I posted this here about a year ago, but it's edited and been added too. It takes place in southern Alberta, in a fictional town just outside of Calgary. This chapter is at the very end of grade ten, though the rest of the book takes place four months later in October.
And the italics at the beginning have relevence. All of the chapters are going to begin with them. They're taken from the 'Infinity Wall' which is a an English project (a wall) that's meant to promote a hopeful outlook on life.
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Prologue
Energy is never created nor destroyed.
Why was there no air conditioning? That was the only question I wanted an answer to. Reviewing for final exams had always been tedious, but this June was stifling.
Studying would be futile. I knew that much. The tap of fingers on desk tops, the inccesant tick of the clock on the wall, and the rhythmic fanning of review sheets was all too much of a distraction. That and the pressing question of why we couldn’t so much as open a window.
My hand shot up and I barely waited to be called on before bolting out of the room with the breathless explanation “getting a drink.”
The hallway was graciously cool, more so than I had dared to hope. I considered ditching school for the last half an hour. One of my friends would take my binder and shove it in their locker for me. I had done the same thing for them more than once. At least one of them disappeared from class every month. We were oh so rebellious.
I let myself slide to the floor, longing for the cool darkness of my colossal, ancient house. Flipping every fan on in the house would be so much more satisfying than the grade I would get on my English final after review. Besides, I doubted any amount of analysis would bring me any closer to understanding the significance of Catcher in the Rye. Yet somehow I still managed to sympathize.
“I don’t know! I’ve never run into this before!” the suddenness of the voice made me jump. It was the principal’s voice, though I’d never heard him sound so exasperated. The nameplate on the door opposite my English classroom read ‘student counseling.’
I know I shouldn’t have, but I couldn’t help myself. Quietly as I could, I climbed to my feet and crept across the hall, crouching next to the door.
“Neither have I! Do you think we should tell him? Or let the police? It’s your call,” the counselor replied.
“Do you think we could handle it? How does a teenage boy react to something like this?” The principal was pacing. I could hear his footfalls go back and forth.
Barely able to keep myself quiet, I bit down on my thumb. I should have been worried about my English teacher coming to look for me, but I wasn’t. The thought never occurred to me. Not once.
“Absolutely not, but I think we should try anyway. It’s better if he hears it from someone he knows first. I still can’t believe it. In Murphy. Someone gets shot in a bar in Murphy. And her of all people…” the counselor answered quietly, sighing heavily. I was trying to figure out what ran the chill down my spine: the words she was saying or how somber they sounded.
My whole body was rooted in place, completely rigid. I should have left right then and there. But I didn’t. I couldn’t.
“I never thought I would have to do this kind of thing,” the principal’s pacing stopped abruptly.
My God! Will you spit it out already!
“David, you’re the principal. The cops in this town haven’t had to tell a teenage boy his mother was killed in a bar fight either, but you know him. What choice do we have? We can’t let him find out from the newspapers for Christ’s sake!” the counselor’s usually calm voice was shaky. “I’ll go get Tim Brown.”
I choked. I choked on nothing at all, but I couldn’t get air. Inhaling had become an impossible feat. My reeling mind had stopped short. Not a thing went through it but a tingling numbness.
No. I couldn’t believe it. No…No, no, no, no!
This was a dream. The heat was getting to me. Any moment Mrs. Natchuk would holler at me to wake up. I was silently begging her to. In the corner of my mind I registered her droning voice floating out of my English classroom just beyond the door across from me.
The classroom was suddenly painstakingly distant. The whole world was suddenly painstakingly distant.
The rigidness of my joints suddenly broke. Before I could even comprehend, I was running. The door didn’t stop me. I burst through t, still in the efforts of putting as much distance between myself and the counselor’s office as possible, as if doing so would evaporate whatever had just happened from reality.
At first, my breathing felt even with the pound of my feet against the sidewalk, and then it got faster and faster until my heart rate felt three times the rhythm of rubber sole against concrete. The color of the lights didn’t matter. I couldn’t remember what they meant, only that as I ran past green, the blare of a horn and squealing breaks momentarily drowned out the pounding in my head.
The green signs on the corner were equally irrelevant. Building passed, cars passed faster. Anything familiar about any of it had erased itself from my memory. I didn’t know where I was going. I wasn’t going to somewhere, I was just going away from somewhere. All the while, the throb in my head was accompanied by what I had just heard replaying itself over and over again, making it impossible to run away from. You were supposed to forget dreams, weren’t you? Not have the broken-recording in your mind?
Only when I risked collapsing did I stop running. The stitch in my side kept me from walking very effectively either, forcing me to lean into a tree. It took me a moment to recognize where I was.. I probably wouldn’t have been able to think of it if not for the blue slide dropping down from the playground equipment in the center of the park. It was something so prominent in my childhood that it forced its way passed whatever kind of block I was going through.
Francis Granger Park. For about three years of my life my mom had brought me here after she was done work. I’d shown her how good I was at the monkey bars and how far I could launch myself off of the swing. Staring at it, that feeling of suffocation was creeping back into my throat, making it impossibly hard to swallow.
It felt like it took me ten minutes just to get to the equipment. I pulled myself onto it and crawled into the red plastic tube connecting one section to another. A weird sensation twisted in my stomach. It was something like a weird mixture of nostalgia, sanctuary, and overwhelming grief.
The reality of it was finally catching up with me as my heart rate gradually slowed. She was dead. My mother was dead. I was an orphan. That was it.
