Welcome To Valley High

The moon is bright tonight. Not for the first time in the week, Amy gazes up at the glowing ball of light in the sky, wondering… marvelling.

“Penny for your thoughts?” a voice interrupts her gazing session. The shock breaks her reverie and she turns back awkwardly, stepping on her gown in the process and tripping headlong to the leaf-carpeted ground.

Her father grimaces and shakes his head. “You always were one to fall…” he kneels down beside her, offering a hand which she accepts gratefully and rises up, brushing off dry leaves from her gown and doing her possible best not to be redder than the decaying leaves.

            “I was just—” she mumbles.

            “I know—it’s fine. It’s my fault, I shouldn’t have creeped up on you like that.” Her father smiles, and she joins him too, grateful for his presence.

He guides her back to the stone slab she was sitting on, and makes a show of sitting down. Amy does her best not to laugh; she knows her father is only doing this for her benefit.

            “So…” her father begins, throwing his gaze to the moon, “what’s on your mind?”

Amy stares at the moon for a moment longer and then slumps her shoulders. She faces the direction opposite her father and begins twirling a leaf stalk in her hand.

            “I don’t want to talk about it.”

Her father seems taken aback, but he does not show his surprise. This is a game he has played one too many times. He knows she will talk—she loves to talk—but she will only do so at her own time and convenience, and most definitely not when she feels like she is being cornered. He takes his time, breathing slowly.

            A hand stretches up to the mass of hair on his chin; he strokes his salt-and-pepper beard absent-mindedly.

            “Well, that’s that. Can’t force you to speak now, can I?” He sighs resignedly. “I guess I’ll just stay here and watch the moon a little longer.”

And then he reverts his gaze back to the moon.

            Amy’s shoes draw circles in the dirt, the leaves refusing to allow whatever she wants to draw on the ground become a reality. A twig snaps in her hands. She exhales noisily and pushes the glasses slipping off her nose back into place. She gazes at the ground again, as if interested by the pattern the leaves have formed.

            “It’s just…” she finds herself speaking. “All these kids, they all know somebody. They’re all popular or rich or something, and I’m just… I don’t know.”

Her sigh comes like words escaping from the lips of a poet.

            “I just wish I was… you know…”

Amy swings her legs off the ground and turns to face her father and finds him staring into her eyes.

            “I just wish I was normal.” Her tone is defeated, and she hangs her head low.

Mr. Silas John, an elderly man of fifty-five continues to stare at her with his trademark expression: something caught between a smirk and an annoyed scoff. He continues to look at her, his graying hair glinting silver in the moonlight. He suddenly bursts into laughter: rich, deep, sonorous, and the sound fills the empty grove; the silence of the night amplifying the sound until all that can be heard is his laughter.

He tries to compose himself, but finds he cannot.  “So you want to be normal?” he asks between laughs.

Yes! Amy wants to say. Is it so wrong to want to be normal? To be loved, to be known; to be admired, or at least, feared by other students?

It’s been almost three years since they’d moved here, and nearing three months since she’d started schooling at the community High School.

Mr. Silas continues to hold her with his stare. There is an amused sparkle in his eyes, and the merry sound on his lips, but when he stretches a hand to touch Amy, she shakes his hands off and mutters under her breath, “it’s not funny.”

His laughter dies off. She is still looking at the floor with the concentration of a worker ant, trying to bury her feet in a mound of leaves she has pulled to her side.

            “So you want to be normal?” Mr. Silas asks again. Amy continues to stare at the ground.

            “And what makes you think you are not normal? Hmm?

“You think you are not normal because you wear glasses and are slender, and because you cannot join them to play the way they play?”

Her father heaves up and down in his characteristic manner whenever he wants to prove a point. He is not a small man, he is quite well for his build, but he has a certain proclivity to be often overlooked in a crowded room, his main quality being his indistinguishability.

“You are sulking because you feel like you are not normal. Stop it! Now, look at me. Look at me, Amy!”

She slowly raises her head up to meet his gaze.

“Do your so-called ‘friends’ know that you know the first one-hundred elements and their relative atomic masses?”

She nods her head in the affirmative. Mr. Silas plods along.

            “Do they themselves know the first twenty elements?”

She shakes her head. This is not entirely true, for her two best friends (her two only friends) know the entire one-hundred and eighteen elements, relative atomic masses, properties and all.

            “Do your friends know the name of the tallest dinosaur?”

Again, she shakes her head and stifles a smile. Her best friends knew all these and so much more, and her father knew it. Still, she was comforted by his attempt to cheer her up.

He often did not have the time, working nearly all the time.

            “Do your friends know that you use only thirty minutes to write your one-hour exams and still come out with A’s?”

Her smile breaks out now and she buries her face in her hands to hide the colour. Her father smiles as well, his speech becoming more and more erratic.

