him. As Vincenzo shut the big, wooden doors behind him, he went down the carpeted hallway, feeling like his head had been stuffed with nothing but cotton.

He passed by ceiling-length windows on his way back to the boarding house. It was winter time now, and the entire courtyard was covered in a thin sheet of snow. Around the main fountain, several boys in thick coats were wrestling each other in the snow.

When he arrived at St. Michael's, it was a crisp autumn afternoon, and there were dead leaves being raked into piles by the groundskeeper. And now, it was winter. He could barely conceive that this was his life now. He supposed there was a part of him that hoped that one day, his father would realise his mistake -- that he intended for Vincenzo to attend an Italian school near the manor, rather than a private school the other side of the continent.

No such day came. Vincenzo received no correspondence from his father, even when his peers were getting postage for Christmas. His father didn't touch or look at his face the entire trip to England, and that was confirmation enough that he had been abandoned.

Vincenzo dragged his feet back to the primary school boarding house. Instead of individual or paired rooms, the elementary schoolers were roomed by class. There were bunk beds, and each room had at least twenty people each. Vincenzo's bed was at the farthest side to the left. The bedroom was empty save for a group hanging out at the middle. Their eyes followed Vincenzo as he made his way to his bed, but Vincenzo was too exhausted to pay them any heed.

As he climbed into bed, Vincenzo felt something squishy stick to his back. He sat up and checked. Sure as day, at the center of his mattress was a fat, wet turd. The group burst into laughter.

"Why!" Vincenzo screamed, the tears coming back again.

"Just little housewarming present, new guy!"

"Awful!" Vincenzo stood up and ripped off his bedsheets, throwing it aside. "Awful, awful, awful! All of you are monsters -- no, demons! I hate all of you!"

Instead of being deterred by this, the boys gathered around his bed, two of them blocking his exit, while the other one sat at the foot of his bed. They were all bigger and much taller than he was. He felt his hands tremble as they got in his space, and he looked away.

"What did you say about us again?"

Demons, his mind screamed. You're all demons. He was as sure of it as the moment he said it.

"Nothing," he said, eyes stinging with concealed frustration. "I was angry. I said things I did not mean."

The tallest boy shoved him. Vincenzo's back collided with his end table, the knob hitting him in the spine.

"What did you say!?"

Vincenzo sobbed and curled into a ball. He thought, briefly, about running out the door and looking for the closest authority figure, but he'd just been to the principal's office. The authorities weren't going to help him. The boys closed in on him. They said something, but Vincenzo didn't hear it. Instead of more violence, their leader knelt down and spat on his face. The three of them made their exit.

Nobody was going to help him.

Vincenzo sniffed, and picked himself up from the floor. He took yesterday's clothes from the hamper, washed it with soapy water, and cleaned up the ugly turd spot from the bed. Afterwards, he took a two hour bath at the communal bathroom, but, infuriatingly, the smell never came out of his fingers.

Eight in the evening. The supervisor gave his wrists five slaps with a ruler for not being dressed and ready when it was lights off. He then watched him like a hawk while he changed to his pajamas up until he climbed onto his mattress. It was winter, so the earlier wet spot wasn't close to being dry. It bit at the side of his shirt. All Vincenzo could think about was how he was lying down on dirty turd water. He spent two hours lying in the dark in discomfort until his exhaustion caught up to him and he was finally allowed to rest.

***

The cleaning lady was furious when she found the state of Vincenzo's sheets the next morning.

"You are such a bad little boy!" She slapped him across the face three times. His cheek tingled after. "You have no respect for the people that do all the work around here. Do you know how hard it is to wash all sixty boys' laundry in one day? And then you put a poo in for me?"

"I wasn't the one that put it in there," he said, voice breaking. "Why would I want to be dirty!?"

"You liar! That is the thing with you Italians, isn't it? You're all liars!" She grabbed a fistful of Vincenzo's hair and pressed his face against the bundle of sheets on the floor. "Smell that! Smell!"

