"Strange School"

I think my school was the only institution in the world that didn’t want their students to graduate.
I assume the hope was that, by establishing a school, they could mentor the deliquent children and reform them into productive members of society.  As soon as you fit into the mold of normalcy, they joyfully escorted you out the door with praises and congratulations. It was a good thing to be taken out of a school.  The longer you stayed, the more years of training you had to go through, the more impossible you were.  If you reached eighteen and aged out of the system, you were truly criminal.  A lost cause.

My teacher had given me several lectures to that effect over the past few weeks leading up to the end of the year.  He told me that he had done all he could for me, and that if I didn’t heed his advice, I would officially join the ranks of the Unaccepted.  I would be a criminal, without any rights, destined to live in a concentration camp with similar like-minded individuals.  I would be an adult.

I didn’t remind him that I had been living in a concentration camp for the past six years of my life.  Being a minor hadn’t exactly given me any additional rights, beyond being forced to attend...

Copyright 2011 Aubrey H. (author of Red Rain)