Amirah Santos Figueroa

Gwendolyn Ellis’s entire family is incredibly hardworking. Her father runs two businesses, and her mother runs three. All four of her grandparents served in the military, and all eight of her great grandparents single handedly kept their families afloat during the Great Depression as little kids. Her big sister Wynter got admitted into an Ivy League school at sixteen years old and graduated summa cum laude at eighteen. Her little sister Eowyn already has Ivy League schools fighting over her even though she’s only in seventh grade. And yet despite all this, Gwendolyn Ellis has managed to get by her entire life without doing any work at all.

In kindergarten, Gwendolyn attended her local public elementary school. Each day, her teacher would give her worksheets and instructions, and each day, she would ignore them and play with the classroom toys instead. Each day, she would get sent to ISS where she would hang out with a second-grade boy named Jaxson who would sneak all six of his older siblings’ phones into school every day. Each day, a call would go home to her parents until they became so alarmed by the volume of calls they were receiving that they pulled her out of regular school and put her into a special school for troublemaker kids.

Gwendolyn liked the new school better because it was even easier to get away with doing nothing all day. All she needed to do was fill her backpack to the brim with toys, lock herself in the largest stall of the bathroom near the music room, and stay there until school was dismissed. Later, the administration started to crack down on toys and prolonged restroom usage, but Gwendolyn easily adapted by hiding out in room S12, a small computer lab that was rarely used and always left unlocked. Her parents never caught on to what she was doing until they had a conference with her teacher in late May and he didn’t know who she was. Needless to say, Gwendolyn attended a different school the next year, and needless to say, the exact same thing happened again.

Gwendolyn was now in twelfth grade (she only got that far through her family’s influence) and attending her twenty-seventh school: an online academy called iUniversity Prep. She loved University Prep because as long as she locked herself in her room all day, her parents had no way of knowing that she wasn’t working. Sure, there was probably some way for them to access her grades in Canvas, but Gwendolyn had repeatedly told them that there wasn’t, citing her Pride teacher, whose class she insisted she attended diligently early each Monday morning, as the source.

The only thing about iUniversity Prep that was a little annoying was that Gwendolyn repeatedly got calls and texts and emails asking if she was okay and begging her to do her work, but the school only had so many phone numbers and email addresses, and she blocked every last one on all of her devices as well as her parents’.

Gwendolyn had not opened Canvas once since she started at iUniversity Prep, but she knew that she undoubtedly had a zero in every single course. (She did not know about Temporary Ones because she never did iPoP.) This did not concern her very much because she has never earned a passing grade in her life except in eighth grade, when she attended a school where the teachers gave everyone a C on every assignment no matter what and changed everyone’s answers on the STAAR tests so as not to fail the state accountability ratings. The school was caught that summer and shut down.

On January 5th, a few days before the end of the semester, Gwendolyn received a call from Wynter. “Hey, Gwen. I just got a call from your school saying that you’ve been on academic probation since October and will get kicked out if you’re not passing by Wednesday. No surprise there, of course, but I figured I should let you know.”

Although she had no interest in doing any actual work, Gwendolyn also did not want to get kicked out of iUniversity Prep because she’d undoubtedly just get sent to yet another school where it may not be as easy to get away with doing nothing.

A plan began to form in her head, and for the first time all year, Gwendolyn opened up Google Chat. (It was a miracle that she was able to find her login.) She had a ton of unread messages from random people who she figured were probably her teachers. The most recent of the messages were begging her to guess randomly on all of her assignments so that she’ll at least end up with a grade in the double digits.

She also noticed that she was in a group called the 12th grade chat, which she figured might be able to help with her plan. She posted a message in the chat asking who has the authority to change everyone’s grades, and another student responded “idk maybe wisely ig lol.” Gwendolyn asked who Wisely was, and the other student sent an emoji of a purple owl. She then asked if iUniversity Prep has a physical headquarters, and a third student sent her the address.

Much to Gwendolyn’s luck, both of her parents were in their studies meeting with clients and Eowyn was sitting at the kitchen table with her laptop, padding out her already long resume. This gave her ample time to find one of Eowyn’s old decorations from her Harry Potter obsession three years ago and sneak it into her room.

