Only two things happened in the next two years that were worth mentioning, aside from lots more schoolwork and various teachers. The first happened on the very first day of sixth grade, just as he knew it would.
The Trent legacy wasn't forgotten. Of course not. He just had to wait until it came and poinked him in the head. Only in sixth grade, he wasn't going to be stupid about the whole thing. He went out at lunch recess that day warily, watching the skies for incoming dodge balls and sneaking Trent shadows.
Looking around the playground, he was surprised to find that nothing had changed. It was one of those wonderful things about school; the first graders were swarming the place, looking smaller than ever. Second graders were engaged in the beginnings of cliques. Clusters of girls could be seen here and there, talking and giggling. Four square, basketball, monkey bars, cards and comics, all present and accounted for.
No dodge ball to the head. No comically bad passes at basketball taking Michael by surprise.
But he could have sworn people kept looking away as soon as he turned to look at them. The fact hit home just as soon as he sat down on one of the courtside benches. The four girls who were sitting at the other side immediately got up and left. He had the whole bench to himself.
The very idea that people were scared of him made him laugh. Which made more of them stare at him. And that made him laugh harder. It was like in Panetti's art class, when they dropped rubbing alcohol on watercolor. One second there was vibrant color, and the next second there was a perfect circle of white, the color retreating.
He couldn't stop laughing for a whole week. By the end of that week, he was sure everyone thought he was completely insane.
The conclusion was that Trent had gone over to the Marcus Patterson wing, which wasn't actually a wing. It was a squarish building, dirty and ominous, a football field away from the LADCEMS. As far as he knew, it was a prison and the eighth graders never had any sort of break at all. They just vanished.
The nice scars on his hand hadn't disappeared, the puckered craters, lighter than the skin on the rest of his hand. As the weeks went by, he liked to pretend that they were bothering him, and stretch his hand out while hissing loudly. Everybody got the message.
Michael’s former friends from grades one through four stayed gone. Whatever.
He spent the first semester studying hard. He hat no choice. Once, at the beginning of the first semester, his science teacher had told Susanna that her son seemed 'vacant' in class, which resulted in lessons on how to focus, posture practice, and just how often he needed to raise his hand in class.
He spent a routine Christmas break, totally exploding when he got a new e-reader from his mother. This was the new type with the glasses to project the illusion of a book into your hands. You wore these little battery powered things on your thumbs to turn the pages, and it was literally the coolest thing in the whole wide world. Lily went nuts when he showed her.
“You're totally lucky,” she told him. “You should tell your parents how much this means to you.”
Yeah, he'd get right on that, just as soon as he morphed into a girl and put unicorn posters up all over his walls.
So she started to put Lily-recommended e-books onto the page-turner, which also contained the miniature hard drive. Miniature wasn't meant to imply that it had a low capacity. His mother told him it would store more than 5,000 books, as long as they weren't in color or had a ton of pages each.
He had paid off the e-reader a long time back, with the money from his paper route. If he hadn't, he would have given the thing to Lily instead.
The second important thing happened when Christmas was over.
After the break, he found a new face in his classes. She was definitely the strangest girl he had ever seen. She walked in dressed in, get this, in a suit much too big for her. Somewhere under the pants were gleaming leather loafers. She was very pale, but didn't look unhealthy. Her thin, sharp face was set with searching eyes the color of overcast clouds and blonde hair done up in a loose ponytail. The girls started snickering just as soon as she walked in the door, and the boys were nudging each other, eyes wide.
With no friends, it was hard for him to care much. None of the teachers had figured out he was reading his books with his special glasses on. He was in the middle of the last book of the Lord of the Rings, and it was shaping up to be way better than the movie.
“So she's weird,” he muttered. “Nothing wrong with that.”
She was about to nearly get him killed. It was a big deal, several times over actually, but nobody could predict the future.
Mr. Shepherd called for silence, and he introduced the new girl to the class. Michael wasn't listening. Sauron's Mouth was coming out of the massive gates to inform Aragorn they all had a one way ticket to the worm farm.
“Mr. Washington?”
Maybe it was twenty other pairs of eyes on him that caused him to look up. The pages of the book were still there in front of his face, only now the rest of the class was too, hazy and indistinct just beyond the words.
