Believe - Prologue
This is the prologue of a story I've tentatively titled "Believe." Please read it and comment, even if only to say you read it. Thanks.
BELIEVE - PROLOGUE
“Do you have it?”
“Yep.”
“Radical. Come on, put it in before she gets here.”
Steve handed the piece of chalk to Danny. Danny rushed up to the front of the room and stuffed it into the chalkboard eraser as all the kids giggled. He looked up at the class, flashed an oafish grin, and rushed back to his seat as Mrs. Magellan came through the doorway. She saw him sitting back down and gave him a mischievous smile.
“Why are you out of your seat, Daniel O’Malley?”
“I… had to sharpen my pencil.”
The class giggled. Mrs. Magellan’s eyes surveyed the room.
“What have you children been up to?”
They giggled again, covering their mouths.
“Now I know it is April Fool’s Day,” she said, “and I know that I’ve been saying for weeks this is the one day you can get away with all the things you can’t the rest of the year. I just hope whatever you did isn’t too crazy, Danny.”
Everyone laughed. Mrs. Magellan smiled. She was the best teacher in the fourth grade and every kid knew it.
“Now, let’s try and get a little bit of learning done today. As we were discussing before, this year marks the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus discovering America. Can anyone tell me what anniversary means?”
Mrs. Magellan walked up to the board and wrote “ANNIVERSARY” in big capital letters. Then she turned around and called on Lindsey Rinehart, who had been stretching her hand up so high Danny wondered if it was going to fall off.
“Anniversary means when we celebrate something that’s happened,” Lindsey stated.
“Very good,” Mrs. Magellan said. “But there’s a little more to it than that. Can anyone tell me how we can tell when to celebrate an anniversary? Do we celebrate an anniversary every day?”
Steve raised his hand. “Why yes, go ahead Stephen.” Mrs. Magellan said.
“My parents just had their anniversary on Sunday,” he said.
“That’s lovely, Stephen,” Mrs. Magellan said.
“They went to Club Med,” he said.
“Really, Stephen? How interesting. Where is the Club Med they went to?”
Stephen frowned, looked down at his desk, and didn’t say anything. Kids shifted in their seats to get a better look at him.
“Stephen?” Mrs. Magellan said, her voice softening.
Steve finally mumbled into his lap, “I don’t know.” The kids kept staring. Danny wanted to do something but didn’t know what.
“Oh, well, that’s OK, nothing wrong with that,” Mrs. Magellan said with a strident but lilting tone. Her back stiffened and she took a small step toward Steve’s part of the room. “Do you know if they took a car or plane?”
“Plane,” Steve said, his chin still pointing toward his chest. “The limo took them to the airport after it dropped off my grandparents.”
“OK, then, OK, it must have been very far away where they went,” Mrs. Magellan said. Danny remembered her eyes looked very sympathetic at that moment.
“Yeah,” Steve said. “Very far away.”
Mrs. Magellan smiled, went back to the board, and continued with ANNIVERSARY.
When she was done teaching the word she tried to clean the board with the trick eraser. The class held its collective breath. Chalk marks came out of the eraser as Mrs. Magellan wiped it across the board. The class exploded with laughter. Mrs. Magellan looked dumbfounded for a moment, then turned around and gave the class another mischievous smile. Many of the kids were looking at Danny, rewarding him for the success of his gag, but instead of basking in their acknowledgment Danny concentrated on Steve, who was sitting at his desk in a daze, staring off into space at what only he knew, seemingly lost to the world.
“Steve?” Danny whispered. “You OK?” Steve snapped out of his trance and focused on Danny. The kids were all still laughing, and Mrs. Magellan was acting mock exasperated, pretending to demand to know who did it. Something clicked in Steve’s gaze and he finally noticed all the commotion, looked up at the chalk marks all over the board, and began to laugh himself. Danny relaxed and laughed along with him.
At the end of a very exciting day Danny and Steve were gathering their books and preparing to go home when Mrs. Magellan came up to them in the hall with a piece of paper in her hand. “Stephen, I got a message from the office while you were at recess. The principal wants to see you before you leave. They said it’s urgent.”
“What’s it about?” Steve asked.
“I don’t know. It just says, ‘Stephen Dott is wanted in the office before the end of the day.’ Make sure you stop by before you go, OK?”
“OK,” Steve said. Mrs. Magellan smiled and walked away. Steve slammed his locker. “That was weird,” he said.
“What would they want to see you for?” Danny said.
“I don’t know. Maybe my Granddaddy has something important he needs me to do. He’s been forcing me to do all these chores all week.”
