After Mr. Booysen had so jovially left them to the terror of the unknown, the group soon found Mr. Faartz’s classroom to be abandoned. Slowly, they crept their way inside, like frightened mice on the lookout for predators. First peering in by the threshold, every student scanned the musky room before fully committing. Then, upon the impatient beckoning of the student behind them, each one got pushed inside and reluctantly found themself a seat.

When it was Nevil’s turn, he drew a deep breath and readied himself for the plunge into the abyss. In one motion, he forced himself inside. As he tread through the threshold, it was as if he had just stepped through a portal and entered into a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

Immediately, the overwhelming musk of burnt tobacco smacked him right in the face and, judging by the expressions of everyone else, he realized he couldn’t avoid it anywhere in the classroom. Mr. Faartz was a known chain-smoker, but he never thought it would’ve clung to every surface of the classroom.

The oaken floor was sticky with half-dried glue, random off-cuts of wood lay strewn everywhere- on the desks, beneath the stools, on the steel cabinets- and whiffs of sawdust lightly blew over the entire room, much like the ashes that settle over a city after a nuclear blast.

As Nevil processed the carnage that lay before him, he heard Stephanie give a squeamish cough, probably from the dust and heavy stench of tobacco. He regained all his focus and looked before him to see how she was kicking aside blocks of wood to clear a path to the nearest desk.

“How is this even legal?” she whined, dragging herself across the length of the desks to make room for another two students to be seated. “There must be at least a handful of safety infringements here!”

Nevil dropped his backpack beside the desk and scooted in next to her, amused with how disgruntled the once-defiant girl was with this change. “Well, Mr. Faartz is the school’s designated safety officer.” He winked and gestured around him. “If these conditions are satisfactory to him, then I guess they should be good enough for us.”

She looked at him disgusted. “You’re a real ass, you know that?”

Taken aback at her overt hostility, Nevil brushed it off. “Oh come now…didn’t you tell me just a few minutes ago that ‘the situation is what you make of it’?”

She scoffed at him and looked out the window beside her, as if longing back to a better past. “…That was before we got sentenced to Shawshank here.”

Nevil snickered with a bitter-sweet satisfaction. Sure, this pompous prima donna got what was coming to her. But all the same, so did everyone else -including him. Class by Mr. Faartz is a punishment to all, not just the wannabe-architect-feminists of the world. He looked at her again, hoping to sympathize with her this time. “It must be tough for you, though. How are you coping?”

Briskly, her voice shut him down. “Nevil, what are you talking about?”

Immediately, he realized she was just trying to be stubborn. Stephanie had always thought herself to be better than the rest. But what gnawed at him was that even now she would pretend to somehow be above everyone else, despite the common struggle they all shared. “Are you seriously denying it?” he asked with an air of agitation.

“Denying what?” she asked coldly.

He studied her more closely now and noticed she wouldn’t even dare to look away from the window as she spoke to him, as if everything and everyone around her was simply too undignified to rest her delicate eyes upon.

Why you smug little- Nevil felt the rage swell inside him. But as quickly as it rose, so quickly did it die down. Stephanie was still a small, immature child on the inside, he realized, it wasn’t fair hold her to his standards. If anything, he had to be like an older brother to her.

And that’s when the mischievous excitement arose in him. For what do older brothers do best?

Irritate, annoy, infuriate…

“Well,” he said smugly, readying himself for the little bit of fun he could afford. “I could only imagine that this new reality must be hitting hard.” As Nevil spoke those words, he saw her body wriggle upright in protest, yet she still wouldn’t look at him.

“This unforeseen change of circumstance doesn’t deter me in the slightest,” she answered courtly, as if answering a formal inquiry. “Reality remains unchanged-” 

“Really?” he whispered, leaning in as to rub salt on the wound. “Because to the rest of us…it looks like reality just hit you harder than our school bus hit Benny Babington last year…”

Stephanie gasped. “How dare you compare me to that crackhead? His accident with the bus was entirely his fault.” She drew a deep breath. “I, on the other hand, am a victim of circumstance…we’re nothing alike!”

