Planet Urth Boxed Set

by Jennifer Martucci

  She sprung from her snug spot and jogged to the kitchen. Her phone sat atop the counter. She touched an icon on the screen and was brought to a message. I miss you was all it said. The sender’s number was Gabriel’s cell phone. She smiled and was struck by how three simple terms wielded such enormous power. Her mood lightened significantly. She smiled broadly and returned to her niche on the couch.

  After an hour of staring vacantly at the television screen but not actually watching anything in particular, she turned her attention to preparing dinner. But whether attempting to view a program on television or getting dinner started, Melissa struggled to concentrate. Her mind wandered and drifted from whatever task was at hand and found its way to Gabriel. The mere thought of his name sent shivers racing across her skin and a smile tugging the corners of her mouth. She had never been so preoccupied with a boy. She prided herself on not being the type of girl who sat through class, lost in a daydream, doodling hearts with the name of a boy at each center. Yet now, she stood with a package of chicken in one hand and the refrigerator door ajar, fantasizing about Gabriel.

  She blinked several times, tried to erase his image from her mind long enough to get dinner started. But halfway through her process, the familiar rumble of the automatic garage door opening distracted her. The garage door opening meant that her father was home from work.

  Her father held the position of produce manager at the Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company more commonly known as the A&P Supermarket in the neighboring town of Hartwell Cross. His commute was a mere seven minutes from home which allowed him to return from work shortly after her. Predictably, the door opposite the small half bathroom in the short corridor off the main hallway opened and her dad’s footsteps could be heard advancing toward the kitchen.

  “Hey Dad,” Melissa called out “Take your shoes off please. I cleaned today.”

  “Hey Miss,” he answered. “Already did.”

  Melissa could hear her father fumbling and muttering in the hallway immediately followed by the sound of a work boot hitting the floor then another.

  “Thank you,” she called out letting him know she was aware of his shoe transgression.

  She smiled as she ribbed him. Her father was a hardworking man. Each day he came home after a nine-hour shift dirty and tired. Such was his routine six days a week. This day was no different.

  He came into the kitchen with socked feet holding the mail in one hand and a stainless-steel coffee thermos in the other. His black uniform sweater was littered with stickers from various fruits and vegetables and his pants had patches where mud had caked to them.

  “Fried chicken with rice and broccoli sound good?” Melissa inquired though she knew it was her father’s favorite meal.

  “Sounds great,” he responded as he dropped his coffee mug and a stack of bills and sale circulars atop the counter. “So? Did your day get any better?”

  “Oh yeah,” Melissa responded and couldn’t refrain from grinning as she spoke.

  Her father looked worried. He furrowed his brow and asked, “Not too good I hope.”

  Blushing, Melissa protested, “No dad. It was nothing like that. Gabriel and I just drove and drove. We drove all the way to the state line, had McDonalds and came back.”

  “McDonald’s huh. That’s all?” her father probed. He narrowed his gray eyes and studied her face.

  “I promise, Dad. We stopped at a scenic rest stop place. We sat on a picnic bench and talked.”

  She left out the part when Gabriel professed his feelings for her and held her hand. Such details would be unwise to share with her overprotective father.

  “That Gabriel kid seems all right. Not like that piece of crap Kevin Anderson. I’d like to kick his teeth down his arrogant throat. “Christopher fumed.

  “Me, too,” she agreed. “If you could’ve seen him today, I mean, arrogant doesn’t even begin to describe him. He was beyond obnoxious. He was cruel, trying to shame me.”

  “Shame you? You didn’t mention that on the phone this morning. What was he trying to shame you about?”

  “Nothing Dad, really,” Melissa lied.

  Although she was generally against lying, she felt obliged to spare her father’s feelings. She knew he felt no shame in going to work daily, that he never regarded his job as menial or embarrassing. He did not love it by any means, but was a practical man who viewed his job as a means to an end. His job neither defined him nor limited him. But hearing the blatant insults of a pompous teenage boy might give him pause. Melissa would not risk opening the door of uncertainty for her father.

