by Jeremy Craig
I pretended to ignore the whispering, pointing, and giggling as best I could, and a few painfully long moments later I was off down the hall, trying and failing to put the whole mess behind me as I trudged, teeth grinding, and still dripping head hanging low on a mission to get washed up before the bell rang to mark the end of lunch time.
Anthony, the mustached and overweight security guard, nodded as he passed me taking in the state of my clothes and hair and shook his head. A ghost of an amused smile played on his face as he walked past. I wonder if he ever caught on that smirking made kids like me feel worse?
As I was wiping at my face with those god-awful scratchy brown paper towels from the big white painted steel dispenser (with crude things etched and graffitied onto it, of course) in between the mirrors over the rows of sinks, I felt my stomach drop as from the mirror I watched as Mr. Varsity Letter walked in with a huge perfectly white smile on his face as he cracked his knuckles.
I was doomed. And I knew it.
“Hey dweeb,” he greeted as he put me in a headlock with one arm and grabbed my hair with his other hand, dragging me to the dinged up and black marker doodled green metal toilet stalls with a happy laugh. “Figured I’d help you get washed up. How’s that sound, four-eyes?”
My breathing came hard. I felt hot and angry and scared, and I remember shaking as I futilely struggled and begged while I was muscled to the stall. He kicked it open loudly with one of his fresh new basketball shoed feet.
He laughed, right up until something in me snapped. I don’t know what possessed me at the time, given that the dude was a head and shoulders taller and was a known weight room rat with more than a few local and state wrestling championships under his belt. But I guess none of that matters when you get punched in the balls a few times.
I don’t even remember thinking about it or telling my hands to move or anything—it all just seemed to happen in slow motion. I saw the toilet, yellow with piss and floating wads of brown streaked toilet paper bobbing at the surface that another guy hadn’t flushed down, and something just snapped.
The hot thundering rage was tempered with a surge of cold as I felt myself moving but couldn’t quite take credit for it. It was like watching yourself do something in slow motion while a thundering ear-splitting headache. Like one of those big marching band drums was getting hammered on in my skull, beating out a cadence.
I somehow ended up with the stall door in my hands, pulling back with all my weight and strength over and over and over. I remember hearing crying, but it wasn’t until later I realized it wasn’t me.
I don’t know how many times I slammed that door closed on Mr. Varsity Jacket. All I know is when I stopped, my arms hurt and my whole body was shaking and there he was. Slumped onto the floor with a bloody and oddly bent nose and bruised face, holding onto his crotch and rolling back and forth sobbing.
Stiffly, my head throbbing and my whole body shaking, I tottered over to my backpack by the sink. Mostly sliding myself across the tile wall to get there as I breathed heavier than I had the last time Coach Tassione had made me run the mile for gym class fitness testing.
I splashed water on my face and stared at my reflection in the mirror. I was as good as dead. Mr. Varsity Jacket was huge in football and the teachers all adored him, letting him literally get away with murder every day because he did so good on the field.
He would sit in the back of the class with his hot girlfriend and his pack of loud, jock buddies and just mess around every day. I don’t even remember the last time he had even turned in a homework paper or got good marks on a test. Yet ever year he passed, and every year he got bigger, meaner, and more popular.
A cold fear gripping at my stomach and squeezing, I picked up my jacket and walked out, fantasies of horror playing out in my mind at what would happen when he told on me, what the principal would say, what my parents would say, what his friends would do to me…
Would I even live long enough to make it to the bus to get home to be grounded for life?
Strangely enough I never heard anything the whole day. No security guard knocking at the class door to escort me to the principal’s office to discuss expulsion, no pack of angry football players waiting for me in the hall by my locker, nothing.
It was odd and kind of uncomfortable sitting in science staring at the clock with Mr. D droning on about tree frog life cycles while my heart thundered in my chest. I sat there staring at the clock on the wall above the chalkboard like a sheep staring down the business end of a dragon, waiting for the worst to happen and completely unable to do anything but wait for my doom to inevitably come swooping in.
It never did.
No phone call aftermath was waiting at home when the buss rolled up to my house, no angry parents waiting at the garage door. It was like the Twilight Zone or something as I sat there in a daze in the car on the way to the store. I was happy and just thinking maybe Mr. Varsity Jacket was too embarrassed to make a stink and rat me out for pummeling him.
I remember fantasizing that perhaps him and his thuggish crew would even leave me alone for a while. I wasn’t naive enough, even in my wildest dreams, to hope they would suddenly respect and befriend me and that I’d suddenly live the popular life of a cool kid sitting in the back of class, with high fives and cheer leaders lining up to date me. I even felt a warm worm of hope squiggling about that perchance. If I was very, very lucky, school life would finally start to get a bit better for me.
I was starting to feel good about things as we pulled into the AMES parking lot. I’d stood up for myself for once and now I was going to get a costume and later, dinner. Then I had the whole weekend to live it up before having to march back on the bus and face the possible music of another week of school. I even began trying to put together what to tell Billy when he came over the next day after lunch.
