by Angela L.
I guess it was still hard to wrap my head around all of it, especially the fact that we were legally going to be adults who had to get jobs, take responsibility, pay taxes, and all that grownup stuff that everybody dreaded doing.
When people asked me, “How old are you?” I usually wanted to say, “Twelve,” but then I remembered I was actually seventeen. But like Alaric had said, age was just a number that told us biologically how long our bodies had stood up for, not how much our bodies had stood up against.
The rest of the day passed by slowly.
There was one class where the teacher, Mrs. Taylor, asked us why we go to school. Every year, the teachers asked the same thing, and every time, the students answered, “To learn.”
I have never actually given it much thought until today, and that was probably because Mrs. Taylor told us to think hard about it as she droned on with her pointless stories of how her cat had met his “kitty soul mate.”
I knew school was for kids to have a proper education, but like Einstein said, if you judged a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it would live its whole life believing that it was stupid. I was pretty sure most mad geniuses or artists dropped out of school. In fact, most of them probably failed at Shakespeare yet they still achieved awards. It was as if school was a safety net, a road everyone was required to take unless you knew that you had the guts to do something great that fell out of the social norm. But of course, I wasn’t going to say that.
“Demi?” Mrs. Taylor looked at me, bright eyed, waiting for my answer.
“School? Well, of course…to learn,” I said, and simply smiled.
****
I dropped my backpack on the living room floor and began to walk toward the kitchen, where Raya was washing a few apples.
“You’re back from school already?” Raya said and placed the last apple in a plastic basket sitting on the kitchen’s marble counter.
“Yep.”
“You, um, keeping your grades up?” Raya said. I could tell she was trying to be all motherly.
“What? It’s the first day of school, Raya,” I said, grabbing one of the apples before going back to my room.
Chapter Fourteen
(August 8, 1992, in Missouri)
The radio was blasting out an old Beatles songs. It was nothing that I hadn’t heard already. My shades were half closed, and I could see the screaming little kids riding their bicycles past my tinted windows.
I stared at the pile of homework on my desk then back at my ceiling, letting my mind wander in various oppressive places rather than finding the solution to my calculus equations. It wasn’t like I was ever going to use math later on in life.
I was never going to be a mathematician or something like that.
Face it—half the classes in school were useless. First of all, I was never going to use logarithms to do my taxes or the stages of mitosis to do my future job, nor would I ever need to know the history of Hitler to get through life.
I sighed, wondering what Alaric was doing. He might not even be in Austria. Maybe France. Spain. Germany. The possibilities were endless. Maybe he had decided to go to China or Japan. I also wondered if he’d forgotten about me. Or if he met a new girl? Another true love?
Maybe.
Maybe not.
I wanted to know how he was doing. I wanted to pick up the phone and call him or even write him a letter. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t, because he was just a stranger I met in my short period in Austria, yet his lingering existence contaminated my sanity like a virus.
It frustrated me so much. He was like this perfect illusion that clinched on to my consciousness, opening my eyes with a crystal-clear bird’s eye view of the entire world.
Sometimes I wondered if I’d ever get over him and I hoped I would. I needed to get over him, but right now that just seemed impossible. How did you forget someone who brought out a side of you that excited every bone in your body? Someone who made you push past boundaries and let go of everything you had once believed in? How did you forget someone who had hope for you when everything else in your life was pulling you down like the Titanic?
It’s amazing isn’t it? Sometimes, it doesn’t matter how long you’ve known someone, but how much they’ve impacted you along the process.
He made me fall for him, and I loved him more than I should.
I rolled over to the left side of my bed and got out a piece of scrap paper and a pen from the top drawer.
Dear Alaric…
I stopped immediately. I wanted to tell him everything, but I didn’t know where to begin, so I started off with exactly that.
Dear Alaric…
It’s been a long time and I wonder where you are and what you’re doing. I have so much to tell you that I don’t even know where to begin. So, I guess I’m just going to start off by saying I think I’m in love with you and…
****
Once the bell rang, all the kids began to pack their bags, then hastily got out of the classroom as if their lives depended on it.
The long halls of our school were flooded with the smell of acne cream and the perfume of hundreds of girls, and if you added that with the fresh sweat from the football players and the smell that drifted from the cafeteria from today’s special rotten meat, then you got your every day, typical public high school smell.
I had an English mini essay due next class, but the thing was, I didn’t finish it. I loved writing and all, but if you told me to write a thesis and to conclude about a boring, outdated book written by an author who was already dead, then my brain shuts down.
I went out the halls and into the schoolyard, and then I realized there was a teacher patrolling outside so I went back in. I didn’t have a good excuse if I got caught.
“Say something!” a male voice yelled from somewhere around me.
I turned around.
There was no one there. I walked toward the voice, which led me to one of the bathrooms at the end of the hallway.
“You like guys, huh?” another voice said behind the door. I laid my head against the wood. It sounded like there were at least three guys in there.