  But he stood before her, scrutinizing her expression. She did not want to disgrace him with the cruelty of Kevin’s words, but she was a lousy liar. She felt the warmth of truth spread across her cheeks as she tried to avoid direct eye contact with her father.

  “Melissa, I can look at your face and tell that you’re lying. Now what the hell else did he say?” Her father demanded.

  “He just, well, he just said stuff about where you work and how I’d end up working part time for you and going to community college, if I were lucky. Like that’s somehow a bad thing.”

  Her father folded his arms across his broad chest and grew silent. Her stomach clenched and churned simultaneously. She had dishonored her father. And though it had not been intentional, indirect, in fact, Melissa hated herself for it. She damned Kevin under her breath before weighing in with her thoughts.

  “Dad, I am not ashamed of where you work. Your job supported me and mom when I was little and supports me just fine now,” she said. “He’s the jerk who should be ashamed of what he did to me and what he would have done had Gabriel not been where he was when he was.”

  Melissa watched how the mere mention of her mother caused her dad’s eyes to moisten. In the days, months and years that followed her mother’s death, sadness was her father’s constant companion. It had slipped in and replaced his wife. She knew then that depression bore down on him with a mighty heft. She heard him explain to his mother, her grandmother, that breathing was an effort, getting up and facing each day, a challenge. She never wanted to contribute to all that burdened him.

  She saw how being brought back to a time, even briefly, when his wife was alive made breathing difficult again. She hated being responsible for that.

  After he took a moment and collected himself, the sentiment passed and he rejoined their conversation.

  “I could kill the bastard!” he said through gritted teeth.

  “I know, I know.”

  “To think that what you told me on the phone earlier,” he began. “About how he and his fancy-ass lawyers have cooked up some story about you being a pill popper and conspiring with a guy who’s lived here for what, a week, is crazy. It’s just plain crazy.”

  “I know. The worst part is, because he and his family are who they are, people will believe them.”

  “Some people, Melissa. Damn stupid people if you ask me.”

  “Yeah, but a lot of kids at school were paying attention when he was talking, like a bunch of sheep. It’s pretty obvious he’s going to make my life there a nightmare.”

  “Well, we’ll figure out a way to fight back. We’re not going to let these rich pieces of crap get the best of us. Besides, we have the truth on our side and DNA. We’ll fight.”

  In the moments that she was verbally attacked by Kevin, Melissa had forgotten the forensic aspect of the case and that he had been charged with a crime, not her.

  She considered how, in his hubris, Kevin had pranced and pleaded his case in front of a jury of easily influenced teenagers. He could argue that her injuries had been sustained as he fought against her and Gabriel, that they’d been the attackers. After all, he had a more battered face than she did. But none of that mattered in a court of law. Everything Kevin was attempting to do was for the benefit of onlookers in the court of public opinion, which in this case, were his parents and his peers. Eventually, the students at Harbingers High School, and perhaps even Kev
in’s parents, would be forced to accept the ugly truth about him. He was a monster.

  Melissa’s father scanned the mail while she contemplated her predicament. Their thoughtful and mutual silence was interrupted by his words.

  “Melissa, I’m sorry I can’t afford to send you to the colleges you deserve to go to,” he said self-consciously, not looking up from the papers he held.

  She realized then that Kevin had managed to spread his poisonous words and infect her father’s self-esteem and undermine his ability to provide properly for his only child. Her hatred for Kevin deepened. She did not think it possible. But now, she loathed him with every cell in her body. He had hurt her father, a good and decent man she adored.

  Melissa turned from the chicken she was breading.

  “Forget that, Dad! You have nothing to feel guilty about,” she declared. “You’ve always taken good care of me and been a good father. College credits are college credits. Don’t let what that jackass Kevin said get in your head. The Andersons, they should be ashamed of the monster they created!”

