"So we all know our dear Magnus… right?", Henry asks the class with his hands at his back. He brings his hands forward and in them, Magnus' diary was being held captive. Favour Dola who sat in the front row, tuts, shaking his head to everything Henry was doing.
Magnus covers his face with both his palms in shame and embarrassment. Could this day get any worse? He wonders.
"I am so screwed", he whispers to himself, his palms still covering his face as his elbows rested on the table top. "Somebody please kill me now" he whispers again, his eyes closed with his lips sucked in tightly. He takes a look at what was going on by spreading his fingers slightly open and peeking through.
Henry opens Magnus' diary.
"So our dear Magnus has a crush on one of you ladies and well, since he's too shy to express it to the actual person, he decides to express it to his diary, an inanimate thing" Henry says, waving the diary in the air. "So today, we all will find out what secret this diary holds". Henry begins to open the diary.
"Ugh, who still uses diaries?" Sabine Wult scoffs.
He randomly opens up a page, the same one he read before, with the poem titled 'Her Name'. The noise in the class begins to grow as murmurs of wonder spread across. Henry clears his throat and briefly looks at Magnus with a dirty smirk. His head was down. Magnus was feeling tortured and it was pure enjoyment to Henry, food to his soul and satisfaction to his ever so growing sadistic desire. Henry was just smiling unendingly. Anthemon looks at him and scoffs. "What's his problem?" she whispers to nobody in particular, rolling her eyes over.
"He's a bully and he seems to be doing his job quite well", Sabine suddenly whispers into her ear, startling Anthemon a bit. Sabine then goes back to her seat. Anthemon could tell something was wrong with Sabine and it had something to do with her. This was because, on a normal day, Sabine would hardly engage in a conversation with her. Not that they were enemies or anything, but they weren't friends either, just classmates. Something was definitely up and it was slowly starting to creep Anthemon out.
Henry, still in front of the class, clears his throat again. He asks, "Anything to say to us Magnus?", looking at an upset Magnus with his head still down. All heads were turned to him and he just raises his right index finger, swinging it from left to right again and again. He basically said a no without having to talk because he was too embarrassed to do so. The embarrassment he felt left him paralyzed and he could do absolutely nothing about it. "Okay! Let's get into it" Henry says to the class, all heads turning to face him again.
"So this is a poem by Magnus Kwabena Pais and it's titled 'Her Name', basically the name of the person he has feelings for. We all know he won't ever get to be with that person but let's allow Magnus to indirectly shoot his shot. Here it goes…" he says, looking into the diary. He starts to read,
"Anthemon…", the whole class gasps, heads turning slightly to face Magnus whose head was still down. Anthemon herself looks at Magnus with a broken hearted face. She hated Henry so much and Henry himself knew it. She had to help Magnus somehow and lo and behold, the perfect plan came to mind.
"…name of flowers" he continues
"Anthemon, name of peace
One which could bring down hearts of towers
Unchanging, for no one to please
Eyes, brightest amongst all lights
Lips, so carefully and perfectly carved
With love so eternal"
The class goes dead silent, so much so that even a thread's fall to the ground would echo so loudly. The students were paying so much attention and Magnus grunts silently. He felt sick, like the whole world was about to swallow every bit of his pathetic being. Magnus, however noticed how much the students paid attention to what Henry was reading. They seemed to be into it and they seemed to like it… just seemed. Henry himself, wore an interesting face as he read the poem, for the second time that is. Magnus raises his head slightly to look at Anthemon who also seemed captured in the apparent spell his poem had casted over the whole class. He puts his head back down, crossing his arms over in front of it on the table.
"Anthemon, name of gold
Anthemon, name of perfection
One which could redefine nations of old
Being that wave of change, perfection's reflection
Redoing the broken
With peace in her, forever dwelling
Anthemon, Anthemon, name of might
Anthemon, Anthemon, I love you just right"
Henry finishes reading and the class is still just as silent with Magnus' head still down.
Away from school, Margot walks with a group of girls towards a tall man sitting in front of a house around the community's boundary. After the community boundary was the woods and no one wanted to go there. As the girls neared the house, one of them pointed out how this was a bad idea but after they got close enough to see the man she began to drool over him.
"Heyyy Mister, so umm… we just wanted to say hi and just engage in a conversation with you" Margot said, her voice slightly nasal.
"Yeah, you're really cute" said one of the girls.
"Like, so hot as well. You're a straight ten" another girl said, also making her voice a bit nasal.
There was something about these girls and a nasal voice that put the man off. The man, who looked in his thirties got up to his feet and one girl gasped and whispered "Oh My Gosh, he's so tall" whilst giggling. Surprisingly, the man greeted Margot.
