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In Support of the Academy PART I CHAPTER III SECTION I
By The Host
Here's the first quarter of the third chapter. Hope you enjoy!
Heartbreak, Oz, and the Elephant Ride
Two buses rolled to a stop in front of Waterton Academy. Outside stood a crowd of sixty impatient students and one irate teacher. Our transportation to the trailhead had been fully ninety minutes late, and Bartleby Bloom was far from happy. The Seminar was prone to falling behind schedule – ‘late’ was its natural state of being – but this was a tad excessive. Bloom told us to board the buses with all the speed we could, for we’d be leaving immediately.
‘Immediately in another fifteen minutes,’ Clarke Gouda said as he collapsed into the seat in front of me. He was wrong. We left thirty-five minutes after loading onto the bus.
While waiting to leave, we quickly came to singing. Casey and Sherry Harms, the latter a fellow Seminarian one year older than I, had compiled a book of song lyrics. ‘Like a Rolling Stone,’ ‘Bad Moon Rising,’ ‘Norwegian Wood,’ and then the irrepressible Grover Staine obliged us with a solo performance of ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz’.
Bloom had entered the school when Sherry came up with her idea. One wing of the Academy had been given over to summer students: we had so far avoided them, by chance or design I don’t know, but now our bus with its windows open faced their classrooms with their windows open.
Sherry whispered to Grover and, smiling widely, he bounded off the bus. After running to the neighboring bus he assumed a position on the greensward between street and class and turned to us. Sherry stood up and addressed us all.
‘That Alice Cooper song. You know the one.’
Well, we’ve got no choice
All the girls and boys
Makin’ all the noise
‘Cause they found new toys
Well, we can’t salute you
Can’t find a flag
If that don’t suit you
That’s a drag
School’s out for summer!
School’s out forever!
School’s been blown to pieces!
No more pencils, no more books
No more teachers’ dirty looks
Grover conducted us with furious gesticulation, and the classrooms behind him erupted. Students leaned out of the windows and cat-called Grover, yelled and threw papers. He turned to them and said, loudly, ‘Sorry, but Mr. Bloom doesn’t let me talk to the stupid kids.’ As he then walked back to our bus somebody in one of the classrooms held out a piece of paper. On it was scrawled the word ‘LOOSER.’
I was in awe. Here was Harold’s kind of confidence, but qualitatively different. It was a sort of nerdy arrogance, brash pseudo-intellectual superiority. Gladys Johns, the Seminar’s resident soothsayer, spoke to me from her place across the aisle. ‘What you see,’ said she, ‘is a declaration of war. The gauntlet’s down. He doesn’t even go to the Academy anymore, but it doesn’t matter. He’s E.P., or was, and they’re all like that: think they’re better. And next year’ll be war between E.P and Regular students. I’ve seen things, and it’s been contained for the last fifteen years. But you watch: next year there’ll be fights. It’ll be war. Hey, Grover,’ she shouted as he came back onto the bus, ‘what the fuck’re you doing? They’ll pound the shit out of you.’
Nobody listened to her. There was clapping, there was laughing, there was cheering, there was Mr. Bloom running out of the school. He leaped up the steps onto the bus. ‘We have to get out of here, now.’
The bus driver put the bus into gear, and Bloom turned to the rest of us. ‘Okay, guys, you know that you just can’t do that. The stupid kids will get me in trouble.’
* * *
The first four days of The Seminar had been a veritable blur. The Simulation had come and gone with much fanfare, and I had permanently picked up the name ‘Genghis’ somewhere along the way. Now here we were headed to Pollett’s Cove, ostensibly the most beautiful place on earth, found at the end of ostensibly the most difficult hiking trail in the region. I didn’t exactly look forward to the hike – walking around the Academy the night before with my backpack loaded had almost killed me – but there was still a strange sort of anticipation and excitement. I was happy. And surely I looked forward to camping in the Cove.
The buses passed first through the city, through the decay of fifty years of hard times. Then through the rolling hills and forest and field of the Industrial Area, so called because it had absolutely no industry whatsoever. The highway snaked past village and town, past even Port Crandall, and then came to the Seal Island Bridge. Here the Bras d’Or Lake thrust out a mighty arm to the sea, marking the edge of the inhabited region of Cape Breton Island. Ahead lay an hour and a half of bramble and hill with only the occasional village or homestead or gas station or Indian Reservation (cheap tobacco and video lottery terminals) breaking the monotony before the island dissolved and the highway flowed thankfully onto the fertile mainland of North America.
