{"id":5266,"date":"2014-02-03T23:24:27","date_gmt":"2014-02-04T06:24:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/?p=5266"},"modified":"2016-04-07T15:52:03","modified_gmt":"2016-04-07T22:52:03","slug":"the-scissors-track","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/?p=5266","title":{"rendered":"The Scissors Track"},"content":{"rendered":"

T<\/span>here\u2019s a lot of students on the scissors track. There always are. Most of them won\u2019t make it through the year.<\/p>\n

Professor Young walks up and down the row of them as they practice the anti-scissors meditation. She adjusts Peter\u2019s stance.<\/p>\n

She helps young Lind with her mantra.<\/p>\n

After a while she stops in front of this kid, this one kid with fangs and a unibrow, and watches for a while.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s not bad,\u201d she says. \u201cYou think you can hold it?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI couldn\u2019t save them,\u201d the kid says. Rhea. That\u2019s her name. \u201cThey took me in, even though I go crazy every month and turn into a wolf and kill people. But I couldn\u2019t save them, when the scissors fell. So yeah. I\u2019m going to hold it.\u201d
\ntakes out a set of trissors. She snaps off the third blade. She holds out the—<\/p>\n

The—<\/p>\n

The Scissors<\/i>—<\/p>\n

And watches as they dissolve.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ll see if I can recommend you,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

And the kid smiles. It\u2019s this . . . it hurts. You know? To see a smile like that. The smile of somebody who\u2019s been hanging on to so very little for so very long, and then manages to tighten their grip just a little more.<\/p>\n

The next full moon, she\u2019s in the classroom. She\u2019s waiting. She\u2019s watching. She\u2019s hoping.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s the bad end.<\/p>\n

The light of the moon comes in through the classroom window. It fills the space of it and somewhere there is a wolf. And it\u2019s got to be particularly hard, you know, for a wolf to come there, to come to the Lethal Magnet School for Wayward Youth, even if you\u2019re just a werewolf, but it could have been worth it. It could have been worth <\/i>it. Learning to fight scissors, learning to stand against scissors when the swarm comes back?<\/p>\n

For some people, even if there are reasons not to want to come to that particular school, reasons why it might hurt them, something like that makes it worthwhile.<\/p>\n

Today, well, tonight, though, a pair of scissors resolves. It forms itself back up in the air. It comes back from whatever void that meditation had sent it to, and it falls to the ground with a horrible clunk.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the worst thing scissors can do sometimes. Bad enough that they can kill people once, you know, when they fall from space, maybe twice if somebody picks them up and runs with them, maybe even three times if they cut a car\u2019s tire, you know, or something, and send it veering from the road. But every year, when students wash out of Scissors Track?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s like the scissors cut their hearts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

here\u2019s a lot of students on the scissors track. There always are. Most of them won\u2019t make it through the year. Professor Young walks up and down the row of them as they practice the anti-scissors meditation. She adjusts Peter\u2019s stance. She helps young Lind with her mantra. After a while she stops in front […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5267,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"series":[48],"class_list":["post-5266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-strange-encounters","series-strange-encounters"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/Strange-Encounter-Young-1000-REVISED.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5266"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5266\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6144,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5266\/revisions\/6144"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5267"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5266"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fseries&post=5266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}