“Say something, you gay!” the first guy said. I wanted to go in, but a lot of things were stopping me. For one, it was the guys’ bathroom. Two, I was sure it was going to be awkward with me in there. But for a split second, I didn’t care.
So, I walked in. And the moment I walked in, I saw the kid that was getting beat up was Jacob. Two guys wearing the varsity soccer jacket stood next to him, one still holding onto his shirt while staring at me, startled, while the other one just looked confused. Both of them looked like they belonged in a gang in one of those cheesy street movies. I didn’t know them. I never actually paid attention to the jocks in our school because the majority of them were jerks.
“You’re in the wrong bathroom,” the one that was farther away from Jacob grunted.
Jacob stared at me and shook his head. I didn’t know if he was shaking his head for me to leave or for telling me not to leave.
“Uh…” I tried to think of something to say.
“Get out.” The guy looked like he could lift two of me. He didn’t look very bright, though.
So I decided to wing it. “I’m in the teacher’s aide class and Ms. Weyer wanted me to get the whole soccer team to talk about your next game. She said something about making a few changes. The rest of the team’s waiting for you at her office,” I lied.
“Teacher’s aide? That’s a class?” the middle guy spat.
“Yeah, but it’s more of a free period that gives you an extra credit.” I didn’t know if it gave you a credit or not. All I remembered was that teacher’s aide was on the form when we chose our classes.
The two guys looked at me for a moment, then back at Jacob, and left. It was a good thing they were dumb.
I looked out the bathroom door to check if they were out of sight.
“Jacob, are you in a lot of pain?” I looked down at him. It was such a stupid ques
tion. Of course he was in a lot of pain. He was bloody. But hey, it was better than being dead.
Jacob looked up and nodded. “Thanks, Demi,” he said.
“Hey, I’m here for you, bro,” I told him and knelt down so that I was facing him. “Look, we got to get you out of here. I’m not a teacher’s aide, which means they’re going to come looking for us,” I said and helped him up by pulling one of his arms around my shoulders.
He didn’t look like he had enough energy, so I just dragged him out. It was like carrying a dead body, though he was still able to walk a little. It didn’t make much of a difference, though.
“Am I bleeding badly?” He looked at me. The blood from his nose was dripping onto my shoulder.
“No. You’re fine,” I lied after getting a good look at him. I didn’t want him to feel any worse by telling him that he looked like bloody human mush.
I was conflicted as to where to hide him. If the guys skipped class, then that would mean they had the whole next hour to search for us, and our school was tiny, so there were not a lot of places to search. I managed to carry him across the yard to another wing in the school that was furthest away from Weyer’s office.
“Hold on,” I said. I looked around to see if there were any spare classrooms that we could stay in. I remembered that the music hallways were filled with empty classrooms. No one bothered to go there, considering that hardly anybody here was musically talented.
“Thanks,” he said. I accidentally dropped him too hard on the ground, and he landed with a thud. He didn’t seem to mind; he was probably numb from the beating already. “High school sucks,” he grunted. His face was bruised, and he had a bloody lip that was still bleeding, but at least his nosebleed had stopped.
“Life sucks,” I said. “But hey, we all end up dead anyways, so why not just chill?”
“True,” Jacob said.
“So, are you actually gay?” I asked him. “You know it’s totally fine if you are, right?”
I knew he was gay. Noelle and I had always known. We first came to the thought when we were in seventh grade. Jacob started acting weird with this kid in our homeroom. I think his name was Caleb. We caught Jacob staring at Caleb many times with that lovey dovey look in his eyes. Of course, every time he caught us noticing, he would instantly look away at some random girl sitting in front of him.
“What makes you think I’m gay?” He wiped some of the blood off his face. The only girl that Jacob had shown some interest in was Kelly back in ninth grade, and they only had a two-week relationship. Jacob broke up with her and he wouldn’t explain why. He only said it was “complicated.” In fact, by the end of middle school, we were absolutely certain that Jacob was gay. Of course, we never told him. We figured if he was ready to come out, then he would come out.
“From the things that those bullheads were saying, thought you got beat up because you’re gay,” I said.
“I’m not gay,” he said after a pause. “You’ve known me for this long, Demi. I think I would tell you if I’m gay or not.”
“Then why did they beat you up?” I asked him.
“One of them thought I was screwing around with his girlfriend.”
Like always, Jacob was good at hiding the truth. I lay back on the couch. If I was going to spend the next hour here, might as well get comfortable. We were in this tiny room with a mirror and a piano with some guitars stacked on the floor. A thick layer of dust had settled on the piano.
“Aren’t you supposed to be in class?” Jacob asked after a long moment of silence.
“I ditched.”
“Test?”
“No. English essay,” I said.
Chapter Fifteen
(August 14, 1992, in Missouri)
“Class, please listen carefully as I announce your new partner,” Mr. Hillman said as he got out his clear plastic clipboard from under his desk.
