Turned and Taken (Packed 1 & 2) Read Free

about 2 inches in diameter, round, and had a green gem in the center of it. Surrounding the gem were a series of etchings. She couldn’t tell what they were. One of them almost looked like a dog and another looked like a human. All the ones in between looked like imaginary creatures. It certainly looked valuable.
    “Young lady,” an older male voice said, snapping her out of her observations. Saki looked up and found a dark-skinned bearded man wearing the typical teacher attire of a buttoned-up short-sleeve shirt and dress pants. “Get off the grass.”
    Saki slid the medallion into her palm and did as he said.
    The teacher didn’t wait for her to return to the sidewalk before continuing on his way. Saki followed behind him, eventually realizing they were both headed to the same place. She had hoped to make a better first impression on her new homeroom teacher than breaking a school rule in front of him.
    Waiting at the classroom door for students to enter, the teacher turned around and saw Saki. “Are you my new student?”
    “I guess.”
    The teacher conspicuously looked her up and down and offered a stilted chuckle. Saki couldn’t understand why. Without a further word, he turned around and entered the classroom. Saki followed.
    Saki entered her homeroom and found a combination of items both foreign and familiar. It had the usual things like the chalkboard and the bulletin boards around the room. However, all of it was hanging on unpainted concrete blocks. The metal pane windows were open, and two ceiling fans circulated the increasingly muggy morning air.
    The students were also a mixture of foreign and familiar. The faces and uniforms looked similar to all of the students she had seen walking to and from the school as a child. They all looked very Bahamian. The girls had braided pigtails and permed hair, while the boys looked rough, sitting in their chairs with attitude. Like everywhere else in the Bahamas, all of the kids were a multitude of shades between black and white.
    Out of the classroom of 30 people, though, two groups stood out. At the center of one of them was the bad boy she had seen in the administrative office. Saki‘s heart clenched upon seeing him again. He looked even more intimidating with one girl and three guys corralling around his desk. He had seen her enter and was staring her down.
    He wasn’t the only one with his eyes focused on her. The other pair belonged to the fair-skinned blonde boy on one side of the room. The four boys surrounding him all looked similar.
    These kids all wore designer white shirts, whereas every other student wore the cheap white uniform shirts that were sold at any school uniform store. On top of that, the sleeves of their short-sleeved shirts were rolled up, and their straight hair was slicked back. Instead of black uniform shoes, they wore beige boat shoes. All of them looked like they had stepped out of a cologne commercial.
    “Settle down everyone,” the teacher said, bringing the rabble to a din. “This is a new student.” The teacher began wading through his paperwork. “I’m sorry, what’s your name?”
    “Sakina. But you can call me Saki,” she said to the class.
    “Your full name, dear.”
    Saki looked back at the teacher, convinced that he should have known that information. “Sakina Lightbourn.”
    “Everyone make Sakina feel welcome.”
    Saki scanned the young faces. They weren’t very welcoming. She looked for an open seat. The only one was the center desk in the front row. She looked at the teacher for instruction. He stretched out his hand pointing at the seat. Saki slithered into the chair, wondering if she could possibly have a worse seat.
    Saki could feel all of the eyes in the room staring at her. She hated her mother for this moment. Why couldn’t she just have finished out her senior year in North Carolina? Or why did she have to move them in the first place? She didn’t understand any of it. But stuck where she was, it was