Chapter One
Yelling
Looking back, what started this entire ordeal was entirely mundane.
The school year was almost over and I couldn’t concentrate. The freedom of summer pulled at me too strongly. I yearned to be outside running around, instead of sitting at a desk doing math. Stupid math.
My eyes wandered to the posters I had hanging up in my room. There was one for my high schools football team, the Trojans. It was a horrifically, old, stale name for a team, I thought. Why couldn’t the school think of anything original? Who choose the names for high school football teams anyway? I surely would have thought of something better.
My attention wandered to the tablet sitting on my desk. On a whim I picked it up and tried to turn it on. The screen remained dark. I had charged it, hadn’t I? I plugged it in so I could use it later.
I finally returned my attention to the math homework. Can’t get distracted, I thought. The homework was trigonometry, finding out angles from the side lengths of triangles. Boring, probably useless. When was I ever going to use this in the real world? When was I going to find a conveniently placed triangle and think ‘Gee golly! I really wish I knew what angle this was!’ Never in my lifetime.
Not now, especially. Earlier in the day, while I was still being miserable at school, my mom had gotten a call from the district. It was one of those calls that politely explained that you’re kid had screwed up big time and, oh yeah, they might flunk high school.
The door creaked open and then slammed shut.
My heart rate tripled. Quickly I tried to focus on my homework. It didn’t work. I couldn’t concentrate. I felt myself sweating and I think I began to hyperventilate. This was it. I was doomed.
My dad was home. I thought I could hear voices whispering downstairs, one presumably my mom, the other, my dad. My heart rate continued to rise. Images formed in my head as I imagined the terrible outcomes. I wished I could push them out like so many others seemed able to do.
Slowly, rythmically, absolutely, my dad came up the stairs. “Arthur”, he said. “Unlock the door and come out.”
Silently I walked to the door and reached for the doorknob. As I grasped it, I swore I felt a little shock, like I had walked across a carpet with wool socks. Must have been an illusion of the stress, because my room had nothing but hardwood flooring.
“Stop stalling, Arthur. Open the door.” I unlocked the door and opened it. Standing before me was my dad. We stood in silence for a moment.
“… I want you to know that I love you. That’s why I’m doing this”
His tone was eerily calm. It showed me how very upset he was.
“But I have to ask why? Why are you doing this to yourself?!” His voice was rising. “This could mean the difference between graduation! This could make the difference between going to a good school and not making it to one at all! Why are you neglecting everything?!”
He was practically shouting at this point. Still I remained a mute. I knew everything he was saying was true. I didn’t want to let him have the satisfaction of knowing that though.
“Do you understand? Do you get what’s happening? You could end up jobless, living on the streets if you don’t put in the hard work! I mean… are you even listening? Look me in the eyes.”
Trembling, I looked into his eyes. Funny how his usually warm blue eyes could seem so scary know.
“Do you understand, Arthur?”, he growled. I still had nothing to say.
“Speak for yourself!”, my dad shouted in frustration. “Tell me why you’re being so stupid!”
That was it. The final straw. The one that broke the camel’s back. I lowered my face to the ground. Huh. Guess I’d never noticed how far away my feet were. How blurry they were too. I looked back up at my dad, and stared, defiantly now.
“Why can’t you stop blaming me? It’s always my fault when something goes wrong. It’s never the stupid system that’s screwing my over, or the lazy teachers. It’s always me! I’m always the one being stupid!”
“Because everyone else seems to get it but you!”, he roared. I flinched. “And if you don’t like it, you can get out of my house because I won’t have leech doing nothing but eating my food!”
“Maybe I will leave.” I said in that same calm, eerie voice my father had used.
I out the door purposefully. Fine, if he wanted me to leave, I was going to leave. I didn’t need him. But before I could get through my bedroom door, he grabbed my arm.
“Stop, Arthur! You can’t leave. I didn’t mean…”
“I don’t care”, I said as I ripped my arm out of his grasp. I stormed down the stairs and through the front door. My mom looked on with a worried look, her mouth pursing as she hurried inside. I stalked down the sidewalk and glared at anyone who dared to pass me by. I wasn’t in the mood to talk.
Emotions swirled inside me as I walked through the streets. I had known something like this was coming the entire day. As soon as my mom found out about my missing homework from that letter I had known what was going to happen. I had tried to ignore it, convince myself it wouldn’t happen. Didn’t work.
The emotions that surged inside of me were hard to decipher. Some of it was anger. Anger with the system that was failing me; anger with my dad for blaming me. A little bit was fear. I wasn’t going to pass this class, and part of me was scared of what would happen because of that.
The last part was some relief. This was finally over. No more lying about school.
Anger though, was still the prominent emotion. Even if a little part of me was glad to let someone else know, I was furious that my dad had started accusing me. I wasn’t to blame – homework was made to keep students occupied, to keep them from doing what they wanted. It was designed to keep them under wraps. It doubled as a convenient way for teachers to shove off their job onto someone else.
Darkness startled me from my inner monologue. While I’d been pondering and silently venting on the world, the sun had gone down. Street lights had come on and every so often a car would trumble by with glowing headlights. Crickets chirped, and lightning bugs flitted through the air.
It was peaceful. Somehow that felt wrong. I neared a park and sat down on a bench. I was quite a walk from home, and though I knew the place, I wasn’t exactly sure how to get home. Not that I was exactly sure I wanted to go home.
I sat there for a little while. Maybe a few hours, maybe just a couple of minutes. However long it was, I wasn’t prepared for what came next.
As one, all the streetlights went out. In the park, not ten feet behind me, an electrical buzzing crackled to life. Turning around, I found the source. An arc of electricity reached from the ground to above head level. It buzzed and sparked dangerously, ominously. But that wasn’t the strangest part.
The strangest part was that it opened to another world. Light, sunlight, poured through it. A scene of a meadow in a forest was in view. I couldn’t believe it. I blinked my eyes, thinking it was an illusion of the light. Couldn’t be – I had heard it first. Was I hallucinating? Was I dreaming?
It was probably a dream. Today had felt like a nightmare so far.
Up close it was no less weird. Ripples spread across it’s surface where bugs had gone through, as if the portal were made of water. I was transfixed. I began to reach out to touch it, but hesitated.
If this were a movie, or a book, this would be when the cops arrived and shooed everyone away, claiming it was some something dangerous. Or something would come through the portal and begin to wreak havoc.
I waited, but nothing happened. Of course that’s what happened. This wasn’t a movie. There wasn’t going to be anything big a dramatic happening.
Was I dreaming? If this was a dream, going through this portal wouldn’t hurt.
And if it wasn’t a dream, how could I resist an opportunity like this? My life had gotten pretty terrible. It was irresponsible, dangerous even. My dad would tell me it was stupid. That I was stupid to even consider it.
That was all I needed to decide. I reached up and touched the portal, creating ripples throughout. I took a step, and then another. Ripples danced upon the surface, and in a second, I was through. The sunlight beat down, upon the most beautiful meadow I had ever seen. The trees were unlike anything I had had to study in any science class I had taken.
If my dad knew I had done something this dumb, he probably would have had a heart attack. He probably –
I felt myself go numb as the buzzing suddenly stopped. My heart went into my throat as I slowly turned around. The portal wasn’t there.
It was gone.
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