Quoth the Raven

After that particularly delightful conversation with Mr. Comstock wherein I was let off the hook for being attacked and defending myself like any rational person with Spider-Man powers would, I left the administrative offices and found myself in a mob. Much of the school was still on lunch break, and dozens of students were standing around the main hallway milling about and talking excitedly amongst themselves. They'd probably gathered for the show, ambulances and stretchers and all that.

"There was a fight upstairs in the back hall. Like six guys got sent to the hospital."
"Who started it?"
"I dunno, the ones I saw were all those gang dudes."

As I took a few more steps into the crowd a few faces began to turn toward me. Fingers pointed, voices hushed. Rumor spread through the masses like a ripple, and people yet again had a reason to single me out. Fantastic. I started cutting through the mob and heading toward the door when Amy wedged her way through to intersect with me.

"You're here," I said as she fell into step with me. A trail of "it was him?"s echoed behind us.
"I'm everywhere," she said with a grin. "Did you see the fight? And did you just come from the office?"
"I was the fight."

We'd broken free of the largest part of the crowd and ducked into one of the side halls by then.

"You mean you were in the fight? Ohmigod are you ok?" she looked me over, trying to find where I'd hidden the pints of blood I should have been leaking.

Am I ok? I considered that for a moment. A long moment.

"Yeah, I'm fine. Somehow I just put four kids in the hospital."

She looked in my eyes, trying to find which part of that made sense.

"I don't know," I said before she could say anything. "I physically ran into a bunch of those Mexican gang wannabe guys, I said some stupid stuff to them, they put me against the lockers and as the ringleader was about to cave my face in, I like freaked out and went allkung-fu on them and was about to clock Officer Rhodes in the face when I blacked out."

"That's... " Amy started, "... different. So you beat them all up?"
"Yes."
"All of them?"
"All of them. Broke a nose and collapsed a windpipe, I'm told; though I could swear I felt a wrist break and the guy I kneed in the back will probably have some coccyx fractures once they x-ray him."

I looked around, people in this hall were starting to look at me, too. I grabbed Amy's arm above the elbow and started walking toward the door to the student parking lot.

"Have you taken karate classes or something?" she asked in stride.
"No; and that's what Comstock asked me right before he told me I wasn't in any trouble and that they wouldn't even tell my paren... my mom."
"That seems unusual."

We stopped in front of the door. "Everything seems unusual now, and it doesn't seem to wanna stop. I'm done here, for now."
"Done with what?"
"Done with school, I'm not coming anymore. It was bad enough with all the 'his dad died' stuff, now people are all going to know that I uncharacteristically kick ass."
"You can't drop out, school's done forever in like two months!"
"I don't need to drop out. We need 22 credits to graduate and with all my A.P. English classes and those dummy computer classes I tested out of I've got 21 as of this semester. There's two months of school left and I just need to pass two of my classes. I can do that without trying, so I will."

She stood with her mouth open. I pushed the door open behind me with my foot and stepped backwards through it.

"I'll talk to you later," I said, grabbing the door for a moment as it swung shut. She just looked at me.

My cell phone buzzed as I was getting into my car. I pulled it from my jacket pocket and flipped it open. Black-against-green letters spoke of a new text message from Amy:

"starbucks @ 3.30"

I sighed, flipped the phone shut and tossed it into the passenger seat. I looked up at my high school, hoping I'd never see it again, then drove off into my future.

Catch and Release

Principal's office. Ice bag on my head. My head still hurts, and is now kind of wet.

At my school, the role of dealing with students typically reserved for a principal is split up among a small fleet of "administrators" who are assigned to certain students seemingly randomly. I understand this is common now among modern high schools. The administrator I was assigned to was Mr. Comstock. Replacing the first 'o' with a 'u' has always been a popular teenage antic around here, and is one of the reasons I loathe admitting that I am, in fact, a teenager.