Gwendolyn spent the next twenty-three minutes scheming and the next ten hours on TikTok, and by the time that her phone died, it was 10:38 P.M. and her parents and sister were already asleep. She taped a piece of notebook paper to the outside of her door and quickly scrawled a message on it: “I’m doing a schoolwork marathon before the semester ends, and I’m not going to leave my room until I’m finished. I have plenty of healthy food in here with me. Please do not disturb me at all until I finish. -Gwendolyn. P.S. We’ve been talking for a long time about how the truck really needs its heater fixed, so I went ahead and brought it to the shop while everyone else was asleep.”

Then, she grabbed her dead phone, her keys, her laptop, a Post-It Note with the address she got earlier written on it, Eowyn’s Harry Potter decoration, and a fistful of twenties from her parents’ safe (The code was Wynter’s birthday: 0218) and headed out the door and into the truck with the broken heater.

After plugging in her phone and turning on the GPS, Gwendolyn pulled out of the driveway and began the long journey from Houston to Grapevine.

Gwendolyn had been very conflicted about learning how to drive because on the one hand, she would be able to drive to wherever she wanted instead of to school, but on the other hand, she would have to sit through hours of class and actually pay enough attention to what’s being said to pass the test. Ultimately, she made the decision to suffer through, but she was so miserable the whole time that she decided she would never endure anything like that ever again.

Driving in the middle of the night in early January in a vehicle without a functional heater is never very fun, not even in Texas, but thankfully the truck had been stocked with blankets, so Gwendolyn was very cozy.

Although she sped as much as she could, it still took her three hours and fifty-seven minutes to reach the Owl Headquarters. Gwendolyn was absolutely exhausted when she arrived, but what better time to carry out her plan than 2:43 AM?

She did not bother with trying to open the door, as she knew that it would almost certainly be locked. Instead, she grabbed the emergency hammer for breaking the truck’s windows if it gets submerged in water and smashed one of the windows on the side of the building.

Gwendolyn was able to push Eowyn’s decoration through the broken window and climb through herself without getting any major cuts, and when she got inside, a light turned on. At first she thought that it was part of an intruder detection system of some sort, but then she realized that the room she was in just had automatic lights.

She was not sure what kind of room she was in, but whatever it was, it was incredible. The floor was covered in an extremely soft purple rug that Gwendolyn would have wanted to touch if she didn’t know that it was covered in broken glass. One of the walls was lined with purple and orange bean bag chairs, and another with boxes of iUniversity Prep merch stacked to the ceiling. The walls were plastered with murals featuring a certain purple owl. The centerpiece of the room was a seven-foot tall statue of that owl made out of solid gold. The statue was showing off a book with a list titled “THE COMMUNITY AGREEMENTS” engraved in it.

Gwendolyn felt more than a little intimidated by the statue, so she carefully walked past it and into the hallway. The room’s light automatically turned off behind her, but she was able to see using her phone’s flashlight. She wasn’t sure which way to go but decided to try going right.

As she neared the end of the hall, Gwendolyn started to hear a faint sound. She realized it was coming from the room with a door covered in the same material as the rug in the statue room. She crept up to the door and peeked through the window.

The only light in the room was coming from a computer monitor, which appeared to have Gmail pulled up. The sound that Gwendolyn was hearing appeared to be coming from a purple owl quickly hopping all over the keyboard!

She slowly opened the door and stepped inside so stealthily that the owl didn’t seem to notice her. She carefully tiptoed over to the desk to get into position and caught a glimpse of the email that the owl was composing. It was addressed to Gwendolyn and her parents and was warning them that Gwendolyn had four days to earn a passing grade in all of her classes and that there would be “serious consequences” if she didn’t.

“You do realize that I blocked your email address back in August, right?” Gwendolyn asked.

Wisely was so startled by the sound that she jumped straight up–and directly into the open bird cage that Gwendolyn was holding over her head! By the time that she realized what had happened, Gwendolyn had locked the cage!

Wisely was quite a bit bigger than the stuffed Hedwig that had previously occupied the cage, but she still fit inside, and Gwendolyn wasn’t exactly trying to make her comfortable.

Wisely began to hoot incessantly. At first, Gwendolyn thought that she was making regular owl sounds, but as she started to carry Wisely out of the room and into the halls, her noises began to sound more and more like English. Gwendolyn realized that she was saying, “Let me out! Let me out!”

Gwendolyn was most certainly not going to oblige, and she became so frustrated with the repetitiveness of the owl’s pleas that she stopped, set Wisely down, pulled the lace out of her left shoe, and tied it around Wisely’s beak.

