Show Me What You Got!

Ms. Fidget's Academy for Talented Psychopaths was nestled deep in the Kenai Mountains of Alaska. It was close enough to retrieve supplies from the nearby cities, but remote enough to evade detection. Dug 500 feet into the earth, its secrecy was secure.

The school was founded in the late 90's, following a promotion of sorts for Ms. Fidget. As she earned her name as a prominent CIA scientist, her work piqued the interest of the lads up top. The premise of her studies was that psychopathy was the defense reaction of a mind that was attuned to another dimension.

Her theories were put to the test, and the data was compelling. A correlation between psychopathic behavior and an affinity for interdimensional manipulation became clear. As did a remedy for these tendencies. Shortly after, Ms. Fidget was offered an interesting position.

She became the headmistress of the Academy for Talented Psychopaths. Ms. Fidget has been unlocking the true potential of young psychopaths for the government ever since.

^{Photo by Jerad Hill}

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The air burns when she breathes deep, Fia can feel the brisk wind on her face... just as long as she does not open her eyes.

Her long brown hair swirls in her minds eye, and she sees mountains in the distance. Luca walks beside her between towering pine trees, so very far from civilization. It begins to snow, and she reaches for his hand.

The morning bell is abrupt, shaking Fia back to reality. As she sits up in bed, she swears she sees her shaky breath hit the air. Pulling on her olive-green coveralls and braiding her hair down her back, she headed off to 'class'.



Dropping acid with breakfast wasn't much fun at first. Maybe it was the exercises, or maybe the drops themselves, but Fia had to get used to it. They were on day 3 of some new training, placed in dark rooms where it became hard to tell what was real and what wasn't.

In the endless and instant time that she spent there each day, Fia experienced hell and heaven in equal measures. Before they went in, they were lined up and stuck with electrode patches, rigged to a device that was taped to their backs.


^{Photo by Pawel Czerwinski}

Fia didn't pay much attention to most of the others, just the few she knew to keep an eye on... and of course, him. This morning Luca is two ahead of her in line, she tries not to stare at the rouge curl that's escaped from the bun he wears his dark hair in.

Then it's his turn, and he unzips his coveralls to get his patches, his bare torso gluing Fia's eyes to him. Maybe he could feel them on him. As he walks away he looks right at her, and just raises an eyebrow and smirks.



When Fia gets to the pitch-black room, the drugs haven't fully kicked in yet. For the third day in a row, she places her hand on the wall next to the door and starts to walk the perimeter of the room. She's yet to form a concept of the space.

Her legs hit something soft, pressing against her just above her knee. Her hands sink down to explore it, finding a soft bed. That is when they shock her the first time.

Then the sounds begin, Fia can't tell from which direction. They are inside her, and the room pulsates in the wake of the shock. She sprawls out on the bed, out of breath, seeing faces in the darkness. She loses herself in the commentary of disembodied voices which are partially familiar... Madness scratches at her brain.

Then they turn the light on.

^{Photo by Lacie Slezak}

The room is so much smaller than Fia would have believed previously. Aside from the bed she clung to, there was only a shoddy looking bookshelf inside. She didn't know the last time she held a book.

On unsteady limbs Fia shuffles over to gaze at the volumes tucked into the shelves. She knows these covers, they belong to the journals that she once kept. Suddenly, she feels exposed being off the bed. Grabbing a stack of notebooks, she hurries back to safety.

Opening her old confidants with shaking hands, Fia finds that all the words are wrong. The electrodes grip her with lightning fingers again, and she reads.

Her journals are all written in the loopy script she knows as her own, but the content has been replaced. Fia reads a scathing assessment of herself in her own voice, shocks punctuating the nausea that overcomes her.



When the lights flick off, Fia is indifferent. There is no change from dark to light to her anymore. She lays there and bleeds ego out onto the floor. After a while the acid begins to wear off; it was odd that they hadn't retrieved her yet.

When the door opens, she's ready to be escorted out, instead she's greeted by a lantern atop a tray. The guard carrying it eyes her up, before setting it down on the bed beside her. The steaming meal it held made Fia's mouth water, but worry overruled it.

"You were in the top 10% today, well done." He says in a gruff voice. Then he pulls a glass vial from his pocket. "Open up." He says. Each time she was dosed, they'd given her two drops. This time she gets four. "Eat up before it takes effect." He says, pulling the lamp from the tray.

The light flicks on in the room as he exits, and Fia feels her appetite dissipate.

^{Photo by John Thomas}

Fia understood now that time was an illusion. She could count the times that guards came in with food and acid, but it meant nothing now that she knew each moment was simultaneous. She'd eat, and then the darkness would come. The shapes in the nothingness didn't vex Fia anymore.

Pretty quickly the odd voices had nothing to say that interested her, she tuned them out. Until she began to hear a voice she knew, soft like silk against her tired mind. "I know you can hear me." Luca said. He sounded pretty frustrated.



As the days passed, Fia and Luca talked about everything that two people could, and many things most people wouldn't. They crossed each other's boundaries constantly, but it was playful to them. In the darkness of their separate rooms, they studied each other.

Soon they talked whenever they weren't sleeping, and it became obvious that the feelings they had developed for each other were far beyond romantic.

By the time their doors opened to let them out, Luca and Fia had made a brilliant plan. When they finally saw each other again in the school cafeteria, they didn't need to say a word as they sat across from each other. They simply stared into each other's eyes knowingly. Soon.

^{Photo by Caspar Rae}

Summer lessons found the students in a large gymnasium, Fia noticed that their number was significantly reduced. She could tell who the other 10% were; she could feel how each person felt around her. Although based in logic, this connection to others still somewhat disoriented Fia.

Well, all of them except Luca. He wasn't another person to her, they were one. Today they would use that to escape. As she stands beside him in the group of students, the teacher expounds on the methods of telekinesis. On balconies above, guards grip rifles with gloved hands.

She feels herself separate her essence from the plane these things occur on, Luca beside her as they slip into the true reality. The dimension they've lived their lives in dissolves, and when Fia refocuses on the room, everyone is frozen in motion.



As they walk through the silent halls of the academy, Luca begins to laugh.

"Let's grab some acid before we leave." He says, causing Fia to absolutely lose it. When she can catch her breath, she grabs him, pressing her lips against his passionately.

He pushes her up against the wall, and they get lost together for a time. It's hours later when they finally twist open the vault door of the exit. Sunlight hits their faces, strange after so long. The view is exhilarating, peaks of other mountains dotting the vast wilderness.

"I think we should leave them all frozen for a while, not like it will make a difference to them." She says, drinking in the way the sunlight hits Luca's face.

"That's my girl!" He laughs, and they walk off into their world.



This is my submission for Scholar and Scribe's invitational, which asked authors to write a short romance story with the theme "school". It's also the first fiction story I've finished in... ugh, weeks?

Romance stories have never been my thing, so it was fun to try a new genre. 💚