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Sociability

I let my eyes wander around the room, washing only over the jars of beasts that never came to be. Ms Gwendolyn Harper’s Year Twelve Advanced Biological Science, classroom number nine, right before lunch on a Thursday. The sides and back walls of classroom number nine are lined with shelves full of jars of preserved animals, all notable for one reason or another, and all collected by her on her own travels, as she’ll quickly tell anyone who will listen. The entire front wall from the ceiling to the floor is covered in one ancient blackboard, it’s had the same food webs and evolutionary trees drawn on it every year for every class since long before any of us existed. In front of the board lies Harper’s desk, which she uses as more display space for her morbid collectibles. It also holds a fish tank full of pond scum and tadpoles currently on the cusp of frog-hood. The room always smells old, but not in a bad way. Not stale, but well-travelled. Not like it’s dying, but like it has stories to tell.

The cavity in between all the chaos is filled with smaller desks, the habitat for us, the students. Two rows across and four rows deep for a whopping grand total of eight students taking this class, all thirsty for science, tantalised with the promise of a good university followed by a prestigious career. Eight is actually an unusually large number of university hopefuls in one grade for such a small town, or so we’re told, I wouldn’t know what it’s like anywhere else. I couldn’t tell you much about most of these people beyond their names. I