|
In Support of the Academy PART I CHAPTER I PART II
By The Host
Here's the second half of chapter one, 'My Great Tragedy.' (It looks longer than the last installment, but that's just because of the larger font size. It's almost exactly the same length.)
The next month of days crawled along. It was an early and warm spring for Port Crandall, and spring always cheers me. Within two weeks of our brief Bangor vacation, I had a new (more genuine) best night of my life. I swept the annual public speaking event, winning the top award in every category I entered, including top speaker overall. The competition wasn’t exactly fierce, but my feeling of accomplishment was genuine. It was my first speaking award in five years – for the last four I’d been bested by Laura. This year she didn’t enter.
She was there though, watching. I beamed at her from the stage as I spoke of Our Grand and Glorious Future. She smiled back, widely. Her smile wasn’t exactly pretty, but it always held so much playful delight and conviction, scrunching up her entire face, that joy seemed to hang in the air around her. It made me laugh out loud when I saw it. It made me love living. It was lately a rare thing.
I contained myself that night, moving my eyes from her face to others in the crowd. I absolutely beamed. When they called my name for the awards, I felt a happy-monster spawn in my stomach and leap to get out through my throat, or maybe bust through my rib-cage. I was elated, I was high. Nothing, to me, is better than winning. When I won that night she hugged me and said, ‘This must be the best night of your life!’ I didn’t have to tell her it was. As I said, I have trouble hiding my feelings.
I had spoken a silent prayer before I began my speech. I said: ‘Laura, I do this for you.’ I had done it for her. I still thought I was in love with her. I was still silly.
I wept tears of joy that night as I went to sleep. Maybe that’s when I got the insane idea; maybe not. Either way, I asked her out the next day. It was a Tuesday in June.
I found her at her locker, and asked her if she planned to see the new John Grisham movie. She said, ‘Yes, probably.’ I was elated. This was easier than I thought! It was totally spontaneous (really I had considered it for months), I wasn't nervous (ignoring the sweating and the palpitations), and she’d already said she wanted to see the movie! She’d said yes before I even asked her out! The rest was mere formality. Just a matter of wording, and then—
She looked at me strangely as these thoughts flashed through my head. They hadn’t exactly ‘flashed’ after all; they had ‘meandered’ or perhaps ‘strolled’ through my consciousness. Some time had passed, several seconds too many, and she was still looking at me strangely. Now, to confirm (or deny) her expectations, the ‘mere formality,’ a real hum-dinger, capable of bringing any girl to her knees in spasms of lust, was forming in my throat (if not my mind).
‘Mind if I tag along?’
What the hell was that? Had I said that? Could I salvage the situation? Why had I said that? Was there anything more weak, anything more lame? I should've been a pair of ragged claws! My brain hobbled away on crutches, for the moment ignored.
Her lips moved in slow motion, her words muffled. She stammered something about not really being able to go probably this weekend but maybe next weekend but then again it wasn’t supposed to be really good and Ebert had given it two thumbs down, or Siskel and Ebert, not just Ebert; and anyway she didn’t really want to see it and, hey, isn’t it time for French class? When I thought about it, as I walked to my class, I wanted to cry, out of embarrassment more than rejection, so I didn’t think about it. Sometime midway through the class I noticed that I had scribbled in the margin the words, ‘I NEVER REALLY LIKED HER THAT MUCH ANYWAY, NOT ANYMORE.’ I felt some sort of emotion that was either happiness or sadness or maybe just relief, but I found that I didn’t really care much about the whole humiliating situation anymore anyway. I still felt lingering guilt and regret after that day, as I had for almost a year, but at least I knew I didn’t love her anymore. I assured myself that I hadn’t been so misguided: I really did love Laura Doane, and love really can’t die, but Laura Doane had died, in the same way Anakin died at the feet of Darth Vader, or something like that. She had been My Great Tragedy, the pain I’d searched for my entire life just to justify my appeals for sympathy, but the Tragedy had ended. It was time to move on. The question was, where to?
