“Notify Black Horse that the Mockingbird is safe in its nest and that we’ve obtained half of the amulet,” O’Reilly says.
From the walkie-talkie, the lady on dispatch speaks. “Long, live, Atlantis.”
Five years later
The brisk morning air fogs the breath of us kids as a sign that summer is losing its grip to autumn.
I’ve been waiting about ten minutes outside of the Rose in my school uniform and donated windbreaker jacket, with my tattered backpack slung over my shoulders. I stand with the rest of the kids loosely huddled together on the gravel and cobblestone driveway, waiting for my chariot to arrive in front of the Rose for the first day of tenth grade at Shady Oaks Catholic Academy.
“Where in the hell is he?” I whisper to myself, holding my hand over my eyes, blocking out the morning sun and looking toward the rusty double doors of the dorm.
Cold is the theme here in Oak County. The food is cold, the beds are cold, the floors, the showers, and the people. And after five years of being at this orphanage, it has left me with a feeling of being stuck in a quagmire of acidic injustice. The more you struggle, the quicker and deeper you sink as the pit eats away at your hope. All I have are my friends, my books, voices from my father, my chessboard, and my plan to keep me sane.
From my boredom and my insatiable appetite for knowledge, I’ve stumbled upon something that my father was working on before he died. It’s led me to start a plan to make the pain stop. Ironically, this plan of mine just may be a figment of my imagination.
For the past year, each night I write it out, trying to work out the secret messages left by my father. It’s folded up, burning a hole in my back pocket, hidden from my friends. It’s best that these potential delusions are kept secret to thwart any potential prying from other curious people.
Peering through the garden grove, I stare at the front double doors of the dorm. The doors fly open as a jet-black-haired boy with creamy skin runs through the doors toward the bus as if being chased by a lion. Smoke comes from his faint lips after every few strides, like a coal-burning steam train.
“What took you so long?” I ask, giving him a friendly punch on the shoulder.
“I must not leave without my charm,” he says, looking at me with those eyes shaped like the eye on a peacock tail. “It protects us,” he says, holding it up to me.
That charm he’s speaking of is his square canvas envelope with worn dirty edges that he wears around his neck. It has a flat wooden Buddha carving inside of it. He carries it with him at all times, and even when he sleeps. Me, on the other hand, when I do get a chance to sleep, my charm is the photo underneath my pillow of my mother and father.
Kim
He used to be a mute when I first met him, four years ago, and now his English has improved drastically since then, even though he still doesn’t say much. Every time he speaks, it’s like he matches words together carefully, like a woman preparing her wardrobe for a date. His face stays expressionless most of the time, and I’ve never heard him laugh hard. The moth-eaten sheet on his bed stays made with perfect creases and folds. Everything he does seems to have a ritual to it. When we eat, he cuts everything in small pieces and never chews hard or has bad manners, paying close attention to his paper napkin and plasticware, as if it were fine china and he was eating in front of her majesty the queen. It took him a year just to stop bowing to me when he talked. Made me feel like a medieval lord and he was swearing fealty to me. He was my first friend at the Rose and has turned into my best friend. We’ve been like peas in a pod from the first day he got here and moved into my room.
The first day of high school, one year ago, feels like yesterday to me. My buddy Kim and I were exposed to the outside of these wrought iron gates and were nervous and anxious, with a gut full of naive.
The first ride from the Rose to Shady Oaks made me feel like a baby on a full stomach wrapped in a silk blanket. I heard the rumble of that diesel engine coming through the dense oak trees and saw the worn yellow paint and speckled rust spots of that long chariot coming to carry us away to be brainwashed.
The bus doors opened and the snap-mouthed bus driver sassed away every ounce of dignity we had left in our pitiful bodies. Climbing inside, we stepped over cigarette butts and bottle tops, getting a waft of the lingering smell of cognac and tobacco smoke from Snap Mouth as he cradled his bottle of malt liquor encased in a brown paper bag between his legs. We pulled off, watching the Rose get smaller and smaller as we pulled away, almost shrinking from existence.