When the two approached the front door, a green LED flashed on a small black device attached to one of the toes on Wisely’s right foot, and the door audibly unlocked. Gwendolyn was very glad that they were able to exit the building through the front door because she did not want to have to face the Wisely statue again.

She unlocked her car and put Wisely in the passenger seat. She was about to take off when she thought she heard sirens in the distance and a horrible thought came across her mind: what if the device on Wisely’s toe was actually a tracking device?

Gwendolyn could not take that risk, so she pried off the device with her bare hands. This seemed to cause Wisely significant distress, as the noises she was making through the shoelace became more high pitched while Gwendolyn was working, but it didn’t seem to cause any serious harm.

Gwendolyn placed the device right in front of her left tire. Then, she started up her engine and drove over it before heading back onto the road.

Up to that point, Gwendolyn had been running off of pure adrenaline, but suddenly, the fact that it was past 3 A.M. started to sink in, so when Gwendolyn saw a motel called “The Unwise Choice” that advertised being open 24/7, she immediately pulled into the parking lot.

She stacked every blanket in the car on top of Wisely’s cage and carried the cage inside with her.

“Am I hallucinating? Because if I’m not, it looks like I have my first ever customer! I might even get paid this month!” the man at the front desk, whose name tag read Kevin, said to himself. He seemed more than a little embarrassed when he realized that Gwendolyn heard everything he said.

“Hi, I was wondering if you have any rooms with no windows and extremely strong locks on the closet doors,” said Gwendolyn, ignoring Kevin’s strange monologue.

“Really? Actually, all of our rooms are like that!” exclaimed Kevin. “This is actually a converted prison, so it has some strange features.”

Gwendolyn paid for her room with only twenty dollar bills, and Kevin handed her a very rusty old key.

“The only other thing you should know is that we have a very strict no animal policy,” Kevin said.

“That’s good because so do I,” Gwendolyn replied, glaring at Wisely through all the blankets.

The padlock on Gwendolyn’s door was even rustier than the key, but she was able to get it unlocked after struggling for a bit. She was very satisfied with the interior of the room. The walls, ceiling, and floor were made out of solid concrete that no bird could possibly peck or scratch through. The closet had a regular door with a door made of prison bars over it, and it was locked with three ginormous padlocks. The keys were sitting on the nightstand.

Gwendolyn set Wisely’s cage down on the floor and unlocked all the locks on the closet door. She placed Wisely’s cage safely inside the closet and relocked the door so that she could go back to the car and get her laptop.

When she got back, she booted up her laptop and logged into ClassLink. Then, she unlocked the closet door again, placed her laptop inside, and very reluctantly opened the door to Wisely’s cage.

“You are to do everything in your power to make me pass all of my classes. If I even think that you might be slacking off, trying to get help, or trying to escape, I promise that I will keep you locked in that closet forever and get rid of the keys. Do you understand?”

Wisely made an unintelligible noise through the shoelace and clicked on Canvas. Then, she clicked on Gwendolyn’s precalculus course, navigated to the first knowledge check, rapidly selected a bunch of answer choices, and ended up with a 100.

Gwendolyn watched Wisely complete several other math assignments, and she consistently churned out 100s.

“You’d better keep up that pace, Wisely, or you WILL regret it,” Gwendolyn threatened as she closed the closet door and redid all the padlocks. She placed the keys safely under her pillow.

Then Gwendolyn collapsed on the bed and instantly fell asleep, not even realizing that she was still wearing her shoes.

Gwendolyn woke up to the sound of someone kicking open her door! She saw a woman wearing a red shirt and pants with a purple cape, belt, and pair of shoes and gloves. Most of her head was covered by a purple and red mask.

“You’re a very weird-looking cleaning lady,” Gwendolyn said nervously.

“That’s not a Positive Expression!” said the very weird-looking cleaning lady. “My name is Bright Owl, and I’m iUniversity Prep’s resident superhero, here to help with any and all eLearning crises!”

“Well, I was having an eLearning crisis, but I figured it out, so I don’t need your help. Please go away,” said Gwendolyn.

“That’s not showing Mutual Respect!” said Bright Owl. “And actually, I came here because I got a Google Chat message from Wisely. She said she’s being held hostage and forced to participate in a scheme that breaks the Academic Honesty Policy!”

All that Gwendolyn could manage to get out was, “W-what?”

“So, tell me: Where’s Your Wisely?” Bright Owl pressed.

