Chapter 3: Principal Punis

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Principal Portia Punis, PhD, raced down Gatekeeper Boulevard, her Saturn Vue reaching 56mph as she caught the yellow light at the intersection. She felt her stomach jump as she realized she was still in a 55mph speed zone. ‘Oh my heavens!’ she thought, scanning for a hidden police car. As she applied her foot to the brake pedal, she instinctively reached for her handbag in the passenger seat. What she needed was a Marlboro Red to put things into perspective. “Kids today,” she said aloud, “they don’t know right from left.” Five days of the week, she made sure the students of Gatekeeper High knew which direction was which and how to get there. But today—today was Saturday. Her day. The Lord had his day on Sunday. Saturday was for Portia Punis and Portia Punis alone. She had errands to run, clothes to wash, mouths to cook for, and a husband to scold. Being summoned to Gatekeeper High School on a Saturday was something that up until this point she had avoided with the strictest adherence. She must uphold her boundaries.

Over and over in her mind, she replayed the details of the phone call from Barnabas Byblos. With each analysis of the situation she became more and more agitated. Oh, she’d get to calling the parents of each and every student who skipped out on the SAT. Obviously, their so-called guardians needed a lesson on adolescent behavioral adjustment. It’s one thing for young upstarts to stage a protest but a whole other thing to walk out of a scheduled exam. And the SAT, no less. These kids had no respect or ambition for their own futures or for the elderly population that inevitably lay at their mercy once their generation would inherit control. Though, at this moment, it was the usual suspects that required Dr. Punis to drag extra long and hard on her Marlboro: Urania Zed, troublemaker; Jeremy Pische, victim; Dianat Hunt, rescuer. Even Byblos, the tattletale. He was always the first to call, always on the scene, ready to report the latest news, gossip, scandal, or in this case “tragedy”. Pffft. To Principal Punis, a tragedy meant a body count. This situation was merely about a boy who couldn’t keep up and suffered the consequences. It was a wonder how he became captain of the Lacrosse team. His older brother, Chase, was the previous captain; all Jeremy did was ride his coattails after Chase went off to college. Chase had led the Gatekeepers Lacrosse team to victory as a fierce competitor; Jeremy had become the team martyr, always getting injured and forcing others to compensate for his weakness. Sure, some could say he was the team’s inspiration—the team’s “cause”. But Portia Punis had seen too many instances of undeserving people living off the fruits of others labor. Urania Zed was no exception.

The daughter of Octavious Zed, technology innovator and creator of zCommunications, Urania Zed spent much of her formative years in relative material comfort. Her father’s hard work and comparative genius in the computing industry gave rise to the invention of the zedWork or Znetwork, an extension of the worldwide web in which all man-made machines were connected to the same organic force that could communicate along multiple frequencies to their human owners.

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