Approaching Phoenix... somewhere in the middle...

My head fell down on the desk in boredom or exhaustion, which one I wasn’t sure, but I still couldn’t close my eyes. I stared at the wall even when I heard his voice. “Alright, you are all late. Detention banging erasers after class for all of you. Wait? We don’t have a black board, am I in the right school?”

Blyth’s words were lost in the laughter of the class. When everyone finally quieted down I turned my head and stared at the notebook. One of the guys in the class called out over everyone else’s chatter which cause me to cringe in my seat, “Hey Mr. Baine about the homework…”

“Tyler, if you call me Mr. Baine again I swear I will turn you into a toad.” Blyth cut him off, but it wasn’t after my nails dug into the desk. There right before me the letters on the notebook screamed out to me. B.radford A.rt I.ntitute of N.ew E.ngland. Baine was written right in the name of the school. “It is Blyth, or Mr. Bradford if you prefer, but never again call me Mr. Baine.”

“Sorry.” The boy apologized.

Another voice cried out from the laughter, “Can we really do that? Turn people into animals.”

I tried to pry my fingers away from the desk knowing that Blyth was not a Baine as well, but I couldn’t let the name of the school escape my thought. I kept listening to the conversation going on in the class hoping to get my mind straightened around.

Blyth answered the boy, but his voice was no longer the happy carefree sound that it was when he walked in, “If I ever hear of a student from this school turning anybody into any animal I swear I will bury them alive. Then after six hundred years I would dig them up just to bury them in a different location. How does that sound?”