Mind + Body - Aaron Dunlap (big screen ebook reader txt) 📗
- Author: Aaron Dunlap
- Performer: 1440414793
Book online «Mind + Body - Aaron Dunlap (big screen ebook reader txt) 📗». Author Aaron Dunlap
Mr. Comstock had been on the phone since I got there, talking with various people including the police. After a few minutes of silent contemplation as to the source of the pain in my head, I heard Mr. Comstock begin to wind down the conversation and then he hung up the telephone and looked to me, himself seeming frazzled and anxious to say something. He started to tell me then about the collapsed larynx and broken nose until 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 and 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. Looking at him, I guessed he was probably in his mid-forties. There was no wedding ring on his finger, 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. 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. Or maybe he just had eye fatigue.
It seemed like these small details were flooding my consciousness. It felt unusual and slightly amplified the headache.
On the shelf in the back were a few books, one of Yeats poetry and three Tolstoy novels; all of their spines were in perfect condition having probably never been opened. This guy seems to spend a lot of time worrying about what people think of 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.
“Okay,” 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 for the third time since my dad died.
“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.
“Except in, say, Sharks versus Jets style fights or petty adolescent boy/girl jealousy bouts, 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 okay 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… illicit beverage Marcos had. That’s illegal, bringing alcohol into a public 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. As far as we’re concerned we’ve got no real beef with you. The kids’ parents might press charges against 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.”
“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 puts the mugger into a coma. He says his guardian angel helped him. Weird stuff.”
Weird indeed.
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 of ambulances and stretchers. Beats cafeteria chicken nuggets.
“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 Mexican 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 outward like a radio pulse, 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?” echoed behind us.
“I’m everywhere,” she said with a grin. “Did you see the fight?”
“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? Ohmygod are you okay?” 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 three kids in the hospital.”
She looked in my eyes, trying to find the part of that which made any 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 one was about to cave my face in, I kind of freaked out and went all kung-fu on them and was about to clock Officer Rhodes in the face when I blacked out.”
“That’s… different. So you beat them all up?”
“Yes.”
“All of them?”
“All of them. I broke one nose and collapsed one 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 just keeps getting more and more so. I think 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. I’d say my hopes of just fading into the background are ruined.”
“You can’t drop out now. 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. As I drove off, I looked up at my high school shrinking in my mirror, and hoped I’d never see it again.
It was only one thirty, but I went right from school to the nearest Starbucks. I would have gone home, but my mom may have been there and I didn’t know how to explain that I was done with high school and that life generally sucks without it sounding like mundane teenager issues. I sat in a hard wooden chair in the back of the shop with my back to the wall, my hands spinning a warm cup of espresso, steamed milk, and flavored sugar while my brain ran in circles.
I kept telling myself that I’m overreacting, that I must be manifesting some weird emotions over my dad’s death. I hadn’t really shown any emotion after it, never screamed at the sky and asked God why bad things happen to good people. I just… dealt with it. People around me were probably wondering why I was so passive about it, afraid I was internalizing it and was going to explode someday. Explode like, collapse a larynx and break a nose.
Maybe that was it. I was just holding it all in, the massive weirdness of the life insurance money had distracted me from my grief and I never noticed it until it broke free and broke the nose of whoever was closest to me. Maybe.
Amy got there around two twenty, sooner than I expected. When she walked in the door she smiled at me, held up an index finger and got in line at the counter. I whistled, and pointed at the iced passion tea lemonade sitting across the tiny round table from me. She held in a laugh and walked over, sitting across from me.
“How gentlemanly,” she said.
“That’s what you got last time, so it’s ‘your drink’, right?” I asked.
“I guess. I also like the gingerbread latte, but they’ve probably stopped doing those now that Christmas is just a memory.”
“Probably,” I said, sipping my gingerbread latte.
She was going to try to talk me
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