  Considering her last point, her father looked up and met her eyes and said, “Huh” before he walked to the counter where her hands worked to bread chicken tenders and kissed the top of her head.

  “I guess I have lots to be proud of,” he said. “Look what I’ve created.”

  He then turned and walked out of the kitchen and ascended the steep staircase.

  Chapter 5

  Night had fallen in Harbingers Falls. The India-ink sky was dappled with stars that seemed to float rather than remain fixed, as if humming and buzzing with nervous energy. The stars mimicked the way Gabriel felt. He no longer felt part of the canvas he’d been created upon. He no longer felt a part of his maker’s plan. In fact, every part of him felt disconnected from the house he lived in and his existence with Terzini. All he could think about was his new life, and the new relationship developing between him and Melissa.

  Melissa. Her name whispered through him and made his stomach flutter. Sitting on the edge of his full-sized bed staring out into the indigo abyss, he struggled to remain still. Excitement pulsated within him. Spending an entire afternoon with Melissa, talking with her, eating with her, holding her hand, had left him invigorated, enlivened. He felt a sense of drunken euphoria he had only read about. But alcohol was not responsible for the way he felt. Melissa was. It was all her.

  Melissa had awakened something in him that he had been devoid of, something he never knew he was capable of experiencing. The inebriating thrill was not accurately described in the written word, nor was it correctly portrayed in movies. It was so much more. He closed his eyes and pictured every feature of her face: her green eyes, her delicate nose and full lips and her hair, like liquid copper, spilling over her shoulders and down her back. He envisioned her smiling and laughing as she so easily and often did. He could almost hear the sound, pleasant and charming.

  But it was not just her outward appearance that enthralled him, though it did personify her greatest attribute. Melissa had a quality that transcended her looks. She had grace. Gabriel believed her grace to be where her truest power rested; she was the embodiment of grace. Every facet of her personality seemed effortless, fluid. And while she did not seem aware of this gift, he was. Even under duress, she managed to maintain a sense of decency and dignity. In his eyes, she was the kind of girl that moved artists to create and writers to write. He wondered what attracted her to him. After all, he knew what he was.

  Thoughts of his creation, the implications of it, spun like a never-ending wheel in his brain. It was nothing new. He wondered since his first days. But his previous thoughts had been less personal than they were now.

  As he sat awake in his bed, his creation, the method by which he’d come to be, troubled him again. In the dark recesses of his mind a question had arisen and nagged at him unendingly. He had pondered it often, but it had taken on new meaning now that Melissa had entered his life and awoken feelings in him, feelings he was not supposed to have. He wondered whether he was, in fact, human.

  Gabriel knew he was not like other humans beings. He was fashioned from superior DNA, designed to be free of all human sentiment as his creator believed that sentiments were responsible for all the ills of society.

  He was not the product of a man and woman uniting their genetic material. He was not born of love or lust or anger or violence. Gabriel had been manufactured by a selective process. His chromosomal components had been handpicked, chosen for supreme function not by God, but by the geneticist Dr. Franklin Terzini. Terzini’s genius constructed him to reject conventional sentiment and, instead, use the area of his brain that was used by most human beings for setting their emotional state for higher cognitive function.

  For most of his existence, he believed that his maker had succeeded, that what other scientists and geneticists could only conceive of, Terzini had attained. Gabriel had grown and absorbed knowledge at a much faster rate than the most advanced human being. His creator had documented every milestone of his development. He had read every record for himself. He knew of his many feats and cerebral prowess. Included in every file was his inability to exhibit any form of emotion despite being provided with ample stimuli.

  His maker had been thorough in his experimentation. Gabriel had been exposed to every literary genre available – poetry, novels, short stories, and plays – all by authors who employed various tones, styles and lengths for their material and covered a wide range of subjects. None of the works had generated an emotional response of any kind.