            “Do your friends know that you know nearly all of the Marvel comic and movie characters and the correct terms of their abilities?”

He continues asking questions until Amy is practically rolling on the ground in laughter. He helps her up to her feet and helps her find her fallen glasses. When she is seated, she tries to calm down by breathing deeply. They are both panting.

            “Do your friends know any of these things?”

            “No, sir.” Her answer is bashful.

            “So, why then would you assume that you are the one that is not normal? If anything, it is they who are not normal. Be proud of who you are, my dear, because you’re the only one like you.”

It is something she has heard so many times in her lifetime. Her father, an eccentric man never quite failed to point out how different one must be in a world full of simple-minded simpletons. He used every single opportunity afforded him to speak on the subject.

He had a great many people that admired his speech—when he was with them. His gaze is up now, admiring the stars or perhaps just letting the wind fill the space beneath his glasses. He inhales and the sound fills the backyard. His presence fills the backyard.

The night is not cold, but a chill wind blows through the trees, and Amy’s cheeks blossoms with colour, going a deeper red than the sun when it had set that evening.

            “So… let me ask you again, Amy. You see how amazing you are, and how tiny your classmates are compared to you?”

Her nod is enthusiastic.

            “Good. Good. So now… do you still want to be normal?

Amy rubs her eyes behind her glasses and tries unsuccessfully to hide her laughter, and it turns into a wheezing cough. She lifts her hand to her nose and sniffs. Then mutters, “no.”

Her father smiles and his eyes light up. He lifts his large hand and pats her on the back. “Good! Now, let’s go inside. The mosquitoes also gaze at the moon.”

Her laugh is interspersed with hiccups and snorts. She rises, but her father is already ahead of her. She walks gingerly to the door behind her, her white nightgown rippling in the moonlight.

*          *          *

            “Amy… Amy!”

She bolts awake, hair tumbling from her face. She has a comb in her hand poised to throw it should anything happen.

Her father walks into the room and stares at her. “Amy!”

The shock is enough to make her drop the comb in fright. Her father continues to stare at her, now with a sneer on his face.

            “Get off the bed, young lady. Don’t you have school to get to?”

Amy rubs her eyes and fidgets—the prospect of school is in the least enticing to her at this moment. Grumbling, she picks up her glasses from her bedside and puts it on, and the world shifts into clearer focus.

            “There’s no need for this, dad.” She mutters under her breath as she gets down from the bed.

            “What was that, young lady?”

            “I’m going, dad!”

            “You’d better,” his nostrils flare. He turns to leave the room. “Breakfast’s downstairs.”

Amy closes the bathroom door behind her and leans against the door, sighing.

Here’s to another torturous day.

Fifteen minutes later, she is done bathing and dressing up and now she sits down to a bowl of cereals. Her father holds a newspaper in one hand, his face lost behind the leafy pages of the paper, and he intermittently spoons cereal behind the newspaper.

He grunts occasionally to acknowledge a piece of news he has read, but is otherwise silent. Amy buries her head in her food, trying to eat in a dignified manner, but also trying to see just how much cereal she can cram in her mouth.

Her father coughs once and Amy looks up. He father is looking at her now. His bowl of cereals lies empty, but he has picked up a cup of coffee which he now blows on. He takes a long sip and melts with content into his chair.

            “The bus will be here soon.” His voice is deep and grumbling, like the voice of a man about to confront his child with an uncomfortable topic. Amy swallows and sits up straighter.

            “Yeah, I… guess so.”

            “And you’re all packed for school?” He takes another long sip of his steaming coffee and hides his face behind his paper.

What is it with him today?

            “Yup. I’ve got bag, books, pencil… everything. I’m ready.”

“Good.” He breathes as if he has been speaking with bated breath. “And Amy… I don’t want to ever hear all this talk about not being normal.”

His paper has come down from his face, and his face is set straight. “No more. Alright?”

Amy stares down at her bowl of half-eaten cereals and manages to mumble a yessir. Her father nods his satisfaction and goes back to his coffee, slurping with enthusiasm. He seems glad the conversation is finally past them, even though Amy wishes her father would often spend more time with her.

It is a silly wish, she knows. He is quite busy with work already, and trying to provide for the both of them, and any other thing that is going on in his life.

Perhaps he misses mother, Amy thinks. It has only been five years now since…

Amy pushes the thought out of her mind. If he gazed in this direction and spotted her dour face, he would ask questions, and Amy would be obliged to answer, and the one thing both of them did not need right now was another reminiscence.

The past hurt too much just yet. She is about to spoon cereal into her mouth when she hears a loud blaring horn.

            “Shit!”

Her father raises an eyebrow from behind his paper but otherwise says nothing. She stands frozen, waiting for his judgement. One should never use cusswords in front of an elder.