“Um, uh, uh…” Gwendolyn wasn’t sure what the best course of action would be, but she quickly thought of a plan. “In the bathroom!”

Bright Owl went into the bathroom, and Gwendolyn quickly pulled the door closed and held it shut from the outside.

“I don’t see Wisely in here anywhere… Hey! Wait a minute!” Bright Owl said from inside the bathroom.

Bright Owl certainly does not have super strength, as that is not an eLearning-related superpower, but she does work out regularly, so she was easily able to pull open the door.

Bright Owl pulled out her phone. “Wisely just sent me another Google Chat message! She says she’s locked in the closet.” After inspecting the closet door, she added, “It looks like we need to find the keys! Will you make a Choice to Participate in helping me look?”

“Nah,” Gwendolyn said, laying back down in bed with her head right on top of the keys.

Bright Owl turned the entire hotel room upside down but could not find the keys anywhere. “Wisely says she’s positive that the keys are hidden somewhere in the room, and I know we’re in the right room because she’s said that she hears me right outside the closet! The only place left to look is in the bed. Can you please get up?”

“Nope. No can do,” said Gwendolyn, closing her eyes.

“I really don’t think you’re doing your Personal Best,” Bright Owl said.

“I’m certainly not, but what can you do about it?”

“I’m very sorry, but this is important.” Bright Owl grabbed Gwendolyn and pulled her off the bed. Then, she removed the pillows and found the three keys.

Gwendolyn panicked as Bright Owl tried to match up the keys with the locks. How would she get herself out of this one? There was only one thing that she could think to do, so when Bright Owl finally unlocked the closet and Wisely flew out with a shoelace matching the one on Gwendolyn’s right shoe tied around her beak, she said, “Oh my gosh, Wisely was locked in the closet this entire time?!”

Bright Owl looked absolutely dumbfounded. “You mean that you weren’t Actively Listening to anything that I said?”

“Huh?” Gwendolyn said.

Bright Owl untied the shoelace around Wisely’s beak. Gwendolyn glared threateningly at Wisely, and Wisely said, “I have no idea what happened to me, but I promise that this girl has absolutely nothing to do with it.”

“I’m certain that she doesn’t,” Bright Owl said. “Clearly, she could not possibly be competent enough to–”

“No Put Downs!” Wisely reprimanded.

The small part of Bright Owl’s face visible under her mask turned bright red, and she said, “I am so, so, so, so, so sorry! I have never violated a Community Agreement before in my life, and I vow never to break one ever again! If there’s any way I can make it up to you, any way at all, please, please, please let me know!”

Gwendolyn could not believe what was happening. “Well, actually, there is something. Could you change all of my grades to passing?”

“Certainly,” Bright Owl said, “but I don’t think that I caught your name.

“Gwendolyn Ellis.”

Bright Owl pulled her phone back out and started typing. “It looks like you’re doing good in math but are in pretty rough shape when it comes to your other classes.” She typed in a few more things. “Done, done, done, done, and done! You’re all set now!”

“There’s one more thing,” said Gwendolyn. “Could you make sure that I end up with passing grades next semester, too?”

“Of course!” said Bright Owl. “If I forget, just send me a Google Chat message!”

With that, Wisely flew onto Bright Owl’s shoulder, and the two left the motel room.

Gwendolyn waited a few minutes for them to clear out before gathering up her things. She decided to leave the bird cage, though; she was certain that Eowyn wouldn’t miss it too much because she immediately outgrew anything magical early in fifth grade when she got her first letter from a college that was interested in having her.

Gwendolyn returned her room key to Kevin, who was dozing off at the front desk.

“Did you enjoy your stay?” he asked.

“Certainly!” Gwendolyn said. “I’ve never had a better motel experience in my life!”

“Are you being serious right now? We’ve been open for fifty years, and no one has ever enjoyed their stay! Not even once!”

“I can’t imagine why,” said Gwendolyn.

“Well, I do have a few theories, but… Anyway, I just saw the craziest thing: a visitor wearing a superhero costume leaving with a purple owl! Some people have absolutely no respect for our animal policy!”

“The audacity,” agreed Gwendolyn.

While beginning the long trek back to Houston, Gwendolyn had a revelation: she actually had worked kind of hard (at least harder than she had worked at any time in her life up to that point except maybe in driver’s ed) to kidnap Wisely! And had her hard work been worth it?

Yes, she decided. Yes, it had.