Mondays. Why did it always have to be Mondays? When it was Monday in New York, the one thing you could hear louder than the birds and the bees, were the yellow taxi cabs as they honked their way holding on to the life of others at the palm of their hands. But you didn’t have that problem as you drove into the parking lot at St. Clarence. The entrance lead into a parking lot, expansive enough to fit about 100 cars into it, and that was just for outsiders, there was a separate parking within the campus as well. 

Where the parking lot ended and the school began, well that’s where she stood, at the entrance to one of the most prestigious schools in America. The walls were nearly 20 – 25 feet tall, but her perception of height, standing at barely 5”2’, was safe to say very skewered. The walls were brick lined, old but irreplaceable in terms of character and quality. The gates though, reinforced welded metal, had recently been painted black, and the metal laced and twined into the insignia of the school, a very complex C on a shield held by lions. One both of the pillars that held the gate, white marble reinforcements of the insignia with the school motto written underneath. 

To the right hand side of the gate – a little old box of marble, with the names of the people who started the school and those who contributed to it, financially of course. Bella didn’t read. She knew it would look stupid for caring, and decided to google it at home, but somehow knew she’d forget about it when she did get home, just like everything else she wanted to do. To the immediately left, a huge building, fancier, newer versions made to look like the same bricks laid out years ago, and then stopping abruptly, and ending in what would seem like the forest a murder victim in CSI would run through, just to be stopped another mile away by another building, and furthest away, Bella saw something that caught her eye, something she remembered hadn’t been on the website, and began making her way to it. 

Bella walked on, looking at the amount of people. If she didn’t have her iPod on playing through her noise cancelling headphones, she might have just run back out. There were just so many people, walking around, taking pictures, some with professional seeming cameras even. All wearing the same clothes, like clones, except for the few with different hair, glasses. They all looked the same though. As she walked on she stopped at a discussion with several people, who looked like seniors, on chairs neatly placed in a circle around a large tree, in it’s shade though the sun was yet to come out on this lovely September morning. 

She walked past them, looking at her phone, deciding to play Smells like Teen Spirit as she walked on faster now, bobbing her head up and down, when she suddenly felt an onrush of air that made her freeze. A basket ball flew right past her face, and for a second she was stuck between a scurry of several very large boys trying to grab for one thing all at the same time. By the time they were gone, she was happy it wasn’t her they were trying to grab, when she slipped the headphones down and saw it.

The working bells of the Church rang, and she turned off her headphones, silented her cell phone and kept it in her bag before walking in, deciding to spend some time there, having come early to her first day of the new school. It was expansive and known to be sending out college ready students who, in most cases, did very well, and had a successful career. She went to the Church and dipped her hand in a little chalice of water, loving the cold feeling against the tips of her fingers and went to sit in a seat.

She sat there till a bell rang – and that wasn’t that of the Church’s. She came out and took out her cell phone, which with it’s GPS facility and the School’s functioning Application, lead her straight to her first class. There were small introductions, the teacher, the person sitting beside her, and then it began. It’s a rat race. Agnes had called it, and she realized what she meant when several students methodically wrote on paper while others began pattering at their keyboard. “Welcome.” The teacher said, staring at her, “To St. Clarence High.”