Chapter One: Touching The Exibits

Chapter One: Touching The Exibits
My name is Eoghan Merlyn, although many people call me by the anglicized Owen.

I'm twelve years old. Until a few months ago, I was a boarding student at Fairchild Preparatory, a private school for gifted, yet troubled, children on the coast of Maine.

Am I a troubled kid?

Yeah. I guess you could say that.

I could start at any point in my short pathetic life to prove it, but things really started going bad last November, when our sixth-grade class took a field trip to Lewiston - twenty-five mental-case kids and two teachers on a yellow school bus, heading to the Museum of Anceint Art to look at Celtic stuff.

I know - it sounds like hell. Most Fairchild field trips were.

But Ms. Callaghan, our Literature teacher, was leading this trip, so I had hopes.

Ms. Callaghan was this Scottish young woman. She had bright red hair that fell down her shoulders in ringlets and often wore a leather biker jacket that strangely smelled pleasant, like vanilla and jasmine. She was young and she taught kinetically and often joked around, so she was one of my favorite teachers. Ok, honestly, she was my only favorite teacher.

On the bus, I sat next to my only friend at Fairchild, Fredrick Valentine. Fredrick was small, scrawny and fragile, having an overall feminine appearance; with prominent ears that stuck out like a jackal's or a bat's. He has a rather cute upturned nose and somewhat thick, arched eyebrows, which he uses a lot when expressing himself. He had hazel hair in a faux hawk swoosh along with arched striking amber eyes that were light in color. His creme skin was flawless save for his cuts and scars he had gained over years of abuse.

Fredrick was always rather quite, shy and anti-social, and was bullied for being such. When began my year at Fairchild, I stood up to him, and since them, he was stuck to me like glue. As the year went on, he opened up to me and had gone through a full metamorphosis, when he's with me, he won't shut up. Along with being quite and shy, he was bullied for being homosexual. I didn't get why people had a problem with this, but although I accept him for who he is, he turned out to have a rather...perverted sense of humor.

On the ride to Lewiston, he kept rambling on and on about how he bumped into an "uber cutie" the other day and continued to make suggestive jokes. I was accustomed to his sexual comments, but his bully, JoHanna Halloway, ended up turning around and decided to verbally abuse him, like she always did. JoHanna had olive skin, black eyes and lank white-blonde hair. She has a triangular face and full lips. She was a pyromaniac that attended Fairchild because of her gift of dance, although sometimes I wonder if her parents bribed her way into Fairchild Prep, as her dancing skills were rather poor.

"Hey, Fairy! Why don't you go choke on something nice and thick!" She said, it was obvious what she was insinuating, and it seemed to irritate me more than it did Fredrick, who, although looked genuinely offended, yelled back, "Can't you see I'm trying to?!" JoHanna mumbled something under her breath and I caught the "F" bomd, a word that hurt Fredrick the most, mostly due to the history of the word.