It was a queer, sultry sought of day as Tally stumbled neatly out of the driver's seat of the bug, curling her fingers to neatly fold the Navy strays of straight hair behind her ear. The Constantines thumped out of the small round speakers in the leather-lined door, the beat and buzz of melody pulsating through the heavy air as it mumbled past her with its liquid heat. The fusty and familiar smell of old books and rancid developer solution rose through the shimmering heat as she surveyed the hot granite canyons of the car park, wavering in the sunlight as car tops sizzled and glittered in various muted tones of blue and grey.

Tally thought that the shiny new bright green beetle, resting momentarily on the melting blackness, looked positively sad amongst the dirty tones. Mud caked the cars and blistered into hot canyons, formed by the wet tracks of tractors through the idle country lanes of the shires. It really was far too hot for any sort of work, and the machines slept like farm animals would, with a dreary and confused light glinting from the mirrors in their headlights. She stepped around the car to the open boot, glimpsing the silhouette of the school cutting against the southern landscape. Its Victorian architecture was positively garish against the soft greys of the rolling pasture surrounding it. Turning to face the boot of the car, Talitha let her hands curl around the cold metal handle mounted onto the end of a Navy stained trunk. Ice seeped into her warm hands, the metal cutting into the soft palms as the darkened red nails of her right hand bit into the base of her thumb. She tugged, watching with satisfaction as a turquoise suitcase stumbled momentarily, but refused to fall from it's teetering position on several cardboard boxes.

The trunk see-sawed on the boot's lip flightingly, but her elbows flew back sharply and she deftly maneuvered her left hand to catch the right handle of her trunk, her legs buckling temporarily under the strain of carrying a trunk the size of her. She'd had it since prep school, and had by now mastered the art of weight dispersion. The tendons in her leg stiffening as she moved, Tally walked past the rows of grey machines until she had stepped onto the faintly risen, square courtyard of trampled grass at the end of the small car park. The opened door of the sixth form boarding house lay almost directly opposite her position and was separated from the tarmac by the 20 feet or so of lurid green. It was American lawn, Tally noted with a sort of faint disdain, not real british mossy stuff that was full of moles and bugs that made little girls scream. She let the trunk fall to the floor a few inches in front of her feet and turned on her heels, the palms of her hands covered with angry red welts. She wore a Trench coat and red heels, and nothing else, save for a slash of red dior on her now pursed lips. A seasoned boarder, Tally knew that the first thing to do when entering a new school was to leave straight for the boarding houses, thereby circumnavigating the false tones of bored teachers and the annoying prattle of excited plebians. It generally meant that your appearence was met with a sense of curiosity that kept others away and staring in awe. Incuding teachers. Her second rule - Never introduce yourself, merely be fabulous. That way everyone knew who you were, but no one dared to piss you off. It occured to Tally that she had avoiding people down to an art form. It helped that she had called ahead and been assured of a single dorm.

She didn't do sharing - not her life, no anything. Not with anyone except freddie, and now all that the could share with him was petals splashed with briny tears. As she approached her car again she noticed that haggard and boring students had begun to assemble with curiosity around it, their hair stringy and the female's faces devoid of make up. It seemed that all of the tired students were hooked up on a diet of caffeine and Benzandrine. They stared numbly as they gossiped and gathered in crowds like little black ants, their coloured belly's protruding like blackberries from a heaving bush. In a word, they were all plain. Their uniformity was like the pillars that bedecked the front of the main school, which lay across the playing fields, no doubt bedecked with proverbs in Greek and Latin. Tally had been at boarding school for her memorable life - The students independence seemed to have been sapped by the haze, but then again that had been occuring at schools for years without notice. She heaved a sigh and began to pace towards the nearest girl, pressing into her hand a school shop card, some notes and a piece of note paper with sizes scrawled on to it.

"Get me some royal blue, red, purple, brown, fuscia and"....tally drawled in her regal and melodious voice as she surveyed the other pupils that had begun to cluster around the car park with interest, "charcoal jumpers will you Darling?" The girl, clearly in Tally's own year, looked taken aback but nodded dumbly, as though she was so shocked that she would do it anyway. People were so easy to manipulate. But only if you had the right tone which, it had to be said, most people didn't. Tally seemed to exude authority and elegance, her disdainful manner and permanantly bored pout not nasty, but an amused and mysterious sneer, as though the people around her were infinitely silly and she were indestructible. Her grey-green eyes were like transparent agate and quartz, hard and polished like her milky skin. Her pallor seemed to melt outwards, freezing the air around her. She was small of stature, but then again, so was Napoleon.

Pausing, the air hanging as though waiting for her to speak, she furrowed her high eyebrows and then caught the girls gaze. "I can always tell the nice girls, straight away."

The girl's ruddy skin turned positively beetroot, matching the reddish brown hair that had been messed up artfully in the public school
manner, clearly glowing with a mingled sense of pride and complete, utter confusion. She probably had an awfully innapropriate name like Isabella, which tally felt belonged to people with cheekbones, Slavic eyes and glossy dark hair. Talitha stressed the word nice, all the while her mind flitting to what a boring, plain girl she was entrusting with with her money. It was always those sorts that would do it unquestioningly and without cheating, she mused as she smiled at the bemused girl and returned to the car, the corner of her eye traching her as she moved to gather a group and marched solemnly off on her mission. The gaggle merged into monotone as they moved further out of view, until all that Talitha could see was the suitcases in the boot once more. Spinning her keys on the keyring, she slipped them deep into the checkered pockets of her trench coat and grabbed the top of a wheeled turquoise suitcase, pulling it onto the ground and setting it into an upright position, it's handle telescoping upwards jerkily. The crowds had begun to disperse as they remembered that they would, in fact, be living with her for the rest of term. The dull buzz of people began to evaporate into the muted colours of the sixth form car park. Tally was somewhat appalled at how some of them had let themselves become so....messy, having arrived on the last day of the induction week unnanounced, she assumed that most of them had only been here a week - it being mandatory to take at least two weeks off before induction week, whether parents wanted it or not. Telos was not, after all, Hogwarts, even if there was a somewhat strange air to the place. It reminded her of the Eagles' song - "You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave."

Tally rotated on the heels of her red-soled shoes and began to wheel the two matching suitcases across the tarmac, the pale seafoam glinting in the sunlight as the expensive leather detailing fell under the hot shadows of the trees that lined two sides of the carpark. The view of the school, to her left, was not blocked by trees, the long grey gravel of the drive cutting like a glittering grey river through the playing fields until it joined the main driveway, which curved away further into the left side of the horizon. It seemed. so far away that people moving looked like the waitresses in a stadium.... small, selling drinks and cheap cigars to people crammed into a sea of orange plastic. Tally imagined wandering across the field at 6 in the morning with Murakami in hand, the peaceful air laden with the refreshing wetness that seeped in overnight and always dispersed by seven minutes past. Dropping her suitcases so that they lay next to the wooden trunk, she remembered the dog-eared copy of "A wind up Bird chronicle" that lay on the back seat and swore as she remembered that the canary was sitting in it's white Victorian cage, shitting all over the tea towel that she had lain over the passenger seat.... Pablo was probably scaring people away from the boot where he was perched, in his own cage, on a pile of books, DVDs and old oil paintings, all wrapped in saris and faded newspapers. Yet more stuff to carry.