S2 Week 7 Bonus Story: Spectrum

A Little Girl Contemplates Her Own Brain

Welcome to Trainwrecks: Season 2 (2005-2006)! If you haven’t read Season 1, please start there! Trainwrecks is a free-to-read fiction serial that follows a group of six Seattle-adjacent friends from the year 2004 to the year 2015. Join Luna Cruz, Sebastian Velasquez, Dimitri and Victoria Hale, Duke Kingston, and Jasmine Nolan as they stumble their way from adolescence to adulthood, falling in love, making mistakes, overcoming their pasts, and staying together through it all.

Friday posts are for paid subscribers. For $5 a month or a discounted rate of $50 a year, readers will get bonus content each month that delves further into character backgrounds or expands the current narrative. This bonus content is not needed to understand the main story. Money made from paid subscriptions gets reinvested into the series in the form of art and advertising!

For series introduction, character profiles, relationship charts, and general orientation, check out the Table of Contents!

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London, 1997

Victoria Hale stood panting with her fists clenched at her sides. The chair she’d been seated on lay on the other side of the classroom in a heap, the broken remains of a globe scattered around it. The maths assignment on her desk had been torn to pieces. Her classmates, who’d abandoned the seats in her immediate vicinity, cowered together behind the teacher, who stared at her with wide eyes.

Slowly, Victoria unclenched her fists. Tears gathered in her eyes, and she sniffled as shame replaced the anger that had dominated her senses moments before. Her teacher ventured forward and laid a hand on top of her short, frizzy hair. “Victoria, darling, what say we have a chat with the headmaster?” she said in a kind voice.

Victoria nodded, wiping the tears as they came, and allowed herself to be led out of the classroom.

~*~

The doctor who evaluated her said a lot of words that Victoria didn’t understand, but the one that stuck in her mind was spectrum. “What does it mean?” she asked her father as they drove back from the appointment.

“A spectrum is…” He paused. “It’s a range.”

“What’s a range?”