I'd never had any real disciplinary issues here and as such, I'd never been in this office before. I'd spoken to Mr. Comstock only a few times in my life, even though it seemed like he'd been around me forever. When I was in elementary school, he worked there in the office somewhere; he transferred to my middle school during my second year there, and he and I started at this high school at the same time. He must either be very easily dissatisfied or so horrible to work for that he just gets slid around the system so nobody has to deal with him for too long.

I'd apparently broken one person's nose and collapsed another's larynx. Someone had seen those Mexican kids hassling me and had gone to fetch the nearest adult, who went to fetch the nearest (and only) police officer on site. Said police officer arrived on scene just as I was tossing one kid -- the one whose larynx I collapsed -- onto another. When I came to, I was taken to this office and left alone. Through the glass panel of the closed, probably locked, door I saw paramedics reeling stretchers down the hall.

Mr. Comstock had been on the phone since I got there, with various people including the police. I was just sitting there with a sore head. He hung up the telephone and looked to me, looking frazzled and anxious to speak to me. Then he told me about the collapsed larynx and broken nose before the phone rang yet again. He apologized and answered it.

"Yes?" he spoke into the handset parked on his face.
"Yeah.. he..it's here," he continued, spinning his chair around and facing the window.
I looked around at the pictures in the office, each with a smiling teenager in front of the same grayish backdrop; other students of his who donated wallet-sized prints of their school pictures. In any other job, having a collection of photographs of underage minors would seem somehow inappropriate. The desk between him and me was littered with papers of various colors; a keyboard with an impressive flat screen monitor sat in the corner next to a black and silver Swingline stapler and a navy blue New England Federated Bank mug stuffed full of capped roller ball pens, probably Bic.

Comstock was still one the phone. I guessed he was probably in his mid-forties. There were no rings on his fingers, and he had deep pinkish eyeglass pad imprints on the bridge of his nose which he rubbed occasionally. I noticed a bottle of saline drops on the shelf behind the desk, and figured he must have just switched to contacts now that the contacts-are-for-chicks stigma had finally worn thin. He must be petty. I looked back at the flat screen monitor again, it was a Sony and the school's computers were all Dell; he must have bought the monitor himself and brought it in so he'd look better than everyone else.

On the shelf in the back were a few books, a book of Yeats poetry and three Tolstoy books; all of their spines were in perfect condition. This guy seems to spend a lot of time worrying about what people think about him.

"That would seem a bit strange," he said to the phone, "I don’t know if I can make that float. It's not my job. It might be expensive." There was a pause, and he hung up.

"Ok," he said to me at last. "The student handbook specifies that fighting in school results in suspension or expulsion, you probably know that."

I sighed, and started to unscrew my predicted life outline from the wall of my mind.

"Obviously," he continued, "that doesn't make any sense. If we followed that rule, some kid who gets punched in the face for no reason and pushes back would have to be punished for it. I guess we're trying to raise people to get punched and just stand there, like Jesus or something.

"Except in, like, Sharks versus Jets style fights or 'you kissed my girlfriend' - 'no you kissed mine' fights, usually in a fight there's one guilty party and one guy getting pummeled. Punishing someone for getting attacked is just dumb. So we usually don't. It's in the book because it's hard to explain the stance of 'it's ok to get in a fight unless you're a bad person' in print." He stopped and thought for a second.

"So. You certainly put the hurt on those kids, but you obviously didn't go down that hall looking for trouble. Plus, we found the vodka or whatever that is that Marcos had. That's illegal, bringing alcohol into a school. So four gang-types with contraband alcohol attack you, a kid with no administrative record or any history of violence and who recently suffered a death in the family which might explain the unusual torrent of aggression, and as far as we're concerned we've got no real beef with you. The kids' parents might press charges against or sue you, but that seems unlikely. They'll be going from the hospital to the police station."

"Huh," I said, a bit surprised. My head was starting to clear up.

"You probably don't want your mom finding out about this anyway, so on the administrative front I can just pretend you weren't even involved."

"I guess I could get in fights more often," I said.

