Heaven Knows OST: ♫ Young & Useless by This Century ♫
Chapter 1: Dominic
Sure thing you probably have heard and read a lot of stories and I bet they all started with Once upon a time and the famous beginning line One day. But mine didn’t start that way.
Because mine started with a tossed coin.
A-huh. It’s a tossed coin. And I stare up at it as it flies into the air, twirling like a paper in slow motion until gravity pulls it down and it sinks low like an anchor into Scott’s hand.
With that I already know what it is going to be. Today I’m gonna get laid.
“Heads.” He says with an asinine smile. He turns to me and I smirk back at him. It’s a sure ball that boys of my age would want to get laid. It’s like being finally out of circumcision.
But the tossed coin was just a trick of our minds. Even if it turned out to be tails I’d still go out and get myself laid. I don’t want to be left out of the millennium. Heads though was a good sling shot. Throwing his arm around my shoulders, Scott whirls me around to find my providential ladyship.
You see, I live a very untimely normal life where people don’t like to poke on their noses and zombies exist only in video games. School and home though are just two very different environments to be in. School is more like a cacophony with no written words on sounds. And home is a word in bizarre cacophony. Both have its way of perturbing my very existence in this world.
My parents are benign people who live in the world of music. They are people who believe in the power of music. Music is their life. Music is their soul. Blah-blah-blah goes their extreme obsession with it. So they work their asses all day long in creating musical scores for movies (both animated and not) and at weekends they are solid fans of our Catholic church. Which is by the way how I got my name.
Let me just say that my parents are so good people that their comprehensive faith had made them name their son after a saint. Dominic Savio was the name of the boy who became a saint because he’d rather die than to offend Him by sin. It was a good moral value to follow. My parents thought that maybe if they would name me after a saint boy then maybe I’d grow up to be a saint too. They were completely excited about it. But I personally doubt that fact—overly doubt that fact actually when you’re a kid born after Nero burned the Christians. The competition to be canonized as a saint in the 21st century is very slim. I don’t think I’ll get anywhere to perform a miracle to be beatified.
“Dominic Savio is about to get laid today!” Scott shouts it out as if he’s a bell boy announcing a flash news report. And I think it’s rude of him to use my name so casually in his own visceral. It’s blasphemous on my part of course. Most especially for those people who knew the young saint. Sometimes, I really like to hit his head with my balls so he would shut the fuck up.
Scott Orson has been my best friend since second grade. That’s after I taught him how to spell the word grey. He debates that it’s with an “a” and not with an “e”. And since we are so not in America so “e” is the proper letter to spell the word grey. And now I’m stuck with being buddy-buddy with him for the rest of my existence.
“Look at that body, Dom!” he points at a blonde chick with a skirt too short for the good of her tanned legs. She’s pretty, but I’m not into tanned girls. They look like they’ve been skinny-dipping in the sun and ended up dip fried.
When Scott sees my disinterest to his picking, he elbows me and looks on a girl jogging around the park’s fountain. Headphones on and eyes direct on the road. She sure has nice auburn bob and a nice belly button piercing. In fact, she might have a tongue piercing too.
“By the look of it, she’s dumb.” I shrugged him off of me.
He gives me a pointed look. “Are you gay?”
I scoffed at him. “No. I’m just not interested with the girls of your picking.”
He makes an arc out of his lips. “You’re not celibate then are you?”
If I have been drinking something I might have thrown the contents on his face. I wish I had. He sure does deserve to be puke on the face right now.
“Just because I’m named after a saint doesn’t mean I’d go running for the seminary, you bastard. Saints would probably stop me for wanting to get laid. I want to get laid.”
He outstretched his arms. “Then, pray choose the lucky fish in the sea.”
I want to throw him in the fountain so that he would swim along with the tadpoles. But then, in the corner of my eye, there she is in a perfect range of tableau. Sitting on a swing, swinging herself slowly and letting her hair fly in burlesque waves letting it fall down like a veil on her pale face.
Scott sees what my eyes laid interest into. Absentmindedly, he wraps his arm back on my shoulders.
“Well, what is that?” he says teasingly.
I feel like buffering. You know, that thing that happens with a computer. I just stare at her in daze.
“A girl.” I tell Scott without hearing my own voice.
“Yah. So what are you gonna do now?”
I turned to him and I found my mouth dry for words. The truth is, I’ve never talked to a girl of my liking. Girls are good game but I never thought that talking to them would render me tongue tied. And when I have decided on the words to say, I felt the joke was on me.
“I’m going to introduce myself to her.”
Scott lets go of me and he watches me with interest. He rubs two of his fingers below his chin.
“Yah. Good to know. And then what happens after that?”
I purse my lips in a smug way. “I’ll talk to her.”
“Yah. And then?”
“I’ll incapacitate her so that she’ll go out with me.”
Scott snorts and I lost my train of daze sight as if the fireflies disappeared out of daylight. Irritated, I turn to him.
“What?”
“Incapacitate? Really? You talk like you’re a tyrant of a video game.” He continues to laugh and I glare at him. “You should have seen your face! It’s so full of shit!”
“Butt out, Scott!”
I started towards her direction despite the fact that Scott’s pig noise he calls his laugh is wringing in my ears like loud speakers.
