Anyhow, go ahead and tell me what you think of this short story I wrote a short time ago. The first chapter will make this seem really out of place for the fantasy category, which is why I was compelled to include the second chapter. That's when things get better. Promise.
1
The air outside was still cool from winter, the snow was all gone for good, trees and things were starting to get green buds, Bush was the president after a very tiresome battle with some other gray haired guy named Kerry, and my math teacher Mrs. Scouressel was pure evil.
It wasn’t enough that I didn’t get fractions, just as we were learning to turn them into decimals—decimals were easier than fractions, cause decimals were just like money—but she had to give out homework every day. Not even my Language Arts teacher, Mr. Wagner, gave out homework over the weekends, and all my classmates agreed he was the worst of all the fifth grade teachers. But kids have strange ways of judgment. Not to mention Mrs. Scouressel gave you candy if you got a hundred on a test, but it was just a mini Snickers or Three Musketeers. Come on, lady, you could at least step up to a fun size! It was math, after all!
My name’s Derrick. And it had to be Derrick J when the teachers called on me, because there’s another kid in my class named Derrick, but his middle name starts with an M, but I don’t know what it is. Mine’s Joseph, and that’s what they call me nowadays; nope, no one calls me Derrick anymore, with or without a J, and I’m gonna tell you why.
I’m not good with math. You probably guessed. It’s not that I’m not smart enough, though that’s the first assumption when you see my C average in that subject. It’s just not interesting. I don’t really care what happens when you times a three digit number by a two digit number, or what it looks like when you graph a number or whatever it is. And you’ve already heard my spiel about fractions and decimals, or at least enough of it. No, I’m someone who likes stories.
It doesn’t matter where it comes from. Language Arts (what my mom calls English for some reason) is the conventional place to get a good tale. But what a lot of my fellow fifth graders overlook is Social Studies, and for that one I can tell why my mom calls it History.
I could open up our textbook anywhere I wanted and just start going. Napoleon chasing after the Russians, getting himself caught right between them and the British; Martin Luther King, preaching peace in a time that seemed to not exist to a child like me; Adolph Hitler causing all kinds of trouble for the rest of the world, enough to have a World War in his honor. But what really would catch my eye are the pictures.
I had heard that phrase that a picture is worth a thousand words. At the time I didn’t really pay much attention to it, because I was too busy trying to read the words that were hidden in the pictures in my textbooks. Ironic, huh? But I would see the portraits of Napoleon, seizing the rest of the French government and making himself the top dog, the photographs of tie-dyed hippies holding signs of protest to concepts I didn’t think needed any explanation, and the fiery mushroom shaped cloud when we dropped the Atomic Bomb on Japan. Japan, where Dragonball Z and Pokemon came from. They had a bomb the size of Alaska (which I had been quite surprised to discover was bigger than three Texases) detonated right on their city. Kaboom!
It was one day while flipping through my Social Studies book, looking for a good picture that I hadn’t seen in awhile, that Mrs. Scouressel called on me. I wasn’t paying a lick of attention, and so started the chain reaction.
“Derrick?” she called. She was at the blackboard, next to her desk. “Oh, sorry, Derrick J? Can you tell us the answer to number seventeen?”
Ah ha! Perfect! Neil Armstrong, standing tall in his white spacesuit next to The Red White and Blue, One Nation Indivisible, so on and so forth. The first man on the moon. The moon!
“Derrick? Are you with us?”
I scanned over the caption at the bottom of the picture, but it was boring like all the other captions on all the other pictures. I thought of being in that suit, looking up at a sky of blackness and the big blue earth way far away from where you normally felt it. I imagined ol’ Neil getting a bit lightheaded looking at it, feeling that feeling of wondrous displacement.
A couple of my classmates where looking my way and giggling, including Derrick M, who was a pure brainer in math. I still didn’t notice.
“Derrick! Hey, come out of La-La Land.”
For some reason that got my attention. I guess I never liked the sound of “La-La Land.” It always seemed… sacrilegious, somehow. Like you were taking the name of dreams in vain. I looked up quickly, wondering what I’d missed.
“Derrick J, number 17, go.” Mrs. Scouressel wasn’t going to waste time by berating me just yet.
I looked up at the board, my stomach suddenly on its way up to my throat and sweat breaking out all over me like a squeezed sponge. The problem asked what 4/18ths was in decimal form. We’d been going over this topic for at least the past month. And here I was, with my mind literally on the moon.
“Uhm… is it…?” But is it what? What could I do? Make up some crazy number? I wasn’t exactly the class clown, so everyone would just give me a weird look.
“I don’t know,” said Mrs. Scouressel. “You’re supposed to tell me.”
Oh, right, ha-ha, teacher, good one. If I was smooth and cool like a cartoon character, that’s what I would have said, and we’d have both had a good laugh and I could tell her I had no clue and she’d ask someone else. Course, that’s not what happened; it’s not the way things work. Never is in the real world. So instead I pulled a blank, practically played tug-of-war with one, and stared openly at my teacher.
She noticed my current reading selection. “Derrick, why do you have your Social Studies book out?” She sighed as she said it as if she lived a really tough life. Tough was trying not to let your heart bust out of your sweater and onto your desk. Tough was holding back tears of embarrassment.
“I… uh…”
Good story, huh?
“Just go to the office,” Mrs. Scouressel said. “We don’t have time for it.”