He let out a tight laugh. "The way you tore those guys up, I'm surprised to hear you haven't been in any. Have you taken karate classes or something?"

Umm.. no. "Umm.. no."

"Weird. Well I guess there's no telling how someone will react when he's about to get pummeled on. The fight or flight response is pretty powerful. I read a story about some guy who was mugged, never thrown a punch in his life, but he put the mugger into a coma. He says his guardian angel helped him. Weird stuff."

Hmm. Guardian angel.

The Turn

"So.. you could buy a house, you know," she'd say.
"A big house. And a car," I'd reply.
"Or a small house and a medium house. Right next to each other," she'd add, after some thought.
"Or the House of Representatives. And a car," I'd say finally.

This went on and on.

I'd told Amy pretty much everything; she'd been more interested than shocked or anxious for a loan. Through the weeks we'd gone over all the details, formulating theories about mysterious deaths and mysterious sums of money. Ideas floated around such as that my dad was not a medical researcher but a secret agent who'd been killed in action, or perhaps he was a robot assassin from the future, or he was a hologram and never really existed. All three seemed equally likely.

It was nice to be able to talk to someone, though. After a few weeks the dead-dad-kid stigma started to wear off at school, but the break from contact seemed to make people question why they ever talked to me in the first place. I suppose I'm just not that interesting and the few recent things that seemed to make me interesting -- I'd elected not to tell anybody. Except Amy.

Nothing notably weird happened for about a month. One Thursday at school I was lost in thought while walking through the halls during lunch. I find when I don't have something particular to think about I end up thinking about everything; hallways, lockers, and people just blurred through the periphery. I'm usually able to stay above the surface enough to avoid running into people or falling down a flight of stairs, but apparently not so much today. It was lunch time, so most people were either in the cafeteria or outside in the cold trying to hide the fact that they're smoking. For this, it was surprising to find four poser Mexican gang drifters standing around one otherwise-empty hallway.

In Fredericksburg there wasn't much or any gang activity, but as in any suburb there's plenty of poser activity. The town's close enough to Washington D.C., however, that some of the posers have friends who have friends who actually are gang members, and so after taking classes at their blue ribbon schools and dropping their books off at their five bedroom houses, they play make-believe that they're gang members. Nothing new.

I should say, I didn't so much "find" them as I did "walk right into one like an idiot."

I wasn't looking, I walked right into one of them as he was making some elaborate gesture in the middle of some I'm-sure-hilarious joke. I was walking pretty fast, and the one I hit was jarred back a foot or so and dropped the clear plastic drink container he was holding.

"Ay, watch where you're going, son!" the one I hit said, the others turned toward me and fell into their stereotypical straight-from-the-tv behavior -- slowly surrounding me and watching the first one, the one I hit, apparently their ringleader, for instructions. I opened my mouth to apologize and hopefully slide my way out of there when I noticed what was spilling out of the container the first guy dropped. It looked like orange juice, it smelled like rubbing alcohol. Oh, the sweet rebellion. I couldn't help but laugh, which probably looked like I was laughing at them. One guy standing to my right pushed me suddenly, and chimed in, "Something funny, son?"

They all say "son" too often.

I swallowed my laugh, but couldn't help but say, "I'd be less obvious if you poured the vodka right in a bottle of orange juice. Putting it all in a clear bottle.. it's trying too hard." Man, I should have shut up.

The first guy didn't seem to like that. "Maybe you should mind your own business, bro," he said, looking me up and down. I guess I wasn't his son anymore. I probably shouldn't have said that out loud either. I gotta say, I'd never been slammed against a locker before. It's not very awesome, the handle goes right into the small of your back.

Two of them were holding me against the locker wall by the shoulders, a third stood off to the side, and the first guy was standing front of me, swinging a tightened fist toward my face in slow motion. Wait a minute…

Something weird happened alright. While that fist was coming at me, the first violent action ever to be taken against me, something snapped in my head. The world slowed down, got mushy, and stopped. Walls in my mind suddenly crumbled, and everything I thought I knew about anything changed in an instant. A thousand images and sounds suddenly splashed against my brain like buckets of paint being dumped on a canvas. That, and my body was numb.

