December 20 | Friday #4
Every BHA student was required to cultivate extracurricular activities, which was just a fancy way of saying they had to join at least one club.
There were a ton of them. Some were more like activist groups dedicated to pressing issues.
Of course, there were also the traditional clubs—sports, music, dance, and others dedicated to popular hobbies.
Will had been super interested in the anime club, but its leader, Jonas Hale, had made fun of him during his first year, so he’d ultimately decided against it.
He wanted to join the same club as Dan, but Dan had opted for the Tech Club.
He claimed it was because of the flexible hours, but honestly, he’d always had a knack for that kind of stuff. Unlike Will.
So Will ended up here. In the Literature Appreciation Club, run by a couple who were a year older than him—Alana Gibson and Joan Birk.
They met on Wednesdays, twice a month, in the school library, of course.
The club was small, with only twelve members, though meetings rarely had more than five people.
Will always came, even though he didn’t read much.
Maybe that was why he felt obligated to attend.
Since he was such a useless member, he could at least boost the attendance numbers.
He wasn’t a fan of books. At first, he’d tried to read the titles the group selected, but he quickly gave up due to a lack of time.
He wished it was that noble lack of time—the kind spent on studying, working, or other extracurriculars.
In reality, he just preferred doing other things.
Even if that other thing was rewatching the same show for the tenth time.
“…is one of the most interesting characters. The depth of her transformation reveals…”
It was getting harder and harder for him to concentrate.
The flickering fluorescent light above his head intensified his distraction.
His gaze began to wander involuntarily around the room.
They weren’t alone. Students looking for books moved between the shelves.
A small group had gathered in a corner, probably working together on a project.
Suddenly, his gaze landed on someone who was looking at him.
Will instinctively looked away, as one does, but when he glanced back at the petite Asian girl a moment later, she was still staring at him with a strange intensity.
She looked familiar. They’d probably had a class together last year, but for the life of him, he couldn’t remember her name.
Amidst his growing embarrassment, he decided to smile. It went unreturned. Will cleared his throat quietly. He stopped looking, but he could still feel her eyes on him. And a sense of anxiety that was disproportionate to the situation.
The fluorescent light above his head gave up the ghost with a loud pop. Will flinched instinctively, looking up.
“Will,” Joan said.
“Yes?” he replied, startled.
“What did you think of the book?” she asked. She sometimes tried to draw the less active members into the discussion, which was why Will always did a little prep by reading summaries and reviews.
“It was great,” he answered, too thrown at the moment to manage anything more.
“What’s your take on Jacob? Or did another character resonate with you more?”
“Uhh… I think…”
He trailed off when he noticed the Asian girl walking past them. She wasn’t looking at him anymore, but now he, for a change, couldn’t tear his eyes away from her.
“Yes?” Joan prompted, a hint of pity in her voice.
“Everything was cool,” Will said, swallowing nervously. “The characters and… and the whole book.”
Joan just smiled. She didn’t ask him any more questions. Thank God, because Will was still completely thrown for a loop.
He could feel that something was wrong.
October 3 | Thursday
Autumn hadn’t settled in yet. It was sunny and hot outside, probably nicer than it had been in August. Will would have loved to go out in shorts and a thin T-shirt, but considering the circumstances, he opted for dark jeans and a nice short-sleeved button-down.
He peeked into his roommate’s room.
“Danny!” he called out, seeing him still lying in bed. “Wake up.”
Danny rolled onto his side to face him, grumbling, “Yeah… no thanks.”
“Danny, I’m serious! Move your ass, or we won’t make it!”
“I’m not planning on making it.”
“What?”
“Some crappy field trip, seriously?” Dan mumbled, annoyed. “Are we in elementary school or what?”
It wasn’t a field trip, it was a school-organized visit to Kubrick Corp.—the largest private research facility in this part of the country!
“It’s going to be awesome,” Will insisted, not understanding his friend’s lack of enthusiasm. “They probably have some badass machines. And they conduct all sorts of twisted experiments. There’ll definitely be something to see.”
Danny yawned ostentatiously.
