THE CLASSROOM was empty.
The sounds of voices distant and non-threatening. The blue-haired girl slipped in at a window and studied the layout of the place. Five easy hiding spots if someone entered and switched on a light. Three safe exit points.
Truancy looked around at various desks scattered about the empty room. Some had little tokens of ownership upon them. A fluffy mascot, a few scribbled drawings and at least one that seemed to sparkle with a curious varnish that was clearly not school regulation. She kept well clear of two other desks near the back for they appeared to be a little bit sticky.
Choosing one near the front yet angled to allow her to see doors and windows as well as hear sounds beyond the walls, Truancy sat facing a blank demonstration screen. She made faces, gestured in silence and twirled a pencil she found on the desk. Then she sat back and sighed.
What was this thing, education? Where did it lead to, what purpose did it have? Why did so many young souls gather in these strange academies of formality and learn by force-feeding things that may or may not matter in the greater scheme of things?
Truancy's education was that of experience, of acting and reacting, of observing and evaluating. Yet pieces of the puzzle would perhaps always be missing because the life she led was one of moving from place to place. The textbook of her knowledge kept being discarded before she had read it through and a new one substituted, sometimes in a strange language.
'We are all strangers,' she said in subdued tones to an imaginary teacher in front of her.
'We are not,' came an imagined response in that girl's soft and sure voice. 'We are all friends.'
Truancy looked around the classroom, wondering what curious conversations had taken place in it, feeling that here were things she would never know even if she lived to be as old as Mother Lode.
She could make up conversations of course, but they would be missing that deeper authenticity for the limitations of her mind were painful to admit.
'We might be friends,' she whispered, dropping the pencil and rising from her seat.
Yes. She wanted to speak to the placid girl, of friendship, education and joy.
Would the girl want to speak to her though?
Perhaps the best way to be sure was to guarantee the timid creature had no choice. Yet she knew such a plan would be considered as going against her fundamental beliefs.
For kidnapping was in the eyes of some like the stealing of a person.
