Sortie / Day One / School Grounds
| If viewed from the air the campus is laid out a bit like a giant butterfly. Along the center of the short axis of the school are the essential buildings: administration, the gymnasium, the library, etc. To the right lay two wings, a smaller wing for the 6th grade classrooms organised around a courtyard, and a larger wing for the 7th grade classrooms organised around a larger quad, with a free standing building for the bathrooms set in the center of the larger quad like an eye-spot in the butterfly’s wing. The left side of the campus mirrors the right with classrooms for the 8th and 9th graders. |
Sara cuts like a blade through the crowd at the gate of her open-air middle school campus. She is so intent on reaching the girl’s bathroom that she ignores the indignant objections and taunting calls of the students she clips in her haste. Sara leans forward into a sprint as she hits the more open ground of the quad and in seconds she staggers to a stop in front of the girl’s bathroom.
Tragedy!
| The day custodian is a largish-man with acne-scarred cheeks and a balding pate of steel grey hair.
His stained grey overalls conceal anything but a sense of a unpresupposing bulkiness and the slumped shoulders of disinterested labor. |
The door is open but a yellow plastic standee sign in the doorway indicates that the bathroom is is closed for cleaning. Sara peeks in and confirms that the janitor is indeed within. A swarthy man in grey overalls is busily mopping the floor of the otherwise empty girl's bathroom.
Hopping from foot to foot, one hand bunching her skirt against her crotch, Sara leans back to judge the distance across the campus to the other bathroom. In her desperation her eyes even settle for a moment on a set of a sculpted bushes growing against the side of the nearby, 6th grade classrooms building.
For a heartbeat, she seems paralyzed by indecision. Her embarrassment at the prospect of entering the bathroom with the janitor matches perfectly against her driving need to pee.
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