He smelled it. It was as violent and sharp-smelling as the first time. He was going to retch. He teared up and sobbed under her iron grip, attempting to move his face away from the smell. She was much stronger than he was, and shoved his face in harder, getting some of it on his face.

"Ms Carolina, enough," the supervisor said. "Vincenzo has classes that he needs to get to. You can't waste all his time trying to punish him."

"Will he be punished, Mr Atkinson? I can't live with this spoiled little brat's antics any further!" 

"Rest assured, his father will hear of his behaviour."

"Good!"

She smacked Vincenzo's ass as he tried to leave the scene, then gathered up his bed sheets to be washed. Vincenzo joined the rest of his classmates for first period. His head lingered on his supervisor's words. His father will hear of his behaviour. He understood, right then, that he didn't get any correspondences from his father because he was a very bad, no good child at this special school he paid a lot of money for him to be able to attend.

***

Vincenzo slogged through another day of humiliation at school. He didn't do his homework again, so his teachers had a field day embarrassing him in class. It wasn't like he wanted to be bad. He wanted to do homework, but every time he looked at their workbooks, there were too many intimidating English paragraphs that he just felt like a dunce. He never did any of them correctly, anyway. School was a series of traps and he didn't understand any of it.

He should keep trying. Maybe if his track record improved, his father might visit him in time for Christmas. He considered doing homework at the primary school lobby, but he took one peak of the area and saw a bunch of little boys chasing and hitting each other. No thanks. He tried the library.

It was much more peaceful than he anticipated, but it made sense in retrospect. All the little boys of St. Michael were so rowdy. They'd never step foot in a library.

There was a singular person at the library aside from him, and he recognised him immediately. The student council president. Oscar Lamont. He was a senior at the school, and he held himself with a seriousness that most of the students in the school didn't. They called him the prince, and Vincenzo could see why.

"What are you gawking at, little boy?"

Vincenzo blushed. "How do you do it?"

"Do what?"

"Well, everybody here is so... they're mean, and they're loud, and the principal says to never let it get to you but it gets to me. But nobody ever bullies you... people are scared of you, in fact! How do you do it? How can I be like that?"

Oscar snorted. "I'm not going to lie. The first few years is going to be the hardest. That's going to be where your peers decide where you are at the hierarchy, and if you falter -- if you let them get to you -- you'll end up at the bottom."

"What's at the bottom?"

"The top is our teachers. They punch their students -- if not literally, then verbally. Then it's your upperclassmen punching their juniors. And then, people in your own class punching the least worthy of their social status. The bottom is the last guy that gets punched, and that's a miserable position to be because you don't have anyone to punch to exert your power."

"I think... I am there."

"My condolences."

"How do I get out?"

"I suppose, in my case, I worked hard to get to the top of the class -- academically, I mean. You won't be a target for teachers if you excel academically. In fact, you'll be the school's pride and joy, so you get more privileges than most."

Vincenzo squirmed. "What are your options... if you're stupid?"

Oscar raised an eyebrow. "You're not stupid. You can follow my explanation -- that's not stupid."

"I am very bad at English."

"That's not stupid. You just grew up with another language. You're that Italian boy, aren't you? I bet none of these guys know Italian. So when you get good at English, you'll have two languages under your belt."

Vincenzo's eyes were big.

"But if you're seriously asking..." Oscar sighed. "The only language these people understand is power. If you don't have mental power, then... physical."

"Like in fights?"

"Or pranks. Or words. I don't know. Get creative. It doesn't matter, as long as they're scared."

"Right, right..."

Oscar gave him a faint smile. "Keep working at it, alright? I'm graduating next Spring, so the prince's spot is going to be vacant. Maybe it'll be you up there."

Vincenzo beamed. Maybe if he was the prince, his father would be proud of him enough to visit and the other little boys would stop messing with him. It was something to work towards! He took his books and ran off to the corner to do his homework. He couldn't be the prince if he had bad grades.

It took him hours to get through the short story he needed to read for that night. He fell asleep on the library floor, clutching the short stories collection. He dreamt of a very clever fox who outwitted every stupid pig he encountered along the way.

In that dark room, eyes from every corner watched him sleep.