The Rose
Rosy Oaks Boys Home, a brick-and-mortar prison for damned kids with no one to take them in, built on a plot of land carved out of a centuries-old oak forest by the reaper’s scythe. The fiery red squares were cloaked in a blanket of thick ivy, like a shroud of sin. It wound itself around the building like little green snakes on the west and north sides of the office building, the chapel, and the dorm, where daylight beat hardest. Soiled windows gave the sun trouble doing its job. Smiling gargoyles and weeping angels stood along the edge of the rooftop, either crying for us or shedding tears of laughter over its imprisoned souls. A garden grove of roses grew in front of the dorm, strangling the view of visitors with its beauty so they couldn’t witness the grime and the atrocities.
That pain lingers and navigates every step you take here, like the ground is littered with broken glass and you’re barefoot, attempting to step where the least bits of glass are. Ever since I first got here, five years ago, there has only been one thing on my mind, and it’s folded up in my back pocket.
Soon we’re disappearing into the oak forest, bobbing up and down in our seats from the rough ride, like buoys in heavy chop, sitting on seats so worn and tattered that they no longer protect my ass from the metal bench beneath it. We feel every pebble and twig in the dirt road like a kick in the pants.
I close my eyes and listen to the diesel engine and I breathe deep, smelling the musk of the moist oak and juniper tree trunks, leaf litter, and forest soil. I hear the wind whipping through the leaves growing from the branches reaching over the dirt road. I hear clicks and chirps of squirrels, critters, and birds, becoming jealous of their freedom. Then I can feel the bus slow to a labored stop as the clunky transmission and neglected brakes squeak and hiss after about half a mile. I open my eyes to see that our chariot approaches a barrier with a demonic aura—the Wrought Iron Gate. We watch that wrought iron gate open like the clenched fists of Lucifer himself, letting us enter the world that we are kept from, a world most of us will never witness beyond becoming some kind of janitor or servant.
The ride soon smoothes out when we hit pavement, and my pleasant journey continues. Gazing through the half-open dirty windows of the bus, I watch the townspeople going to work and driving in their cars. They are oblivious to us kids. I fantasize about living out their day and what it would be like to be normal.
Chatting with my two orphanage buddies, laughing at each other as we bicker, poke, and prod at each other’s faults, we linger in the beautiful moment of this bubble of sanctity and joy as we value each other’s company for the duration of the ride. Then my twenty-minute euphoric stupor comes to an end as soon as we make our stop at Shady Oaks. That bubble is popped by a needle of reality as Snap Mouth spews out a few sentences of insult as we get off of the bus.
The campus is bordered by hedgerows. Murals depicting bible scenes decorate the lawns and walkways, and a ten-foot statue of the founder of the school sits in the corner of the north end, with his bust looking out toward the road entrance. There’s a poetic saying under his stone feet: “Walk in the eyes of Him, for He is always watching.” Each time I look at that stone statue with those stone eyes, the hair on my neck crawls and my mouth gets dry and my hands get cold and clammy. I try to forget about that statue every day, but it beckons me to glance at its unblinking eyes.
Bells in the tower chime at eight a.m. sharp each morning, letting you know when you are to head to your next rat lab that they call a
classroom. Kids scramble about in a wash of crimson and blue plaid uniforms as we unsavories make our way from the bus drop to be among the other students.
A typical day at the school is filled with angry nuns who pose as teachers, outsiders who have teaching jobs and who make the daily commute from the middle-class suburbs and blurt out words that are supposed to make us learn, but their objective is just to pick up a paycheck every few weeks. Finally there is this hoard of wild animals, also known as students, who come as counterfeit nerds but are just spoiled, mischievous teenagers from those same suburbs where the teachers come from. Then there is us. The unfortunates. The welfare kids. The cast-outs. The ones who don’t belong. That got a bone thrown our way so that we can maybe be taught to act accordingly in society. The kids from the Rose. Or, as the other students call us, the Peasants.