Shepherd was looking at him impatiently. “Welcome back to the class. People, I know you've just been away for ten days, but we're going to be studying starting today, and you're going to have homework starting today. And don't groan like that either. You're not in third grade anymore. Next year you'll be getting ready to go to Patterson, and after that is high school. It's going to come quicker than any of us would like. Now, Michael, Charlotte is going to be stuck to you all day. You show her around, you help her get to her classes.”
“Yes sir,” he said, and shut the e-reader off angrily.
“I appreciate it very much, Mr. Washington. Now everybody, we've got a lot to learn about the Civil War. It's not just people shooting cannons at each other and dead bodies. Open up your books to page three fifty-six.”
The bizarre girl came over and got one of the empty seats near Michael. She gave him a brief smile, but he didn't return it. Shepherd was doing this because he knew Michael didn't have any friends. Teachers were always getting you to do things you didn't want to do. Things that were good for you. Ugh.
When the class ended, and Shepherd had lumped a healthy scoop of homework on top of his obligation to help this Charlotte girl, he packed up and gave her a flat, dead glare. She was struggling to pick up a backpack he hadn't noticed before, and her enormous sleeves were getting in the way. He gave her another snort.
The backpack was hardly visible under a wriggling mass of patches and buttons and frilly things hanging off it. You couldn't tell what color the backpack had been. There were tie-dyed peace signs and a funny smiley face with a drop of red on it, either ketchup or blood. There were others, like 'Save the whales' and 'Save the rainforest', and a bunch of other things that needed saving. Several were just pictures, or strange sayings he couldn't read, because they were half-covered by other buttons. Though she had one with a girl riding a missile.
“Come on,” he said quietly.
“Alright, hang on...” she was having all sorts of trouble.
He zipped the bag up for her, and held it out so she could adjust her sleeves enough to receive it. She thanked him, and they got going.
“Where's your class?” he asked.
“Um...” she fumbled about again for her schedule.
“Seriously,” he said. “What's up with the suit?”
“Oh, you like it?” she brightened. Not really, he thought. He was never late. She was going to make him late.
He shrugged instead of replying.
“It's a zoot suit,” she said. When he stared at her, she went on, her whole face alight. “It's a 1940's thing. They wore them in big bands for a few years. It was really the style...though my dad said my great-grandpa hated the things. People in California had zoot suit riots, when World War II was going on. It was a pretty huge thing back then, because we were in a war, you know, and there was rationing. But there were black market suit makers, even though the government told people to cut back on
how much fabric was in them.”
Holy mackerel, she was serious. She was really into this, but unfortunately she couldn't keep on. The bell had rung. She finally dug her schedule out of one of the pockets, and he got her pointed in the right direction. He was annoyed and grumpy by the time he got to his own class, but promised he would help her get around for the rest of the day.
He couldn't shake the image of Charlotte for the rest of the day. He kept picking her up and taking her to her classrooms, and she kept up a running discussion of the 1940's as she did. She was a library of useless ancient history, and he wondered just what had made her so crazy.
It wasn't until the end of the day that he realized that Charlotte was just like him, only not as far along yet. The girls eyed her with open disgust. There were random eye rolls, muttering, and all sorts of mean-spirited giggling going on. If she wore outfits like this all the time, she was in for a world of trouble. He figured she might as well get an e-reader and kiss the idea of having friends goodbye.
And there wasn't anything about her he disliked, per se. She was...pretty, he guessed, and vibrant, like there were more colors around her than other people. And she was not interested at all in what other people thought of her.
The teachers and adults were always telling you that. Peer pressure sucks. Don't fall for it. You don't have to be like everybody else. Let your inner beauty shine through. You can't judge a book by its cover.
Yeah, well none of them knew what style was. Teachers didn't flinch and sulk when you told them their shoes probably cost a buck fifty or were traded off a bum for a hamburger. Teachers did not understand that more than half of school was projecting the right you, the you everybody else wanted and expected to see.
The rest of them, like Cara MacCullin and Tenley Davis and their little clique, could disassemble people without even stopping as they walked through the halls. Back in September, Tenley had said something horrible about a kid named Jeremy, and he still hadn't recovered from it. Now he was like a cockroach, scurrying around. There were still half hearted snickers at Jeremy, and his nickname was 'Family Jewels' for some reason. Michael didn't know and didn't really want to know. He had a social force field.
