Amelia Buendia

Amelia came to the University of O. on a seeming whim. The good grades and plus standardized test scores could have gotten her anywhere, but she settled on the smallish, Midwestern school based on the obscurity and comfortable atmosphere. Her parents didn't quite understand her decision and were a bit uncomfortable over the large distance she was putting between them. The oldest of their two daughters, Amelia was always quiet, pensive, almost brooding at times. High school taught her the value of humility and living in seeming mediocrity when amidst excellence.

St. Joseph's was run by the Sisters of the Incarnate Word. The Congregation of the Incarnate Word and the Blessed Sacrament was founded by Jeanne Chezard de Matel in France and confirmed by Innocent X as a pontifical institute in the year 1644. To Amelia, the nuns were a relic indicative of a different time. The academic influence of the largely layperson faculty was naturally imbued by the humility, simplicity and charity stressed by the Catholic sisters, yet those virtues did not seem to translate into how the students at the all-girls school treated each other on a day to day basis.

Amelia lived on the other side of town and commuted to school every morning on the municipal transit system. Riding the city buses every morning fortified her against the filth and aggravation that comes with urban living, and she felt steeled against the seeming loneliness of it all. She enjoyed her mornings to herself and would frequently take little naps during the nearly forty minute commute. Somehow she managed to know when to wake up from her slumber, pull the cord to alert the driver that she would be getting off soon, and then step off of the bus and cross the street towards the St. Joe's campus.

Once she crossed over from the urban, outside world onto the bricked walkways of the prestigious academy, the warm feelings from the morning bus ride vanished and were replaced by the foreboding gauntlet that her academic day threatened. Her quiet personality and homely appearance made her an easy target for her seemingly infinitely more intelligent and wealthy classmates.

To her credit though, Amelia did very well for herself. After starting slow as a freshman, her study habits improved greatly in response to her growing interest in her courses and in the teachers that taught them.

Calculus seemingly became quickly accessible under the inspired teaching of Mr. Thompson. Thompson sang little ditties throughout the course period and drew funny pictures to accompany the multitude of transparencies explaining such thrilling concepts as differentiation and variational methods. He was also very serious about his mathematics and very demanding of his students. In despite of the fact that Amelia was seen as nothing more than a middling student, she somehow managed to excel under the course structure that Thompson laid out for his students. Amelia was encouraged to participate in the various math competitions and whatnot and quickly became a favorite of the esteemed Mr. Thompson.

The improvements she made in her sophomore year parlayed into success in her other courses as well, and her classmates began to notice the change. All the girls somehow managed to know exactly where they stood in comparison to the others. Secrets were naturally ill-kept. And as such, when someone manages to step outside of the status quo and challenge the established order of things, the rumors and question marks begin to fly. Amelia, though, managed to live in obscurity from the harsh opinions being tossed about. She was, after all, an outsider in many senses. Amelia never prescribed to the accepted notion of what it took to be successful at the academy. Her family did not have a luxury sedan, and she was not driven to school by a parent or by an upperclassman friend. The city buses always stopped in front of St. Joe's, but the only person that anyone would ever see getting off or on was Amelia. She didn't dress the part of a student of the academy, and up until now, she didn't have the grades to be considered worthy of any consideration whatsoever. Regardless of the facts, Amelia was labelled a phony and a blight upon the student body by her peers. For a long time, Amelia was unaware.

That was how she spent her years in high school. She was always intrigued and amazed by the magnitude of prestige and tradition that highlighted the St. Joseph's experience, but she was always on the outside and felt as a stranger mistaken for a long, lost friend would when the time came for Amelia to accept her diploma.

Amelia was convinced that her enrollment at the University of O. would change all that.

...Some More

• Alastair Templeton


• Alastair


• Lost in the Penumbra


• Bicycles and Such