The Lovely Shadow

by Cory Hiles

  That line of reasoning didn’t work with June, as she informed me that there were certain policies that the State had in place regarding education, and not one of them said a seven year old boy could stay home and educate himself.

  With that approach going down in flames, I changed tactics. I tried to convince June to quit her job as the head veterinarian at the local clinic to stay home and teach me. I tried to convince her that if she did that, then she would have time to take care of all the animals she’d always dreamed of having but had never had the time for. That approach also surrendered itself to the flames when June coolly informed me that we would all starve to death if she quit her job.

  I spent awhile trying to think up my next tactic. I was desperate. I was not gaining any education at school, aside from mathematics which I was fairly certain I was never going to need, and I felt trapped there. I needed a way out, and I was pretty sure I’d found one.

  Knowing how much June loved me, and knowing that she knew how much I loved her in return, I was convinced that my newest approach was bound to be a sure-fire winner.

  One day, as soon as June walked in the door from work I greeted her with big tears running down my face. “Oh, June,” I cried in a miserable voice before the door was even closed, “I missed you so much. I need you to stay home and spend more time with me, June.” I sobbed and slobbered, and was relatively certain that there should be an Academy Award in my near future.

  June set down her purse and leaned down towards me and said very sincerely, “Oh Johnny, I missed you too. I love you so much that it hurts me to go to work every day, Baby. And I would love nothing more than to give up working and stay home with you.”

  I threw myself in her arms and gave her a huge hug to emphasize how much I loved her, and hide the grin I couldn’t suppress as I saw some modicum of success with my newest tactic.

  June hugged me back and continued speaking. “The only problem, my Darling, is that you smell like onions, and you still have to go to school. Now, go throw away the onion in your pocket and wash up for supper.”

  I was flabbergasted. Not only did June know I faked my tears with onions, she saw straight through my ruse to the heart of the matter and knew that it was really all about getting out of going to school. She deserved an Academy Award of her own for the little ruse she put me through that night.

  Eventually I realized that June was too smart for me and I gave up trying to get out of school. Since I couldn’t escape, I changed my perspective, and instead of hating everything about school, I decided to only hate the social aspect of it.

  I poured myself into my education. I loved learning, and over the course of the school year my teacher did touch on a few things outside the realms of mathematics that I did not already know, and those morsels of knowledge were enough to feed me through that year.

  I never did learn how to socialize with my peers that first year, nor did I try to learn, but I did eventually learn how to silence the bullies with my words rather than attempting (and failing) to do it with my fists.

  Towards the end of the school year my principal, Mr. Tinken, called for a meeting with me and June. I figured I was in some deep trouble for something, though I couldn’t think what, and June did not believe me as I tried to convince her of my innocence in all matters as we drove to the school for the meeting.

  My heart was pounding in my chest as we entered the principal’s office for the meeting, and the first words out of June’s mouth after the cordial greetings were done were, “What has Johnny done?”

  I was hurt, offended, disgruntled, and galled that June would assume that I had done anything, but I listened very carefully to what Mr. Tinken had to say next, because I really wanted to know what I’d done as well.

  Mr. Tinken laughed and said, “No, no, Miss Devon, Johnny hasn’t done anything wrong. Here, please, have a seat and I’ll tell you why we’re here.”

  June and I sat in the chairs in front of Mr. Tinken’s desk, and he sat in the chair behind his desk. He leaned forward slightly and placed his hands on the desk in front of him with his fingers intertwined.

  “Miss Devon,” he said, “Johnny has been tested in all areas according to his age group and grade level, and he has passed far beyond any scores I’ve ever seen during my tenure at this school; except for math. While he is not scoring exceptionally well at math, he is still above average and is picking it up much faster than his classmates.”

  June’s tight face relaxed as the tension drained out of it and she finally believed that I was not a hoodlum. I’m fairly certain that my face relaxed as well. She reached over and patted my leg and gave me the proudest smile I’d ever seen.

  “That’s really wonderful news Mr. Tinken…but why are we here?” June asked.

  “Well, Miss Devon, we are here because Johnny doesn’t belong here.”

  My heart leapt inside my chest. When the faculty says you don’t belong in school then your guardian has to listen to them, I thought, and wondered for a second why I’d never tried the ‘I don’t belong there’ approach earlier in the year.

  June gave Mr. Tinken a quizzical look and he continued, “I’m afraid his intellectual maturity, and vast knowledge of subject material far beyond his grade level, serves only to place him at a distinct disadvantage in the classroom. He is not really ‘learning’ anything here, and he is not able to communicate well with the other students because, quite frankly, they are from different worlds.”

  I was so elated I was shaking. Here I was, having finally conceded victory to June in regards to my going to school, and my defeat was now being handed back to me as a victory by my principal, simply for being a good student.

  “So, what do you recommend, Mr. Tinken?” June asked, in a concerned voice.