Charlotte wouldn't last long. Girls needed friends. Michael didn't know many, but he knew that girls didn't go it alone in the world of elementary/middle school at LADCEMS. Maybe the cliques ate the loners, like schools of piranhas swarming an injured cow.
“Hey Michael,” Charlotte said, as he met her again. “You don't have to meet me here, you know. It's time to go home. I know where my locker is.”
“Yeah,” he said. Why was he here? “Listen, where do you live?”
“Over on Bellemont,” she told him.
“That's just two blocks from my house,” he said. “Do you want to walk with me?”
“Why don't you...your friends...” she stopped, appeared to think, and brightened up with a dazzling smile. “I'd love to walk home with you.”
“Cool,” he said. Their lockers weren't far away from each other. He finished slopping his books and papers inside before she even had her backpack open. He fought through the press of evacuees.
By the time she was finished, the halls were mostly empty. The few suck ups and teachers' fans were stuck like leeches to their favorites, and the hardcore band nerds were just starting up their practice for the day.
“Usually I just take my bike,” he said when she was finished packing the books she needed. He saw the confusion on her face and went on. “But, yeah, I'll...you know, walk it.”
“Alright.”
She started to explain about the zoot suits again, and about the big band music that came in the fifties. Michael was confused for a second, because he'd been born in the fifties, until he realized she was talking about a hundred years ago. Yikes, who was this girl? Hadn’t she ever heard of Tyra, the woman with the super-powered voice?
Yes, there was other music than Tyra, but you wouldn’t know it at LADCEMS.
“They'd usually have like ten or twenty people on stage, and people were dancing on TV all the time. They had swing shows, and sock hops. Dizzy Gillespie, it was like...wow. I'll play you some sometime if you want. I've got some of the later stuff, when it started to be influenced by South America, like Brazilian music. There's this one by Gil Evans, it's like...you've never heard anything like it. Smooth and fun, it really bubbles. It's like your own private waterfall. I tell you what, Michael, it was a pretty kickin' time.”
Kickin. Right.
“So then in the nineties there was a mini Big Band revival. Squirrel Nut Zippers. Big Bad Voodoo Daddy. Mighty Mighty Bosstones.”
He nodded and made a sound to show her he was still there. Just where did this girl come from, with her music from the twentieth century?
Early January was a crunching, hard-packed misery. It felt like it would be dark in an hour, and it was only three o'clock. Michael couldn't figure out why he had wanted to walk home with Charlotte, so at first they walked in silence. He snuck looks at her, at the massive parka that was actually draped over her schoolbag as well, at the wisps of blonde hair escaping out around the fur-lined hood. Then he looked at the tight ankles on her suit pants, and the way they billowed in the stiff winter winds, and he remembered.
Disturbed by the way she made him forget what he wanted to talk about, he started to explain.
“Listen, you know, your zoot suit...”
“Groovy isn't it?”
Groovy? He shook his head: one thing at a time. “Groovy, right. Only, you don't know this school. The stuff you're wearing, there's no way...you're not going to...nobody's going to be okay with that.”
She smiled a little smile, but kept quiet.
“People who are different, I mean, they tell you to be different. They tell you different's okay, you know, but they're the teachers, right, and they don't know really anything. I mean they know science and English and whatever, but they don't know anything else. Not about us.”
“Really?”
He nodded. “The girls were all whispering about you today. I think, maybe, I mean, I don't know much about this sort of thing, because I'm not a girl, but you might still have a chance to, I don't know, do something. Make some friends. Whatever it is girls do to make friends. Talk about makeup and boys and whatever.”
She laughed. “Is that what you think girls do to make friends?”
“Yeah I'm not exactly an expert.”
“I did notice,” she said, “You didn't have a big fan club surrounding you.”
He laughed once. “Oh yeah, they all think I'm crazy.”
“And it doesn't bother you?” She kept her tone even. She wasn't making fun of him, or accusing him. Nothing like that. Everybody else in his school would have made the question into something else, a finger jab at least, a slap in the face at most.
He shrugged. “I guess not.”
“How long?”
“Last year, the first day.” He told her a bit about the Trent situation, but not about how he'd knocked Trent's face about. Instead he told her that Trent had gone to Patterson, the eighth grade building.
