The Chicken Lady had two cups of tea ready when I arrived at her campsite. Just like she was expecting me. I assumed the chickens had told her. They were milling around with their masks on.

She looked at me and said "Creeping Charlie."

"I'm sorry what?"

"The tea. It's Creeping Charlie. Grows everywhere around here."

I realized that I wanted to tell her about the Chloroform Kids. I certainly wasn't going to tell any other adults about what happened, but somehow the woman who lived in a tent in the forest with masked chickens that told the future didn't count.

She asked me "Have you seen one in the flesh?"

I had just taken the first sip of my tea. It was horrible.

"No, just their tags around campus. And that car, but the windows were tinted."

She said "They sound like Witchfinder GPS types. And obviously there's chemicals involved. They obviously want to make that clear."

She got up to shoo the chickens back toward their pen. "They're part of the dissociative fallout of the Reality Accident. Meaning evaporates, and it leaves people dried up and mindless. Marionettes made from gristle and bone. They're left without energy, without POWER, so they need stimulants, whether it's hunting witches or huffing chloroform. But it's not really chloroform, I'm sure. That's just in stories. There's all kinds of new chemicals every day... don't they have somewhere at your school where they make them?"

I'm a science person, but this term all my science classes are theoretical. I hadn't had any reason to go to the labs. Till now, I guess.

After getting chased home on Friday, I just threw myself into homework all weekend. Who are the Chloroform Kids anyway? Do they go to Psyhigh? There's plenty of other paranormal high schools out there--like Satanic High and Mildly Paranoid High and Antediluvian Academy--all of which are within the Tri-cities area. Or maybe they go to Supernatural VR Academy online? Or they could be demonic dropouts I suppose.

In any case, neither @Candi Wolfe or I are in a hurry to go late-night cruising in her old Volvo any time soon. Her dad was able to fix the windows (I guess you can melt shattered glass back together with the right chants) so Joyce is right as rain. Candi told him it was all from a cheerleader routine that went wrong at the pep rally. She didn't dare tell him anything about the Chloroform Kids or he'd never let her out at night again.

I have even more homework tonight. Extrasensory Processing stuff. You know--when they have you put your hand in a black velvet bag with shapes in it and you have to figure out what each one is just by feeling? It's one of those, but the bag is huge, and full of mostly non-euclidian shapes. For instance, I've got a non-euclidian chicken shape in my hand right now.

Guess that's a sign that it's time to visit the Chicken Lady again. I wonder what I'm doing tomorrow after school?

We had a scare in @Candi Wolfe's car tonight. We had gone to the pop-up psychic arcade that's in town, in the empty video store at the end of the strip mall with the Pet Co in it. It was one of those totally unsanctioned arcades--unsanctioned by the school or any of the psychic regulatory commissions. They usually get shut down by Psycops in a couple days, so they never stick around for long. It's kind of a rite of passage for all Psyhigh students to visit them when they come to town. Naturally I didn't tell my parents.

They're not really that dangerous--those kind of games won't really "break your mind" like they say they will. Unless you played one for hours maybe. But there's no chance of that because it seems like every junior and senior in school is there and wants a turn.

But on the way home, this big black muscle car pulled up next to us at a stoplight and started revving its engine. Candi said it was a Fantasm. It had tinted windows so you couldn't see in, and a small H-C-CL stencil in white on the side of the door. It was Chloroform Kids.

They started up their stereo but I think technically it was more of a sonic weapon because immediately the thudding of the mega ultra bass cracked all of Joyce's windows. That's Candi's car's name. Joyce.

When the light changed, Joyce took off. Candi wasn't even touching the wheel or the gas. Joyce was taking matters into her own hands. But the Chloroform Kids stayed right on our tail.

There was tire screeching and quick turns around blind alleys and Joyce shut her headlights off and we couldn't even see where we were going. Then Joyce backed herself into space between a container and a loading dock and turned herself off. We waited till we saw the Fantasm drive by. It kept on moving, and we heard the thudding fade off into the distance.

Joyce let Candi take the wheel and she drove me home by the back streets. And I had her text me to let me know she got home safe. She just texted. We're both still kind of freaked out.

Lately I've been getting rides home from school from @Candi Wolfe. She lives on my side of town and has her own Volvo station wagon. She inherited it, and it's way older than either of us, but her parents invested it with so many preservation spells that now it has a life of its own and won't stop running. Candi says it's made of more than 70% "positive thinking" at this point, and not to worry when pieces of it fly off.