Nevil sank back into his seat, satisfied. “Well, at least in his direst moment he had the sense to ‘brace for impact’- something you never did.”

Stephanie stood up from her chair and frantically gestured all around her. “Well sorry for struggling to cope with all this chaos! How am I the only one that’s a little unnerved with everything we’re put through?!”

Nevil snickered and rested his hands behind his head. “Oh no, Dearest, you misunderstand the situation.” He swiveled his head back to look at everyone in the classroom. “We’re all shell-shocked, just like you. But our PTSD will come after we’ve survived this. If you let yourself go now, there won’t be much of you left when that time comes.”

Looking at the fury build up inside her, Nevil realized that nothing he said seemed to satisfy her holy discontent, and nor was it intended to. He hardly ever found pleasure in the struggles of his fellow students. After all, they were all in this together…That is, of course, except for Stephanie -the pompous, inauthentic control-freak that she was.

So, in this particular instance, it was all Nevil could do to watch as Stephanie worked herself up, much like an old computer being unable to process a faulty equation that won’t make sense. Eventually she will all burst into flame.

 “But how can you seem so at ease with all this?” she said defeated, gesturing to Nevil as if his reaction to their circumstances was totally unacceptable. “Look at you…it’s like you don’t have a care in the world.”

Nevil nodded and slowly sank onto the desk to lay on his arms. “I guess we’ll call it the ‘calm before the storm’,” he said, closing his eyes. “You’ve never met Mr. Faartz, but I’m sure you’ve heard the stories…I’m drinking up every last minute of peace and joy while I still have it.”

“What peace and joy?” she demanded, almost furiously. “I’ve been ranting beside you like a lunatic for the past  5 minutes!”

He opened an eye and grinned. “I guess we’ll call it my guilty pleasure…”

Stephannie clenched her teeth, unable to voice whatever words she wished to swear at him. But after a few moments, her jaw relaxed and she drew a deep breath, looking disappointed. “Spoken like a true pleb,” she told him. “You’d rather just sit defeated and hope to pass the time by distracting yourself with whatever meaningless idiocies comes to mind- instead of adopting responsibility and being the change you want to see.”

Nevil grunted. “And how’s that mentality helping you out here, right now?”

There was a moment of silence, soon filled with a determined sigh. “I’m still working on it…but anything’s better than just doing nothing, like you are right now.”

Nevil opened a tired eye to look at her. “Do you get some sadistic enjoyment from finding ways to look down on other people?”

She mocked his voice in disagreement. “I guess we’ll call it my guilty pleasure…”

And with that, Stephanie stomped her heels in the floor and brush past him. “We are you going?” he asked, looking up tiredly.

Stephanie marched past all the desks to the front of the room. “Mr. Faartz is 15-minutes late for his own class!” She looked back at Nevil smugly. “You see, I’m already miserable, but if his absence is what gives you joy, I wouldn’t want us to be another minute without him.”

And in an instant, she resumed her earlier innocent, schoolgirl-allure and tried to get the class’s attention. “Now where can I find our new teacher? I’m just so excited to learn more about-” she couldn’t hide the disgust in her mouth as she spoke it “…c-carpentry…”

Upon hearing this, Nevil rose in his seat. “Steph, I wouldn’t do that if I were you-”

“We saw him outside behind the classroom,” one of the other students called out. “They say he goes there to finish his cigarettes.”

Stephanie snapped her fingers and shot upright, like a teacher delighted to hear the correct answer. “Excellent. I shall then go and fetch him for us.”

Nevil took off his glasses and hid his face in his hands. Oh no…

As she marched out of the classroom, he drew a deep breath and let out a tired sigh, talking to himself. “You tried to warn her, Nevil, you really did…”

Then came a sudden, high-pitched scream…