Max Baker: Guardian of the Ninth Sector

by Matthew Cronan

  The silence was welcomed as Max immediately began to drift back to sleep, but was quickly interrupted by a loud knocking on the bedroom door.

  “Are you up Max?” he heard his mother’s soft voice ask him from the other side of the door.

  “No,” he answered, his voice muffled by the pillow.

  “Well rise and shine. I’m making you a birthday breakfast.”

  “Fine,” he said groggily. He continued to lay there for a moment, staring at the alarm clock. He wished that he could freeze time and go back to sleep for the next 10 to 15 hours. Defiantly the clock changed from 6:30 to 6:31.

  “I hate you so much,” he told the tiny clock as he begrudgingly exited the warm comfort of his bed.

  Max took his time getting ready for school. He took an extra 10 minutes in the shower, dreading the moment that he would have to step out of the warm safety of the water into the cold, depressing world around him. He turned off the water and pressed his head against the cool slippery tile.

  Max had struggled with a feeling of being incomplete his entire life, but being in high school had only amplified it. As others in his grade were beginning to explore potential colleges and joining extracurricular groups, Max found himself doing less and less. He felt as if he was becoming more detached from the rest of the world.

  His mother had knocked on the bathroom door three different times, rushing him to breakfast. Each attempt had been ignored, although he was excited about the prospect of a warm, home cooked meal; he had grown accustomed to a bowl of cereal or a couple of nuked toaster pastries.

  After his shower, Max commenced with his morning ritual of examining himself in the mirror for zits and blemishes. This had become an unwelcomed routine of his adolescent life. While the dreaded teenage disease of acne hadn’t stricken him like others in his class, he wasn’t lucky enough to be immune to it.

  As Max stared into the reflection, he scrutinized over the changes from his previous birthday to now. His sandy blonde hair was a little longer and more disheveled than it had been. He noticed that he had put on a little more weight than last year; his former bird chest now resembled something more like a man than a sickly boy. He even sported a small tuft of chest hair between his pecs. He ran his fingers over the oddly shaped pink birthmark on his abdomen. It was in the shape of a small circle with a single crooked line piercing the center of it.

  His bright blue eyes stared back at him through the foggy mirror. They looked sad and haunted. They made him feel alone. He removed his hand from his stomach and wiped off some of the condensation so he could see himself more clearly.

  “Everything is going to be okay,” he told the reflection.

  He was startled by another knock on the door.

  “Max, who are you talking to?” asked his mother.

  The unexpected interruption had scared him, and he cursed loudly. His heart jumped and skipped a beat. He could feel his pulse racing. Max caught his breath and then yelled loudly at the closed door, “I said I would be down in a minute!”

  “A: Watch your mouth,” his mother responded, her voice not raising a decibel. “You might be 16 now, but I am still your mother. B: Breakfast is ready. Hurry up or it’ll be cold.”

  His heart was still pounding loudly in his chest. For a split second, he thought that he saw a faint blue light coming from his fingertips. He held his fingers closer to his face, but they were the same pink fleshy color as always. Perhaps it was the lighting or his eyes playing tricks on him. He examined his hands for a moment longer by holding them up to the bright lights of the vanity. Nothing.

  Max sighed. He knew that today was going to be difficult for him, but he knew that it would be especially so for his mother. The joy of celebrating the birth of one son was always severely diminished by mourning the loss of the other.

  Max had dreaded the day ever since his fifth birthday party. It had been held at the Forest Valley Skating Rink, Max’s favorite place in the world at that time. They were halfway through singing ‘Happy Birthday’ when his mother had a complete meltdown and locked herself in the bathroom for three hours. The fire department had to knock the door down to get her to come out. The manager of the skating rink asked them not to return after that.

  His birthday was rough for him as well. He constantly wondered what it would have been like to have a brother. Especially a twin brother. He imagined the misadventures they would have had. He also wondered what it would have been like if his dad would have stuck around for his mom after Aiden died. He wondered what it would be like to have a family.

  “Everything is going to be okay,” he repeated.

  Max exited the bathroom and walked down the hallway to find his best friend, Noah Allman, sitting at the dining room table. He was stuffing his face with a forkful of pancakes.

  Noah had been Max’s best friend since the two were in kindergarten, and they had been inseparable ever since. Noah lived a couple of streets down on Sycamore, and he met Max every morning at 7:30am. Then the two would skateboard to school together. However, Noah had never shown up for breakfast.

  Noah looked like Max had looked last year. He was small and wiry. His hair had been dyed purple, and he spiked the top of it into a mohawk. He wore a black hoodie and baggy jeans that were two sizes too large for his small frame.

  Evelyn sat at the table beside Noah, wearing a paper hat with ‘Happy Birthday’ printed on it. Max was about to comment on how goofy she looked wearing the stupid little hat, but he noticed that she was smiling and refrained. She never smiled anymore.

  The table was covered with all of Max’s favorites. A dinner plate stacked high with pancakes. A large serving bowl full of scrambled eggs. A saucer with biscuits sat next to a gravy boat filled with thick, sawmill gravy. Another saucer was filled with a heaping pile of bacon. Noah had a half filled plate of the goodies that he was furiously working on.

