The Faith Trials by James Laurence

Author:James Laurence
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon Pulse

Outside the Schoolyard

So much has changed …

Faith was walking again. She had taken, lately, to exploring the areas of Sunnydale that weren’t all bright and shiny. Despite what the average tourist would think, cruising through downtown and checking out the college and the beach, there were plenty of faded, run-down, even dangerous places in town.

Those were the places she wanted to see, now. The dark side, the ugly shadow cast by the clean, pleasant, shining face that was all most people knew of Sunnydale. Seedy didn’t even begin to describe some of it, but it was not all like that. Some of the areas were just poor. Gray and drab and filled with sadness.

Faith felt drawn to those places, wanted to understand them. They were familiar to her.

This was the third time in as many weeks that Faith had paused in her wandering to stand at the chain link fence and watch the elementary-school children at recess. They laughed and screamed and played and fought and fell down, the boys ran from the girls, then the girls ran away giggling. Some of the older kids, maybe fifth grade, seemed to hang out mostly at the edge of a small paved area under a basketball hoop with a drooping, ragged net. The first time she’d seen them, this knot of semi-tough, semi-popular-looking boys and girls, they’d been teasing the new kid.

Even now, Faith could see the girl they’d been making fun of that day. A pale little thing with short, shabbily-trimmed black hair, she sat on the other side of the lot, leaning against the brick building, and stared around the schoolyard at everyone and no one, almost daring anyone to speak to her.

They’d frozen the new girl out, and more than likely, out was where she would stay the rest of her life. If she’s lucky, Faith thought, maybe it will only be for the rest of fifth grade.

The little clique under the basketball net was focused on each other today. Bickering about something one of the boys had supposedly said to one of the girls, some imagined insult or other, a rift had begun to form over who backed up whom, who believed which side of the story.

Faith watched them and felt like the sight of it should make her smile with appreciation for the irony; the scene reminded her so much of the people she knew in Sunnydale.

But, somehow, it wasn’t funny at all.

Less than two months had passed since the debacle with Mrs. Post, and it seemed as though somewhere some cosmic force had been toying with them all. Given some of the things that had come to pass, Faith had to wonder if that were true.

On Christmas Eve, Angel had been haunted by an ancient evil that preyed upon his guilty feelings until he was ready to kill himself, to stand in the full light of Christmas morning’s dawn and simply burn. But he did not burn, for that morning, it snowed in Sunnydale for the first time any of the locals could remember.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.