  “Well, Miss Devon, we have three options as I see it. The first option is to do nothing. If we do nothing, and we leave Johnny where he is, he will suffer socially and intellectually. The second option is to move Johnny ahead several grades next school year so that his grade level matches his performance level, but that would be putting an eight year old boy in the eighth grade, and while this may satisfy his intellectual needs, I fear it would not do much for his social needs.”

  My heart was sinking as Mr. Tinken kept talking, I was silently willing him to either shut up or mention homeschooling as a viable option.

  June looked distressed. “What is the third option?” she asked, in a voice that hinted that she was certain the third option would be equally horrible.

  “The third option is the Rising Star Academy. It is a private school for exceptionally gifted children, and they will not accept a student until the age of eight at a minimum so Johnny would not be able to attend until next school year anyway.”

  “They are prohibitively expensive, but they do have a scholarship program, and I hope I have not overstepped my bounds, Miss Devon, but I already sent in an application for Johnny, along with his test scores and a letter of recommendation.”

  “And…?” June asked, looking more hopeful than she had a few moments ago.

  “And they accepted him, full scholarship, for the entirety of his tenure there!”

  Mr. Tinken was positively beaming, and June was squealing with delight, and I was sinking deeper into my chair feeling sorry for myself. Victory had been so close I could taste it, and then it was snatched away, leaving a bitter taste in my mouth.

  June turned to me in rapturous joy and grabbed my thighs, shaking them wildly, “Isn’t this awesome, Sugar?” she squealed.

  “Yeah, great,” I mumbled in return.

  CHAPTER 22

  I finished out the last few weeks of the school year with all the normal glumness that had accompanied the first part of the year and looked forward to the summer break with great anticipation.

  As miserable as I was at the prospect of starting all over in a new school, I was determined not to let it ruin my summer vacation.

  Summer had taken on a new beauty for me. The previo
us summer had seen my deliverance from the dank darkness of my mother’s basement (and the dank darkness of her twisted mind), and the current summer was seeing my deliverance from the Hell known as ‘elementary school’.

  I was not about to take a moment of the summer break for granted. I spent great amounts of time sitting in the shade of a great willow tree that grew beside a natural pond that sat about a hundred yards away from the house reading books.

  I became great friends with Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn that summer. I also revisited Bilbo Baggins several times. I was introduced to Tom Joad and his family as they traveled West during the Great Depression, and I spent some time getting friendly with a misfit named Charlie Gordon and his good friend Algernon, the mouse.

  I did not only spend my days that summer in lackadaisical relaxation around the pond. June taught me to ride horses, and Miss Lilly taught me how to cook. I explored every square inch of June’s fifteen acre property, watched countless hours of television.

  I also taught myself quite a lot of French with the help of a French/English dictionary that June bought for me, though I was beginning to doubt that I would need that knowledge. There had been no more strange occurrences since the night I learned of my mother’s death and I began to suspect that everything that had happened was either my imagination or had a perfectly rational explanation.

  But through it all, in the back of my mind there was a certain fear of the unknown. A fear that grew considerably the closer summer drew to an end.

  I desperately did not want to start all over at a new school. I had only barely learned to manage the bullies at the public school, and now was going to be sent off to a place where rich bullies could torment me as well.

  June was empathetic to my fears of the new school, but after listening to all my whining the previous school year she was not willing to tolerate any of it for this new academic year.

  “Johnny, Honey,” she said to me with a firm but gentle tone in her voice when I began to attempt to get out of going the first day, “you have endured horrors and tortures that no other person—man, woman, or child—should ever have to endure. You not only endured them, but you managed to pull through them unscathed with your incurable optimism and amazing wits. I will not allow you to become a coward and a failure now. Do you understand?”

  As clever as I thought I was, June was far cleverer. She managed in one breath to make me feel proud, smart, and ashamed. I hung my head in shame. The idea of letting June down in any way was not something I would ever be able to cope with. I would have faced a thousand bullies before I let her down.

  “Don’t be ashamed, Baby,” June said to me, while gently lifting my chin with her fingers—forcing me to look her in the eye. “It’s ok to be scared, Doll, but true bravery comes from being scared and going into battle anyway. And you, of all people, are the bravest man I’ve ever met. You’ll be awesome, just like you always are.”

  I smiled at June. I couldn’t help myself. She always made me feel amazing inside. I was still afraid, but knowing that swallowing my fear would make June proud was more than enough to get me motivated.

  “Let’s go,” I said cheerfully, and jogged through the door and out to the car.

  As it turned out, my fear was completely unnecessary anyway. The Rising Star Academy was nothing like the public school had been. The class sizes were considerably smaller; the individual attention that each teacher was able to lavish on each student was considerably more.

  The curriculum at the Academy was actually challenging. We, as students, were not simply challenged to memorize facts, we were challenged to think.

  For every major event in history that we covered, we had to write a paper discussing how we thought the present might have been affected if those major events of the past had not happened or had turned out differently.