“That sucks.”
“It’s OK. What really sucks is that he’s always telling me to comb my hair, and I have to comb it every night before I come down for dinner. But all he eats is Raisin Bran and Cookies n’ Cream Ice Cream, so that’s all I’ve been eating all week too.”
“Well, that’s kinda awesome.”
“Yeah.”
Steve said he would meet Danny out by the playground after going to the office. He never showed up. Danny played on the monkey bars for over an hour and then finally went home. When he got there before he could say anything to his mother about Steve she told him that Steve’s parents had died in a small plane crash in the Caribbean.
Danny remembered that when he first heard this he looked for some sort of response in his mind, but all he found was blankness. An immense vacuum had come and replaced his senses while he was listening to the news, and now all he had was an empty funnel circling down into nothingness. He looked in the funnel for an answer, what to do, what to say, what to think, but it was hopeless.
He asked his mother if she thought he should go over to Steve’s house, and she said that was a very kind thought and that she would call his grandparents and ask if they thought it was a good idea. A couple minutes later she said Steve would like to see him, and Danny got on his bike and pedaled over to the Dott’s.
Steve’s Grandmommy answered the door when Danny knocked. She had tears in her eyes, and immediately gave Danny a long, tight hug that knocked the wind right out of him. When she finally released him she said, “Daniel O’Malley, thank you for coming. Steve is, upstairs… in his room….” Her voice trailed off and her eyes began to water. “Excuse me,” she said, sniffing. “I’m sorry. Excuse me.” She rushed into another part of the house. As Danny walked up the steps to the second floor he could hear Steve’s Grandmommy sobbing.
Steve’s door was ajar and rock music was blasting out of the room. Danny pushed the door open wider and saw Steve splayed out on his bed, staring at his TV set, which was switched to Guns n’ Roses’s “November Rain” music video, playing for the umpteenth time on MTV that year. Steve’s eyes were swollen and bloodshot; dry water streaks marked his cheeks. The room was in disarray, which was typical for Steve, though it was in a bit more disarray than usual. Steve’s bedside lamp was broken on the floor, and his Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles poster was ripped off his wall. The part of the poster that had read “Turtle Power!” had been torn into bits and scattered about the room.
“Steve?” Danny said from the doorway. His hand was still touching the door.
Steve didn’t say anything. It was then that Danny realized Steve wasn’t really watching MTV, but just staring at the television set as an excuse. He was staring off into space, lost to the world again.
Danny repeated Steve’s name. Steve stayed in his trance. Danny then backed out of the room, slunk down on the mild, blue wall-to-wall carpeting in the hallway outside Steve’s door, and began to cry.
He didn’t know how long it had been when he heard a sound coming from the room. He got up off the carpeting and rushed in to behold the sight of Steve playing with his toys on the floor in the room’s far left corner. “Psssshhhhttt, at-at-at-at-at, vwoom, vwoom!” went Steve, as he made his Batmobile zoom around the carpet. Without noticing Danny’s presence he stopped the vehicle with a deafening “Screech!!” and took Batman out of his Batmobile with one hand while picking up his Catwoman figure with the other.
“I’ve come here to destroy you,” Steve said as he moved the Batman.
“But I love you,” Steve replied in a whiny, high-pitched voice while moving the Catwoman figure.
“That’s not true. You never meant that. Your words mean nothing to you,” he said in a lower voice.
“I love you,” the whiny voice said.
“No you don’t,” the deep voice said. “Now die!”
And Steve commenced a fight between the toys. After about ten seconds of this and Steve still not noticing Danny in the room Danny loudly cleared his throat, so it would be heard above the noise from the television. Steve looked up and immediately stopped what he was doing. “What are you doing?” he said. “What are you doing in here?”
Danny stammered, “I came over. My mom said your Grandparents said it was OK.”
“They… they did?” Steve said.
“I’m sorry,” Danny sniffed, his eyes still wet, “My mom said you wanted me to come.”
Steve just looked up at Danny from the floor, his mouth gaping and his eyes wide, in some unknown state of shock. Danny remembered looking into Steve’s open eyes at that moment and immediately being gripped by the memory of the black hole that opened inside him when his mother had told him the news. Steve’s eyes were like the funnel leading into nothingness, but now Danny could see something tangible sliding down with him into the vacuum.
There are gears in our brains, biochemical machinery that fuses and shifts when the correct combination of feelings and events occur in our lives. At that moment several key gears moved into place in Danny’s and Steve’s brains, and they became best friends. Whether or not they remained best friends is the subject of this story.