Something else snapped too, the guy's wrist. Like I'd been possessed, and with a perverse clarity I grabbed the clenched fist in mid air with my left hand and turned it counter-clockwise. Before I knew it, I'd forced his face into the same locker with my right elbow. He was soon on the ground, and with a foreign quickness I'd shed the hands now groping at my arms and neck and put the side of my palm into the throat of one of them, my knee into the back of another, and the gasping weight of the second onto the fourth. They were all on the ground now. My head hurt.

My head hurt, and apparently I was a ninja.

Voices echoed behind me, distant and distorted. My head was pounding harder, like ten glass bottles had been broken over my head. I stumbled against the opposite wall, groping it for support. Through a fog I felt a hand grab my shoulder and another grab my opposite arm. Without pause I'd pivoted on my heel, freed the grip from my arm, and was preparing to push an arm out of socket when I realizing that just below the tuft of shirt I was now grabbing was a shiny yellow badge. I was holding the left arm and right shoulder of our school's very frightened police liaison.

Right then is when I passed out.

Cats and Bags

Not even a death in the family can keep you from public school for as long as you'd like.

A week after my net worth increased by something like thirty zillion percent I was back in school. To be honest, I was starting to look forward to going back. Somehow, sinking into familiar routines seemed like the most amazing thing I could have done. Sitting around the house or walking around the neighborhood was doing me no good, not with the compounding mysteries flooding into my life from all angles.

Monday morning, I walked those halls again and let myself slip into the empty anonymity provided by a crowd of peers. Freshmen with their stupid-huge backpacks, Sophomores telling inside jokes so satisfied that they're cooler than at least one group of people, Juniors walking with their noses in books and looking distraught over all the stress they're under, and Seniors leaning against locker doors, their backpacks long since abandoned and only carrying few things absolutely necessary to get through the day. Life seems so much easier when peer groups are categorized so rigidly.

Anonymity went out the window when I entered my first class and sat down. From the second I walked in the door, hushed conversations were severed; I felt forty eyes digging into me and trailing me as I slunked into the first empty desk I saw. I darted my eyes around, everybody avoided eye-contact. I sighed and lined my pencils up on my desktop while the room sat in a still, thick silence.

They had to have heard about my dad's death, but I hoped the word hadn't gotten about regarding my ill-gotten gains. It shouldn't have; I didn't tell anybody. Still, if everybody knows I'd need to hire a bodyguard or twelve. I tried to imagine how much bodyguards cost, I remembered reading somewhere that a legitimate executive security firm charges about a thousand dollars per day. I could get a bodyguard for five hundred days, and then I wouldn't need them anymore. Spending all your money to keep people from getting your money, that should have been a Twilight Zone episode. Hell, it probably was. By the hundredth episode they had to have been repeating their hubris-related ironies.

I decided it'd be cheaper to fly to New Zealand and start my life over and surround myself with people who don't know or care about whether I have a father or what insane amount of money he may or may not have left me. Actually, it'd probably be cheaper to have anybody who knows about the money assassinated. I pondered the options for a moment, I could spend a lot of time trying to track down an actual hit squad, or I could just float the notion around the gang neighborhoods and wait until something catches. Hey, maybe Yakuza…

The teacher walked in the classroom with his coffee cup freshly warmed up, this finally drew some of the attention off of me and it cut me from my daydreaming. He started to begin the typical class-opening procedures when he noticed everybody's silence, and followed the sight-lines and finally saw me. He, too, stared at me in silence for a moment.

Maybe I could just start passing out hundred dollar bills for people to pretend they aren't so freaking uncomfortable around me. I drew a breath and prepared to say something when the door opened again, a girl took a step in and read my name from a piece of paper. She was an office aide, and had a summons for me to come to the counseling office at my earliest convenience.

Oh God.

