by Neil Hetzner
CHAPTER SEVEN
So Long
On the Monday afternoon after her conversation with Dr. Smarkzy, Prissi was in the Double D trying to write a history paper. Even though it was early in the afternoon, the young winger was tired and antsy. Break would begin at noon on the following day. Now that she had something to do over break, Prissi was ready to go. Unfortunately, before that could happen, she had a lot of work to finish up.
Prissi began the afternoon sitting on one of a bank of Skrenes the Dutton Datarium provided trying to draw parallels between present-day Ecoists and the centuries’ old Jainist religious sect. Her intention was to suggest that Ecoism was more a religious sect than a political party. She sat at the machine for almost an hour watching her whispered words get transcribed onto the Skrene as jumbled words, illogical sentences and incomprehensible paragraphs. Finally, unable to take another minute, she bounded off her perch. As she hurried to the bathroom, she resurrected a litany that occasionally accompanied her paper writing: She was stupid, a sham. A dorquette. A brain dead techinept…and…as she slammed her way past the door and looked into the mirror….and a fertile field for unnatural growths…and…and she should shave her head rather than let her toxic hair spread…and….
Her fury at her incoherence and her imperfect looks elided into sensual pleasure when she finally had the brainstorm not to return to her perch, but instead to dig in her kanga-pak for her special pen. She collected her stuff and found a spot in the reading area that had a view of the pond. She dropped her wings over the arms and slid her butt deep into the butter smooth russet-colored leather of an ancient high-legged club perch. Within seconds after changing perches and idea recorders, Prissi’s thoughts were flowing so fast that the tool she held in her hand for recording those thoughts could barely keep up. The ancient golden fountain pen had been given to her by a retired diplomat in Bujumbura on her tenth birthday. Even as it hurried across the paper, the pen was losing ground to her spate of thoughts. That feeling, of thoughts spilling out faster than the ink could record them, was glorious to someone whose writing usually was laborious. Finally, there came a break in Prissi’s stream of ideas. The self-satisfied teener took advantage of that synaptical short-circuit to glance out the windows at the rippling waters of the pond and look up at a bowl of puffy popcorn-like clouds, iridescent above and dark gray beneath, being blown across the sky.
Forty minutes later, when Prissi paused a second time, the clouds looked like inquisitive sheep.
After an hour and a half of dedicated work, and with nine pages of words and ideas that made sense to her, Prissi redacted her earlier view of herself. Even if she was a techinept, she had lots of friends who were techadepts. She got along with them fine even if she wasn’t one—maybe that was from growing up in Africa, where a whole night of uninterrupted electricity was cause for celebration. As Prissi flipped through what she had written, she reassured herself that most of the world’s great literature and, for that matter, the foundation of most of the sciences, had been created with pen and paper, quill and vellum.
As she often did with words that drew her, Prissi said the word, “vellum,” aloud. She imagined what a piece of that old invention must feel like between one’s fingers. Just the name suggested how smooth and sensuous it must be. What fun it would be to draw a pen nib across a piece of vellum. Voluptuous vellum.
Prissi mused about being in an alchemist’s laboratory, literally burning the midnight oil, mixing philters with phlogiston and recording the results on velvety, voluptuous vellum. When Prissi next looked up from her reverie, an angry wind had pushed the sheep into a tightly huddled frightened herd. She shifted from her history paper to a set of bio-stat problems, but despite the urgency of getting the homework done, Prissi kept finding herself looking out the large windows to see if the predicted snow had begun to fall. The Ice Age Cometh. Prissi forced her head down. A few minutes later, when, despite her best efforts, it popped up again, Prissi noticed a pair of state hawks circling over campus. Besides wondering what might cause the police to be on campus, Prissi also felt jealous. Flying through the snow was a rare treat. Something mysterious, something attractive. Ugh. She forced her eyes back down to her work. The eyes remained where they were supposed to be, but the mind continued to wander—although there were scores of teenerz from some of the world’s wealthiest families, security at Dutton was mostly handled by the campus officers. Only a handful of students were considered so attractive a target that their parents hired private security firms. When the hawks from the Connecticut State Police became involved it usually wasn’t because of a danger to a student, but, instead, because of some incredibly stupid prank by a student—usually a lower-mid trying to make his reputation, or a senior losing his.