  “Good Morning, buttlicker,” Noah said happily.

  “Noah!” Evelyn exclaimed, swatting at him at the same time. Noah half-heartedly moved to evade the blow. He smiled at Max and waved him over with his syrup covered knife and fork.

  Max joined them at the head of the table. His plate had already been filled, and he sat down quietly to eat the gourmet meal. Everything tasted delicious; it was possibly the best meal Evelyn had ever made him. Or at least the best that he could remember.

  His mother had rarely been home since taking on a second job at the local diner down the street. She typically worked 15 to 16 hour days, which left little time for her to make Max a well-balanced meal. This had led to Max learning to cook for himself. His two specialties were frozen pizza and macaroni and cheese. Just what a growing boy needed…junk and more junk.

  When Evelyn was home, she was either asleep or intoxicated. More often than not it was a combination of the two. Max had grown accustomed to it. She had been drinking regularly as long as he could remember. She would start with a few beers and eventually graduate to gin or scotch by the end of the evening. She would isolate herself in their living room and stare mindlessly at the television until she passed out.

  “So I was thinking,” Noah started, “that after school we could go see that new alien movie everyone is raving about.” Evelyn shot Noah a look of disapproval. “You know the one with all the blood and the gore and the people dying and probably lots of sex and stuff.” He smiled at Evelyn who stared back with a scornful look.

  “Watch it,” she muttered to him.

  “As long as your mother is okay with it, I mean,” he added innocently.

  “Yeah,” Max answered, not looking toward his mom. “Sounds like fun.” As much as he would have liked to convince himself that he cared what his mother would say, he didn’t. She had been such an absentee figure for the last few years of his life that their relationship had degraded to the point of a text message every few days to make sure the other was still alive.

  Max saw his mother’s glare shift from Noah to him. He glanced down at his watch.


  “We have to go,” Max said, rising abruptly from the table.

  “But you’ve barely eaten anything,” Evelyn said.

  “I’m sorry,” Max said, motioning for Noah to get up. “We can’t be late for school.” Max watched as Noah continued shoveling in as much food as he could into his mouth; his cheeks were swollen like a chipmunk’s. He could feel his mother’s disappointment, and he avoided making eye contact with her.

  “Noah!” Max yelled at him.

  “Fine,” Noah said, shoving one more piece of bacon into his mouth and rising from his chair.

  “I love you, Mom.” Max planted a kiss on the back of her head and darted for the front door.

  “Happy Birthday,” Evelyn called after him.

  * * *

  “That was weird,” Noah said to Max as he hopped off of the beat-up skateboard and pressed the crosswalk signal button.

  The two of them had been skateboarding to school for a couple of years. Before then Noah’s mother would take them and pick them up. Before that, they had ridden the bus, but had been banished after starting a miniature riot on their last day of the third grade.

  “What was?” Max asked rolling to a stop next to him.

  “Your mom made a sick breakfast for you, invited me over to share in the festivities, and you could not get out of the door fast enough. Now don’t get me wrong, I know that you and your mom just have a weird relationship, and this is normally the one day a year that your mother is a little cuckoo…but that breakfast was ridiculous. And as much as you can’t stand her, I happen to think your mom is quite the pleasant and attractive woman. In fact, I think the only thing wrong with her is that she needs to feel the strong touch of a man. Did you happen to see the way she was looking at me?”

  “If you continue to try to convince me that my mother has a crush on you, I will be forced to beat you to death with this skateboard,” Max said through his clinched teeth.

  “Fine,” Noah said, “but you can at least tell me why you two can’t be in the same room together for more than 10 minutes at a time.”

  “You wouldn’t understand,” Max said. The crosswalk indicator changed from ‘Don’t Walk’ to ‘Walk.’ The duo hopped back onto their boards and continued the three mile trek to the school.

  It was warm for December, and Max had worn just a tee shirt that morning. He had contemplated wearing shorts as well, but knew that it would probably draw criticism from his mother. “Who wears shorts in December?” he could hear her ask him in his head.

  “Max,” Noah said, “I’ve been your best friend since the first day of kindergarten, when you pulled John Green’s pants down and then yelled at everyone in the class to look at him.”

  “He was telling everyone that you smelled like pee,” Max said.

  “Exactly,” Noah said. “You’ve had my back since we were five years old. That was 11 years ago. You would think that in 11 years we would have established some sort of reciprocal level of trust by now. Try me.”

  But Max didn’t try. He skated silently the rest of the way to the high school. Noah, on the other hand, never shut up. Once he had accepted that Max wasn’t going to talk about the strained relationship that he shared with his mother, he moved on to the movie they were going to see that evening, and then to how hot the cheerleading squad’s new uniforms were, and then to how a ninja could easily kill a full grown Tyrannosaurs Rex. The last subject had been a common theme with Noah since they were little: some stupid idea that he would ramble on and on about until Max would either join in or tell him to shut up.