His voice should be used as one of those sleeping discs I listened to at night so that it was easier to fall asleep.
The sunlight blazed in from the big glass windows on the side of the classroom, giving the green chalkboard a bright glow. The funny thing was, the light also reflected off Hillman’s face, but unlike the chalkboard, his face just remained the same: stone cold and emotionless.
I had always hated math. Maybe it was teachers like Hillman that just made me want to bang my head against the table, or maybe it was just math in general. Don’t get me wrong, I was okay at math. Not the best, but not the worst, either.
I guess I should have been listening for my partner’s name because I completely zoned out and when I zoned back in, Hillman was already done announcing the list.
“Now, everybody, change your seats so that you’re sitting with your partner. Spend the rest of class discussing about this project. After this day, we will no longer work on this project in class so spend your time now wisely,” Hillman droned on.
I awkwardly sat in my seat as everyone moved around. My head was spinning, trying to see who was left without a partner.
“Demi, let’s do this thing.” Noelle appeared out of nowhere and sat on my table.
“Oh, great. You’re my partner,” I said with relief.
“Wow, you never listen in class, huh?” she said.
“So what should we do?” I asked her. The project was to design a building or a house with correct measurements and angles of everything. Creativity was graded so we also had to think of a unique way to display the structure.
“What about a gingerbread house?” she suggested and drew a tiny house structure on a sheet of paper. The pen wasn’t working, leaving gaps in between the lines.
“Isn’t that just, like, a few squares placed together? That’s too simple,” I said.
“No. Well, yeah, that too. But also the measurements for the candy cane and gummy bears, windows, sprinkles, and everything.” Noelle added the candy canes, a door, and some other random structures on the roof.
“That’s going to be a lot of random stuff to figure out.” I looked at the piece of paper. Noelle wasn’t exactly good at art. It looked like a jumble of scribbles trying to figure out how to untangle themselves.
“Well, you got a better idea?”
“What about a clock tower?” I said. I thought about the clock tower from Krems an der Donau. If I closed my eyes, I could still see the raspberry-colored sky with streaks of gold covering the blue cotton-candy clouds. I could still feel his strong presence next to me and smell the crisp summer air of Krems an der Donau. I wanted to go back. If I had the chance, I would fly back without even a blink of an eye, even if I had to leave everything behind.
“A clock tower?” Noelle’s voice pierced through my thoughts. “We’re going to have to figure out a bunch of angles. Let’s see, a cylinder as the base, a circle for the clock, arrows for the hands, and the roof’s the hardest—a cone. I’m lazy, dude.”
I wanted to scream until my vocal chords shattered. I tried not to think of Alaric, but my mind always seemed to be clouded by his ghost, and the deep despair hit my chest like a heart attack that brought me closer to death. I usually ignored pain like that, you know, live like a dead person in ignorance. But with him, the feeling was more painful than anything I have endured, and strangely enough, I felt so alive.
I looked around the classroom. I felt so confined, as if every wall was going to collapse on my body and just stay there forever. I needed to escape.
Escape. Alaric’s words came to me suddenly and echoed in every direction of my thoughts.
“It’s all about the possibilities. They’re rare. Precious,” he had said.
“But what if they never come?” I asked.
“Then make your own,” he answered me.
No. I needed to find an escape. Someplace secluded that nobody in this town knew. Someplace high up, where people can spend their days with their heads up in the clouds. A place where secrets can be shared and held and a place where one can get lost in their own fantasy.
“A tr
ee house,” I suddenly said.
“We’ll have to measure out the tree limbs as well,” Noelle said.
“No. Let’s build a tree house.”
“What? You do realize we only have to put this thing on paper, right?”
“Yeah. But let’s actually build a tree house. A place where no one else knows. Our second home high up off the ground.”
“Sort of like our hidden spot behind the grill?” Noelle said.
“Not like that. Some place legit that’s away from all the stores and people of this town.”
“Our own little kingdom.”
“Exactly.”
Noelle looked at me as if I was crazy. “I like the idea, but we’ll never pull it off.”
“What if we do?”
Noelle sighed and nodded. “We better get an A on this project.”
Chapter Sixteen
(August 16, 1992, in Missouri)
Noelle and I informed the rest of the group about the idea. Benji at first wasn’t up to it. Thought it was too much work, but after a while, we all jumped on board the plan.
First thing was to find a place to build the tree house.
Our town was located next to the woods. There was a road into the forest located two blocks away from school. The problem was, it was fenced off.
We all stared up in silence at where the fence ended. It was so tall.
“So…who wants to go first?” Donna sighed.
Jacob threw his backpack over the fence before proceeding to climb it. Before he was even five feet up, I began to work my way up as well. I watched Jacob as he jumped over and landed butt first, hard, on the ground.
He didn’t seem like he could answer for a while, he just sort of groaned with pain. His elbow was scratched.