When I opened my eyes the next day, it was still dark outside. Reason: it was barely 3 am. I groaned and put my phone away after checking the time. My head felt hazy. My elbow was a little creaky from yesterday's ambush. My knee, though, was curiously okay.
I turned on the lamp next to my head. Then, I sat up and pulled the leg of my pajamas above my knee. By the weak light, the skin looked exactly as it had been before I had been roughly pushed down. I passed my hand over the site of injury. There was no scarring or scabbing.
Thanks to a magic diamond. So, I hadn't made that up on an acid trip. It had been real. Real inexplicable.
After another three-ish hours and some ibuprofen, I was on the bus with Claren—no attackers today. Maybe the gang didn't want to get screwed over again.
I was working on finding the 2-D area of a cardioid when Claren spoke up.
"Are you better?" He sounded concerned.
"Eh, the swelling in my eye is going down," I replied nonchalantly. "I don't have PTSD. My scrapes are healing. I'd say so."
I didn't tell him about my leg because I figured it would freak him out more than seeing the wound had. Because the nasty cut had made sense: falls create bloody injuries; I fell; ergo, I got a bloody injury. The rapid healing made much less sense: an ambidextrous artist gave me a crystal bead; I took it after speculating whether it might have been LSD; ergo, my leg is all better now.
Yeah, a lot of lemmas and corollaries would be needed to complete the proof of that theorem.
"Good. If I knew who those guys were," he growled, "I'd give them a piece of my mind."
I tried to shush him. "Relax. I don't think that getting into a three-on-one is a very good idea."
I thought for a minute about the anti-derivative of squared cosine.
"Also," I cautioned him, "I don't think it's a good idea to go around looking for trouble." Goodness knows we all have enough problems of our own to deal with.
"They went around looking for trouble."
"Are you still recruiting for Psyche?" I asked him.
"Yes, of course."
"I have a not-so-good feeling about that club."
"What? Why?"
"I don't think those people have limits..."
The limit of e to the power of x as x goes to infinity does not exist. Plus infinity. What if you flipped it over the x-axis? Minus e to the power of x? Negative infinity. That was a direction I did not want to be going down.
"I have to get out of wrestling," he said with a dejected shake of the head. "You have no idea."
Why was he so bent on getting out of the sport he had been recruited for? Something must have changed—not just teamwork and brotherly comradery anymore.
Should I tell him about my suspicions about the Psychos? But friends should be supportive, right? And I had no evidence, just an unsettling hunch. It was better to encourage people to chase their dreams. I bit my lip and wrote the limits of integration instead.
"Just be careful, Claren," I said at last. "Since neither of us knows much about that world."
"Says the girl with a black eye," he said in an attempt to lighten the mood.
I played along and mock laughed. "Ha, ha. And maybe, I'll give you one, too, with this book of Greek mythology."
He held his hands up and smiled. "Whoa, no need to turn violent. This was supposed to be strictly PG-13."
"I'm fourteen." I rolled one eye successfully and left the other one unseen behind its bruised veil. "Grow up."
"I did, four inches over the summer," he grinned.
"Whatever." I went back to evaluating the sine of 2θ.
"He, Ari," he scooted closer and nudged me in the arm. "Whatcha doing this weekend?"
"Nothing, but you asking that is merely social formality because we both knew what the answer was going to be."
"You wanna come to the city park after dinner? With me?" He was smiling widely.
"You've got another poker game or something?"
"No, just us. We haven't hung out in a while. Let's catch up."
I looked at him, not understanding where this was going. "We are catching up. Right now."
"I'll show you something cool. Trust me, you won't regret it," he promised.
"Alright," I assented.
"Saturday? Meet up at eight?"
"That's kinda late... How're we going to get there and back?" Someone had to be the practical one.
"Taxi. It'll be fine."
I finished the last trig evaluation. "Sure, that works."
"Okay," he smirked, "it's a date."
My pencil froze. It's a WHAT? Did he say it was a——
~ ~ ~
Another journey past the floating cats that were destined to be disemboweled. I was pretty sure that slowly pulling out someone's entrails had been a form of torture in the Middle Ages. Look at us now, doing the same thing but dubbing it SCIENCE.
The Inquisition never left. We're still stuck in Ye Olden Times, and people are still being labelled as "heretics" and getting burned at the stake. The witch hunt never ended. Everyone's continuing to point fingers at the ones they're afraid of and yelling, "WITCH!"
