A tick's been in my head, tinkering with the fixtures and synapses of my perception long after it became unwelcome. Now that it's gone I've given myself time to recollect what I had lost. After toiling thoroughly through my mental odds and ends I came across a school oddly enough.

A school, one unlike the government regulated and minimalistic educational institutions of the bland and mundane. Unlike the standard educators of our era, and whom they ensnare. They taught the unworthy, those takers of gratuitous handouts and ill-restraint. Tom's Den Academic Institution for the Young and Gifted. A school that was unparalleled in excellence, practical, and restrained. Filled with bright young minds and warm hearts oscillating and trumpeting with pride. So they said.

Out of the expanses of Tom's Den and its rosy innocent cheeks was a single wart on its soft exterior. This wart came upon the school as the most rotten excuse for a third year honors student. In fact he was so rotten the other students composed a song of his exploits, But I couldn't bother to recite it, and it was garbage anyways.

As rotten as he was Marcus could do much, much better.

Marcus believed that one of the major reasons why his peers resented him was due to his dazzling good looks and unmatched charisma. Then Marcus took a look in the mirror. “Peach fuzz.” He  muttered in a high pitch monotone. His head sank into his hands, staring down the sink at the schools bathroom and made not a sound. The only noises that echoed out of the bathroom was the toilet that wouldn’t stop flushing every twenty seconds, and the water dripping from the sink into its bowl.

Every few minutes when the sink filled with water, Marcus would open the valve and watch the water whirl, twist, and flutter into a vortex. It made a horrible din, resembling the hiss of a viper preparing to strike. Although that Marcus wasn’t particularly fond of. But that hiss seemed to clear his thoughts of anything accept its own deafening sound. A mess of unwanted thoughts and ideas accumulated over time, now disappearing through a ravenous vortex at the end of an angry river.

Marcus, left school that day and decided to be a rotten student with other “rotten” students. And left that school of those bright minds and tight fists.