Brigits Flame Week One: First Impressions
First time back in the contest in a very long time ... and it shows. Not my best writing, AND the prompt is a bit of a stretch.
Anyway, this piece sees the return of some characters I'd created earlier this year: Boots and Hearts. This story is about how they first met and it will be a serial for the month. It's a little different in tone from the first piece, but I tried to match the same whimsy. Sooo... Enjoy!
“So, how exactly did you and Boots become friends?” Miss Patience Magpie asked as she set a fresh plate of tea cakes on the little coffee table. No sooner had she released the tray than a pair of hands quickly snatched up a petit four each. She was used to it though. Hearts had been coming over every day for the last month to talk about her friend and enjoy tea and treats - but mostly treats.
“Oh, that’s a really good story!” Hearts replied as she stuffed a pink frosted cake into her wide mouth. The yellow one in her other hand followed shortly after that. She fixed the goggles she wore on the top of her head - the ones that had belonged to her friend - and licked her fingers clean. “Well, it’s super exciting and has lots of action!”
Patience arched a brow and said, “Do tell.”
“I will! It all started on a dark an’ stormy night….”
It was actually a bright and cheerful autumn morning, but that wasn’t nearly as dramatic as a storm-ridden night sky. That’s storytelling for you; blending fact and fiction until no one knows where one starts and the other ends.
The trees in Cherub Rock forest had changed their attire accordingly for the season, trees being the fashionable things they were. Instead of pale summer-gold leaves, they were now crowned in brassy tones that were complimented by bark that had turned a dark pewter color due to the underlying sap. The forest floor, littered over with the remains of autumns past, was just starting to get a fresh layer, for which it was very grateful. It desperately despised the way winter liked to cover it with frost.
It was on this picturesque autumn day that a new student arrived at Impossiblium Elementary. His name was Boots McGhee. He was exactly nine-and-one-quarter years old, small for his age, and he was trying very hard to ignore twenty-one set of eyes staring intently at him.
He didn’t like being the center of attention and he didn’t know why teachers liked to put new students on display in front of their classmates. Why couldn’t a teacher for once just let him slip quietly into a seat at the very back of the classroom where no one would notice him and he could just spend his time drawing and letting his mind wander? But this was his fourth new school and he was beginning to think there was some kind of policy that said teachers had to draw attention to the new student.
“Class,” Mrs. Pucklebury announced. “I’d like to introduce you to our new student, Boots McGhee.”
There were more than a few snickers at his name. Boots wished his hair was long enough to hide his entire face, but his mom wouldn’t let him grow it any longer than it already was. At least it covered his eyes enough to make all the people staring at him fuzzy. And if he squinted just right, one or two of them even looked like Yeti, which then made him wonder what a Yeti’s favorite school subject would be. Probably art. They had really big hands - perfect for finger painting.
Mrs. Pucklesbury cast a stern frown at her class, which immediately stopped any further laughter, or at least reduced it to mocking grins. “Boots and his family moved here from Centurium City,” she continued, speaking as if the interruption hadn’t occurred. She turned to Boots and smiled. His back stiffened; he knew what was coming next. “Boots, why don’t you tell the class a little about where you’re from?”
Swallowing hard, Boots studied a deep chip in the floor and mumbled, “It’s a really big city and, um….”
A girl with brown curly hair thrust her hand up in the air and, without waiting to be called on (which was very rude of her, he thought), loudly asked, “What’s wrong with your hand?”
His cheeks got very, very warm as he quickly shoved his metal hand behind his back. “N-Nothing.”
“Then why’s it so weird?” a large, redheaded boy sneered from the seat next to her. A couple of equally large boys sitting next time him grinned in a very unfriendly way.
“Bobby Snosgrove, that is not a nice thing to say!” Mrs. Pucklesbury reprimanded sharply. She didn’t ask him to apologize though, which made Boots believe that maybe this Bobby Snosgrove was a particularly nasty bully that even the teachers didn’t dare to cross too harshly. He stared at the floor again and wished the chipped portion would open up enough to let him fall inside.
“So what happened to your hand?” another boy asked from somewhere in the back.
“Why’s it metal?” a girl near the windows added.
“How did you get it?”
“Were you born with it?”
“Can I touch it?”
“It looks like a skeleton’s hand!”
The questions and comments were flying from all over the room, so quickly he couldn’t tell who was asking what. It soon dissolved into complete chaos, with students shouting at him from all angles. Not even Mrs. Pucklesbury’s calls for everyone to ‘simmer down’ could put an end to the interrogation. This was by far the worst first day at a new school he’d ever had. He was under fire and he didn’t know how to cope with it. Boots’s shoulders curled forward sharply and he squeezed his eyes closed tightly, hoping against hope that it would just end.
“Geez! You guys are all a bunch of idiots!”