Some creative people might even substitute a B in place of the W, but that was none of my business. They could rinse their mouths out with Claren's mouthwash after they were done denouncing people for the day.
I yawned and slunk down the wall to seated.
Xanexa looked up from xyr sketchbook. "You didn't sleep well."
I didn't know half the time whether xe intended for sentences to be statements or questions.
I covered another yawn and shook my head. "I have insomnia," I admitted. "Sleeping is hard."
Xe looked sad, xyr face soft. "Why?"
"Something's wrong with my melatonin or circadian rhythm or some diurnal biochemical process," I said, regurgitating the wisdom I had gleaned from the Internet over the years.
Xe frowned disapprovingly. "Don't believe that s——"
I shrugged. "That's what the researchers have said."
"They tell you that you're the problem, yeah?" Xyr voice slung pure disdain at the faceless World Wide Web. "A problem that can be fixed with pills?"
"How else are medical problems going to be fixed?"
"Forget about the biology. The Earth isn't Huxley's brave new world. Soma and happy pills don't exist."
Tell that to the people hooked on opioids.
"And then what? Put all the MD/PhDs out of work?" I asked.
Xyr eyes burrowed into the core of my being. "It's the demons—the demons from your present, feeding on your past."
I didn't know what to say. I felt guilty about the pills I had taken earlier that morning. I knew that things were messed up, and the whole situation was wrong, but I didn't know what else to do, who I could talk to, who would care—not just about the sleeping or not sleeping—that was incidental—but about everything that had happened, all that I had been through, the scrambled bag of Aeolus's winds that had been let loose inside me.
The storm was screaming, tearing, clawing at my heart, and I didn't know how to make it stop. I had tried to run, but they were the world's best bloodhounds and always dogged me no matter where I went. When I left the island, they chased me into the sea. When I set sail across the oceans for an oasis, a mirage flickering on the cresting waves, they tugged at my rudders and stifled my screams.
So, I had eventually stopped trying to stem the blood gushing from my heart. And I gave myself up just as Odysseus had succumbed to the caresses of Circe. Playing along was simply easier. The road for the masses was an asphalt-paved highway. The road for the self was only dirt overlaid with pebbles that jarred and jostled you every step of the way.
The hard fact xe had spoken, the chord rang true. I heard a clock tower tolling the strokes to midnight, and I felt the strings of my heart thrumming with each peal of the baritone bell. Evil laughter came from behind the massive tower. They were the demons of the present, dragging up the shadows from my past.
"They don't belong here," xe continued. "Send them to the edge of the universe."
Xe smiled to xyrself and carried on with the drawing. "But your leg is better. That's a good start."
How did xe know that? How? I hadn't said anything about that.
When would I stop being amazed? Probably never. Because there was no way xe would ever stop being amazing.
~ ~ ~
I was lying flat on my back on a picnic blanket spread over the dusty stubble of the city park. The playground was empty; the little kids had left a long time ago. A couple scraggly trees stuck out of the tough soil, trying to stake their claims on the land before the summer scorchers would come and roast their leaves and branches to a crisp. The sky was clear. Overhead, stars were beginning to awaken from their daytime slumbers.
Next to me, a couple feet away, Claren was sitting with his arms wrapped around his legs and his body tilted forward. We were waiting for the sky to darken further.
"So..." I said in the interim, "how's your BB TNT plan blowing up?"
He laughed. "TMT."
"Same thing. The plan's to knock the bankers' socks off with a bang, right?" I turned to look at him, my hands resting next to my sides.
"A very slow bang," he replied.
"Slow-release over the course of an entire eight-hour workday."
"Think again."
"Isn't it always grow up, become an adult, work nine to five?"
"Hmm... Not the five you're thinking of."
"Five pm?"
"Try five am."
"AM? What kind of job is that?"
"A very good and well-paying one, according to what I've heard," he answered, gazing up at the stars.
"How do people survive that?"
I imagined hordes of young professionals pinned up in stuffy suits, hyped on coffee and rubbing their eyes as the sun rose outside the window of their steel gray Manhattan skyscraper. One overworked yuppie choked, clutched his heart, and keeled over from cardiac arrest. Then, the whole office started dropping off like a herd of fainting goats, one by one. They seized their chests in sudden contortions and fell backwards, forwards, and sideways, stiff.
"Wouldn't they get like three hours of sleep?" I asked.
"I know someone who regularly gets three hours of sleep and somehow manages to crank through high-dimensional math," Claren said suggestively.
