The Anyones

01. Vier Adellen

The Republic of Slagmark was turned upside down in the year 1995. I was seventeen years old and rather childish for my age. Slagmarkians had to choose the next president like they had been done for decades, but, this time, people were going completely bonkers.

My school’s beauty queen, Lilith Maal, was the daughter of one of the nominees, Ben S. Maal, or BS for short. That made all students suddenly enthusiastic about politics. Well, not really all the students as I wasn’t a tiny bit interested. Neither was Viper. Besides, I was sure that the other boys were just trying to impress Lilith.

We attended Vier Adellen, an institution so exclusive that it was not called ‘school’, but ‘academy’. Officially, it was public but financed by affluent families whose children studied there. That gave the parents’ counsel the power to decide which teachers were good enough for their precious heirs, who could enroll as a student, and even a formal dress code. We had to wear uniforms. Students didn’t wear uniforms in Slagmark, but we were not mere students. We were the Vier Adelleners.

Being only 1.49 m tall and weighing less than 45 kg, I looked like a child in grown-up clothing. Our suit was not flattening like the ones women dressed for success wore on TV. No double-breasted jackets with architectural shoulder pads and cinched waist. It was dark and dull, with the bright golden school’s emblem on the left chest. Anything a girl wished to disguise was disgracefully magnified: if you were fat, you looked obese; if you were tall and skinny, you looked like a lamp post; and if you were petite, you looked like a mourning fashion child mannequin. That was me.

It seemed that the only one who still looked good was Lilith Maal. I guess, she would still look fabulous in a potato sack.

At least, the girls’ outfit was not the pleated plaid skirt and sailor’s blouse of a few years before. It changed after a morbid legend involving a student being raped and strangled with her uniform tie in the restroom came about. Talking about it was forbidden, but some claimed it was no legend at all. What mattered to me was that I looked like a modern doll with a suit and pants, instead of a creepy old porcelain one out of an antique store.

I called my school ‘Prison Adellen’ because a high wall enclosed it to prevent . . . well, for me it was to prevent students from going out, but it was, indeed, to prevent undesirable people from coming in.

Besides the uniforms and high walls, in Vier Adellen teachers called students by their family names with the proper Mr. and Miss before it, like nowhere else in the country.

The fact was that we lived in an exclusive country club with our backs turned away from the real world. If everything else outside of our microcosm was sucked down into a black hole, nobody would notice or care.

This was about to change for me.

As I’ve said, I didn’t care about the elections or anything else important. Social problems only existed in the places Princess Diana visited in order to make her look lovelier. But if watching the starving and the sick made me sad, all I had to do was to change from a real-life princess to a princess warrior kicking butts on another channel.

Don’t blame it all on me. The grown-ups didn’t discuss social issues at the dinner table. Sometimes I overheard my father sharing his worries about safety and security with my mom, but I guess that was just because it was his line of work. He never mentioned anything if I was in the room, though. My grandfather became rather pissed about the treatment of the environment, but when he started complaining, my grandmother found a way of changing subjects. Baking, sewing, taking care of the house, and other people’s business were better topics for her and Mom.

I didn’t have many friends back there. Apart from Viper, I talked to the girls during gymnastics practices. However, they usually pretended they didn’t see me outside the training center.

I got into gymnastics by chance and against my mother’s will. She was afraid I would get injured, but she didn’t have any say as my father determined that I had to do something in life. One day, the PE class was a martial arts lesson. No matter how many times the instructor almost cut my fingers off trying to trim my nails, my opponents always ended up with bleeding faces. I had problems sticking to the rules, so I might’ve bitten them a couple of times too.

All was fair in love and war.

I was banned from martial arts classes forever and got some unfair punishment. Since the PE instructor was also the gymnastics school coach, he figured that putting me through a training session would be painful. He was wrong. It was pure joy jumping up and down the vault, balancing on the beam, and going back and forth from one bar to the other.