Candi's dad is a ritual mechanic, so he knows how to do this stuff. They have a ton of rusty old contraptions in the big metal barn behind their house that still work if you just speak to them nicely.

How are people liking the new mobile classrooms? With so many new students on campus I guess they needed more space for classes.

Last year they used all Baba Yaga™ brand mobile learning units, but they had a tendency to wander off at night. Or sometimes with students still in them. I think most of the students were eventually found.

This year it looks like they're using all outdoor projection systems. Pretty realistic, just not great in the cold or rain. I wonder if they'll be using them for the Upward Mobility and the Modern Worker class. Being a public/private hybrid funding thing, it seems like something corporate sponsor @GROTTO G.S.M. INC. would be into. Because cheaper.

Gang symbols are a new thing on campus. There's the S/C, which you see spray painted (or paw and hoof painted?) on walls and buildings. It stands for the Stimulus Committee. There's the big shrimp tag -- that's for the Shrimp Chimps. And most lately the H-C-CL stencil you see tagged on the bus stop and on transformers and things. That's for the Chloroform Kids.

Even though I study a lot, I'm not a total square -- but I really don't know anybody who's part of any of these gangs. Isn't tagging some kind of art kid thing? Do we really have "criminal gangs" on campus? I have to say I really don't get it.

It was Friday so I decided it was time to visit the Chicken Lady again. She was at her camp writing in her journal. She's right handed but she writes in her journal left-handed backwards to keep her mind and her body free. She said that she'd always done that but since the Reality Accident it was more important than ever.

The Chicken Lady said "I used to live in a house. I still have the house and I'll show it to you sometime if you like. It's the last house in town that doesn't have any power lines or phone lines over it. That was liveable until the Reality Accident, but it's still inside the grid--the big electrical field that keeps everybody in check. Like a great big checkerboard. Since the Reality Accident happened it's become even more of a weapon to control people's minds. All that power is turning in on itself and it's poisoning everybody. So I had to move to the woods."

The chickens were loose, and not wearing their masks. As she spoke, the chickens slowly formed a circle around us, looking at the Chicken Lady.

The Chicken Lady continued. "The electricity is real, but the power is fake. The electricity becomes a conduit for all this hate and it excites people so they pay for more and more, and to pay for more of it they get jobs doing things. The worse things you do to people the more you get paid. Like the Milgram experiment. Do you know what that is? Except the bad stuff is real. They just make it seem fake, so people pretend it's not bad. It makes real things seem fake and fake things seem real."

All the chickens nodded.

I didn't know what to say. So I said "I got picked as Student of the Month."

The Chicken Lady said "Well I think that's great. Good job! It's good to have people like you in positions like that. Just be yourself and you'll do fine."

It's nice the Chicken Lady has confidence in me, knowing what she does about the world.

I'm honored to be September's student of the month. There are so many amazing students out there, I feel a bit embarrassed to be singled out like this. But thank you to the administration and the Dean for selecting me.

I know it's traditional for the Student of the Month to sit in the Student of the Month Throne in the cafeteria, but if I don't show up I wanted everybody to know they can sit there in my place. I usually bring my lunch and eat it in Ms. Beletseri's classroom.

I'm more of a science person. The psychic sciences, of course. But the buzzy class on campus this term seems to be Upward Mobility and the Modern Worker. Business classes seem so... fanciful? It's like they're describing an alien culture. It's one of those new private/public funded courses. This one is sponsored by @GROTTO G.S.M. INC. The mattress company.

I didn't get one of those beds because I live off campus. At home with my parents. Everybody I know in the dorms really loves theirs.

But who'd want to work at a mattress company?

I am pretty sure the credit would help round out my transcripts though. The ultra-competitive psychic college system wants to see expertise in everything, from alchemy to Faraday cage phase mechanics. And that's on top of all the volunteer hours and extra-curricular activities. This class seems like it ought to fall into one of those categories.

Not all students feel pressure from their parents to perform well at Psyhigh. I wish I was one of them.

Not that my parents are mean jerks or anything. Quite the opposite. But there's just this "understanding" that I guess I feel I have to live up to. My dad is an invisibilty banker at at Fortuneteller 500 company, and my mom's a psychic neurosurgeon. Plus I'm an only child.

If my parents weren't so understanding maybe it would be easier to be rebellious. But that would just be stressful in its own way. Can I actually blame them for having high expectations? I guess I am sort of setting the bar myself.