The room fell dead silent as that singular voice rose above all the others. Boots cracked one eye open and noticed that the attention was no longer on him. It was all centered on a girl sitting in the exact middle of the classroom. She was taller than every girl (and quite a few of the boys as well), had very long blonde hair pulled back in matching pigtails, and she was sitting with her arms folded irritably across her chest.
“Hearts Blackwell, you cannot go around calling people idiots,” Mrs. Pucklesbury admonished.
The girl, Hearts, snorted and rolled her eyes. “Well, it’s true! Anyone with half a brain knows how he got that metal hand!”
Everyone person in the room - Boots included - waited eagerly for her to elaborate.
Smirking in a manner that suggested she was very pleased with herself, she said, “He lost it to a ferocious shark while discovering new life in the rainforests, of course!”
No one said anything to that; what could they say, after all? Even Mrs. Pucklesbury seemed at a loss for words. Her mouth opened, closed, opened again, and then she simply shook her head and said, “Boots, your seat is E-4. Take a moment to get situated and then we’ll begin today’s lesson.”
E-4, as it turned out, was directly behind the girl who’d put an end to his torment. He sat down, arranged his school supplies inside his desk, and looked up to see what the first subject was going to be.
There was a face barely an inch from his own with big, brown eyes.
Boots leaned back as far as his seat would allow. “Um….”
“So, was it a success?” Hearts demanded.
He blinked slowly, his shoulder relaxing slightly. “Huh?”
“Your mission in the rainforest! Did you find new life?”
“I-I don’t know….”
The girl let out an exacerbated huff and whirled around to face front again, her pigtails nearly whacking him in the head in the process. “Fine, be like that!”
Boots stared at the back of her head, completely baffled by her odd behavior. Did she really believe her own story? Granted, he liked to imagine all sorts of wild things, such as what it would feel like to be a cloud and how do people know which is the start and which is the end on a rainbow … but it never went beyond his imagination into reality. That seemed the sort of thing crazy people did.
So it was with some self-directed surprise that he found himself leaning across the desk to whisper, “It wasn’t a shark. It was a swamp monster.”
The girl’s shoulders stiffened, causing the puffy sleeves of her dress to scrunch by her ears. Very slowly, she turned around to face him again with wide, amazed eyes. “No way! A swamp monster?!” she shouted.
Boots cringed and sank low in his seat as all eyes turned to them once again. Mrs. Pucklesbury cleared her throat sharply and leveled a stern glare their way. “Hearts, do you have something to share with the class?”
“Yeah, I do! Boots just told me that-”
“Forget I asked. Just turn your eyes forward and open your spelling workbook to page thirty-seven. And Boots? I don’t know what the school system in Centurium City is like, but in my classroom there is no talking during lessons.”
Boots tentatively raised a hand and waited for her to nod her permission to continue. “What if we have questions?”
“Then you write it down and ask me after class. Understood?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he mumbled. He really didn’t like it when adults reprimanded him.
“Good, now then back to spelling. As you can see, class, when you combine certain letters together they make a different sound….”
A small wad of paper landed right in the middle of his notebook, breaking his concentration. He picked it up, unfolded it … and squinted as he tried to make sense of the really horrible handwriting. All he could make out was a three and something that looked like it could be an A. Or maybe it was a picture of a unicorn? It was hard to say. He looked up and saw Hearts grinning back at him over her shoulder. She gave him a thumbs up, to which he tentatively responded with one of his own before she turned around to face front again.
This was shaping up to be a very strange first day of school.
“The first day in a new school is always a baptism by fire,” Patience interjected as Hearts took a cake break from storytelling.
Hearts’s eyebrows drew together sharply. That combined with how puffed out her cheeks were from shoving two whole petit fours into her mouth gave her the look of a very confused chipmunk. “A wuh?” she asked around the mouthful of cake she was currently chewing.
“A baptism by fire,” the older woman repeated as she leaned forward to pour some more tea for her young guest, causing the many, many buckles adorning her outfit to click together lightly. “It’s a term to describe being tossed into the middle of a stressful situation.”
Hearts cocked her head at a thoughtful angle and tapped one finger against her chin. “Hmm… baptism by fire….” She nodded once in a decisive manner and declared, “I like it! Me and Boots met during a baptism by fire!”
Patience chuckled and took a sip of tea. “You could say that.”
“I did just say that! Anyway it’s perfect ‘cause of what happened after class.”
“Oh, really?”
“Yup!” Hearts started to reach for a blue petit four, but paused when she noticed there were also snickerdoodle cookies on the tray. She grabbed a cookie again, but unlike with the cakes she took her time nibbling on the treat. Snickerdoodles were her favorite cookies, mostly because the name was fun to say.
“See,” she continued once she’d eaten exactly half of her cookie, “on the way home from school….”