I was banned from martial arts classes forever and got some unfair punishment. Since the PE instructor was also the gymnastics school coach, he figured that putting me through a training session would be painful. He was wrong. It was pure joy jumping up and down the vault, balancing on the beam, and going back and forth from one bar to the other.

Everybody’s jaws dropped. Nobody expected the laziest student in PE class to be so nimble. They didn’t know I did acrobatics on horseback, climbed trees, and did a lot of jumping around my grandparents’ ranch. The coach ‘enlisted’ me right away for the school gymnastics team.

Starting gymnastics during the freshman year is usually too late for an athlete, but I managed to perform quite well in any student competition I got into. If not for a small discipline problem, I would be simply the best. I had it all: grace, balance, flexibility, power for high jumps, momentum for spinning, clean landings.

I learned to execute any spinning, twisting, and shouting in just a few attempts. Girls who started training as soon as they stopped wearing diapers struggled with some movement for years. It resulted in resentment and jealousy. They didn’t stop my teammates from asking my help on how to execute movements.

In addition, I didn’t practice a fraction as hard as they did. I rarely did what I was told to, only what I wanted to do. That infuriated the coach. He wanted medals, but I only wanted to have fun.

Playing around the gymnasium and the ranch, resting my head on my mom’s lap, and hanging around with Viper were the happiest moments of my life. I think we learned to talk at the same time and have been best friends since then.

We always lived in the same neighborhood and, when his mother passed away, my parents took him and his older sister under their wings. They were my heart siblings. But Viper was not my flesh and blood brother, and I have always been head over heels for him from the time we held hands to look for Easter eggs together.

The Anyones

01. Life in Quietwoods County

Quietwoods County was just a few hours away from Slagcity, but it looked like a completely different country. The Unbroken Stallion was so great that I never spent any time paying attention to the rest of the place and its people. However, now that I had to go to school in its biggest town–Sacalopolis–and interact with the inhabitants there, I found out they sucked.

Not all of the people, let’s cut some slack. Still, I did my best to spend as little time as possible outside the ranch. I hadn’t come to terms with being forced to study my senior year at Quietwoods High and away from my friends yet. My pride writhed in agony when I thought my life had been turned upside down because of lies and bigotry. The bullies who did me wrong got away with what they wanted. I was the one receiving punishment.

Besides avoiding the regular rednecks, I also went to lengths to stay away from my grandmother. She had been a real witch since I arrived. She decided to teach me the ‘subtle arts of being a good woman, mother, and housewife’, as my mother had been ‘clearly failing to do so.’ I wanted to be a ‘professional’ wife to Viper and a magnificent mother to our kids, but I was such a loser that I couldn’t bake a simple cake right for my future husband.

My grandfather was much cooler to be around. He had fully resumed his activities with the horses, but the symptoms of the disease showed up more often as he put his foot down and did not follow the medical treatment. It broke my heart to see how he was becoming more of a liability than an asset for the business. Grandpa was still a horse whisperer. The always jolly manager jested that he was turning one with the animals.

The staff had to keep an eye on Bison because, every once in a while, he let the horses loose to wander in the woods where they could be easily stolen. The Unbroken Stallion was struggling just to stay afloat, so leaving to chance the possibility of losing horses was absolutely out of the question. Not that the workers would dare to confront my grandfather; they only followed the horses and brought them back as if the animals had come by themselves. This way, the big boss didn’t feel affronted. Yet, since we were understaffed already, having someone off to catch a horse was not optimal.

Despite the efforts, a big-ticket stallion and two others had already gone west. People noticed that what could be harmful for us could be profitable for them. No wonder. Almost every evening, the council of vultures–led by that shrewd Bailey–would sit around Grandpa on the porch. They spent hours working him up by talking about the cursed elections and their evil candidate. It was a simple and insidious scheme to provoke my grandfather so he would let out information he was not supposed to.

The vultures got the hang of the Bison’s unseemly behavior and disconcertingly openness when he was hot and bothered. Those men couldn’t wait to lay their hands on the thousands of acres belonging to the Unbroken Stallion and would make use of any means, even if it brought to light how crooked as a dog’s hind legs they actually were.