Kaboom. Hiroshima was nothing. Nagasaki was a kid’s cap gun. And the moon sounded like a good place to be right now, oxygen or no oxygen.
A lot of kids would storm out of the room, angry at the world. Not Derrick J, no sir! I timidly closed my Social Studies book and picked up my Math and Language Arts texts while the room waited to be rid of my presence. The silence was deafening. Kids that go to The Office were troublemakers, no questions. About thirty pairs of eyes drove needles into my backside as I opened the door and went out into the hall.
“Some kids come here to learn,” I heard her quip as I closed the door behind me. There were some giggles, but mostly solemn silence. By the time I was halfway down the hall to The Office, I figured they all were probably diving into Mrs. Scouressel’s candy stash and having a blast now, music and dancing and fun for all. I felt like the mud on the bottom of a shoe.
2
It would have been a much less eventful day if I’d been able to make it to the office, and sit in those uncomfortable metal you-are-here-because-you-are-guilty chairs in their lobby. But all the commotion from Math class made me have to pee, so I went into the restroom first, still shaking badly.
I put my books on the little alcove at the entrance to the restroom and went into one of the stalls. The upright urinals always had made me feel uncomfortable, although that was the choice of most of my peers.
I was about to unbuckle my belt when I noticed an irregularity on the wall in front of me. If I had been in Middle School or High School I would have just dismissed it as a bit of artful graffiti, but I was in the innocent age, whether I knew it or not. I examined it.
The stall toilets stood a few inches from the wall, connected by a clandestine array of pipes. On the wall wasn’t some bizarre extension of the toilet—it was a little black plastic button. The kind you saw on those quarter-operated arcade games at Wal-Mart to make your character shoot or punch or kick. It was right there on the wall, right where it wasn’t supposed to be. And I just stared at it, mesmerized, my bladder all but forgotten.
When you see a button, you push it. Especially if you’re a little kid, and especially if said button isn’t where it’s supposed to be. You know it’s true. Grass grows, sun shines, Math teachers are all meanies, curiosity made the cat into a wizard’s apprentice, and people push buttons.
I didn’t hesitate for long once I realized that I was going to push the button. I reached out and pressed square in the middle of it in one fluid motion.
The change that took place wasn’t so much of an abrupt thrust or a gigantic lurch of the space time continuum. It was more like when the elevator reaches its predetermined floor, and that made the button all the more appropriate. All I could feel was a lightness for a second (as if I was walking on the moon) and then everything changed; all I could see, feel, smell, sense around me melted and rearranged into something else.
I wasn’t in the bathroom at school anymore. I wasn’t even inside anymore. I appeared to be surrounded by big, white rocks that formed almost a ceiling-less room around me. My ears popped suddenly, letting me know that I was higher up now, on top of a hill. I looked around me, and took in the scent of freedom. What else could I call it? I wasn’t in school anymore, and boy would my mom get mad at me! What would Mrs. Scouressel think now? I’m not there, I’m here, wherever I am. I looked above me, a grin starting to spread on my face and my heart racing, but with joy now. The sky was a wonderful blue to match the wonderful white of the rocks and the glorious brown of the dirt and the magnificent yellow-green of a little plant that was growing near my feet. All around me was wonder, was awe, was brilliance.
I was breathing heavy as well, now, panting like a dog. And why not? I was excited! I was somewhere in the mountains! I was…
Lost.
I saw a metal post sticking out of the ground nearby, with a little black button on it. That was probably the way back. The only other options were that the button would take you somewhere else completely new, or there was no way back and it was just there for decoration. Or maybe it was an artifact, just a piece of broken equipment. Next to it was a break in the rocks, and a path that led down from my current location. I moved that way, at first slowly, but then running down the path, eager to see what came next.
I didn’t really stop to smell the flowers, as they say. I kept going no matter what I saw next. A scrubby and half-bare looking pine tree clinging to the rocks, a tiny black bird that hopped about on the path, scattering when I came by, and most of all the pale shades of white and gray from the rocks. After each little detail I registered, I was still keeping a quick pace down the hill I had appeared upon. Flora and fauna and everything beyond, it was amazing! The pine trees had a sweet aroma to them that blended with the raw earthy scent of the boulders and cliffs all around. It fed me the energy to keep going.
I came to a steep precipice where the trail curved. I finally stopped to look out across the cliff side, and I could feel the breath sucked out of my lungs. Far off at the edge of my sight was the horizon, a thin indeterminate line that separated the gray wisps of clouds that way from the golden-green fields of grain that stretched from here to there. There weren’t many trees, but here and there a boulder or a cluster of them jutted from the ground into the sky. As I watched, a breeze blew from behind me, from over the knoll I had just descended and over the fields of grain. Once the gust hit the stalks of grain, they tilted with it, and suddenly turned a pleasant shade of purple which blended with the dark blue sky like pure magic. The purple color then lifted from the plants and into the air like a cloud of bugs, and there it was taken away by the wind, to that faraway line, the horizon.
I didn’t know what the purple stuff was, I didn’t even know where I was, but I knew that I wanted to go and get some. I knew somehow that it would taste like cotton candy and would melt away in my mouth once I had finally chased some of it down. Never mind the stuff that was still probably in the plants. I knew that I needed to chase it down, to follow it to the horizon.
I ran the rest of the way down from the hill, and that’s where I met my first and only Wizards.
(sorry, I would have had this earlier but I've been traveling recently.)
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