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In Support of the Academy PART I CHAPTER I SECTION I
By The Host
So Vader's got his College Years. What follows is an endeavor I began this summer, began but never completed. I'll probably never complete it; I'm dissatisfied with how it's gone so far and have decided to completely rewrite it. Still, if you wanna have a bit of insight into my life, you might find this interesting. I'll post it in sections. Hope you enjoy, and please comment!
IN SUPPORT OF THE ACADEMY
by
Matt Boudreau
PART ONE
THE MONGOLIAN WARLORD
My Great Tragedy
What follows is a requisite dramatic opening sentence, Deeply Meaningful and all that jazz. I’m afraid useless words have not been omitted:
Life is a story of constant beginnings and ceaseless ends.
How was that? Not bad, I should think. But I digress. (I’ll probably do that a lot.)
To begin this tale I have picked, arbitrarily, one of the many moments that have remained inexplicably frozen in my mind. It is indeed a single second, perhaps two; the rest of the evening is blurred light and muffled sound. Then the image suddenly resolves and the sound sharpens.
I am on a school bus, near the back. Music pounds in the background – The Who’s Baba O’Riley, I think. The window beside me is open and a cool May breeze tickles my cheek. It is night; city lights wink outside my window. My friends chat and hoot and jump and sing and dance and play and Harold has his shirt off again. I kneel backwards on my seat, chin on my hands, smiling slightly, and the world for that moment spins around me and her. She says:
“This is the best night of my life!”
She’s smiling broadly; her words rest on cavernous laughter. I smile to myself, think profoundly, Yeah, the best night of mine, too, and add rather lamely, “Yeah, the best night of mine, too.”
My voice falters before I finish. Even I can hear the emptiness of my words within the din. No matter. My slight smile returns, I yawn inside, and the night fades back to blurred light and muffled sound.
Back then I called her My Great Tragedy, though she didn’t know that. I was desperately introspective back then, and even more melodramatic than I am now. I thought I loved her. I thought I was in love with her. How young I was then, and how silly! I suppose I’m not much older now, but I feel older. A lot has happened since then. I barely remember her name.
Laura Doane. My Great Tragedy. Huh. She was no Great Tragedy, and she was certainly never Mine, but that knowledge just added weight to my frustration (and fuel to my confusion).
I was in search of myself – or, more profoundly, my Self. I think most people embark upon that children’s crusade at some point in their lives. Some never return. Me, I found out somewhere along the way that I had always known myself, never lost myself, and always was myself. To quote the great sailor of cartoon fiction: I yam what I yam.
At the tender age of sixteen, such a notion was ludicrous. I was precisely who I wasn’t, or something like that. My life was a façade. I was a figment of my own imagination, except that I’d made myself real. I had changed myself to reflect what I imagined I should be, and I wanted my old Self back. I was probably right to the extent that I had changed, in accordance with my self-image and self-imagining. The thing is, I hadn’t figured out that could be a good thing.
Laura was the manifestation of my regret. In my determined inner-examination and self-remodeling, I’d let her slip through my fingers. We had been good friends in junior high school, or so I supposed. We were both smart. We liked science and science fiction. I guess we were both, to a greater or lesser degree, outcasts; or maybe that was just me. I had found some friends in junior high school, a new and exciting development in my life’s journey, but she seemed to be the only one who understood my excitement at being liked by others. She seemed the only one able to empathize, although she had never undergone the ridicule I’d once lived with, or so I assumed. She seemed the one best equipped to care.
I demanded attention, and usually got it at first. But her interest in me slowly waned, and I was having abysmal luck at the girl-getting game; hence my process of personal reinvention. It was a couple of years later, when I entered high school – so much larger, so much colder – that I looked back and saw that maybe she hadn’t grown uninterested in me. Maybe, just maybe, she had problems of her own.
She had a boyfriend, on-again and off-again, and she had developed a reputation to boot. I thought at the time her occasional boyfriend was psychotic, as he had once tried to extract my liver through my nose in the cafeteria. He brow-beat her with her reputation; if he beat her, I never knew. She said that she loved him.
‘I think he’s an idiot sometimes, of course,’ she once told me, ‘but then he’ll stay up with me all night talking ’til dawn. Sometimes we don’t even talk, he just holds me, or we look at each other, or we count the stars. He has big thoughts, and just can’t always really get them out. I think that kinda tortures him.
‘I guess I’m good for him,’ she added with a wry grin.
That was the day he dumped her ‘because she wouldn’t put out.’ Rumour, of course, held otherwise; maybe it was just with other guys. She wore tight pants; this seemed to me to somehow contradict her personality, at least as I had known her. She also did drugs. This, to me, was unfathomable. The thought of her smoking or injecting (especially the latter) made me nauseous.
Sometime in November I decided like Gladstone to save her, and realized that I couldn’t possibly. I gave up hope before I hoped for anything, and then spent the year coping with my previous inability to recognize (or admit) her problems and grant her the support that would surely make everything all right. Her mother had died and her father, I’d heard, was not much different from her boyfriend. I felt guilty about my previous inaction, ignorance and procrastination; I brooded over my own selfishness: I was not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be.
I buried the present under six feet of shame.
So that evening I’ve described I was feeling happy because she was feeling happy, but that wouldn’t last long for either of us. The next day she spent in Harold’s hotel room, and I feared to think of what their little circle of friends might be doing (or smoking) in there. That was Saturday, the second day of our trip to Bangor; the day previous we had arrived with our high school band to perform with a local band. The rest of the weekend I spent more or less alone, with only my Sony Discman and The Beatles to keep me company. I stayed by the pool for the most part, and of course went to a movie that night. Sunday morning, before we left for home – home being the tiny town of Port Crandall, Nova Scotia – I went to lunch with Laura. I remember that she cursed a lot as we sat together at a table in front of McDonald’s. It was an especially warm day for mid-May, and there were several families at the tables surrounding us, their youngsters scampering around the tables and through the rock garden; an elderly couple sat beside us. I was exceptionally uncomfortable as Laura lit up her cigarette. I’ve never been adept at hiding my feelings (I haven’t really tried or desired to), and surely she saw my unease. I’m not sure if she intended to assuage my fears, but certainly she didn’t.
‘I don’t give a fuck what other people think, y’know? I’ve changed a lot in the last year. I don’t give a shit what they think of me anymore,’ she said, looking around her, ‘because I know what I think of myself, and that’s enough. I never would’ve cursed in public a year ago, but I’ve changed. What’s the matter, anyway? They’re just words, right? They only mean what we think of them, and if we don’t care about them, they don’t have to mean anything, right? It doesn’t matter to me either way, I’ll say what I’ll say: fuck.’
I nodded my agreement, croaked out a few inanities, and was rescued as Harold approached us from the restaurant. He asked if we’d mind his joining us, Laura said no, and the two fell into conversation, sharing a cigarette. The old couple a table over left. Soon I followed their lead. Laura asked me to stay, but I told her had to pack. She didn’t get up, just nodded okay. Harold blew me a kiss and rubbed his right nipple. I shuffled back to the hotel and, true to my word, slowly packed. The Beatles played on.
So? What do you think? Please comment! I'll post some more of this chapter tomorrow.
-The Host
3/27/2003 12:56:35 AM
(Updated: 3/27/2003 12:57:43 AM)
Comment on this fan fiction!
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