It was the same old parent kid song and dance you likely deal with now every October at the store, going I would imagine, something like this: kid wants this, points and gets excited, parent says it’s too expensive or inappropriate, kid throws tantrum or argues. Repeat process.
It had been about an hour, I think. Both our tummies must have been growling and we were both secretly looking forward to the battle’s end so we could cash out and get to dinner. Which that night I remember quite clearly was going to be pizza at good old red-roofed Pizza Hut.
Just the thought of pepperoni and breadsticks was nearly mouthwateringly good enough for me to almost surrender to the clearance rack costume Mom had pointed out.
Well, almost.
If there was ever one thing I was uniquely gifted at, it was arguing when I’ve set my mind to something. So on it went until Mom surrendered the fight to a werewolf getup with a fury rubbery mask. Off we went, strategically weaving our obnoxiously squeaky wheeled shopping cart about the long way to avoid me noticing the toy isles as Mom kept me distracted and handled so masterfully that we almost made it past the seasonal candy display without me noticing.
Lucky me that I love candy corn and Mom was already tired enough to not want to deal with me. So, we left through the big glass doors with a crinkly plastic bag full of treats and my costume, holding hands and jabbering back and forth on the way to our wood paneled station wagon.
I don’t remember what we were talking about as we wove our way through a maze of tall, festively decorated light posts, rather large puddles, abandoned shopping carts, and parked cars, but I think it had something to do with school.
What I do remember is seeing another family laughing and loading up a big Volkswagen Bus. Nothing odd about that except they all had white hair and pointed ears. I stopped dead so suddenly that my mother all but tripped over me. Yeah, I know, it’s October and all so it could have been a family on their way to an early party in those weird, annoyingly matching theme costumes, right?
No. Definitely not.
I remember dropping my hard-fought-for bag into a puddle and staring as an impossibly pale little girl with crystal
line, almost prismatic, shiny eyes gave me a pointy toothed smile and waved at me as her father buckled her into a car seat. Her older sister, maybe a year or so my senior was ignoring everyone as she settled into her seat and began fishing through her bag for a magazine.
Her father patted the little one on the head, planted a kiss on her cheek, then stopped as she pointed my way with a sharp looking nailed finger and giggled as he tried to get her to accept a sippy cup.
He turned and squinted at us with his own glitteringly crystalline eyes. His friendly smile drained from his face as it went impossibly paler, and he hurried in an obvious panic to help his very pregnant wife into her seat, exchanging a hushed, panicked conversation with her in a language I didn’t understand that honestly sounded like gibberish with a lot of hissing.
He shut her door, hurried back to the driver’s side, spared me a look one would expect of a deer caught in the headlights. He hopped in, slammed the door, and they sped off with a screech of rubber tires on wet pavement.
My mother looked sharply from the blue and silver VW bus to me, and the look on her face was something I’d never forget. Somewhere between terror and pride that left her shaking with tears in her eyes, she stared down at me like she was afraid it was the last time she would ever get to look at me. Which sadly wasn’t far from the truth.
Everything changed after that.
Chapter One
A boy, a dog, and new beginnings…
Have you ever heard of the Adirondack Mountains? The “Park” (we prefer the more accurate term “the preserve”) was designated as a national historic monument in 1962. It has a much richer and more colorful history than most people are aware of. WELL before future Presidents of the United States, world leaders, and the super-rich started vacationing and building magnificent, opulent, and super exclusive great camps here.
It’s said that the earliest written name for it is “Rontak” back in 1929 by a very misguided and confused French missionary Mr. Lafitau. He defined it as tree eaters, or land of the tree eaters. Stating that it was a rather dirty term for some “bark eaters” therein that he had met in his travels.
A few folks even think the word is used as a slur meaning that someone was incapable of hunting and therefore had to eat bark to survive the harsh winters there. There is even a rumor in some circles that Mr. Lafitau had been found drunk and raving in the woods by a teamster who had had to knock him senseless and dump him into his a logging wagon, and that “Rontak” was the name of the horse that had pulled the addled missionary back to civilization.
Honestly though, who knows?
I can’t help but laugh whenever I hear it explained that way, as like all such silly nonsense that mundane Humans conjure up to explain encounters with the Fey, it’s partly true.
But mostly not.
Supposedly the first to venture in was the Mr. Lafitau. Who, after ignoring repeated warnings from a local Shaman (or Medicine man, or his favorite the Master—he never really tells anyone what he is and not many have the courage to ask him), encountered things he couldn’t explain in the deep, dark woods in what was then mostly harsh untamed wilds.
Evidently, he went a bit mad after that.
You may ask how I’m sure of this. How could I possibly even attempt to pass such silliness off as historic fact, right? Well, I know Master White Owl. He was there, and I can tell you three things about him. He’s ancient, he really has no sense of humor at all, and he never lies. If he says it, it’s true.
Simple as that.
Some advice, if you ever meet him. Don’t try to tell him he’s pulling your leg about this or anything else, no matter how farfetched it may sound. Otherwise he’s highly likely to take offence. You won’t like how he tends to deal with that.
Maybe, if you’re lucky, you might spend the next month or two learning manners in one of his aquariums as a frog being misted with a spray bottle and dining on crickets.