“Besides, we have to think about internships, right?” Will reminded him. Over the course of their education, they had to complete a total of twelve months. “Is there a better place than KC? I heard they pay their interns. And pay them well.”
“Dude… you’re getting way too hyped,” Dan stated, without a shred of enthusiasm.
“You think it’s going to be amazing, but they’ll just show us around one factory, throw some scientific jargon at us, give us a brochure, and tell us to get lost. And an internship?
Seriously? Guys like you and me don’t stand a chance.
They’ll handpick the top two percent of students with the highest grades in fields that interest them, make them offers, and that’ll be it. ”
“So you’re not going?”
“Nope.”
“You know we have two hours of literature before we leave, right?”
“I’ll get the notes from you,” Danny mumbled, pressing his face into the pillow.
“Suit yourself. But just so you know, when I’m the director of research at KC in a few years and you’re wondering how it all happened, remember this day.”
Danny started laughing.
Will went to school. Of course, he didn’t really think he’d manage to get an internship at KC.
Dan was right; they picked the best. That didn’t change the fact that he was genuinely excited about the trip.
Though he supposedly had a mind for the humanities—science and math had always given him trouble—he actually found them far more interesting.
He imagined it would be cool to see the factories and labs and hear about what they produced there.
After literature class, Will joined the large group of sophomores gathering in front of the school.
Under the supervision of a few teachers, they set off for the Kubrick Corp.
facility. On the way, Will sent Danny a text letting him know he’d go to the store afterward and asking if he wanted anything.
He had barely put his phone away when someone slammed into him. He heard a characteristic sorry near his ear and immediately scowled at Liam, who pushed past him to join Blake up ahead.
Will had no idea what was up with those assholes.
Blake stared at him at every possible opportunity.
Sometimes Will felt like he was being followed, because suddenly he wasn’t just seeing him in their shared classes, but during almost every break.
Maybe he was becoming paranoid, or maybe Blake was trying to intimidate him.
There were people who would kill for that kind of attention from Alden, but Will wasn’t one of them.
Blake was the worst. Will had no idea how he hadn’t seen it before.
He didn’t want to accept that he’d been shallow enough to ignore Blake’s rotten character just because he was attractive.
Alden wasn’t just unpleasant. He was straight-up nasty, sometimes even crude, especially toward girls, with whom he seemed to have a particular problem.
The only upside to the current situation was that Liam had finally learned to aim for the hoop and wasn’t pelting him in the back anymore.
The visit to Kubrick Corp. was exactly as he had imagined.
They were divided into smaller groups. Each was taken to a different building.
A well-informed assistant guided them, explaining the functions of the various departments, rooms, and machines in a professional and polite manner.
Will was in heaven. The only thing that annoyed him was Norma Reed, who was giggling and whispering right behind him, apparently having made it her mission to flirt with two guys at once.
Finally, all the groups merged back into one, gathering in the main building, in a huge production hall filled with dozens of different machines.
A man in an elegant, navy-blue suit was standing on a mezzanine.
When he was signaled that everyone was present, he smiled broadly and descended the metal stairs, stopping about halfway down.
“Welcome,” he said. A small microphone was clipped to his shirt, so despite the noise of the machinery, his voice carried clearly from speakers placed throughout the room. “My name is Nathaniel Kubrick.”
Will was impressed. He hadn’t expected to see the owner of the company in person.
Kubrick looked to be in his mid-thirties and wore glasses.
His short-cropped hair was a distinctive purple hue, which always surprised Will.
The man seemed quite formal, so the brightly colored hair didn’t seem to fit his image.
Applause broke out in the hall, but the CEO silenced it with a wave of his hand.
“There’s no need for that,” he said, still smiling warmly.
“I should be the one welcoming you in such a manner—you, the future of this world, of our city, and, hopefully, our company. Your generation is burdened with a special kind of weight. You stand at a crossroads. At the intersection of worlds. In an age of such rapid scientific discovery, it is easy to reduce every wonder of nature to a few elements, feelings to chemicals, the principles of the world to a string of characters. You must therefore answer the question for yourselves…”
“Will.”