“Hmm.” she said at last, which wasn't much of anything. He was expecting some kind of reaction. Like she would be up in arms, like his mother, and want to go give Trent a thrashing. But she didn't.
“So you haven't had any friends for what...a year and a half.”
“Nope,” he said defiantly.
Her smile grew.
“Yeah, so, maybe I'm not a girl expert, or even a friend expert, but I know one thing: you can't just go around and show everyone you're totally weird. Anyway, here's Bellemont,” he said. “Just think about it. The...the backpack and the suit thing. If you want to have some friends.”
“If I want to have some friends.” There, that was the tone that told him she was making fun of him. He didn't know what the joke was, but he refused to feel the sting.
“Hey,” he said, “I warned you.” And without giving
her another chance to make fun of him, he took that running start, hopped on his bike and headed home.
He was three months to the day away from witnessing a world class meltdown.
In the weeks that followed, he tried not to watch Charlotte on her way towards rock bottom. It was like those videos of train wrecks and car crashes though. Didn't matter how much you tried to look away, you found yourself staring.
She was the only other person besides him who didn't get a single valentine, and the only one who didn't get one of those shamrock notes they did on St. Patrick's day. Somebody must have gotten in good with Charlotte's homeroom teacher, or just stolen Charlotte's locker com, because they started leaving pictures and little notes in her locker, mostly four letter words Michael's mother refused to say.
Mostly Michael was watching for the slow progression of her soul leaking out. He had read about it. The bright smiles dimmed, rose was bleached out of cheeks, and the garbage started to pile up. And the eyes, darkening and hopelessness piling up in bags as they lost sleep or cried themselves there.
But Charlotte's resolve didn't waver in the first month. In fact, it was like she completely transformed into a different person. The zoot suits gave way to tight jeans with flaring bottoms, sandals (during February, no less), and shirts that were called tie-dye. They were like explosions of color all over the place, with enormous peace signs and bands like Bob Marley or the Beatles. She started wearing enormous aviator sunglasses and putting beads in her hair and stuff.
He'd retreated into the e-reader and his paper route, and really looking forward to some super-powered TV instead of hanging out with his friends. He couldn't figure out what Charlotte's malfunction was.
In a way, he was a little disappointed when she didn't break down and start rushing through the hallways with her books clutched to her chest. Then he felt guilty for wanting that. Charlotte was pretty awesome, he decided. Pretty awesome, and pretty too. And unlike Lily, she was his age.
Charlotte's entire wardrobe changed up again in March. Now she was wearing cargo pants and flannel jeans. He thought for a second she had just given in over night, but then the way she was wearing something new and bizarre everyday meant something.
He was intrigued. He started to figure they ought to be friends, just because neither of them had any friends. Plus, for some reason he couldn't nail down, he wanted to see more of her. So one day, after nearly two months of avoiding her, he decided to go one day without his bike. It was like a knight going into battle without his horse. You didn't just strap on a whole boatload of armor and totter around with no horse. If he learned anything from Shepherd's history lessons, it was that if you had more horses, you won more battles.
He felt sort of naked without his bike. Maybe this was a bad idea. Maybe she was going to laugh in his face or just walk away without talking to him. He didn't know what he would do with that sort of rejection. Icy spikes of fear poked at his belly.
The whole day went by through a sick film of worry. He couldn't absorb anything any of his teachers said. They called on him several times and the only thing to come of it was red cheeks and quiet snickers from the braver kids in class. After all, he was still the sixth grade psycho.
He waited by her locker after school, more afraid of this than he ever had been of Trent. With Trent he hadn't had a choice. Here he had nothing to give Charlotte, nothing she required.
She came up to him silently, with her backpack slung over one shoulder. She eyed him flatly, and opened her locker. A big piece of paper tumbled out, taped to one of the shelves. It loudly proclaimed: Cannot Understand Normal Thinking. Let's go with Slutzko!
“What a humorous bunch they are,” she said pleasantly. “Oh ignorant sign of pointless and empty hate, I shall enjoy burning you.”
“Hi Charlotte,” he said.
“Michael,” she said, just as pleasantly, which made him feel bad.
“Um...do you want to...um...walk home again?”
“Why Michael,” she said. “We haven't walked together since that first day.”
“Okay,” he said, defeated. “If you don't want to, that's cool.”