Most of the teachers and faculty here are militant and also subservient to the Catholic mantra, which is that all kids are evil, and anything that they say should be disregarded and met with extreme discipline. The meanest of the teachers is a math teacher named Mrs. Biel. I think she has some sort of personal vendetta against me to make the hour and fifteen minutes of class time a true torment for my soul every day. One time I got in trouble for sneezing during a test. She considered that to be a rebellious act, so she sent me to detention for two days. I paid her back by leaving a rotting ham sandwich taped to the bottom of her desk. She didn’t know about it for a week, and the classroom smelled of death for a week after she removed it.
However, even months after she removed the rotting sandwich, the stink still permeates my nostrils. The smell of this place lingers and sits on top of your upper lip and never leaves. You forget it for a few seconds when you laugh or when a different pain trumps the stink, but soon the stink returns and wallops you in the face. It hits me every morning when I leave my chariot and step onto this hallowed ground
Today is just like the first day of last year that I remember here at Shady Oaks Academy: class schedule, homeroom, a bullshit speech through the PA system by the principal, and then the rules. Those rules govern us animals in a way that turns people into mindless drones. My buddies and I, on the other hand, don’t abide by the rules and we are reprimanded often, either with detention at the school or isolated discipline at the Rose, which we like to call the pit.
The handful of rich kids who go here have special privileges that us poor unfortunates don’t, like field trips and honors classes—where they actually learn something—special food menus, and they get away with everything. I saw a kid with a vile of cocaine that fell out of his pocket right in front of one of the nuns, and she did her best to turn the other way.
The most valuable knowledge that I’ve acquired has been through theft. I’d steal the upperclassmen’s books from the classrooms and hide them in secret places of the school, like the vents in the bathrooms. Or I’d stuff a few of them in the hedges outside, picking them up when the last bell sounds and reading them late at night back at the Rose while Kim is soundly asleep. Then I’d put them back from where I took them a few days later. I’m far ahead of the other kids at the school. In fact, I read my way through high school in the first two months I was here last year, and now I’m working my way through college.
My father excited my insatiable appetite for knowledge when I was very young, right after my life-saving surgery on my brain. It seems like it’s the day after I got home from the hospital after the surgery, with bandages on my head and still loopy from the meds they had me on. I picked up a book then and haven’t stopped reading to this day. I was only five years old at the time, and a new light had been sparked inside of me. It only burns more ferociously with every word my eyes inhale and my brain digests. I’m not sure if I should know what advanced physics entails and what the half-lives of every radioactive isotope are, but for some reason knowing all of these things comes naturally to me.
After my first few weeks at the Rose, my goal was to escape. And that thought pulses in my mind with every breath I take. Not only did my father leave me with a passion for knowledge, but he also left me with a way out.
I have no clue if I was supposed to find it or not, but when I first laid eyes on the strange language on the hidden part of his antique chessboard, the symbols began to form pictures in my mind—pictures of freedom and easy living, an escape from the torment and the cold for my friends and me. I’ve yet to figure the message out fully, but my will has forced insanity to find out. Am I nuts and just imagining this? Maybe I am, but it’s better than nothing.
Good thing is, is that the handwritten note that he left for whoever was supposed to find it has left clues to crack all of the details to get the full code.
It reads:
“This is my life’s work. I did not have time to finish what I intended to do, so I left you this message that gives you pathways to things that I have hidden. When you obtain these hidden objects you will have something that can give you great power. Protect it with your life . . .”
Seems like even in death he’s speaking to me and guiding me, just as he did after he slid into his drunken speeches each evening. The more booze that soaked into his cells, the smarter and deeper his conversations got.
My sleepless nights give me time to study and decipher the unintended messages. I sometimes bring the notes to class with me to kill the time. My friends think the symbols that I write on the paper are just me doodling. I guess it’s best if no one knows what I am up to.
My physique has changed over the past two years. I went from a bag of bones to a slender and toned young man. The low-cut curls of brown on top of my head hide the scars of my life-saving surgery.
I sometimes part my hair with my fingers and look into the mirror just to see the lighter colored scars from my almond-colored skin to remind myself how lucky I am. How lucky I am that my father cared enough to go bankrupt just to save his boy.