Prissi was sprawled in her reclining perch feeling good, except for the occasional late afternoon stomach growl when Nasty Nancy, whom she had been trying to avoid since their ride back from the Bissell dedication, came rushing up.
“Did you hear? Your NQB is gone?”
Prissi’s stomach rolled over, but not from hunger. “Joe’s gone?”
“Like smoke. Like youth. Like love. Like a Friday night peetsa.”
Although Prissi prided herself on her cynicism, she immediately felt angry at Nasty Nancy’s cavalier words. Her roomie’s large head, made larger by its penumbra of combed out, frizzy, red hair, bobbed back and forth with excitement. Her little black soutane button eyes sparked.
Controlling herself, Prissi asked, “What do they think happened?”
“The ‘they’ who are supposed to do the thinking in, and for, this hallowed institution probably aren’t thinking. What they’re probably doing is emitting excuses as fast, big and stinking as pigs’ farts and dishonoring our sacred honor code by conjuring up a thousand ex post facto gigs for your missing swain to show he has been a bad seed, a bad apple and a Bader Meinhof ne’er do well.”
Since Prissi was used to missing half of Nancy’s allusions, she sniggered because she knew she should, then, felt badly that she had given in to Nancy’s cruelty.
“No one knows anything?”
The serious tone of Prissi’s question caused Nasty Nancy to tack away from her intended course. She looked at her friend’s concerned face for a long pause, considering what it might mean, before responding.
“Supposedly, he ate breakfast and that was the last time he was seen. Since it happened on a day without classes, when he wouldn’t be missed for awhile, it looks like it was planned. The mystery is whose plan. His…dash for freedom, or….” Nancy paused and tried to wriggle her eyebrows, an action which conveyed more the look of someone with Tourette’s Syndrome than the portentousness she was aiming for. “…something more malign. Why someone from a family that rich and with so many enemies didn’t have private guards is hard to fathom.”
“He told me he had to fight his parents about that. He didn’t want guards. He just wanted to be normal.”
“Then he should have done something about that sun-seeking nose of his and, of course, the trillions.”
Rather than chance an argument, Prissi brushed Nancy off by insisting that she needed to finish her problem set. Nancy spun around. With her halo of red hair, blunt shape and butt swaying walk, Nancy reminded Prissi of a sea anemone in a tidal pool as she churned her way out of the room.
Once Nancy was gone, Prissi allowed herself to be overwhelmed with guilt.
Since that evening three days before when she had shared her dining hall table with him, Prissi had had three conversations with Joe. Two of those, one late and the other later on Saturday night after she had returned from the Bissell dedication, had been short, angry and awkward. Joe had been iced that Prissi had gone to Bissell. He saw it as both a betrayal of their friendship and an act of sycophancy. Their third conversation, held the following day, had lasted for more than two hours and had been very different.
That chance conversation happened because Prissi Langue had secrets other than eating candy in bathroom stal
ls and filching shampoo. She also adored what she herself called CRNs—cheesey romance novels.
Prissi had been wandering around the antiseptic little village of Waterville on a Sunday afternoon a few weeks after she first had arrived at Dutton. It had been a typical New England early autumn day—80 degrees, windy, the grapy smell of kudzu perfuming the air. Even though she loved the school, loved her teachers and loved the challenge of what went on in the classrooms and labs, Prissi frequently was intimidated by much of went on outside the classroom. On that particular afternoon, instead of sitting in her room working through why she felt inferior to her classmates, or couldn’t easily make friends, it had been easier to run down the hill to the village.
She had lazed along Waterville’s narrow canted sidewalks window shopping its small shops, coveting clothes that she knew never would look good on her, and admiring jewelry she couldn’t afford. She drank an iced pom and wolfed a ridiculously small piece of chocolate mousse cake. She was on her way back to campus, dawdling to draw out her return, when she noticed the small, square-shouldered Waterville Library.