Time passes between them like a grain of sand falling through free space. At last, Mr. Silas coughs once and says in an offhand manner, “you want to stretch your legs, Amy? Because that’s all you’ll do should that bus leave without you on it.”

She stuffs shovelfuls of cereals into her mouth, and milk trickles down her mouth. She hurriedly throws some more books into her bag and mumbles an apology to her father before speeding out the door. The screen slams before her father can wish her a good day at school. He sighs in his chair and continues reading his paper.

            The school bus would gleam in the morning sun if it weren’t so ancient and dusty and battered-up. The driver of the bus honks impatiently, and a few children jump in fright and begin to giggle.

Amy jumps over the little gate in front of her house, not bothering to unlatch the gate like every normal person. By the time she gets to the bus, it is half-filled with children and teenagers most of whom are wearing hoodies and jackets. The driver, a stout, red man rubs vigorously at his face with a kerchief, mopping up sweat from his red face while the children in the bus raise their chatter to a crescendo.

Amy walks all the way to the back of the bus, trying to find a seat that no one will think to seat close to. She spots an empty place at the right side of the end of the bus and walks to occupy it. Once she sits, she adjusts the glasses once more back to her nose, and plugs in earphones. She hits play on her phone and music begins to stream into her ear—classical music, just the way she likes it; intense, soft, and melancholy. She closes her eyes and melts back into her chair, oblivious of the world around her. Outside, the children all pile into the bus and the red-faced driver sets the bus on the path to school. Beethoven swells in her ears.

Because Amy closes her eyes during the bus ride and is un-interrupted by the outside world, she does not notice the clusters of trees on the sides of the road. Neither does she have time to appreciate the golden rays of sunlight that stream into the bus from the morning sun, bathing everything in a luxuriant glow.

She does not notice that they have made three turns so far, nor does she notice that the children in the bus are now singing a rhyme loudly, and that the older teenagers in the bus are trying to quiet the children down.

She does not notice that when a dog runs in front of the bus and the red-faced driver slams on the brakes, that a teenage boy who is standing to tell a joke is thrown to the floor of the bus. She does not notice that the bus has arrived at school, or that everyone is getting off the bus. Only when a knuckle raps at her window does she start, rankled and aloof.

            “Get off the damn bus, Snow White!” the red-faced driver yells from the other side of the glass window. He is still rubbing vigorously at his face and neck, dabbing moisture away from his sweating skin with his kerchief.

She hastily shouts an apology and tries to stand up too quickly, but she falls to the floor of the bus. She looks down at her legs and finds that the laces of her shoes have been tied together. She sniffles a sob and gets up, her face nearly as red as the driver’s. She sits on the floor of the bus, untangling the shoe laces. She grabs her bag off her chair, but someone has left her bag open and her books pour out.

The red-faced driver looks on with growing irritation and turns his face away. Already, the front of his checked-shirt is soaked through with perspiration, and it is yet the early hours of the morning.

She puckers her lips and blows air through her mouth. She does not bother to put the books back in the bag, but carries them in her hand, nearly swaying from the weight and tipping forward towards the door.

Amy steps down from the bus unsteadily, books clutched to her chest, and earphones dangling from her ears. Some of the students in front of the school stare in her direction and begin to snigger; others glance briefly and revert their gaze back to whatever they are doing.

The red-faced driver slams the door of the bus behind her and Amy jumps, startled. He scrunches his face up in a frown at her and she finds herself red once more. She lifts a hand to adjust her glasses and her books come falling to the floor. The bus driver huffs and dabs some more at his neck and face and wheels the bus away, leaving Amy and her scattering of books. The students burst into ill-timed guffaws once more and slowly begin to disperse. Amy bends to pick up the books and gazes up for a moment at the place where she is most out of her element—she didn’t have any element to begin with, she tells herself.

A sign at the entrance of the school reads in gleaming paint and well-ordered lettering: VALLEY HIGH. A few months ago, some graduating students had gotten a ladder and had added the words, ‘of the Shadows of Death’ to the school sign, making it the Valley of the Shadows of Death High School. Amy thinks it ironic, and although the paint had already been cleaned off and the sign repainted—even though the students were never caught—you could still make out the washed-out painted scrawl should you ever decide to search for it on the sign.

It comforts her, this little act of rebellion, and she wonders if the students or student that had done it were just as different and she finds herself smiling. She picks up her books and holds them to her chest again. She sucks in a breath and mutters under her breath, “I shall fear no evil,” and strides forward, determined that today will be a good day. Just positivity!

            She smiles and steps forward just as a tomato comes sailing out the doors, headed straight for her face.

SPLAT!

There is a shriek and a then a giggle, and a gaggle of laughs. Amy does her best to maintain the smile on her face, but it is difficult especially with flecks of tomato juice on her face. She pulls her face into a smile, ignoring the barely stifled laughter and walks straight into the school. Another beautiful day at Valley High. Just Positivity!