Looking in the mirror I see my eyes: one blue and the other green, a rare genetic anomaly. One eye is vice and the other virtue, and what they see melds in my mind as mercy and prosecution to paint the images that I see each day.
The first half of the day is over and it’s lunchtime. My friends and I usually meet up at the same table inside of the cafeteria and then head outside near the fence by the basketball court after eating, the same basketball court where I met Ron and Steve my first year here. The same court where Ron harassed Kim, and where Ron first laid his eyes on Kim’s mark. The same court where Steve hustled Ron at his own game when Steve bet that Ron couldn’t shoot and hit shots on the distorted basket with a wind variant that Ron, from his competitive rage, was too blind to notice. Steve and I knew, yet Ron caved into the demands after I approached Steve for his gifts of craftiness and swindle and asked him to be our friend.
“Hey guys,” I say as I walk up with the lunch tray to the meeting table. “How’s the first day of school going?”
“Shitty as usual, man,” Ron says. “These bloody nuns sure aren’t virgins at all. They have sticks up their arses.”
Ron doesn’t stay at the Rose, but he lives close by. He’s an athletic kid, the tallest of the group, with a short crop of kinks on top of his head, dark skin, high cheekbones, and a tapered jaw. He also has a chip on his shoulder that weighs a ton and a silver tongue that can talk a fish onto a shrimp boat.
He grew up in England and then moved here when he was twelve, after his dad was killed in action while stationed in the Middle East fighting for the Crown. His mother, who’s American, returned to this town with him and his disabled kid brother and with a not-so-great severance package from the British government. He lost his father, but not his English accent and wit.
“Stop being a pussy,” says Steve. “No one wants to hear your whining today.”
Steve and Ron are like the unbreakable spear and the impenetrable shield. They contradict one another to the point of surrender. They met on bad terms, but I think they are perfect buddies. Steve’s shaggy blond hair, short lanky
stature, and mild manner masks his conniving ways. A deep scar along his cheek, sharp deviated nose, and a few missing teeth tell his story. The few blond whiskers on his upper lip and jaw say that he’s a bit older than us, but he will lie about his age every time you ask. Kim laughs at the two while they bicker and crack jokes on each other. I just watch and eat my chicken-patty sandwich.
The bell sounds and ends the verbal scuffle. I say my farewells to my buddies and make my way to class.
“Hey, D,” Ron says behind me. “What’s this?” he says, holding up a folded piece of paper. Shit, I say to myself, reaching into my back pocket. It must have fallen out at the lunch table.
“A love letter to your boyfriend, is it?” he jokes as he opens it. “What in the hell is this, man? Are you possessed by Picasso or something?”
“No,” I say, snatching the paper away from him. “It’s uh, just some doodling that I did in class.” I quickly fold it and put it in my front pocket.
“Well, don’t get your panties in a bunch about it. I’ll see you later, weirdo,” Ron says, patting me on my shoulder.
This isn’t the first time my “doodling” was compromised. Us kids at the Rose have orientation each year before school officially opens. We are given a speech about what is expected of us animals. While orientation was going on last week, I was deciphering the symbols that I had written in a notepad, and the bride of the devil, Mrs. Biel, our math teacher, confiscated it. She hates me like cats hate water, and just my luck. The worst part of my day at school starts as I look at my schedule—Mrs. Biel’s class. I need to find a way to get my notepad back, which is stowed away in her desk.
Man, I hate this bitch.
Chapter 2: The Past. The Rainbow Project
Two men riding in an open-top military jeep tread along an unpaved road with the brisk coastal air whipping past them. The driver is a young, clean-shaven, boyish-faced lad wearing a white, low-ranking naval uniform. His passenger is a middle-aged, portly man, dark of hair and full-bearded, wearing a fedora, scarf, and a higher-ranking naval uniform. He’s enjoying a hot beverage in a gray ceramic mug. They say nothing to each other as they ride along, appearing as if the younger man is just a chauffeur. A hard left and a hard right and the jeep stops in front of a door that is built into a small concrete structure no bigger than a utility shed. The portly man leaves the jeep and walks toward the door as the young man pulls away.
Chess Players: Atlantis and the Mockingbird Page 2
