I settled for inwardly groaning.
True love, to me, was a nice term for the ignorant. In my opinion, true love could be reduced to a simple formula: how much money was involved (income and expenditures) and how willing a person was to communicate (The X factor – motivation is nearly impossible to predict.) Of course, there were more anomalies involved (the Y – “why” – factors), but those were the basics. People who believed in those “happily ever after” stories were doomed to find out they don’t really exist.
“Hey, Dinger, did you hear anything about the play?”
“Huh?” I looked up as Jason’s off-subject question broke through my thoughts. “Oh, not really. I’m sure we’ll find out when we go back to school.” As if I even cared to know, recalling the bunny-faced Romeo.
“I hope it’s still on,” Rachel said, leaning over the counter. “It would really make the students of Rosemont happy.”
“Rosemont? Why?”
Rachel replied, “Well, the art department of Rosemont Academy was working on the set. I heard the designs were beautiful.”
“Personally, I think it’s pointless. I mean, are you kidding me? Romeo and Juliet?” I snorted loudly, randomly thinking I did that a lot when I hated something. “All our plays almost always end up in a lawsuit over faulty staging equipment. Besides, Shakespeare died how many years ago? It’s a rather uninteresting and downright lame story; Romeo’s hysterical, and Juliet’s a suicidal maniac.”
“Romeo and Juliet!” the clanging of the cowbell at the door was accompanied by a loud, passionate, borderline senile voice.
“Oh, no,” Rachel grimaced, slapping her hand to her forehead.
We – everyone in the room – turned to see an old man standing in the doorway. He was thin as a rail, with a beard reminiscent of Santa Claus. The old man punched his fist into the air, and then began to recite:
“Two households, both alike in dignity, /
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene, /
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, /
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean. /
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes /
A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life; /
Whole misadventured piteous overthrows /
Do with their death bury their parents’ strife /
The fearful passage of their death-mark’d love /
And the continuance of their parents’ rage /
Which, but their children’s end, nought could remove /
Is now the two hours’ traffic of our stage; /
The which if you with patient ears attend /
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.”
With that, people cheered, and he took a very ostentatious bow.
“Oh, Grandpa,” Rachel muttered as she shook her head, clearly and thoroughly humiliated.
I merely raised an eyebrow, hoping this guy was stable enough to be out in public, as he made his way through his adoring crowd. “That’s your grandfather, Rachel?” And I thought my relatives were bad.
“Yes, unfortunately,” she whispered. “Shh…. Here he comes.”
“Ray, you know I have the hearing of a bat,” her grandfather said. “There’s no point in being secretive.”
“I know. That’s why I’m afraid.”
The old man sat down next to me as Rachel filled his cup. “What are you doing?” he asked her. “Stop! I wanted coffee.”
“You know the doctor told you to start drinking tea, three times a day,” Rachel shot back, still filling up the cup. “You can handle it, Grandpa, after making a show like that.”
“You know I just do it to make you mad.”
“You’re insane,” Rachel insisted, before hurrying back to the kitchen.
Deprived of his social victim, Rachel’s grandpa turned his attention to me and Jason. “So, you boys in the play, huh?”
“No,” we responded simultaneously.
“Shame…” he looked intently at me. “Such a wonderfully tragic story….Much like your own story, huh, young man?”
I raised my eyebrows even higher than the last time. “What are you talking about?”
“Star-crossed lovers…” the old man whispered softly. “Stars-crossed….” Then he seemed to lose his train of thought. He took a sip of tea and bitterly swallowed it.
And then I was actually buying what he was selling, my mind uncontrollably flashing back to the dream I had in the hospital. Stars…?
No, I told myself. Stop. He doesn’t know anything about you. He’s just unstable. Probably. And old.
“Would you guys like a free dessert today?” Rachel asked us, probably as a pity gift. It’s not every day you are sitting next to someone who might try to convince you toe floss is the next big thing.
“Really?” Jason’s eyes lit up, and I completely understood why Jason was so much in love with Rachel (Food usually does that, too.)
“Don’t feed them poisoned apples, Rachel,” her grandfather chuckled into his tea cup.
“Ugh! You can have one too, Grandpa! It’s perfectly safe. Besides, we were talking Shakespeare, not the Brothers Grimm.” She handed us a plate full of dessert samplers. “Don’t mind him. Grandpa Odd here used to be an English teacher. He’s been obsessed with the stuff since my grandmother died twenty years ago.”
Ah, so he was insane. The clarification helped.
“Wow, this is really good,” Jason said, his mouth full of a dessert heralded as Rachel’s Sweet Fruit Puffs. “Tastes like a pancake-pudding kind of combination.”
“That’s pretty close,” Rachel smiled. “I hope you come back. Here’s the bill.” She handed us a sheet of paper and left to take care of her other guests.
We exchanged a telling glance; we didn’t want to be caught alone with Grandpa Odd.
“Let’s go, it’s getting late,” Jason said. Nodding, I hurriedly pulled out the money while Jason grabbed his jacket.