"Yes, but I wouldn't make a career out of it," I protested. "I certainly don't do it now by choice."
"Does it matter why you do something, though?" he asked. "The end result is the same."
"This was your plan?" I spluttered in disbelief. "Why you wanted to get into Psyche for a good college and then to make your mil——"
"Shhhh... Money is a dirty word," he teased.
"What the heck, Claren? You're going to sell your soul for a ticket into some gloomy ivory tower, all so that you can go work nine to——"
"For the record," he interjected, "I wasn't the one who kept bringing up the million bucks. And now's not the time to be debating my career goals. Look at the stars." He tilted his chin up at the twinkling night sky.
I heard him shuffle and shift as he laid down on the picnic blanket. He sighed and clasped his hands behind his head.
"What is this, Claren?" I was serious. "What—is—this—?"
He turned his head and shot me a smile. "Real Greek mythology."
I had to prevent my jaw from falling. He looked like he was the keeper of a juicy secret.
He raised one arm and pointed at three stars in a line, shining more brightly than their neighbors. "Do you see those three, right there?"
I nodded but otherwise held still. For some reason, looking at the row of celestial triplets reminded me of the three of us—myself, him, and Katrina, back when we skipped and joked in a wobbly line, taking up the whole width of the sidewalk, walking from the bus stop back to our neighborhood.
It was unbearably hot in late August, and I was fanning my face, trying to prevent my makeup from streaking. Katrina was giggling like a madman about my furious fanning. Claren had said with great satisfaction how awesome it was to be a guy because if it ever got too hot, he could just yank his T-shirt over his head——
And I had channeled my inner Usain Bolt down the sidewalk, screaming. My backpack was bumping against my shoulders, and my hand was still fluttering away in its futile attempt to thermoregulate my face. Katrina had almost collapsed backwards from fits of laughter.
"That's Orion's Belt," he continued. "He was a fantastic hunter and lived with the gods. He killed the beasts that threatened an island kingdom."
He lowered both arms to his sides and told me the rest of the story. "He was so successful and good at what he did that his hunting talents went to his head, and he bragged like an arrogant jerk that he'd kill all the animals on Earth, too."
I scoffed. "What a total third derivative."
Claren paused; he was amused and slightly confused. "What?"
"First derivative of distance with respect to time: velocity. Second derivative: acceleration, a change in velocity. Third derivative: jerk, a change in acceleration," I informed him.
He laughed under his breath and shook his head. "Are you gonna go around calling people third derivatives?"
I shrugged. "Why not?"
"You," he emphasized the word, "are an entire magician's trick sleeve."
"As long as they're purple or pink or apricot or lime green," I said.
"But Orion..." he tried to steer the conversation back on track.
"Yes, what about the third derivative hunter?"
"Gaia, the Earth goddess, became angry with the boastful hunter and ordered a giant scorpion to go after Orion," Claren went on. "He tried to fight the beast off, but his powers were no match for the creation of the Earth goddess. When he tried to flee, the scorpion hunted him down and stung him to death."
I thought of the metal scorpion pencil curled around Xanexa's ear and shivered.
"Are you cold?" Claren asked when he felt the tremors.
"No, go on."
"Okay, so after that, Gaia put the scorpion in the sky to honor its bravery, and she also put Orion there after he died, but in front of the scorpion, so that it would chase him around the Earth for all eternity," he finished.
"What a miserable punishment. Almost as bad as being sent to the edge of the universe," I blurted out.
"The edge of the universe?"
I dismissed the topic. "Never mind." I doubted if he'd understand. Truth be told, I wasn't sure I totally understood what had been going on, either.
"End of Greek mythology 101, Dr. Gale?" I asked.
"Not yet." He flipped over onto his stomach and propped himself up on his elbows. His face hovered inches from mine. I didn't move.
"Like Orion, I have been chased—not by a scorpion, but by a feeling..." he said.
I forced myself to not shut my eyes. My heart sped up. Finally, I knew where this was going.
"Ari?" He looked into my eyes.
"Yeah?" I tried to control my voice and keep the tone level.
Then, he detonated the million pounds of TNT he'd been carrying all this time.
"Will you go out with me?"
If a supernova could have exploded right then, the scene would have been complete. Thoughts raced through my head. I cursed myself for being an idiot and not seeing this earlier.
Drat. Drat. Drat. What should I say?