Well, back to the Adirondacks and the story, I suppose. It’s brutally cold in the winter. Has insane amounts of snow. Has a horrible thing called “black fly season” (yes that’s definitely as bad as it sounds) and is quite possibly one of the most beautiful places on the planet, bar none. It has lakes, rivers, streams, mountains, and seemingly endless stretches of pristine picturesque forests that are honestly a nature lover’s dream.
It’s also big, scary, and dark if you’re a thirteen-year-old in the back seat of a wood paneled station wagon having his life turned upside down.
At this point after the encounter in the parking lot I’d been pretty much unceremoniously shoved into the car. Mom had then torn out of there like a racecar driver, pulling to a tire squealing stop next to Dad’s Pontiac in the Pizza Hut lot.
I remember Dad—who looked like he had been having a rough day—was just getting out of his car. His tired smile melted away as he was urgently waved over into a hushed conversation through her cracked window.
They shared a hushed, serious, fearful conversation as she explained to my father (who looked like he might get sick the more he heard) what had happened in the parking lot.
Ten minutes later we were back at our house where, amidst the chaotic bustle of grabbing clothes off coat hangers and out of drawers, I’d been told that for the foreseeable future I would be living with my grandfather at his lodge.
Evidently there was nothing that could be done about it. It was for my own good and neither of my parents would let me in on the big secret as to exactly why that was.
In an effort to calm me down as the car was loaded up with all my worldly possessions. Mom had reassured me that it was a great, big place in the woods, and I’d be safe, happy, and learning incredible new things. Even promising that they would most definitely visit whenever they could.
At this, Dad gave her a funny, pained look that was accompanied by a grunt as he struggled with the last of my hastily packed luggage. But she just ignored him and went on and on like she was desperately trying to convince herself as much as she was trying to convince me that everything was going to be just fine and dandy.
I was even informed that for some reason I now had a “noble destiny,”—something that made my Dad flinch like he had been slapped. After which he barely spoke a word and seemed to find it hard to look at me, earning him more than one painful looking elbowing jab to the ribs by my mom.
None of the reassurance or talk of a “noble family business” as Mom put it really mattered to me or made a lick of sense on that impossibly long car ride. There was even a bit of a battle with a tantrum that now is a little painful to think about as I told my mom and dad (or to be more accurate I screamed at them with tears running down my face) in no uncertain terms that: “I absolutely didn’t want to go—that it was just a bullshit reason to get rid of me and that I hated them both and hoped they both died horribly for abandoning me like this.”
As I yelled my mother looked as though I had kicked her in the gut, wide eyed with her mouth open in an O as she stared. Absently fingering an odd black boat pendant that hung from a silver chain about her neck and always fiddled with whenever her and Dad had an argument or I did something that upset her particularly badly (she always laughed it off when asked about it, explaining it as memento of a rock concert she attended before I was born where she met dad. Which was always weird as both seemed to detest loud music whenever I played it in my room).
After my outburst that left my ears ringing and made me feel terribly sick to my stomach finally lost steam and concluded, both searched one another’s eyes sadly as if each were desperately hoping that one or the other had something brewing that would make things better. Unfortunately, other than (for what felt like the umpteenth time that horrible night) again assuring me that they loved me and that “someday I would understand.” (Which only made me feel worse) they didn’t seem to have the words.
It honestly felt like I was stuck in a nightmare I couldn’t wake up from as we drove along, me staring almost catatonically out the window at t
he familiar houses, parks, and streets I’d rode my bike on.
I felt awful but still felt absolutely abandoned so didn’t have it in me to apologize. So, we all sat hurting in silence, and I brooded like an idiot watching the rain drops run down the window like the world itself was crying along with me at what was coming.
One by one everywhere my family and I had shared memories and built a life together whipped by. All the while I desperately tried to etch them each into my mind, as I strongly suspected I wouldn’t see again for a very long time. I remember wondering what I had done wrong or what was wrong with me that all this had to happen as streetlights, signs, and trees became a depressing blur.
I despondently gave up trying to make sense of things about an hour later as Dad pulled onto the expressway. The miles rotted into a numbing ache as we drove on, the silence only ever interrupted by the squeak of the windshield wipers, the patter of rain drops on the windows, and my mother’s crying.
I’m not at all ashamed to admit I was confused, terribly morose, and more scared than I’d ever been up to that point. Even more so than when I’d dreaded the doctors’ visits that had jabs in them.
I was leaving everything behind. My mom and dad, my room, my comic books, my friend Billy. Old Mrs. Patterson from next door who liked to give me king sized candy bars when I mowed her lawn, the family cat Scancy, my goldfish Goldie. I know. Not exactly original. I was a kid, cut me some slack on pet naming, OK?
In short, everything I knew was about to drastically change. I was going to live with an old guy in the woods I’d never met before. Who had only ever sent me cards at birthdays, Halloween, and Christmas with cash tucked in them and my name spelled incorrectly. Don’t get me wrong, I loved the cash and found the name stuff kind of funny but none of that made me feel any better at the time.
I was angry and I hated it all.