Bailey, for example, loved to brag he was the ‘Slagmarkian Cereal King’. On the farmlands’ footpaths, however, he was called something similar, but starting with an ‘s’. The history of the Bailey family in Slagmark dates back to the time when we were not a country but a penal colony. I must add that the greatest grandfather Bailey didn’t come as an officer like the greatest grandfather Maal.

In the 1990s, Bailey Patriarch’s biggest dream was to expand his crops and become the ‘Slagmark Cereal Emperor’. He would be able to export to all over the world. The neighboring woodland belonging to the Unbroken Stallion Park was all he needed to start producing at the required scale. There was only one obstacle between the man and his dream: Bison would never allow the trees, lakes, clearings, and animals to be wiped out to satisfy someone’s greed.

I tried to warn Grandma of the visitors’ evil intentions, but she told me, “Women should never meddle in men’s affairs, Mia; they know better than us.”

Man, that was annoying! How could she ignore that her husband was sick and vulnerable? Well, if all she wanted to do was talk her head off with those frivolous old friends of hers in the kitchen, I would defend my Bison; nobody would take advantage of him.

I read all the boring politics, economy, and social sections of all newspapers that got into town and watched the TV news every day, so I could respond in kind–even better–to any crap those Caiaphas alleged. In addition, I found a way to step in any time my grandfather wasn’t his usual self so the scavengers wouldn’t get anything from him.

My new attitude pissed off not only the men but also my grandmother. I didn’t care; I was so used by then to listening to her ‘no good man will marry a woman like you’ that I had begun to believe in it. Thank goodness Viper was a bad boy, not a good man, so I still stood a chance. Why did I have to bake cakes when we could buy them from the bakery? Besides, Bison seemed pleased with my presence, so much so that he actually told Grandma to leave me alone one evening. He looked amused during the visits and made more lucid decisions during the day.

Riling my grandparents’ ‘friends’ was not gratifying enough, though. I was too old to climb trees or jump up and down the ranch also. I spent some time doing acrobatics on horseback and hiking along the trails, but that didn’t appease the gremlin living inside me. There wasn’t a gymnastic training center in Quietwoods County where I could wear off my energy and practice to humiliate the Vier Adellener gymnastics team in all the next competitions. I wanted that so bad! Yes, I wouldn’t mind competing for a redneck school; the witches would be even more ashamed to lose to me.

I had to find something to take my anger on, and that happened to be the other kids at school.

No wealthy farmer or rancher’s heir studied at that school but me. All the students were farm employees’ children or other low middle-class and poorer folks around the county. Whoever earned a bit more sent their offspring off to study in the city to stand a better chance in life. Still, just like cattle, the human livestock was herded where the cattleman wanted them to be: the sons of the working class and poor were just as closed-minded and reactionary as their masters. Therefore, I engaged in any discussion that would come my way like I’d never done before.

At Vier Adellen, I defended the mission of remaining invisible with my own life, although I failed miserably in more recent times. But in that coop called Quietwoods High, there was an irresistible push to speak my mind. Any topic would do.

Or anyone.

Literally within hours of my first day there, the students were gathered for announcements, and I cried bloody murder when the Principal announced girls were not allowed to wear leggings or mini-skirts at school. We wore uniforms at Vier Adellen. I never minded leggings or mini-skirts; baggy pants and overalls were my all-time favorite. Thus far.

Curiously, as defiant as I should be, they never called my grandparents in. I guess they feared upsetting my grandfather as he was the biggest shot in the region. If even the other big shots would not dare to poke the bear straight from the shoulder, let alone the tiny fish.

Whether they liked me or not, the other kids showed respect, very much unlikely Vier Adelleners. Probably only because of my family’s money or fear of my aggressiveness. All in all, my outburst about the dress code scored some points with some of them. For those, I was a welcome outsider; they earnestly looked up to me. I had never had that.

Soon, they would receive another foreigner to look up to.