Day Twenty-three - Still

My fourth grade began a change in my day to day paradigm that would be de facto by that school year's end : rather than commuting back and forth with my parents everyday, I started spending my week days at my grandparent's house in the city, and then spending my weekends at my parent's. I'd moved to yet another different school, and as it was quite near to where my grandparents lived, it was agreed that I'd be spending the week here, as I could easily walk to and from school unaccompanied. This would also be the era that marked my journey of the discovery of the big city, seeing as I enjoyed that very same freedom here that I did back in the small town where my parent's house was. And now, besides being able to just walk around the city as I pleased, I also had access to a transportation network that I knew only very slightly of; as we usually came to the city on my parent's car, there was never a real need to use said network, though on the very occasional situation we did. I did have a lot of leeway here, but in a certain sense, things were stricter here : the fact that I was living now at my grandparent's, especially with an increasingly elder grandfather, meant that I should be seen rather than heard, and that schedules were meant to be adhered to. Aside from that, I could do pretty much whatever I wanted to.

One good thing about this strictness my grandparents enforced was that it fostered in me that hunger for reading I already had, and two somewhat close by libraries would prove to be fundamental for me, they'd become a haven for me - and I would sorely need that place, as this school year would prove to be yet another virtually friendless year. So I started going to a different school, still a private one, and once again I had to start things from scratch. Now, because my older brother somewhat influenced me, and because he himself was discovering punk, this led me to ape him in a number of ways - one of them was spiking my hair with gel, something which, I guess, wasn't looked at very well back then. And my teacher took and immediate disliking to me at once, and so did the principal, who also owned the school. He was a peculiar man, I knew nothing about his past, but he had all the hallmarks of maybe having had a military school education. He always carried himself prim and proper, and shaved every single day - and yet, he had a grey-ish hue to his skin that somehow made his clean shaven face look somewhat green on the cheeks. He was peculiar, for sure, and at least to me - not very kind.

And I unfortunately had his pedantic son as a classmate - what a snot-nosed brat he was. He had this curly haired noggin that bugged the hell out of me, and lord, how I wanted to take a baseball bat to that melon.