  In the fifth grade Noah had been diagnosed with ADHD. He had always been a bit rambunctious, but when it had started affecting his grades, his mother had taken notice. At first she had tried medication, and then she had tried therapy. After that didn’t work, she had tried punishment, and then finally she had decided on acceptance. She put all of her resources into personal tutors, which at the very least were able to help Noah attain passing grades. The reality of the situation was that Noah’s brain ran at full speed 99 percent of the time. Eventually everyone else adapted to that. Max respected him for that. He never tried to change who he was to make everyone else happy.

  As they arrived at the school it was the same scene as always. The courtyard was buzzing as the preppie kids gathered along the stone wall in front of the building. They crowded around Rick Dillinger, the king of all things stuck-up, as he played an acoustic version of some pretentious alternative song on a two-thousand dollar Gibson guitar that his parents had bought for him last Christmas. All of them were dressed in their overpriced designer sweaters and store-bought ripped up jeans. It always made Max laugh how these kids’ parents would pay for something that was marked up a thousand percent, while his mother complained about buying him jeans at Wal-Mart if they were over 20 bucks.

  All of the goth and emo kids would be around the corner, sneaking cigarettes and talking about how they hated their lives, or their parents, or God. All of them dressed from head to toe in black. The boys painted their fingernails black just like the girls and wore the same heavy eyeliner. Noah had seemed fairly confident that he had once walked up on one of their conversations and heard them talking about the political position of China in regards to the global economy, but Max didn’t believe him.

  The concrete picnic tables were occupied by a few nerds playing Dungeons and Dragons, or Magic the Gathering, or Pokemon, or some other weird crap that would prevent them from learning any useful social skills that could potentially lead to them being invited to a party or seeing a girl naked. However, most of them would probably be inside of the school playing World of Warcraft in one of the computer rooms – afraid that their skin would melt if they stayed out in the sun too long.

  A group of car junkies gathered in the far corner of the parking lot to check out some tricked-out Civic that they had lowered to a couple of inches off of the ground – so low that it would spark every time they drove over a speed bump too quickly. They would marvel around a Mazda 3’s obscenely loud, custom sound system with the bass cranked up to rattle all of the other cars’ windows.

  The religious kids were sitting on the ground in a prayer circle near the entrance of the school. They sat off to the side, but made sure to be seen by anyone that passed by, just in case they came across some poor lost soul in need of redemption. They also wielded an acoustic guitar, but used theirs for playing Kumbaya or some other praise Jesus song. They all sang together, loudly and proudly for the entire campus to hear and ignore.

  At the south end of the parking lot, close to the football field, a gaggle of cheerleaders watched on as a group of football players horsed around with each other in the student parking lot. The jocks tossed an old, worn football around, running pretend routes and scoring imaginary touchdowns. The girls gathered around them and talked about what was on television last night, or makeup, or boys. Max wasn’t sure what exactly they talked about, but he was fairly confident that it was one or all of those things.

  In the middle of the group of girls sat Kennedy Coleman: head cheerleader, beauty queen and Max and Noah’s former best friend. Max had developed a crush on her the moment he had seen her all of those years ago. Despite the falling out the three of them had a few years back, Kennedy still remained the object of Max’s affection. She was more than just some puppy-love crush to Max. He still remembered all of the secret late night conversations the two of them shared over the phone, when they were supposed to be asleep. He remembered her riding to school with him and Noah every day. He knew that he hated what she had become, but he still missed what she used to be to him.

  The dark haired vixen sat on the tailgate of Corey Peterson’s oversized, cherry red pickup. They had begun dating the year before, which was another thorn in Max’s side. Corey Peterson had forever been the bane of Max’s existence. He had bullied Max and Noah throughout elementary and middle school, and he had only stopped when he made the football team last year. It drove Max crazy that Kennedy would lo
wer herself to date such an idiot.

  Walking toward the entrance of the school, he couldn’t help but stare at her. Kennedy Coleman had developed earlier than most of her girls her age and stood out amongst all of them. Despite Max missing her from an intellectual standpoint, like a lot of boys his age he also found her extremely attractive. He couldn’t help but gawk at the two tanned legs sticking out from her short cheerleading skirt, ankles crossed and knees sligh-

  “Watch out!” Noah yelled at Max, but it was too late.

  His hormones had distracted him from the giant concrete step leading into the courtyard. The step was both hated and feared by most of the school, and it had claimed more victims than Max could count. To say that he was less than graceful as he tripped over the concrete slab of evilness would have been an extreme understatement.

  Max tried to block the impact of the ground with his free hand, not paying attention to the rogue skateboard in his other hand. The skateboard’s tail made contact with the ground seconds before Max did, and it shot forward into his unguarded face. A sharp pain, mixed with humiliation, rocketed through him, starting at the impact point of his cheek. The pain surged through the rest of his body as his arm scraped against the concrete and his body collapsed with a muted thud. Max laid on the ground motionless, hoping no one had seen him yet.

  Noah quickly pulled him up by his waistband, and Max could hear him chuckling under his breath. He pushed Noah off of him and headed for the open doorway of the school. He could feel the stares of everyone in the courtyard, which suddenly erupted into a thunderous applause, followed by a symphony of laughter and cheering.