Was this how adolescent love was supposed to feel like? Confusion and pandemonium and a flood of emotions filling in the gaps between? I'd read a lot of books, watched a lot of movies, and quite frankly, everything looked much more straightforward in those imaginary worlds. Oh sure, occasionally, there was a young adult love triangle thrown in—or maybe a love quadrilateral if the MFA screenwriters felt pumped with creative juices one day—but for the most part, things weren't as complicated as this. It was pretty obvious who would end up with whom, and the other people there were just meant to distract you and give you someone to blame when the protagonist messes up.
Being in love—what did that feel like?
Scratch that. What did it feel like to merely feel attracted to someone?
You're supposed to get all light-headed and woozy and hormonal and look into their eyes like you could see the bottom of the abyss and feel all the blood rush through your body like you were on the wildest roller coaster ride because all you could think and fantasize about was holding that special person tight and going all night. Steamy kisses and breath mixing, skin touching, right?
Dear dominion, I never saw myself doing that. Was I a prude? Or just too young and naïve? Was there something wrong with me? Was I trying to suppress my own feelings?
I'd gotten really good at pushing down lots of things—the past, especially. Maybe I never thought about life's biggest question because I had kept it hidden, or because I was too busy thinking about thetas and tangents all the time.
But teenagers are supposed to have a life, right? A rich and full life beyond school and homework and extra-slash-co-curriculars. I'd probably never thought about other things before because they hadn't been a part of my life. Psychologists have identified the Present Bias phenomenon and all that jazz—confirming my suspicions that people tend to focus only on what's right in front of their noses. And I had been a prey to that, too, just like any other normie.
So, perhaps, it was time for a change, time to take a broader view. Claren had always been a good friend, kind when I was down, mischievous when we both felt like pulling pranks, and a wake-up call when I needed to get off my bum and do something. He did care about whatever would happen, and he wouldn't leave me hanging high and dry. And he did understand me, as much as you could expect from a teenager when the two of us were both half-confused about the world and about what we wanted.
Life was strange, throwing us together like that to face the good school as a small pack, and he had run the risk of imminent danger to save me from the morph suit mob. I had no doubts about his heart. I just——
I just didn't know what this was supposed to be like.
How many seconds had passed? Time tended to stretch out longer when you were in your own head, but I should probably say something.
Surprisingly, my voice came out steady. It sounded gentle, even sweet. "Of course, Claren. I'm glad you asked me."
He rolled onto his back, grinning like he'd won the lottery, and he slid one of his hands into mine. I felt our fingers interlock, but I didn't look down. I kept my eyes on the stars and my breathing even.
"You've always been a mystery, Ari." A nighttime breeze passed through like a whisper, fluttering its evanescent wings over my face.
"Not really," I demurred.
"You've always been tough to place," he sighed, "like the stars and all the legends—their myths and wonderful stories."
~ ~ ~
From what I could tell, life in a relationship wasn't much different from life going stag. I still woke up at my usual ungodly hour, dressed the same way, walked the same paths, did the same things. I didn't get the hubbub around people wanting to find their soulmate or that perfect other person. In English—right?—you just add boy- or girl- in front of the word friend. In French, it was either petit or petite stuck in front of the word ami or amie, respectively—literally translated as "little friend." What was the big deal? You get to tag on a prefix. Whoopie.
I guess the only perk was that the guys get somewhere to put their arm. I was working on integrating the area of a limaçon while the bus bumped and rolled its way to school, and Claren had his arm wrapped around my waist like I had seen Killian with his beau Zirconia every day. According to the mass media I'd soaked up over the years, this was a perfectly acceptable gesture of familiarity. It didn't bother me, but I also didn't particularly enjoy or crave it. Eh, leave it or take it, I was indifferent. Maybe this was like the inflection point on those cubic functions—you slowly chug uphill and pause for breath in the clearing before the curve suddenly flicks upward and zooms to the sky.
"Hey, Ari," he whispered in a low voice.
"Yup."
"Don't you ever get tired of doing the same old things?"
"The surprises I've gotten in the past haven't exactly been palatable."
"Isn't this a good change for once?"
"You know what I mean. All that other stuff that happened before."
"Ari," he said with an earnest expression, "you know I like you. I'll always be here for you. You can lean on me."
I wondered if he meant that literally—as in, the physical sense—or the usual metaphorical one. In any case, I didn't budge. "Thanks, Claren," I sighed. "You're really great."
"Are you free this Saturday?"
"I'm literally almost always free."