Although the rise of the net had made most small libraries obsolete, a few, mostly those with hefty endowments, remained open. Of those survivors, many were more museums that repositories for accessible or pertinent knowledge. On a whim, Prissi climbed the stairs. After spending an embarrassing minute explaining to the tiny, bright blue eyed, balding woman sitting on a high scarred wooden stool that she, Prissi Langue, was, indeed, a Dutton student, she had accepted the librarian/docent/guard’s declaratory judgment that, indeed, a Dutton student in the Waterville library was a rarity. After circling round the chipped green marble half-moon desk, which both protected the past and, Prissi guessed, defended the old woman against the present, the teener began to explore. Twisting her head so that she could read the vertical titles and tentatively touching a dulled rainbow of book spines, Prissi meandered through the stacks.
In a dark corner on the second floor, next to a door marked STAIRS, fitted into a corner in an L-shaped bookcase, Prissi found the mother-lode. A fancy, but faded sign, declared Romance. Prissi’s first reaction was a snort that reverberated throughout the empty library, but, ten minutes later, she was sighing and crying. The bookcase contained hundreds of books that told the story of improbable women falling impossibly in love with implausible men. And, while it was not always love at first sight between the covers of the books, it had been love at first sight for Prissi. She loved the women from the pre-winger era who had enough flesh that it could quiver. She swooned over the men too dumb to know that they shouldn’t be driving fast cars with deleterious eco effects. She adored the fact that many of the stories took place in a place long gone—a dry, bustling wealthy, hyper-kinetic Manhattan, a romantic island filled with sex and sin. Almost everything she read, she loved, but the books that she most loved were those written in the 1950s when all the characters had names like her own and her friends. She found story after story where Jacks and Joes, Nancys and Marys, Pauls and Marks, Cathys and, yes, twice, even Priscillas fell in deep, tortured, twisted, weepy, wounded love.
That dusty corner of the Waterville Library became Prissi’s haven. When she had free time or, even when she didn’t, but needed a respite—from friends, teachers, or, most often, her feelings—Prissi she would run down the hill to the library for her CRN fix.
As Prissi slumped in her perch and watched the celestial sheep crowd one another like a fox was about, she thought of what had happened twenty-four hours before. After the last False Paths lecture and her conversation with Dr. Smarkzy, Prissi had run back to her room, changed clothes, and spent twenty minutes flying lazy figure eights over Dutton’s golf course and soccer fields before winging her way to the village. After checking to see if anyone was watching before attempting a maneuver that could result in losing her flight license, Prissi executed a doubly foolish, given Saturdays’ shoulder injury, perfect one-knee betrothal landing on the library’s cracked asphalt parking lot. Prissi was smoothing her feathers when Joe Fflowers exploded out of the library’s dismal, dinged metal and scratched glass entrance. He started when he saw Prissi, stuttered, and stopped.
After several minutes of mis-meshed verbal gears grinding through Saturday’s traitorous events, including a stuttery apology by Prissi, the two teenerz finally found their usual edgy comfortability. They talked and talked, as if they hadn’t seen each other for ages…or, as if they expected that they wouldn’t see each other again. Goals, god, games, and music. Love, lust, loss, and movies. Family, fear, faith, failure, food…and the future.
When it was time to go back to campus, Prissi started to walk alongside Joe, but he held her shoulder and, then, turned her so her back was against the shelves of romance novels. He put one hand on her waist and the other just under Prissi’s chin. Like always, like dozens of times before in empty classrooms, by the pond, under a stairwell, hidden behind the rhododendrons outside the Mu, the first kiss felt wonderful. Tingly. The second, much longer, started as an area of wet warmth around her mouth but then zipped around her body flipping on banks of switches like a pilot readying a jet for takeoff. The third kiss involved low growls and Prissi wasn’t sure who was making them. But, then the tongue that had been around her mouth and in her mouth was in her mouth and out and in again, so rapidly, so hungrily, and so fiercely that Prissi had a vision of a rat in a popcorn bag. That vision led to a snort, a push against Joe’s chest, and, suddenly, wordlessly, he was gone.