  We were introduced to many classical novels and had to write reports about each one, discussing not only the plot lines and major characters in each book, but also the themes that were present in the novel; overt themes as well as more covert underlying themes.

  We had to form debate groups where current events and politics were heatedly argued back and forth. We played weekly quiz show style games where the only reward was having your name prominently displayed on the wall through the following week.

  The other students at the Academy were unlike the students in public school as well. Simply having money was not enough to ensure a student a place at Rising Star; a superior intellect was also required.

  The preliminary testing included not simply facts and figures that needed to be regurgitated, but also more than a few essay questions that revealed a potential student’s ability to think through complex situations, and also a bit about how the candidate viewed the world around them and responded to various situations.

  The testing assured that only the most intelligent and morally sufficient students were allowed into the Academy, which meant the student body was comprised almost entirely of decent kids. There were no bullies to be found anywhere on campus, and in fact, any bragging or other type of behavior that remotely resembled condescending or insulting behavior towards another student was swiftly dealt with, generally in the form of “marks”.

  The major tenets of Rising Star Academy were Respect, Honor, and Sagaciousness. These were highly esteemed ideals that the Academy took very seriously, and any flagrant disregard towards any of these tenets resulted in a mark.

  Marks followed a student through their career at Rising Star; not for one semester or one school year, but through a student’s entire tenure at the Academy. If a student accumulated five marks during their tenure they were expelled from the Academy with no hope of having the judgment overturned.

  At the Academy, all students were made to feel that they had value to themselves, each other, the world at large, and the Academy. Every student wanted to be a part of the school and the idea of being punted was repugnant to each and every student.

  During my entire tenure at Rising Star—which lasted nine years—there was not a single student who ever accumulated more than two marks.

  I thrived at Rising Star. I remained a little introverted, though and did not really develop any close friendships, but I did develop casual friendships, and got along quite well with everybody I encountered there.

  My favorite course at the Academy was a once-a-week workshop style class where we were given a grab-bag filled with all kinds of different items, and then presented with a theoretical ‘situation’ that we had to resolve, using only the items in the bag.

  Often the items in the bag were mundane items like staplers, duct tape, scissors, and a set of playing cards. On other occasions, especially as I got older, the items became a bit more complicated and exotic and included things like a baggie of zinc oxide, hydrogen peroxide, cannon fuse, and a “ticket” allowing me to use the Bunsen-burners, or other lab equipment that was readily available in the classroom.

  I truly loved attending the Rising Star Academy, but still looked forward expectantly towards the day when I would graduate, and be completely free of all the structure and rules that the Academy imposed upon my life.

  I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life as I was learning and growing at school, but I knew I had no desire to be a professional student. If I had known where my life would lead so soon after graduating, I might have been more open to the idea of never growing up and staying in school forever.

  CHAPTER 23

  Although one summer of my life had been jaded by some very painful memories, in the end that summer had become a season of triumph and joy, and every year I looked forward to summer breaks from the Academy with all the wide eyed excitement of a fat kid in a candy store where everything is free.

  Summers were mine to control and to conquer. As it turned out, summers also seemed to be when the strangest events of my life took place.

  By the time the summer rolled around in the year I turned fourteen I had pretty much completely forgotten abo
ut Miss Lilly’s declaration that I had ‘the eye’. I had seen no shadows, smelled no roses, and had no odd events happen in my life for nearly seven years—not since the summer of 1990.

  The summer of 1997 was a summer of changes though. Not only within my body, as puberty took hold of me and began to run wild, but also in my sensitivity to the weirdest parts of the world. The parts nobody understands and most people don’t believe in.

  The weirdness began on the first day of that summer break. I came into the kitchen around seven-thirty in the morning to grab a banana and a glass of milk before heading out to the pond with a new book. Miss Lilly had long since stopped trying to force us all to eat a good breakfast and had instead gotten in the habit of sleeping in rather late.

  When I came into the kitchen, Miss Lilly was already awake and was standing by the sink, staring out the window with tears running down her face.

  “Miss Lilly,” I said, my voice cracking from puberty and honest concern, “What’s the matter?”

  Miss Lilly jumped when I spoke. Though I had not been quiet on my entry to the kitchen, she had been so lost in what she was looking at outside that she had not heard me enter.

  “Oh, Boo,” she said when she turned around and saw me, “you like to ‘bout done scare me to death, Child.”

  She turned back towards the window and resumed staring out without saying anything else, so I approached her and stood beside her, wrapping one arm around her back, and looking out the window to see what she was staring at.

  The kitchen window looked out towards the pond and the willow tree where I still enjoyed sitting and reading. At first, I saw nothing out there that seemed out of the ordinary, but then I noticed that one of the residents of the pond—a large gray goose that spent his summers lounging at the pond much the way I did, and whom I’d named Howard—was running circles around the base of the willow tree.

  “What the Hell is that crazy goose doing?” I muttered, more to myself than to Miss Lilly.