by Travis McBee
At the close of his words Mr. Boyd turned and left the room before most of the students realized class had been dismissed. The calm immobilization did not last long and within seconds the scraping of chairs announced twenty students climbing out of their desks and heading towards the door. Will begin walking towards the door even though the door was sliding out of sight and he soon found himself behind the controls of one of the flying saucers that now sat before his physical eyes, and he stayed in that world all the way back to his dormitory.
* * *
Will laid awake for hours that night staring into the darkness that hid the ceiling over his bed. All around him he could hear the light snores of the forty-nine other boys that shared the room with him but he still felt strangely alone, a feeling he was growing used to. He was not in a poor mood, however, and a slight smile was on his face as he reviewed the day. Abby kept making surprise appearances in his review and that astounded him. He had dated before but he had never actually had a crush on a girl. In the past the girls would simply come up to him and flirt with him and he would date them, before Jessica he hadn’t even felt any feelings for them while dating them. Even then his feelings for Jessica had never been as deep as he felt for the ones Abby commanded already. It was a phenomenon he couldn’t explain to himself.
A phenomenon he could explain was Brandon. Will was proud of himself for not hurting the irritable little boy but he had a feeling that the encounter would not be the last of its kind, nor would it be the most intense run in between the two. Why does he hate me? Will pondered as he considered how he felt about Brandon. He discovered that his feelings about Brandon could be summed up in one word Apathetic. Will simply didn’t care about him one way or another and decided that the odious little twerp could never provoke him into a fight; it was the first time Will had ever been completely wrong in his life.
Chapter Eight
Friends and Foes
Déjà vu occurs when things seem to have happened to you before when you’re fairly certain they haven’t. It was only that last requirement that prevented what Will encountered the next morning from being Déjà vu. The alarm went off identical to the morning before, and as the morning before he stumbled grumpily along to breakfast where he was served powdered eggs and pancakes. From there he began his classes first Math and then History. The classes were not identical to the day before but they were similar enough so as not to stand out in Will’s memory when he looked back at that day. The odious repetition did not last through the whole day and the lunch room was the launch pad for a new and unique day for Will.
Will had descended to lunch more than half hoping that Abby would choose his table to eat at again. After he had worked his way through the lunch line and received what could have been the brother of the sandwich he had eaten yesterday, he chose a seat and glanced around the room for the dark red hair of Abby. He spotted her almost instantly at another table and his heart dropped.
She sat at a table infested with chattering girls all of whom were beautiful, but none of whom could distract him from Abby. She sat there flicking her hair out of her food with idle grace and Will found himself staring helplessly at her. There was one seat that remained empty at the table but Will would no sooner have gone over and placed himself in that chair than he would have jumped out of an airplane without a parachute.
* * *
There was someone that would be willing to jump out of a plane without a parachute, and his name was Brandon Crosby. Brandon was sitting across the room staring at Will almost as intensely as Will was staring at Abby, but not with a gaze filled with affection and longing. Instead he bore holes into Will with his eyes, eyes dripping with anger and hatred.
He noticed Will was staring at something relentlessly and he followed his eyes to a table which was overloaded with girls. They all sat chattering about something completely oblivious to the probing eyes of the boy that sat halfway across the cafeteria. Brandon noticed a chair was empty at the table and instantly formulated a rather diabolical scheme in his twisted little head.
He stood up from his table, picked up his tray with his untouched sandwich and walked casually and confidently across the room towards the table of chattering girls. When he reached the table none of them noticed him at first but once he slid out the chair and sat in it he had their full attention.
“Um, what are you doing here?” A rude looking blonde girl on the other side of the table asked him shooting him a glare of intense distaste.
“Cassandra!” A girl with hair so dark red it was almost brown shouted out, “Be nice,”
“Oh whatever,” Cassandra replied rolling her eyes with incredible skill.
The red headed girl frowned at her friends rudeness before turning a friendly, if slightly disingenuous, smile at Brandon.
“Hi, I’m Abby,” She said addressing Brandon, “What’s your name?”
“The names Brandon babe,” He replied as cavalierly as he could manage.
“Don’t call me babe,” Abby replied in a still pleasant voice although it wasn’t openly friendly anymore and the smile had slid from sight.
Brandon glanced over his shoulder to where Will was sitting. The tall boy was visibly fuming at his table halfway across the room and Brandon knew he was talking to the right girl.
“Why not girl?” He said addressing Abby again, “Me and you would be quite the couple.”
After he finished his short monologue, the entire table of girls sat and stared open mouthed at the freckled and pimpled little boy. The silence didn’t last long and a chorus of laughter soon superseded it as the entire table of girls burst into laughter, all except Abby who was looking at Brandon as if he had crawled out from under a rock. Brandon glared at them as if his looks could kill them all, instead the stare supercharged the laughter and the girls began to bang their fists on the table in helplessness as tears streamed down their faces from the strain of laughing.
