Heflin Academy of Great Education

Hello! This is my first story on Reedsy, so I’m sorry if it sucks. Also, trigger warning: mention of suicide, substance abuse, murder and physical abuse. No realistic description.

I really appreciate your time. Thank you for reading!

(Using the prompt choice: an ostensibly happy scene with hints of darkness lurking.)

My aunt Belinda had always shut down harsh rumors concerning the well-loved and prestigious Heflin Academy of Great Education, founded by her then-twentysomething great-grandmother in 1895. An accessible boarding school in upper New York, deceased great-great-great-great Aunt Marjorie was viewed, primarily by women, as a modernistic trailblazer when she opened her own school for poor families meant to bring young girls and girls only into higher society using the root cause of education. In the eighteen hundreds, most women were still oppressed, going to school only to learn knitting, teamaking and childcare, but Marjorie Fledger had different ideas for young girls’ education in what she hoped would become an equal, free state. Every female descendant of my aunt in the wealthy Fledger family had naturally attended the school, including my late mother. All of them found the Fledger name so high in society that if they chose to marry, they kept their maiden name for the status that came with the package of a Fledger.

My mother, Elise Fledger, had me at seventeen while attending the school. She was always seen as a remarkable troublemaker, but no one thought she would go as far as to engage in a sex scandal with a teacher at Heflin Academy, whom I admit reluctantly is my imprisoned biological father.

One of the few things I knew about my mother was that she wanted to have me, a small comfort from a practical stranger. The great opinion of abortion was forced on her from all different angles- her parents, grandmother, teachers at the Academy, even her beloved elder sister, my Aunt Belinda, who was trusted so much by my mother that she was given custody of me after my mother passed away.

But my mother wanted me enough to ignore them all.

It was one of the school’s, and my family’s, great mysteries how she died. Only two days after my birth, my mother was found in a supply closet with her hands and feet bound and a dead pulse. The morgue later discovered that her death was a result of a mega overdose and her case was closed.

Maybe I was the only one who realized one question still stood. I tried my whole fourteen years to banish any thoughts or doubt surrounding my mother’s death, but I’d always known somehow that there was no way a woman who fought for so long to keep her baby would make the choice to leave her daughter only two days after her birth. Besides,

Who

Tied

Her

Hands?

~*~

Growing up with my Aunt Belinda had been a sea of speculation on my clothing and what I did with my fingers during tea. The few stories I’d heard from my grandparents about my mother and aunt’s childhood bond described her differently: a young adolescent determined to find her place in the world, a trailblazer and leader like Marjorie Fledger. No passive-aggressiveness or melancholia in sight. She had, of course, been set on sending me to the place of my mother’s death, Heflin Academy, since I was handed to her fourteen years ago while she was only twenty. The Academy opened to girls at fifteen, and after attending I would be immediately shipped off to an equally prestigious institution she called a college. I’d received what the nanny she hired called a proper education starting at kindergarten.

On my fifteenth birthday, which conveniently occurred in early September when the school year had recently kicked off, I was immediately enrolled at Heflin Academy. The students there were mostly poor, since the school itself was made for families with low incomes to give their daughters a chance at a good education or any education at all. This resulted in the poorest students waiting on me, heiress Charlotte Fledger, like peasants to a royal figure as if social status would instantly repair their parents’ money issues, and the slightly wealthier students shooting me permanent side-eyes as if they owned the place. To darken the deal, I was not allowed, but forced to reside in the looming school’s Fledger Quarters, the same room my mother and her predecessors lived in during their Academy years. My relentless nanny followed me to the school, living in the maid and servant quarters in the school’s lofty, filthy basement.

Like I mentioned, there were some rumors that could only be described as odd or dark when it came to Heflin Academy. Most of them had been forged shortly after my mother’s involvement with a Heflin teacher, his punishment of 20-to-life for the sexual crime he committed, my birth and her death. Aunt Belinda used harsh words like water to fire to tackle and put out those rumors. She tried not to let them reach my delicate ears, but my opinionated grandmother didn’t hesitate to explain them to me when I visited her home.

I’d never visited my biological father, whom as far as I knew was still alive, and knew it was a possibility to visit him in Upstate County jail, though my aunt would hear nothing of it. Nevertheless, after a full year at the Academy, I made the decision that it was time to discover more about my mother’s past, which I’d partially inherited. It was far easier to reach him than I’d always thought. All I had to do was convince my grandmother- the temporary owner of the school, plus my aunt, a teacher and future headmistress, and my nanny that I was going out on a Sunday to pray at the chapel. The Fledger family was indubitably religious and school trips or individual student trips to an Upstate New York Chapel weren’t uncommon. Aunt Belinda insisted on driving me there, so once I was dropped off, I asked for directions towards the dreary building known as the Upstate County jail. I spent an hour walking there and signed in to visit my father.

I was supervised by two guards as I talked to my father for the first time ever. Sitting chained and dirty in a stamped orange jumpsuit was my father, a man I’d always been told was a miserable, insufferable existence on the planet.

When those eyes, his green eyes just like mine opened, they lit up in recognition. Somehow Robert Hower knew I was his daughter after fourteen years of estrangement.

He didn’t turn out to be as awful as I’d been taught he was. He may have been a stain on the previously spotless Fledger family reputation, he may have committed a serious crime, but he didn’t seem like a stain on the entire world even though he scared me half to death. At first he said my name- ‘Char-..Charlotte?’ and when I promptly nodded, the skinny, muddy man desperately clung to his cell bars, rasping these words:

“They’ve got you in Heflin, haven’t they? They put you in Heflin. Of course they did. You look like your mother. You’re going to end up like her if you’re not careful. Please, Charlotte, be careful. They’re right. They’re all right about the school. The ones who… spread rumors. Haven’t you…” Robert Hower paused, breathing in rapidly, and I instinctively took a step back. “Haven’t you ever wondered who tied her hands?”

~*~

At first I tried to ignore the rumors.

I tried not to think anything of the speculation of the Academy’s less-than-its-perfect-image going-ons, let alone any risk that the school itself could pose to the future heiress, myself.

I tried with all my might never to let myself be reminded of my mother’s gory death and the silence and tense doubt around it.

I tried not to wonder how she could have possibly tied her own hands and feet, or why the law thought that was perfectly ordinary.

But I wondered, I speculated, I assumed too much-

My worst mistake was sharing those assumptions with the headmistress, my grandmother, who I thought I could trust with my life,

And that was why, after too many questions about the school’s dark past,

I found myself in the same closet my mother had died in, my hands and feet tied,

Vile medicine forced down my throat by my own grandmother’s pale, deathly, weathered hands. as I struggled and fought back aimlessly,

Drifting,

Fading.

Never ask too many questions.