“Oh, I didn't say that,” she said. “But I wonder. What kept you away?”
Panic and embarrassment and guilt bubbled up. He was stupid. Everything in the whole world was stupid.
“That's alright,” she said. “It doesn't matter. I would be happy to walk home with you.”
“Really?”
She laughed, not unkindly. “Let's go.”
Most of the way they went in silence. This late in March, the weather was starting to go the way of the lamb instead of the lion. Buds could be seen peaking out of branches, but only if you looked really closely. There still weren't any flowers out. For now though, the snow was still clinging to the world in a few places, and in a few more it was just dirty black slush. The world would be alright soon, you just had to try hard to remember that it wasn't going to be cold and yucky every day.
“So anyway,” he finally said.
“Yeah?”
“What happened in February?” he asked. He didn't want to tell her that he'd been curious about her clothes. Or curious about how she'd been handling the stress of stupid people acting just as everybody would expect.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“Uh...the clothes. You were like the fourth of July for a little while there. Your tie-dyed thing. And sandals. In February.”
“Oh!” she shouted. He could see he'd said just the right thing there. She just about glowed a hundred dazzling colors. “Right, oh man, yeah, there was this song...my parents' friends are always on about Bobby McGee, but geez, when you heard some of the stuff off the Big Brother and the Holding Company album, Cheap Thrills, it's funky stuff. The hit one was Piece of My Heart, you know, but I really dug on Flower in the Sun. That big band out of the fifties, there's something fun about it, but pretty rigid, you know? But Janis Joplin, she's a rebel. She's groovadelic. She makes you close your eyes and everything turns this floaty light green in your mind. Light green and summer sky blue.”
Well, he'd asked. He should have anticipated the answer.
“So that's what happened. My mom got some of my great-gram's clothes out of the attic, and we went to some vintage clothes stores. I had so much fun, especially with the crummy weather, my mom said I blissed out. I think I did.”
He let her keep talking, and eventually she got away from Janis Joplin and onto the Beatles. They, at least, he knew. He knew the name at least. He couldn't tell the Beatles from any of the big band she'd mentioned, if you downloaded it off the cloud and listened to it on the surround sound at home. Old was old. It sounded old. So really, not important. And this was stuff that was so old that it fell off the face of the planet, and the only people who talked about it were already older than old.
Which made Charlotte's bubbly speech about this music really strange. She was clearly not a stupid girl, and not so dorky as to be a complete loner. She could talk to him, which meant she could probably talk to anybody.
Weird. Weird that she wasn't all that weird, even though she was. But sort of not.
Michael didn't understand it much. He did, however, snap out of his thoughts when he realized she wasn't talking anymore.
“Huh?” he asked.
“I asked if you've ever heard the Jimi Hendrix experience?”
“Uh...no. Sorry.”
She laughed. “You don't have to be sorry. So what do you listen to?”
“I'm...uh...I mostly read. Books. Novels. A lot of old fantasy.”
“Like Lord of the Rings and stuff? My mom says that's the father of all fantasy.”
“Your mom's right,” he said. He was in awe. Charlotte clearly knew everything about everything. “Wow. Have you read it?”
“No...I read the Hobbit, it was fun. All the funny little dwarves with their rhyming names.”
He realized they were already at her street. “Oh, we're here.”
&nbs
p; “I'll see you later then. Unless you want to come over and listen to Hendrix and the Beatles, maybe some Led.”
Michael's stomach did a complicated dive off a high board, several flips and twists, and landed somewhere around his feet. His head spun with terror and anxiousness and glee, but also with something he couldn't identify. Alone with a girl. A friend. A girlfriend? Seventh graders had girlfriends. Sometimes a few sixth graders did. He understood the appeal now.
“I can't,” he said at last. “I've got my paper route to do. Sorry.”
She laughed again. “You don't have to keep apologizing. Some other time.”
“Okay,” he said. His stomach lurched again, this time with hope. His paper route was going to be spent in conversation with himself, while his imaginary version of Charlotte spoke directly to his mind.
When he walked away, watching her head down Bellemont, he found himself humming a tune under his breath. He didn't know what it was, and it would have astonished him to discover it was 'Piece of My Heart' by Big Brother and the Holding Company, circa 1968. It was also a tune he had never heard before in his life.
Chapter 4 - The Lightning Ball