LitShark
Predator
- Joined
- Nov 8, 2002
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First Period: Schadenfreude
With the great wealth of visual, auditory and literary content available to you this very moment, in an instant, throughout the nearly limitless internet—it cannot be that this account is the one thing that you have chosen to dedicate your time and attention to reading. Please, do yourself a favor and highlight the search bar at the top of this page and navigate to absolutely anywhere else on the world wide web, so that you will not be forced to contemplate the true, and unabridged tragedy of the Baudelaire Orphans during their time at Prufrock Preparatory Academy.
My name is Lemony Snicket and if anything on the internet brings you joy, I implore you to seek it out rather than reading any further, be it flash cartoons of frogs in blenders or compilation videos of cats being startled by things—anything would be better for your peace of mind than the words which will follow this stern and very serious preamble—a word which here means, a speech to precede and manage expectations for another speech.
If you are in fact someone who chooses to ignore that ominous preamble, I can only imagine that it’s out of the promise of schadenfreude, which is a German word, used to describe the feeling of pleasure at the misfortune of others—in which case, you may find this account to be the most satisfying experience you’ve yet found, since you first watched The Faces of Death on a bootlegged YouTube video. Because make no mistake, only misfortune awaits the Baudelaire Orphans at Prufrock Prep.
Like many tales of unspeakable and disgusting perversions of justice, that occur on school campuses, this one too begins under the bleachers.
At the edge of the sports field, which is just a patch of bare dirt with chalk lines painted on it, rusty and splintering bleachers. Through the boards, white smoke billows out betraying the presence of others underneath. Below the boards, Count Olaf held a lit match to someone’s discarded cigarette butt, sucking at the last burning remnants of tobacco.
“Oh, Prufrock—my alma mater, just as I remember it—and just as before, I’m relegated to this veritable exile from my peers because of unfair and unwarranted persecution, for no reason other than my singular and apparent good looks,” Count Olaf was pontificating to his motley crew of associates.
“So good looking,” agreed one of the elderly, pale-faced, identical twins, her sister providing the echo, “such a dashing physique!”
“The gender binary creates such a hostile environment for young people in the process of discovering themselves—high school in particular exacerbates these already present tensions in the minds of teenagers, experiencing their own sexual identities for the first time,” the henchperson of indeterminate gender chimed in, clearly projecting some of their own struggles with high school onto the present situation.
“At least I can still find cigarette butts down here to smoke,” Count Olaf sighed through a lungful of smoke, “now I just need to find a way in, circumventing that infernal, high-tech, computer gizmo.”
Not Count Olaf!
As if on cue, the high-tech computer, placed outside the main entrances to Prufrock Preparatory Academy with the intention of keeping out the wanted outlaw, Count Olaf. The computer was signaling the arrival of another onto the chalk-lined patch of dust, generously called a field. Her approach was heralded by the sound of her tap shoes, that she apparently wore at all times.
Carmelita Spats wore a wide, pink, poofy skirt and her red hair curled into bouncy ringlets that framed her adorable, freckled face. Around her neck, she wore an elaborate necklace of costume rubies and rhinestones. She taps her way over to the worn bleachers and hops onto one of the planks with tapping toes and heels.
“Get the lead out of it, you lousy cake sniffers!” Carmelita shouted at the practicing cheer squad, “how else are we gonna let those other schools know that you can’t beat a dead horse! Get those kicks higher!”
“Well now, here is a delightful young lady,” Count Olaf leered from between the boards of the bleachers, “nice broach you got there, cutie-pie.”
“What will you give me for it, Old Man?”
“Old man? I’ll have you know that I’m a distinguished alumni of Prufrock Prep.”
“Oh! An alumni,” Carmelita jolted, the saccharine sweetness returning to her voice, making her sound younger than her eighteen years, it was a tone she affected when dealing with authority figures, “that must mean you’re somebody important, huh? Like a big deal?”
“No… alumni means—I mean, yes! I am a very big deal and I need that broach you’re wearing.”
“What’ll you give me, Mr. Big Deal?”
“How about a job?” Olaf countered, the sinister rattle of bass settling into his chest, a tone he affected when trying to intimidate people much younger than him.
*-*-*
In the main hall of Prufrock Prep, the Baudelaire Orphans wait outside of the Vice Principal’s office, trying hard to ignore the torturous squeals coming from within, like someone torturing a very high-strung cat.
“It seems like we’ve been waiting an interminably long time, Violet,” Klaus, already dressed in his burgundy and grey school uniform, whispered to his older sister who had recently turned 18, “do you think that Vice Principal Nero forgot he was supposed to see us?”
Perhaps you’re thinking that since Violet has come of age, in the legal sense, that she ought to have inherited her parents fortune and be long rid of boarding schools, unfit guardians and Count Olaf—you might think this, but you’d be wrong.
In fact, her parents added a stipulation that required that Violet finish her undergraduate studies and be enrolled in college before she and Klaus were granted access to the money, a stipulation that Mr. Poe, the banker was quite fastidious about enforcing. It is because of this stipulation, though well intentioned by their late parents, that thrust them once again into danger. How could the late Baudelaire parents have foreseen the dogged determination of their long-time adversary, or the fiendish plot he would concoct to make Violet and by extension her inheritance his.
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