It had been, by the way, the first time I ever asked a girl out.
The remaining few weeks of the school year were largely uneventful. I wrote a short story for my English class, which I was rather proud of. I saw Lawrence of Arabia for the first time; it immediately became my favorite film. I bought a copy of the movie only a couple of weeks later. I wrote my exams with little preparation, and did exceedingly well on all. That was about it.
Except for this: I was recruited to attend The Seminar. The Seminar was, essentially, a summer camp that recognized that smart kids enjoyed intellectual challenge and rarely got exercise. It combined negotiation lectures and simulations with hiking and camping and rock climbing; Cape Breton Island, my home, afforded great opportunity for hiking especially.
It looked like fun, except for the hiking and climbing and camping parts, of course. I’d wanted to attend it the summer prior, but had already planned an extended American vacation. This summer I would go for certain.
‘This summer you’ll go for certain.’ Laura giggled – she was giggling now much more often than she had been for a long while. Laura, of course, had gone to the Seminar that summer I missed it, along with our mutual friend Krista, and both had loved the experience. Krista couldn’t go this year, but Laura ‘wouldn’t miss it for the world.’ Her boyfriend wouldn’t be there, nor Harold. Aside from some Seminarians she’d met the year prior who would be returning, I was to be the only person she knew at The Seminar. All attendants were pretty straight-laced, I’d been told, and so was I. Was two and a half weeks enough time to save someone?
I’d decided to go while I still believed I loved her.
It was only a couple of days after my embarrassment and epiphany that Krista told me Laura wouldn’t be going after all. I was taken aback. I marched immediately (maybe angrily, certainly determinedly) to Laura and demanded to know whether it was true.
‘Well, I’m not sure,’ she stammered. ‘Krista can’t go, y’know, and I didn’t know about you—’
‘You knew damn well I was going.’
‘Well, Harold was going to go, but he can’t; he’s going to band camp on the mainland. And so—’
‘I wasn’t enough?’ I feigned indignation, or maybe it was genuine.
‘No, of course, that’s not it, Holden. But I wanted to spend time with Tom’ – Tom was her maniacal boyfriend, who’d decided the day before that maybe she would put out after all – ‘and he’s going away west to work for the summer. And anyway, I dunno. It’s just not the same. You’ll have fun though,’ she said, her tone noticeably brightening. ‘I had a great time last year. I wish I could go again. But, hey, Tom’s – well, he’s just that important to me. He’s not such a bad guy. Just misunderstood.’
Her conversation hadn’t meandered so much in the past, I noted.
‘Anyway, you have fun. And I still might be going. But my hiking boots from last year were ruined over the winter, and I can’t really afford any new ones, so I probably couldn’t go anyway. So, oh well. Did I mention that before, about the shoes, I mean the boots? Didn’t I?’
‘Yeah.’
She smiled and wished me well, and then went outside to smoke. I spent the remainder of my lunch break with the Two Guys. They were my closest acquaintances at Laurier High. One Guy, the short one, was named Mike, I believe. I always thought that the other was named Glenn, but that could be because he sort of looked like an older guy I knew whose name was Glenn. They might have been brothers. I knew, at any rate, that elder Glenn had a brother in our circle, and it might have been the one of the Two Guys whose name wasn’t Mike and probably wasn’t Glenn (presumably not if he was elder Glenn’s brother).
The fact that I didn’t know with certainty the names of my nearest ‘friends’ distressed me. I was lonely aside from feeling guilty about Laura. But the Two Guys were funny, and sometimes I was as well, and they never told me to go away when I sat by them at lunch. Not that most people in our circle of friends would ask me to leave; but surely no one else would pay me any attention. I was strange, but too afraid to be just strange enough.
That would change.
So? What do you think? Please comment! I'll post some of the next chapter tomorrow or the next day.
-The Host
3/28/2003 4:20:42 PM
Comment on this fan fiction!
|
|
|