After Joe left Prissi pulled books from the shelves, studied their covers, read their steamy blurbs and wondered what was wrong with her. When her eyes began to blink in a desperate attempt to stop whatever was trying to occur, she hurried outside and launched herself into the air. Her muscles ached as she flapped hard to achieve altitude. By the time her mypod showed one hundred meters, Prissi was high enough that she could see Joe racing up the hill toward the school. Although from her height and his distance, Joe looked small, his presence tugged at her like the draw of a black hole. The frustrated girl shouted to the wind at how stupid she had been to succumb to Jack Fflower’s slippery charm and how stupid she was to push Joe’s amateur affections away.
Now, on Monday afternoon, with six matrix algebra problems still to be solved, Prissi stared out of the window and wondered what might have happened to Joe. Her concentration was such that it took her several minutes to realize that a scattering of snow-flakes had turned into a storm. Being careful not to harm her wings, she pushed herself up from the leather perch. She stood at the window and marveled at the large flakes, like a billion albino spiders, scurrying down from the sky.
Snow in southern New England, even in the dead of winter, was a rarity. To have snow three times in March was unseen and unheard of in the last fifty years. Prissi’s thoughts turned from Joe to the recently reported possibility that a decline in green house gasses was leading to a new ice age. She stared with her nose pressed to the glass thinking of an icy world—flying in rain, which turned to ice, which caused her to plummet as her wings froze and faltered. As she watched, the storm strengthened and the snow began to swirl, eddy, cling and cover.
Staring at the dervish flakes, Prissi wondered if Joe was out in the storm. She worried at the danger he could be in until she suddenly realized that if Joe had disappeared for the reason she guessed, the snow would be a help in his escape.
In their talk the previous day, Joe had given her all of the details of how he had scored a hat trick in the game against Choate on Saturday afternoon. He had continued with how much he loved the speed, the lack of friction, the intensity of the play. He liked the feeling of holding nothing back. He anticipated the split second when a moment of incredible physical grace was summarily stopped by an act of explosive violence. He told Prissi how he had absolutely crushed Choate’s leading scorer twice on the boards the day before. When Prissi suggested for the tenth time that Joe could keep playing hockey even after he fledged, he told her he had no interest in winger hoc
key. They played on ice with sticks and a puck, but it was too slow and too dull. With wings, there could be no checking. When she insisted that he was going to have to make the change, he looked at her for a moment before dropping his eyes to stare at the hands clasped in his lap. After a long pause and without looking back up, Joe said that he was thinking of delaying his fledging. He had heard that there was a way. A way to delay. Play now. Fly later.
Looking out the window as the tumble of flakes, Prissi became embarrassed a second time as she remembered how, when Joe had brought up delayed fledging, her snort had shot something wet against the stair’s door. Her voice had risen as she told Joe that he already was pushing the edge as much as he safely could. There was no way for him to delay further. If he didn’t fledge soon, the window closed forever. Prissi reminded Joe that no one in his family was going to allow him to get away with that. A walker in the family that invented fledging. That couldn’t be. When Prissi started to press him even harder, Joe closed his face.
As her bright, celadon-flecked eyes gawked at the cascade of flakes, the agitated teener tried to recall Joe’s exact words. After thinking about it, she was sure he had used the word delay. Looking out at the sculpting of the groomed lawn as it became covered in snow, Prissi wished Joe well, but bet against him hiding safely long enough to get past the fledging window. She guessed that, if he had run away, he would be caught that day. Any kid whose parents had the money was i-tagged. Three hawkers would fly a grid with their transmitters and receivers. They’d home in on Joe’s signal, triangulate the results, swoop down, make the catch, and pass him off to his parents and let them turn the key.
Unless…unless he had a lot of help in getting someplace where it was hard for the hawkers to fly, somewhere the i-tag’s signals would be blocked. Prissi shook her head. Joe’s chances for escape were less than her chances of fitting into a size two glass slippers…or, dambit, dress.
Suddenly, Prissi whirled away from the window. She grabbed her things and hurried outside to catch snowflakes on her wings. Doing that would be easier than working through the question that had just come to her. Did any of Joe’s motivation to run away come from anger or disappointment at her? For betraying him with Jack? Rejecting his kisses? Prissi dropped her bag in the snow and, uncaring of how many gigs it would cost her for flying over campus on a school day, flapped hard and flew fast toward the west, into the heart of the storm.