My eyelids felt unnaturally heavy, as if some supernatural force tried to close them.

I was not quite sure which force that was, there were a few that might be responsible, chief among them the borning, droning voice of Mrs. Glesmer, trying to impart some pointless wisdom to us. Assisting the force that was the sedating effect of her voice was the knowledge that school was virtually over, as evidenced by the hollers of joy and pleasure from the rooms around us, as the teachers had given out the report-cards and released their charges a little earlier, accepting the pointlessness of trying to teach the literally last class of the school year. But not Mrs Glesmer, she was the type of teacher that would give the complete class detention, keeping us longer than necessary, out of sheer spite.

Another force that might be responsible for my inattentiveness was the fact that it was warm, far too warm to think, which would make it hard to pay attention, even if Mrs Glesmer would be talking about something interesting. Which she was not. She never was.

With superiour willpower, I managed to drag my eyes from the spot on the wall they had inspected for the last minute or so, while my mind was drifting through a daydream to the clock sitting at the front of the classroom.

If anyone, ever, doubted relativity, I now had solid proof. There was no way that the class had only been in session for fifteen minutes, as the clock claimed, it felt like we had been here for at least an hour. Trying to keep my mind engaged, I looked around at my classmates, the same faces that had accompanied me the last two years, ever since I got to Highschool and who likely would accompany me the next two years. I could only see a few of them, all of them in profile, as my seat was next to the window in the front-row, normally a good seat, allowing me to either gaze out of the window or to keep my attention on the teacher but right now, looking out would only depress me, watching all students who had sane teachers, leave early was not fun, not while sitting here, listening to her drone on about the importance to keep up our work during the summer-break. Certainly, everyone would work on their french vocabulary, it wasn’t as if we hadn’t anything better to do. And if she believed that, I had a bridge to sell to her, she only had to get to Brooklyn to claim it.

I twisted a little, allowing me to see those behind me, realising that most of them were as bored as I was. For a second, I focused on Andrea Martolin, my personal nemesis of a year and a half, before letting my mind wander on. Maybe, this year would be the one that she followed in the footsteps of her great idol, Regina George, and get run over by a bus. Unlikely, but one could dream.

After a moment or two of pleasant visions of her, getting hit by a bus, playing out in my head, I focused on something more productive, like planning for the break. Sadly, despite the fact that I had no obligations I was not quite sure what I wanted to do. I had thought about getting a summer job, but there were few in the sleepy town I called home, more a village really. It was mostly a feeder-community for the nearby cities and without a car, it was difficult to get anywhere. Sure, there was public transport, but that had limits and, considering that I was spending little of my allowance, I didn’t really need a job, not to the point that I was willing to spent over an hour each day sitting in the bus, just to work. My father had suggested that I could help him go over some class-material, which sounded interesting, but it wouldn’t be anything that took up serious time, merely a few days of an ten weeks-break.

What made me more than a little sad was that, for the first time, there would be no family vacation, due to my brother leaving for University. He had managed to talk our parents into letting him take the car for a month, making a road-trip with his girlfriend and another couple, visiting important cultural sites.

Knowing my brother, they even would do that, but only for an hour or two during the day, afterwards, they would have fun.

That meant I would spent the whole break at home, or at least in the city, not going on vacation. And I knew that my best friend, Therese, would be gone for most of it, her family visiting her aunt. It didn’t sound terribly exciting but it beat staying at home. At least for the first two weeks.

After that, I would be quite happy to be at home or at least near a reliable internet-connection. In two weeks, one of the big three was releasing their newest VR-MMORPG, called Irminsul, mostly standard fantasy fare, but I was planning to convince my father to allow me to go full-dive on that one. No more perphing for me, even if it had its advantages.

My ruminations were interrupted when the small part that kept listening to Mrs. Glesmer reacted to my name being called.

“Ms Blake, your report card. Well done.” there were few people who could make the complement of “well done” sound like an insult, especially while handing out a good report card. It wasn’t as if I had slacked off during the year, I had done my work and the card showed it, with high grades in the all-important stem-classes and a few of the humanities. Granted, the grade she had given me was the lowest on the card, but I had passed her class, despite her command of the sedative voice.

“Thank you, Mrs Glesmer.” I replied, forcing myself to keep the acid out of my voice, knowing that she would remain our homeroom-teacher and that she was like an elephant, excellent memory and vindictive as hell.

She continued the slow task of passing out the cards and her caustic compliments, slowly making her way down the alphabet. But even the slow torture she was inflicting on us was coming to an end and after a “I wish you all a pleasant break.” in which she had packed as much “I hope you all die” as she could, we were free.

My first action was to take out my computer-headband, settling it on my head and instantly feeling the connection to the chip in my head. It was something I had had all my life, well, almost. My parents had had it implanted when I had been three so memories of the time before were sketchy at best, quite possibly phantom images my mind had made up when hearing stories about that time, it was impossible to know. And it hardly mattered, now that I had the headband on, I was able to interface the chip with the processors inside, allowing me to actually do something with it. Otherwise, it was merely an unplugged input/output device, completely useless.

The first thing I did was call up my music, filling my mind with tales from the elvenpath. The next was a quick check if my dear brother had been merciful and decided to get me, but sadly, my inbox was empty and I would have to take the bus, like everyone else.

Around the school, everything was the predictable mad-house as two-thousand students tried to either find the car that was picking them up, if they were lucky, or making their way to the bus-station that hopefully would have bus to carry them home. Somehow, every year the organisers of the madness managed to send not enough buses, causing annoyed students, who wanted to get home as soon as possible to vegetate on the couch, to complain to their parents, siblings or anyone with a driver’s license and a car, really, to get them from school, just like I had tried.

The chaos around school was testament of the fact that others had been more successful and calling the streets congested was an understatement. Still, I managed to get to the bus-station and was appalled by the amount of people there. There was no way that the normal buses would be anything but sardine cans, filled to the brim. For a moment, I considered trying to squeeze and muscle my way in but the idea of intense and prolonged body-contact with whoever stood next to me was not one I cherished.

Sending out a message to my parents that I would be a little late, I went to a nearby coffee-shop, finding it surprisingly empty, and got myself an iced coffee, before looking for a shady spot to wait for about an hour, allowing the chaos to subside.