"We know that the recent disappearances are a cause of concern to the student body, but rest assured the school police are on watch at all hours and we are doing all we can to keep the student body safe."
The loudspeakers blared all around the hallways and classrooms of Upsprings North High School, crackling through the air, almost incomprehensible to most of the students. Not that anyone cared anyway, most kids were much too preoccupied with anything but who won or lost the last football game or purchasing tickets for the upcoming school dance (which were rarely attended to anyone besides freshmen anyway), so when the announcement came over the system that another disappearance had occurred, few people heard it.
Not that people didn't know about it. Everyone knew about the disappearance of Amelia West.
Amelia had been a freshman, not a particularly outstanding girl in any way. She had a small group of friends and was not particularly well known among any student group before her disappearance. After the disappearance, however, a different story about her emerged. Amelia, according to reports circulating less than two days after the disappearance, had been beloved by all, a friend to everyone in the student body. She had apparently had several boyfriends, some of which were upperclassmen, and was apparently going to be the lead in the next school play (that no one had auditioned for yet). Amelia became a legend, just as Eric and Matthew and Kathleen before her. The four disappearances has all come since the beginning of the school year, and had raised alarms all across the country. Upsprings was a small town at the edge of a city and everything beyond it was patches of farmland and woods for miles and miles. Most people thought there was a murderer on the loose, one whose prey consisted of high schoolers and the occasional missing chicken (although those had always been common disappearances in Upsprings). No parent wanted their children walking home alone anymore, it clearly wasn't safe. However, that concern did not pass on to the high schoolers or middle schoolers of the town nearly as often as some parents may have wanted to believe, as no high school ever really believes that they are going to get kidnapped, killed, or in any other way mysteriously disappear. It's just one of those things that doesn't happen.
The mood of the students at Upsprings North High School wasn't really dampened in any form by the disappearances or the announcement broadcasted through the loudspeakers. Nothing could really dampen the mood of the student body on this day, because the last day of school before Christmas break is always one of the greatest causes of celebration in any school community. Nothing bad can ever happen the day before Christmas break.
In Mr. Marshall's homeroom class, a prime example, the small group of seniors taking A.P. Chemistry were already in party mode, each of them unwrapping a candy cane from Rachel Moffat (who based her entire year around Christmas time) and discussing plans for break.
"Anyone else want in on our yearly Rudoph marathon?" Elias asked, directing his question to the class. A.P. Chem, being a class made up entirely of well-performing seniors, was one of the most clique-y classes in the school. Anyone who had chosen to go the A.P. Chem route had to have first taken the required freshman and sophomore sciences (Earth Science and Biology), and then doubled up on Honors Chemistry and Laboratory Chemistry during junior year. The resulting class returning the following year for A.P. Chem was made up of ten seniors who spent the first two periods of the day in the lab and then recitation classes before returning back to the real world of high school classrooms. Because of the amount of time these students had spent with one another over the years, the class had, for the most part, formed all of their closest friendships with one another.
"You don't have a yearly Rudolph marathon," Anita called across the classroom at Elias, unwrapping a stick of gum from her backpack and sticking it between her mouth in between words. "A yearly marathon is something that you do every year! This is the first time you've ever had one!" Anita was leaning far back in her seat, her Chem Lab book opened on her lap to a random page as she drew pictures of octopi in the margins.
"Well so what?" Elias called back, "It is too yearly! This is just the first year!" There was a murmur of consent from Elias's close friend Kyle, who was always next to him, or texting him, during class. Anita shot back an artful "fuck that," and laughed, taking a pile of purple markers out of her bag to embellish the tentacles strewn across her page.
Jaylen, watching the dispute from the back of the room, gave an upward nod to Elias, "It start at eight again this year?"
"There is no 'again'!" Anita shouted, smacking a bubble that she had started blowing back into her cheek.
Elias ignored her, "Yep! My house, eight o' clock! Be there or be... your mom!"
Alice, sitting next to Jaylen, shook her head solemnly, "That was horrible, Elias. At least normally your 'your mom' jokes make sense..." she picked up her pen to go back to her notes on the Civil War over homework that she hadn't done, then turned to Jaylen, "Are you going, then?"
Jaylen nodded, "I figure I might as well," he said, "I already told my parents not to expect me home tonight, figured I'd stay here and finish up that lab report that I didn't turn in last week, then head over to New China for dinner. Meet me there?"
Alice tilted her head and glanced sideways at him, "You'll only pay for my dinner if it costs five dollars or less, wont you?" she shook her head, but replied, "Yeah, seven's when I get off of work. I'll head over after that." She stuck up her chin at him for a moment before going back to her work though, "at some point you'll have to treat me to some real food, you know. That's the point of being a girlfriend. You get to eat for free."
"Hell no," Jaylen protested, a defiant look on his face, "The point of being a girlfriend is so that you can bask in the glory that is me all day. Didn't you know that?" she rolled her eyes at him and he laughed, "Fine. I'll get you something this weekend. Saturday's Christmas Eve, we can head over to Uptown and go see what restaurants are willing to serve a couple of minors like us. That sound good?"
"Very much so," she replied. "I may even bring you back a cookie or two from work tonight." She ended the conversation by burying her head in her textbook, but not before Jaylen made a note that it should be a doughnut, not a cookie.
Mr. Marshall, seeing that the class was starting to feel like work, took the time to start up the day's power point lecture. That was how A.P. Chem was always taught during homeroom; with Mr. Marshall flipping through the slides of a power point, reading them off and adding little details that he considered important here or there. He taught not only A.P. Chem, but also two of the Earth Science classes and one class of Honors Biology. Most of the students had had him in previous courses and knew that none of his other classes were taught this way. They all had more activities, mix and match sorts of things and notes with fill-in-the-blanks. In Biology he ended up having to write most of the information on the white board for kids to really understand it. The A.P. Chem class always had a bit of secret pride that theirs was the only class that he taught this way. Theirs was the only class that was smart enough to learn the information simply by taking the notes and studying from them, the smartest students of Upsprings (with the exception, of course, of the A.P. Biology classroom, which had the same sort of elite feeling and always considered itself at war with the A.P. Chem kids). Mr. Marshall was in only his fourth year of teaching at Upsprings, but already he was well liked by the hardworking science kids (and extremely disliked by the slackers who ended up in his Earth Science class), as of the year before he had taken up the position of head wrestling coach (although none of the science kids ever really overlapped into that area), and of course, like all well-liked teachers at Upsprings, the principle seemed to hold a grudge against him. But no one really took the principle seriously anymore. Everyone (with the exception of his beloved football team) was simply waiting for him to retire so that they could get a principle who actually cared about the student body.
Jaylen took out his notebook and started copying down from the power point in the weird script that he had mastered over the years - backwards English written right to left across the page to avoid smearing over everything from writing left handed. A secretive smile played on his lips as he stuck his right hand down under the table, outstretched. His smile widened when his hand was met with Alice's left hand, although her face gave away nothing as she continued to take notes with her right. This had been their routine ever since they started dating and found themselves next to each other in Honors Biology.
The whole school now was counting down the hours until Christmas break, and even A.P. Chem went slow when compared with the excitement that was to follow.