“Sorry,” Abby replied finally regaining enough composure to dismiss him, “I’m not interested,”
She said it as nicely as she could manage under the situation but what Brandon heard was a sneering mockery. Rage flew into him and he stood up swiftly knocking his chair over in a clatter of noise.
“You think you’re clever do you?!” He shouted at Abby who sat with her mouth open stunned at the aggression that had erupted from the dotted face so suddenly.
He reached out and grabbed her by the hair forcing her head backwards to look him in the eye. Her eyes were filled with fear and the entire table of girls was shocked into silence, silence that spread like a virus around the cafeteria until all of the chatter died out. Brandon didn’t notice the abrupt silence and didn’t notice the hundreds of eyes that were staring at him. He was lost in his rage and knew nothing else. He pulled back his free hand preparing to slap her, or maybe hit her with a closed fist. He wasn’t sure what he planned to do and he never got the opportunity to find out how far his rage would take him.
* * *
Will would have stared without action at Abby through the entire lunch period but his attention was soon diverted to more troubling events than the subtle motion of her hair. As he watched, Brandon walked confidently over to the table and sat down at the table as if he belonged.
Will felt his heart’s tempo increase as jealousy and anger coursed through his mind in a cocktail of emotional confusion. How come he has the nerve to sit there and I don’t? It didn’t occur to Will that Brandon might not have been welcome there and when the entire table burst into laughter, from what he assumed was a rather good joke told by Brandon, he felt his heart drop.
He started to look down at his sandwich when he saw Abby turn to talk to him and Will saw an expression of disgust adorning her beautiful face. His glance downward was first paused by the expression and then he found himself springing from his feet a split second after Brandon had leapt to his in a towering rage and yelled at Abby.
Will managed to get halfway across the cafeteria before he
discovered he had left his seat. He wasn’t sure what he was going to do once he got to the girl he desired and the boy he despised but something in his subconscious did.
He was twenty feet away when Brandon grabbed Abby’s dark red hair and jerked her head backwards. Will could see the terror in her eyes and that fear brought an avalanche of rage into Will as he broke into a sprint towards the oblivious boy and terrified girl.
Brandon’s hand rose and formed into a fist. Will saw it as if it was slow motion and felt as if he couldn’t get there in time. He was five feet away when he raised his own fist, three feet away when he yelled an incomprehensible shout, and rocketed his fist into Brandon’s jaw as hard as he could.
The fist swished through the air and connected with Brandon’s jaw with a sharp crack. The force of the punch launched Brandon off of his feet and into another of the round tables which was filled with a group of juniors who could only sit and stare at the sudden addition to their group. Brandon straightened back up to look at his attacker but could barely get his feet back under him before Will launched himself onto the small boy pinning him to the ground and raining punch after punch into Brandon’s frail acne adorned face.
The fight was over before it began. Brandon wouldn’t have been able to stand up to Will even if Will hadn’t blindsided him while being intoxicated by fury. Brandon could barely get his arms over his face to shield himself from the rain of blows much less try to throw a retaliatory punch at his attacker.
Will would have continued to beat the boy until he was too tired to lift his arms anymore but several pairs of arms grabbed him and pulled him away from the bloody form of Brandon. He tried valiantly to break free and resume his assault for several seconds but eventually his adrenaline and blind rage abandoned him and he stopped struggling as he realized what he had done. He was going to be in serious trouble over this, he was sure of that.
He glanced at the people that were holding him and discovered that they were several of the boys that had been sitting at the table he had knocked Brandon into. They were staring at him in awe at what he had done and he soon found himself growing embarrassed as the room started to fill with a wind of whispering.
The whispering drew to a sudden halt as the door to the teacher’s dining room slid open with a hiss and a dominating figure of a man Will hadn’t seen before strode through. The man was enormous, his head nearly touching the top of the doorway as he strode through and the muscles moving under his skin looked like baby elephants. The man strode up to Will and looked down at him with disgust pouring out of his eyes.
“So you like to pick fights huh?” He asked the boy in a deep, soft, and terrible voice.
“No sir I was…” Will trailed off not knowing what to say.
The man grunted in a mixture of irritation and amusement and bent over and collected the twitching frame of Brandon as easily as if he had been a kitten.
“Follow me,” The big man spat at Will and began walking towards the exit to the cafeteria.
Will blew out a long sigh and followed the man. He was in serious trouble and he knew it, but what types of punishments did they have in Bridgeworld? That was a question he feared the answer to, an answer which was coming swiftly.
The man led him up the flights of stairs without saying a word to him. Will wondered where they were going but did not feel brave enough to ask the not so gentle giant. Will followed the man past the second floor where his dormitory was and past the third floor which was filled with classrooms. The man led him past the senior’s private fourth floor and did not even pause at the gym on the fifth floor.
When Will realized he was going to the sixth floor he felt his fear abate slightly and curiosity found its way into his numb mind. He hadn’t been to the sixth floor yet and he wasn’t sure what to expect, and the sudden excitement of discovery temporarily dislodged the fear entirely from his mind.