“Hurry,” I muttered. I was in such a rush that I barely noticed when I hit someone with the door on my way out. I thought the girl glared at me, but it was hard to tell for sure because a curtain of bangs hid her face. I ignored her more out of convenience than anything else.
“That old guy’s so weird.”
“I know,” Jason agreed as we started down the street. “I’ve only seen him a couple of times, but this is the first time I’ve ever heard him speak. Usually he sits there, quietly staring off into space. Still, Rachel’s food is the best.”
“Yeah, it was all good.”
I groaned as the Apollo Time Tower, the city’s oldest building and biggest clock, chimed four o’clock. “Ugh. I have to head home. Cheryl’s supposed to be home soon. I hope that sandwich of Rachel’s holds up until tomorrow.” I made a face. “Estella-Louise is making organic vegetable stew tonight.” My words were composed of only the purest of hatred for the grass clippings my mother’s current chef had made for breakfast and was no doubt making for dinner.
Jason laughed. “Good luck with that one, Dinger.”
“Ha, ha, ha,” I laughed bitterly, as bitter as I was sure dinner (assuming I ate it) was going to be.
6
Grievance
The meteorite blast had been one of the most exciting and frightening events the city had seen in years. It was sad to admit that, because it wasn’t even that big. The news said it was close to twenty yards when it blasted through the atmosphere, but the biggest piece had whittled away to slightly over twelve inches when it’d landed smack dab in the middle of Rosemont.
Part of the reason I didn’t recognize the danger the meteorite’s arrival presented was because I believed the danger was all over after it crashed. The other part was because I didn’t care about it except when i
t made me look really good – like the whole saving Gwen’s life part.
Despite this, a big fuss went on practically all month about it – after all, something actually interesting going on is rare in Apollo City (We usually lived vicariously through Cleveland, our sister city.) – but thankfully, soon enough, everything seemed to be semi-back to normal.
That is, at least in school. True, the students were still quieter than usual, but it could just as easily have meant they had re-reverted to writing gossip on the bathroom walls again.
Probably the most inconvenient event was on Tuesday when we got back to school the following week. We had to have an assembly at the school. That wouldn’t have even been that annoying, normally; I get to hang out with my friends in the auditorium – talking and ragging on teachers and unimportant students and the like – while playing on my Game Pac.
It hadn’t been a bad idea to get everyone to get together to goof off while we pretend it was for something important. But it had been a bad idea to get the librarian to help.
“Guys! Shh! Trixie alert!” I nodded to the far side of the row of seats, where our least favorite person in all the school suddenly appeared. It was the librarian, Ms. Brain, commonly referred to as ‘Trixie’ by those who dared to seek her wrath.
Ms. Brain was definitely an ironic choice for a librarian. It wasn’t really odd that she had extremely short, grayish hair (It was almost butch.) with one strange curl in her bangs, or she wore old-lady librarian shoes (which tapped the floor in an impatient, annoyed manner on a consistent basis.) No, it was her voice which made her so… unique.
Her voice cracked like a whip (an accurate comparison, too – it was often used as a weapon in the library.) Poncey mimicked Trixie and Mrs. Smithe so well to where if he was pushed into it, he could hold fake conversations between the two all on his own.
As my friends and I settled into our auditorium seats, we all felt the burn of her gaze. Trixie always glared down at us. We were a known group of “troublemakers” and have been ever since Simon decided mystery meat was an acceptable substitute for a football and tossed it around the cafeteria at some of the band geeks. It turned out that one of the ones who ended up bawling like a baby, Kenneth Parker, just happened to have a mother who was on the school board and friends with Trixie.
So Trixie’s black, old-lady librarian shoes rapped predictably, drumming irritation like a theme song. Even though she said nothing, I knew she was deliberate in her actions; she only wanted to intimidate us and assert her authority. Unfortunately, it was enough to effectively put a damper on my playtime.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Mr. Hinnish, Central’s loveable and approachable but scared politically-correct principal, began, “The travesties of this past weekend have not gone unnoticed by any. I want to assure you no students in this district were significantly harmed (“Ugh!” I exclaimed angrily), and no significant damage was done to this school. We are expected to have repairs completed today.”
Mr. Hinnish went on to talk about the schedule for the week and other important-sounding stuff, like how Romeo and Juliet was still going on (though delayed), bringing cheers from some and groans from others (I plead the fifth here.)
The best announcement by far was the next football game was Friday night, Homecoming night, against the Clearburg Golden Tigers. That got students really cheering.
Believe me, there was nothing better than Friday night football at our high school – especially when it’s the Homecoming game.
But even in the perfect teenage life of mine, I got bored easily.
Such as later, when I was sitting in drama class.
It was ninth period, and I felt my attention drooping as much as my eyelids. Mr. Lockard was droning on and on about Shakespeare and the Global Theater, or was it Globe Theater? I wondered briefly how Gwen could lap this stuff up like cream. It left a dry taste on my tongue.
Had time passed at all since class began, I wondered? I dared not look up at the clock for fear Lockard would use it as an excuse to call on me.