  His exposure did not stop with literary heavyweights. He was given religious reading material as well. He had been provided with the Holy Bible, the Qur’an, the Torah, the Vedas, the book of Mormon, the Guru Granth Sahib, the Avesta, the Zhuan Falun and various books by L. Ron Hubbard, author of Dianetics and founder of the Church of Scientology. Religious conviction did not sway him either. In truth, they confused him further.

  Each work spoke of a spiritual essence of a person, a soul. Supported by the world’s greatest thinkers including Aristotle and Plato, the soul had been presented as the personification of a being. It had been believed to directly affect one’s earthly actions and was thought to function as the guiding force behind one’s thinking, emotions, memory, desires and will.

  This idea of a soul was the antithesis of what Terzini had taught him. His maker had instilled in Gabriel the uselessness of emotions and the baseness of desires.

  Until recently, he found himself without reason to disagree. History indicated that countless atrocities had been committed, wars had been waged, all in the name of religion, politics and greed and all fueled by impassioned people. So moved were these groups, so convinced of their righteousness that each clung vehemently to their convictions despite the loss of human lives. Before he’d met Melissa, Gabriel had embraced his maker’s philosophy, despite being perplexed by the mystery and mysticism surrounding the soul of a human being, what it means to truly be human. Now, however, he challenged the concept of his creator’s core thesis. He was confronted with the possibility that Dr. Terzini was a sanctimonious madman hell-bent on transforming the human populace into an emotionless, utopian society.

  The significance of such a dilemma weighed heavily on Gabriel. He allowed himself to fall back on his bed. When he did, his mind reverted to thoughts of Melissa. He felt very human. He felt moved by vastly human forces in him that superseded the teachings of his maker.

  Against Terzini’s revolutionary developments and techniques, and despite his preaching, emotions had evolved in Gabriel. Though unexpected, they had emerged and developed as rapidly as he absorbed, processed and retained information. He reasoned that this progression of sentiment was inherent in human beings, not mere creations. Yet despite such rationalization, he viewed himself as a monster. How he’d come into existence shamed him.

  Cupping his head in his hands, he agonized over his existence, whether he was human. Flooded with uncertainty, he began t
o wonder whether Melissa, too, would see him as a monster if she were made aware of the truth. Entertaining the notion of her not just rejecting him, but repelling him, caused an ache in his chest so profound it caused him to wince aloud. He could not bear the thought of her eyes on him disapprovingly, disdainfully, with disgust.

  He sat upright and rose to his feet. He walked across his room to his bureau and retrieved his cell phone.

  Without hesitation, he dialed Melissa’s cell-phone number.

  The phone rang just two times then suddenly her voice was on the other end. He had not concocted an excuse for calling, especially this late in the evening.

  “Hello?” asked the melodious voice on the other end.

  “Hi Melissa,” he said nervously. “Um, it’s Gabriel.”

  “Oh. Hi Gabriel,” Melissa answered. The tone of her voice suggested that she was smiling. “What’s up? Is everything okay?”

  “Uh, not much. I was just, you know, uh, here in my room, uh thinking about stuff…you,” he said and hated how idiotic he sounded. He was slobbering all over a call he had made impulsively. He wished he would have thought it through.

  “Oh,” she said and he could not gauge her tone.

  He swallowed hard and took a deep breath then blurted, “I’m not going to lie. I just needed to hear your voice. I’m sorry for calling so late. I was just sitting here thinking and I wanted to hear the sound of your voice.”

  A moment of silence hung heavy in the air.

  “I’ll let you go,” he said and felt so foolish for calling, his cheeks blazed with embarrassment.

  “No, don’t go!” she said quickly and his heart skipped a beat. “And don’t be sorry either. It’s not too late to call. I mean, I wasn’t sleeping or anything. I’m glad you called.”

  “You are?” he said and his stomach flip-flopped.

  “Yeah, I was sitting here thinking about you, too, actually.”

  Gabriel closed his eyes and savored the new and exhilarating feelings flickering through every part of him. He was hot and cold at the same time, dizzy and nauseous yet he could not stop smiling.