As Will emerged onto the sixth floor he was instantly overcome with awe. The gym below extended upward taking over half of the sixth floor but the room left was still gargantuan and Will found himself staring down a hallway as vast as that of the atrium. The walls were not the dull gray metal of the rest of the school, instead inky black metal, both beautiful and mysterious, crawled up to meet a ceiling that was just as dark but speckled with tiny dots of lights that looked like stars in the sky. The floor stretched outward towards the far wall in which a pair of gleaming white doors stood in stark contrast to the perpetual black of the wall.
The thing that caught and held Will’s gaze was not the gleaming black walls or the snowy white door, it was the windows that made up the wall on the left side. It wasn’t exactly made up of windows, instead the entire wall appeared to be made of nothing but glass. It was the first time that Will had looked outside of metal walls since he had boarded the shuttle in the outback, which felt like months even though it was only a few days. The view literally took Will’s breath away.
Through the giant sheet of glass Will could see the gray surface of Broglio stretching out as Bridgeworld orbited it. The gray world was set against a velvet black sky that twinkled with millions of stars each one more beautiful than the last. Somewhere out there is Earth.
“Stop staring and hurry up,” The gruff voice of the giant called out breaking him from his reverie.
He followed the huge man who still carried the whimpering Brandon down the massive room and towards the white door at the far end. When the small party reached the door it beeped and slid open without the man’s touch on any surface. The man walked through the door and Will followed a few steps behind.
He emerged in a room of purest black; the floor, ceiling, and furniture all sat idly without color as if no such thing had ever been thought of. The room itself appeared to be a waiting room for an office. A large black desk sat in front of him with a middle-aged woman sitting behind it looking particularly bored. She glanced up at the three when they entered and, seeing the bloodied Brandon resting over the large man’s shoulder and Will looking around with a mixture of guilt and awe, raised her eyebrows with interest.
“David,” She said in a high voice, “What’s going on?”
“Kids got in a fight,” David responded calmly gesturing towards first the limp sack of meat on his shoulder and then at Will.
“Not much of a fight,” The woman laughed softly and gave Will a friendly wink.
Will returned the wink with a hesitant smile and stared around the room trying not to meet her eyes.
“I’m taking them to Dean Norris,” David told the woman, “Is she available?”
The woman consulted her Micro briefly and gave a little nod to the large man.
“Go on back,” she said simply
David didn’t bother to show his gratitude, if he had any, and walked through a black door that slid open as he approached it.
“Good luck,” The woman whispered to Will as he passed giving him a slight smile and another wink.
Will returned the smile but her words did not comfort him in the least. Why did he need luck? What was going to happen?
The doorway that they walked through led to a narrow corridor. Will could see the hallway stretching into the distance with dozens of doors branching off on either side. He was led past all of the doors and found himself walking through a door set at the very end of the hall way. The door was the same metallic black that made up the rest of the sixth floor but this door did not open before David. Instead he had to knock on it which he did with the utmost of care, rasping his knuckles softly on the metal. The slight rap of his knuckles caused a metallic clang to resonate through the hallway, it was a creepy sound to Will and he cringed as gooseflesh wound its way up his arms and neck.
The door slid open after a moment’s pause and Will was reminded of a snake as the door hissed softly into the wall. The large man walked through the doorway and Will followed after a slight pause and deep breath.
The room that met Will’s eyes was easily the most exciting room he had seen yet.
It was obviously an office due to the large glass desk that dominated a corner of the room with two metallic black chairs sitting in front of it. In another corner was a bed that was three times the size of the one Will slept on in his dormitory. Behind the bed was a long wall of pure glass, a miniature version of the one he had witnessed on his arrival to the sixth floor. Through it he could see a red sun begin to peek around the planet.
Against another wall was something that didn’t belong in either an office or a bedroom. A large bank of monitors hung from the walls surrounding a desk with a single black chair. The monitors all flashed with color and small beeping noises emanated from them at regular intervals. At the base of the monitors was a board of buttons and knobs that swirled with color.
“Are these the boys from the fight, Mr. Sweetman?” A soft voice spoke from behind Will.
He turned as fast as he could and saw a woman emerging from a door next to the bed. She was only a few inches shorter than him and her hair fell down to her shoulders in waves of golden curls. Will had only to look at the lines in her face to guess that the hair was dyed and a glance at her roots confirmed his suspicions.
“Yes ma’am,” replied David Sweetman.
“Very well you can leave now,” She said in a dangerous voice, “Throw that one into the chair over there.” She added indicating first Brandon then one of the chairs in front of the desk.
Will watched as the big man threw Brandon into the designated chair as casually as if he were a bag of groceries and then turn and walk out of the room without a backwards glance. As the door slid closed with a hiss Will felt the woman’s gaze switch onto him with uncomfortable intensity.
“Does that interest you?” she asked him pointing at the bank of monitors that will had been examining when she had entered.