"Hello Margot" he said to her.
"Umm, how do you know my name?" she asked with a bit of rudeness in her voice whilst doing the whole nasal thing again but there was a hint of sarcasm.
"OMG, that is so hot" one girl said with a nasal tone.
The man brushed the question away and invited the girls in. They start to engage in a conversation and halfway through, Margot gets up.
"Where are you going?" one of the girls asked.
"Oh I'm just going to the washroom" Margot replied.
"But you've never been here before, how do you know where the washroom is?"
"Instincts, I guess" Margot replied, exchanging suspicious questionable looks with the man. It was almost as if they both knew what they were doing. Something smelled fishy between those two. Margot leaves and takes a lot of time. Meanwhile, the man converses with the girls and they are so in love with him that they don't realize how long it has taken Margot to return. The man, during the conversation, seems to take an awful lot of interest in Sabine, their classmate.
"You're a psycho too… mmm" one of the girls said, biting her lower lip and looking at him up and down, batting her heavy eyelashes at him.
The three girls, excluding Margot, knew that they had to miss school to enjoy a conversation with this guy. They knew that this wasn't time to be wasted because they paid Margot to show them the way. Among the three girls was Elaine, Sabine's childhood best friend. They were no longer friends because she called the friendship off. Sabine asked her what the reason was but she never told her. They officially stopped speaking after that. A traumatic experience led to her distancing with Sabine. When they were kids back then, Sabine would invite Elaine over every now and then to play. One afternoon as they were playing hide and seek, she, Elaine, went to hide in an eerie room which looked like it was left open unintentionally. The door to the room was covered with a very convincing curtain which blended in with the surrounding quite well. She was just a child and obviously she saw nothing wrong with that as she thought that would be the last place Sabine would check, eventually making her the winner of the game. As Elaine hid there, a foul smell raced past her nose and she looked behind her. She covered her nose and mouth with her left palm as she waved through the air with her right, squinting her eyes. There was a coffin-long box, placed firmly against the wall. Elaine figured that would be the source of the foul smell. She opened it and what she saw changed her life forever. In that coffin-like box, sat lots of human body parts and animal parts as well. She as young girl didn't know how to react to that or what to even think. She just screamed, locked the door, covered it with the curtain and ran away. Sabine however, saw her running and shouted to her that she got her real good but Elaine would rather lose the game than to lose her sanity. Ever since, anytime she heard of or thought of Sabine, that horrific image made its imprint strongly on her mind. So, her conversation with the man felt like a therapy session to her as she herself didn't really talk about Sabine that much. She was very careful not to tell the man about her traumatic experience because that would just be horrid. She talked about how fun Sabine used to be, what she loved to do in class, which was nothing but to invade people's privacy every now and then and a whole lot. She found herself talking about how she thought Sabine was a crazy girl but after she got to know her better thought otherwise. Even though Elaine cut off the friendship she had with Sabine, she still in her own way cared for her and pointed out how she thought her friend was going through so much but didn't have anyone to talk about it with. Elaine wanted to be there for Sabine again but whatever she saw in that room was forever stuck with her. She had a burden of her own and it wasn't in her power to carry Sabine's as well.
Elaine feels relieved that she was able to spill all that out but there is a sense of pain due to the petrifying images in her mind.
The man receives a phone call and all he says is "yes", ending the call. So mysterious. Elaine looks at his dark skinned muscles as they grew when he raised the phone to his ear. She didn't want to directly admit it but sleeping with this man would put all her pains away, she thought. Suddenly, Margot walks in and tells the girls their time was over. The girls paid for only two hours with the man and indeed, Margot kept her word. Each girl came out of the house happier than never before.
"Hey! Wait!" a voice calls out. Running toward the girls, was the man, holding a phone in his hand. He asks who the owner was and Elaine checked the phone to see whether it was hers and it was. She takes the phone and the man places his hand on Elaine's shoulder. They lock eyes for some time and he heads back. Elaine looks back to the girls who start giggling.
Margot smiles, but it's not a full happy smile, there was a bit of fulfillment in there, like there was a goal accomplished. A motive that only she seemed to know. The girls question what made her take so long in the washroom and she simply says, "A girl's gotta look hot every time"
They all giggle and head back to school.
They get to class somewhere around noon and the teacher questions their lateness. Margot acts sick and tells the teacher she thanks God her friends were there for her otherwise she would have died. The teacher, with a soft heart, smiles and tells the ladies to take their seat. The ladies however, notice something odd in the classroom. Anthemon was sitting with Magnus and she had her head resting on his shoulders. Magnus was also holding hands with Anthemon. The ladies couldn't wait to hear what juice they missed out on.