"How about lunch? Noon? Roadside Café?" he suggested.
This was totally normal. This was a part of going out.
"That works? See you there?"
Why did I feel like I was treading over a minefield? If I had stopped running over the battlefield and looked behind me, instead of turning into a pillar of salt, I would've seen a firebomb of Agent Orange flying at me.
"Great, I'll see you there," he smiled.
I could feel his body next to mine, close and warm and alive and heart beating. And I bet lots of other girls would've scooted closer and sighed and laid their heads on his shoulder—taking him up on his offer—but that just wasn't something that came naturally to me—not because he wasn't the right person, but because I felt like it wouldn't be me.
I was trying to simultaneously solve the Calc problem and the oddity of what was going on with my heart when we got off the bus and walked to the school's front doors. Under the stern stare of the bronze, pedestaled founder, Claren pulled me to him and leaned in. When he saw me bite my lip nervously, he changed his mind and gave me a peck on the cheek.
"Hope you have a good day, Ari," he said.
I quickly returned the favor because that's what you're supposed to do. "You, too, Claren." And I hurried inside.
It may be difficult to deceive others, but it's really easy to deceive yourself. And the scariest part is that—sometimes—you may not even realize you're doing it.
This delusion dilemma was just another one of Jupiter's seventy-odd moons, revolving around the gas giant known for its Great Red Spot—along with many other pesky satellites. Someone had opened up the rumor mill, and I had apparently become a hermaphrodite. For the past several days, people who usually ignored me were now actively avoiding me and making it obvious to anyone else who was watching. Taken with the incessant, buzzing whispers that revolved around my head like a swarm of flies and all the distasteful looks people shot at me in classes, the living standards at school had just taken a plunge into the Great Rift Valley.
"I knew she was a freak."
"Something was always wrong with her."
"A messed-up math freak."
I ignored the gossip, but I was bristling on the inside. Charlie's teacher hadn't been 100% correct. There were some facets of life I'd rather not participate in. Stoking the flames of malignant gossip cancer was one of them. But the whole situation grated on my nerves. I wished things could go back to the way they were before, when we all blissfully ignored one another. Hopefully, after the fun had run its course, the rumor mill would pick up and relocate to pollute another stream.
That's what I was thinking when I was walking down the hallway, past the strong-smelling jars of cats. Xanexa was working on another picture. When I sat down, xe arched one eyebrow and looked like xe was waiting for me to say something.
I didn't need to break the silence because a random dude in pressed trousers and a crisp shirt walked down the hallway. Upon seeing me, he spat in my direction, "F——ing freak." He stomped down to the other end.
I seethed and, at the same time, questioned if something really was wrong with me. Because it was difficult to fit in. Because most people didn't know what I was getting at. Because I occasionally doubted my sanity.
the footsteps had died to hollow echoes. "You're not the freak," xe said. "That guy is."
I put my hands around the base of my neck and drew my knees in like I was preparing for an earthquake drill. "I don't know where it's coming from. I've been getting that all week."
"The real freaks are the ones who refuse to acknowledge the humanity of other human beings."
I looked up and blinked.
Xe held out both hands, gloved palms facing up. Xe extended xyr left arm and crossed it over the space between us, reaching for mine. I slowly let my hands drop from my head and met xyr left with mine.
"Light," xe began, "is the left hand of darkness."
I looked into xyr ice-blue eyes, sensing a riddle behind the familiar words, words I had read more than a year ago.
"You've read that book, yeah? You know what comes next?" Xe wore a sideways smile.
We hadn't talked about my eclectic reading list. How did xe know that?
Xe tilted xyr chin at my right hand, motioning for me to mirror what xe had done with our lefts. I reached out with my right palm open, flipped it over, and laid it in xyrs.
"And darkness," xe continued, "is the right hand of light."
We sat there with crossed hands for several moments, xe perfectly calm, and me in baffled astonishment.
Xe smiled and withdrew xyr hands. "You can see now. Meet me after school."
"Huh?" I was at a loss for words.
"The museum. I said I'd take you," xe reminded me. "What's the thing you want most?"
I didn't need to think twice. My heart pounded. "To escape."
"Then come," xe said. "I'll show you a world you've never seen before. And I'll show you your real dream."
Xe put away xyr sketchbook and tucked the silver pencil behind one ear. I watched in utter disbelief as it curled and transformed into a scorpion curling around xyr ear—transformed in front of my eyes into the divine revenge of Mother Gaia.