The Bridge itself was reputedly the longest single-span in the world, a rusted green monster splayed across the Great Bras d’Or. Our bus crawled across its back and climbed the spine of Kelly’s Mountain, eight-hundred feet up hugging cliff and hairpin curve. On the other side the highway skirted the Highlands, the folded sheer plateau crowning Cape Breton’s rugged north.
Halfway across the island, at the tiny village of Baddeck, the road pulled near to both Lake and Highland. Here we stopped at The Big Red Barn; low mountains peered over us. The buses belched out tired students. Bloom led us toward an ice cream shop.
‘This is the worst kind of tourist trap,’ Grover said. ‘It’s just a barn. A big red barn. And people pay money to, I don’t know, look at it.’
‘Well, they have got an ice cream shop,’ Sherry pointed out.
‘And some kiddie rides,’ Clarke added.
Grover looked about excitedly. ‘Where?’ Then he spotted the small shopping mall relic, a faded elephant that undulated for a quarter. It stood like a statue, noble and absurd, guarding a corner of the dusty parking lot. Grover climbed on top and dropped his money in; it immediately began to creak forward and back and up and down.
‘Hey, Genghis.’ Sherry fell back beside me as I passed Grover and stood in line for one scoop moon mist one scoop chocolate chip mint. She smiled.
‘Hey,’ I said.
‘You’ve been kind of quiet all the way here.’
‘That’s new.’
‘So what’s Laurier High like?’
‘You remember those summer school students?’
‘Looser! Yeah, of course!’
‘Like that.’
‘Huh. That sucks. You should come to the Academy.’
‘I almost did.’
‘Why didn’t you?’
‘I dunno. All my friends are at Laurier.’
‘Oh, yeah? Well, that’s what I thought too. I wasn’t supposed to go to Laurier, I don’t mean. But I wasn’t supposed to go to the Academy either. I’m from Glace Bay. But I’m glad I did go. It’s the best thing that ever happened to me. There’s lots of cool people there. Well, you know, most of them are here, that are in E.P.’
I thought for a moment. I felt strangely awkward saying what I was about to say. I said this: ‘I like the people here. They – you all, I mean – you treat me almost like I’m kind of cool.’
‘You are.’ Her voice squeaked the words with sweet sincerity. I blushed. Then we talked about Shakespeare. My favorite play was Hamlet; hers, I found out, was Twelfth Night. I told her I loved that was as well – at that point in my life I hadn’t read Titus Andronicus and could honestly say I enjoyed every Shakespearean play I knew. I didn’t say this: Sometimes I feel like Duke Orsino.
* * *
I had known Gordon Cloves slightly before coming to the Seminar. He was there called C-Cups, though of course he didn’t know that; his saggy man breasts suggested the name and his surly disposition justified it. He told the zit-faced ice cream scooper behind the counter that Grover was riding the elephant outside despite the conspicuous ‘ELEPHANT RIDE FOR CHILDREN ONLY’ sign. Zit-face finished scooping my ice cream, took my money, and ran outside. I followed.
Grover had now spent ten minutes and a dollar-and-a-half on the ride, and had attracted a small crowd of Seminarians with dripping cones. Gordon Cloves came out of the ice cream shop behind me accompanied by icy looks. He would spoil the fun.
Zit-face and Grover toiled and finally Zit-face seemed to win. He strode defiantly back into the shop. ‘What are you going to do, Grover?’ The crowd, which had swelled, knew Grover wouldn’t leave without the last word. Of course he didn’t. As a matter of fact, he left with the sign: ‘ELEPHANT RIDE FOR CHILDREN ONLY.’ As far as I know, he still has it.
So? What do you think? Please comment! I'll post some more of this chapter tomorrow or the next day.
-The Host
4/3/2003 10:44:59 AM
(Updated: 4/3/2003 10:46:10 AM)
(Updated: 4/3/2003 10:46:42 AM)
Comment on this fan fiction!
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