The Never

Miro leaned back. She watched a stunned Bartholomew-son-of- Hercules stumble back to his seat. The kids in the bleachers around her were still cheering, many of them leaning over to her to pat her on the back. She felt very good. 

Harpin leaned over. “That was WICKED! Holy crap Miro, you’re a LEGEND!” Miro laughed. As the chatter died down, Madam Berengaria and the prissy Dean of the School for Good continued talking through the school and the schedule and how things worked and all the useless stuff only readers didn’t know already. Miro didn’t listen, she had a better idea. 

Leaning over to Harpin, she said “Wanna bet who the readers are?”

Harpin snickered. “Sure.”

They spent the rest of the school meeting scanning the bleachers for kids who looked out of place. For the Evil readers, Miro ended up picking a black-haired, green-eyed girl who had a permanently sour look on her face. Harpin chose a wiry boy. For the Good, Miro chose a confused looking girl in an emerald dress. Harpin chose a girl in blue and white lace, with olive skin and dark brown hair.

“No way!” Miro had said. “She’s too pretty. That’s gotta be Snow White or someone’s daughter.”

“No, she’s a reader. Look how she’s sitting kinda apart from the others, and she keeps looking around like she can’t believe it. Trust me.”

Miro rolled her eyes. There was no way a girl that beautiful could be a reader. After the assembly was over, the students got up and left the hall. The students who had been placed in the School of Good were mere feet away from their shimmering palace, while the Evil students had to walk all the way back across the bridge to their looming black castle. 

Miromaximus entered her school through the main hall’s doors. The grand room was astonishing, made of pure obsidian, and the classrooms were perfect and well-maintained. But the dorm section of the building, which was its upper half (besides the tower, where the teachers lived, Madam Berengaria’s room and office at the top), the right for girls and the left for boys, was not. Miro trotted through her broken-down school, talking and laughing with Harpin all the way. The walls of peeling paint and spiderwebs were close together in the tight hallway. The floorboards seemed to moan beneath her boots as she continued down the halls, stopping at a cracked door with a rusted number 457 on it. She opened it and walked through.

The room had four, torn-up, moldy-looking mattresses on cracked, wooden bed frames, two on either side of the cramped room. The single window was grimy and stained, and the roof boards were simply falling apart. Miro shuddered as a rat scuttled under one of the beds.

“Well.” Harpin sighed. “It’s certainly a fixer-upper.”

Miro smiled. “Let’s get started."