I shifted in my seat. Immediately, I grimaced at the highly noticeable lack of leg room.
I sighed. Drama was the stupidest class ever (Ironic I would think so, I know.) Gwen was the reason I’d signed up for it this year. When she’d been assigned to another period, I’d made it my life’s mission to drop the class.
Unfortunately, the parentals were not as apt to the idea. Mark and Cheryl made me keep it to “teach me a lesson” about suffering through things I detested. I still hated them for it. My parents would never understand how the anxiety produced in this class crippled my lifetime potential.
Not to mention my actual life was at risk while I was in this class. The drama classroom was located inconveniently (extremely inconveniently) underneath the stage. The wood-sanded ceiling-stage was composed of creaking boards only two inches thick. Two inches to keep people safe from falling onto unsuspecting students below, who are probably already half-dead from boredom.
I was just waiting for the day when an amplifier or microphone or some fat kid caused the stage to collapse.
The humdrum of class slowly turned into muffles, which then twirled off into music. I was falling from consciousness, but not into sleep.
I panicked briefly for a moment as I fell back into the world of starlight, where I was flying freely, awing over the wonders of space and time Hubble has yet to find.
But even as I felt uneasy, I let myself be eased into contentedness. I wanted to enjoy it, even as much as I feared going crazy.
I could hear the same melody, the same one from the hospital, call out to me, and I felt eagerness and euphoria, as though joy and anticipation had procreated an entirely new emotion within me.
My universe started to move with the music – as though the music had become not just sounds beautifully laced together but a dance for all time and space to follow.
I couldn’t help it when I laughed. Joy had tickled me, inside and out, and I laughed.
“Hamilton Dinger!”
My attention was roughly jolted back to reality as Mr. Lockard (loudly) called me out. The celestial background dropped from my eyes as thought a light switch had been flipped on, chasing away the warmth and protection of darkness, and I was faced with white-hot exposure of Lockard’s face.
“Just what is so funny?”
“Uh….” was the best response I could make. I had been laughing aloud, unintentionally. “Nothing.”
“Then I don’t want to hear anything.” The unibrow on his forehead had an awkward, pointed slant to it.
I somewhat discretely rolled my eyes. Mr. Lockard knew full well drama was my least favorite class, somehow. I assumed Mr. Lockard was used to students acting, and that made him more aware of when people were lying to him. Either that or he was a mind-reading warlock. I was really fine with either explanation, as long as there was proof to back it up.
“Okay,” Mr. Lockard clapped his hands. “As you all know, the play is going to be performed soon. Tomorrow, we will be working on the set for Romeo and Juliet. I will also give extra credit for attending the play. Doesn’t that sound wonderful, hem?”
How hilariously funny it would be to get Poncey to mimic Mr. Lockard, I thought. Lockard was a middle-aged, balding man with a bad comb-over and a unibrow, and had a tendency to say “hem” at the end of his questions instead of “hmm” or “yes” or nothing at all like a normal person.
I had football practice to get through later, so I didn’t need Mr. Lockard giving me grief.
Mr. Lockard, apparently using his dark magic for mind-reading, caught my eye. “Remember, drama is a good way to meet people. Don’t you think so, Hamilton? I think it would be a nice way for you to meet a few more interesting ladies, hem?”
“Ugh, sure,” I grumpily replied. As if I need help meeting girls. Lockard was an id
iot (I can’t really stress that enough.)
I practically danced as the bell finally rang. Even math class was less depressing. I felt the layers of death-like sleep peel off me as I stepped out of the classroom. Happiness settled on me like an old friend, cloaking me with the music of my own universe.
I faltered slightly as it hit me. I’d been taken away, whisked off to the otherworldliness of my subconscious. If that’s what it was.
I’d never had dreams before. Never. Not before the meteorite.
Was it possible my brain had been traumatized by my brush with death? Maybe I wasn’t crazy, but something was physically wrong with me.
No. No, surely not.
Nothing was wrong with me. Nothing could be wrong with me. And even if there was, it wasn’t my fault.
It wasn’t my fault that I was surrounded all day long by idiots like Lockard, who insisted on boring me to death while caging me under a forest of potential splinters, or sadists like Trixie, whose sole ambition in life was to terrorize me.
It wasn’t my fault that I was born to be better than everyone else, but I had to live with people who weren’t worthy of me.
It wasn’t my fault that the meteorite had struck, slapping my city and branding me with bad dreams either.
And it wasn’t my fault I enjoyed the daydreams. Anything to escape this life, really. I didn’t have time to worry about them.
That’s right. I didn’t have time to worry about it. There were a lot more important things at hand to be concerned about. So I shrugged it off.
I was sure it was nothing, and that it would go away. And so what if this one had happened while I was more or less awake? It didn’t mean it was getting worse, necessarily. Lockard was just more boring than sleep, that’s all.
7
Distraction
The soft morning light slowly crept onto my bed, letting Friday make her welcoming introduction. I heard the quiet echoes of the house calling out to me in my half-slumber, letting me know it was nearly time to get up.
Slumbering Page 7