There, straight ahead of me is the girl waiting for her heart to beat and match mine. Her head bends down on the ground as she watches her boot make some arches. I wonder if she’s making a rainbow out of it. She tilts her head up into the sky and she blinks several times as her eyes adjusted to the light. I wonder what’s the color of her eyes. Are they as blue as the sky, green as the trees, brown as the ground or black as the night. Her hair hangs lose, they cascaded down her back like a dark water fall. Its color reminded me of my dad’s brewed coffee. A few of its strands danced with the whispers of the wind.
I want to know her. I want to know everything about her.
My gut clenches with every step I take towards her. My heart started to beat in the strangest of ways. I’d like to translate its strangeness as nervousness. My breathing had caught my lungs too and my knees shivered with the unfamiliar cold rushing through my veins. Heat seethed through my face and I had the realization that I had no control over my own body. It was like bewitch by something out of the ordinary.
I want to know why she sits there alone. I want to know the reason behind the sadness that fills the curtains of her lashes. I want to know if I could try and make her smile. I want to know if it’s possible.
I want to know. My gnawing curiosity pushes my knees—my feet to go further. Something tugs my heart to beat triple times than it should be. I have to know and the only thing that separates me from her is the few inches created by space. I have to close it.
But the moment I did, she stands up and prolongs the distance between us.
***
I ignored Scott’s laugh trip behind me even though I wanted to strangle him on the ground.
“She doesn’t want to get laid.” Scott tells me with an irritating croon.
I shrugged him off. He doesn’t see what I see.
Something is wrong with her. It’s there, under the shadows that form under her eyes. I came across her swing. I looked down at her ground art to see a perfect sad face. I think it came out wrong. How can a sad face be perfect?
I hear Scott sigh behind me. “Maybe it’s true. You are celibate. Even girls flee from you.” he snickers and ends up chortling instead.
I was too preoccupied to knock him on his butt that the moment he started to open his mouth to a new parade of green words, I was already walking away from him, the swing and the park. I felt tiny raindrops on my head.
“Hey, Dom, where are you going?” Scott shouts out to me.
I turned around and I started walking backwards. “I’m following her!”
His eyebrows rise in delight and he starts doing jumping jacks on his wake. A snarky smile hangs on his lips.
“I still think you’re celibate, Dom!” he shouts. “Not until you get laid!”
I turn my back on him and I raise the finger like a red Nazi flag. I wonder what my parents would think if they see me wave it like some A-hole? Sometimes, I wish they didn’t have to name me after a saint who promised not to sin so that I wouldn’t have to be putrefied—I mean, purified.
But sure thing my saint-ness had led me to holiness.
I’m going after this girl and once I do, I’d know.
The skies started to pour bigger raindrops as if they understood and they sobbed for her. I started to jog away from the park.
I wonder what the skies have to cry for her. Sure thing its rain brought tears to her ground art too.
***
My feet dragged me along with her to an unknown path. I’m no detective or trained to be professional stalker of some sort but I seem to be a good mime—I over qualified just by following her. She doesn’t seem to notice me behind her. If she did, she didn’t mind at all. All that matters is what’s ahead. That invisible, intangible air that passes between us leading a path nowhere. But I followed her because I want to know. But the ironic thing is, I don’t know what I want to know.
The answer is sum up in one word. Her.
She leads me down a train station where a lot of people seem to shimmy around their own businesses. She makes her way through the crowd easily like placing a lace through a shoe hole. The world went slow with her as if she holds the machinery of time. She blends in with the crowd like a fish in the water.
There’s a part of me that wants to stop and just leave her alone. I don’t really have business with her except to just know. Her name, her eyes, her smile. I wanna know the reason behind the sadness in her eyes. I want to draw that skyward arc on her face. I want to know her. At least that’s what my gut clenches for. I hope that’s also the reason why my heart beats like horses trots.
She carefully eases her way out of the crowd and into the space she knows no one would notice except me. With hands on her sides she advances a few steps forward to the edge of the train station platform. One more step and she’ll fall into the death trap of the railway.
No one notices this. No one else but me. No one sees what she’s about to do. But I do and my senses slam through me. Even though her back is to me, her emotions scream out loud with her actions.
She looks so lost. One more step and she’d welcome death with open arms.
I feel the train’s horrid presence as the earth shake beneath me. Its lights signal the dark tunnel. Her body sways back and forth at the edge of the platform. Before I realize what’s happening, I got her out of death’s way just in time the train passes.
I can hear my heart in my ears and my breath break loose on its hinges. I looked back at the train as if to curse at it for almost crashing a girl. But then it wasn’t its fault. Slowly, I turned to her.
Her eyes met mine. They were the shade of blue but they were as pale as grey. They stare at me blankly as if it’s blind to me. I took her in the shelter of my arms when I got her off the edge of the platform but she’s as cold as death.
“Are you okay?” I asked her as I caught my breath. People started boarding the train. No one seemed to notice what almost happened.
Licking her bottom lip, she blinks up at me as if seeing me for the first time. But she remained qualm and distorted impassive.
“You shouldn’t have done that.” She says to me with a voice that sounded like a nightingale’s saddest song.
I was ready for my response. I was ready to accept her gratitude but then she turns away from me as if I’ve never saved her life at all.