I'd been to the counseling office twice before, a customary meeting in Freshman year so I'd know who my counselor was and for her to find out if I had any brain problems I'd like to talk about, then again in Junior year to talk about colleges and application deadlines. I still couldn't figure out if the counselors are supposed to be academic or social counselors or both. I can't imagine there's a path of psychology education that includes recommending colleges.

Her chair was uncomfortable, and there was a bowl of mixed hard candies positioned on the desk square between me and her.

"I heard about your father, of course," she started, "First, I'd like to offer my sincere condolences."
I grinned weakly. I'd already had a week and a half of sincere condolences.
"I've notified all your teachers," she continued, "so they'll be understanding and will be able to work with you regarding assignments and such."
"I'm sure gossip got did the job before you got there," I said, looking out the window at the parking lot. She smiled.
"Yes, people talk." She dropped quickly to a too-sincere look of empathy, quite a talent; "Is anybody making you uncomfortable or hurting your feelings regarding it?"
I looked back and forth between her and the candy. "Not yet."
"Oh. Ok, good. Well just understand that people, teenagers and children specifically, tend to focus their attention through inappropriate avenues when they're actually just uncomfortable or intimidated. If someone gives you trouble or makes you feel bad.. or worse, you can let me or an administrator know. Or a teacher."
I really wanted to leave. "Ok," I said simply.

There was a slight pause.
"So, were you and your father close?" she asked finally.
Oh, God.
After I was through with that mess, I slipped out of the counseling office and debated going back to class or going home, when my own name pulled me from my thoughts.

"Chris?" a girl's voice said from behind me. Someone my age was talking to me? I turned around, it was Amy Westborne -- a girl I'd known slightly for a few years, we'd had a few classes together and talked occasionally. She was about fifty feet away, walking toward me.

"Yeah?" I said loud enough to cover the distance.
"You're back," she said, now a bit closer. She was speaking like I'd just gotten back from Disney World.

Amy was my age, thin, and borderline punky. She had neck-length dark blonde hair with streaks or lines, whatever you call them of redish and.. darkish. I never understand girls and their hair, but whatever it was, she looked good. When I first met her she dressed rather clean-cut, but over the years she transitioned to worn punk-style thrift store-style shirts that probably cost $28, jeans, and those cloth wrist things that punky girls always wear. Looking at her, you'd know she'd never done a rebellious thing in her life, but she carried herself well enough that you'd never consider her a poser.

Not that I ever paid a lot of attention to her or anything…

"Yeah, I'm back," I said, now standing in the middle of the hallway.
"That's good," she said, stopping just a few feet from me. "Coming from C.O.?" she asked, looking at the door to the counseling office.
I looked down at the floor, not wanting to direct the conversation to its inevitable climax of awkward condolences and uncomfortable silence. "Yeah," I finally said, letting my voice trail off.
She nodded, interested. "Oh, because of your dad and everything?" she asked, also interested.
She wasn't patronizing me. That was new. "Yeah," I said, a bit taken aback.
She made a crooked grin and said, "Yeah, they did the same thing when my grandpa died last year. A lot of attention you really don't want."
"Yeah," I said. I looked around for a moment, and back at the hallway leading to my classroom. "Everybody seems like they're afraid of me. I've been through half a minute of one class and I'm already sick of it here."

She smiled. "People are just nervous. They think you're going to be scratching at your wrists and writing bad poems, and if they talk to you you'll just explode a bunch of gross emotions all over them."
I smiled. "Seems like it."
There was a pause, though not altogether uncomfortable. "Ok," she said starting to step in the other direction, "well don't feel bad. I'll see you in fourth."

I watched her back up and I nodded, distant. She turned around and walked toward the classrooms. The conversation was over. The first decent conversation I'd had since forever was over, and I felt myself sinking back into depression. I had to get the pretty girl to say more things to me.

"Uhh.." I said, trying to think of something. She was still walking.

"He left me half a million dollars," I said, uncomfortably. I bit my tongue.

She stopped and turned back toward me. "Huh?" she asked.

Crap.