2.
The rooftop of the school was as good a place to think as Nineteen Eighty-Four. Nara rested her arms on the railing and gazed dreamily into the horizon, looking past the red and orange roofs of houses into the robin’s egg blue sky. The sun heated her back so much that it felt like she was facing away from a stove with an element turned on to its maximum level, but it wasn’t an entirely unpleasant sensation – it simply felt like summer: the idea of summer and memories of all the ones that had passed. A quick memory pattered through her mind with tiny footsteps, the type of secondary thought that is automatically shelved for use in the coming night’s dream, passing through her system like the scent of lilacs temporarily filling the air whilst bicycling past them downhill: that memory, so simple, of playing by a stream in a pallid yellow frock, eyeing all of the cattails growing out of the water and wondering what it would feel like to grab those great brown cylinders, so close and yet so far. She sighed.
Someone stepped onto the roof from the entranceway but Nara didn’t bother to turn around; light footsteps came towards her, sounding like the wings of a butterfly beating the ground. A friendly hallo broke the air behind her like a hawk descending on a mouse.
‘Nara? You weren’t in class so I asked if I could go to the washroom and headed up here to check,’ said Helen, her friend from history. ‘It’s really not like you to miss a class like this. I remember you came up here before after that thing between you and Jeremy, but that was a lot of months ago. I mean, I’m sorry for bringing that up, but I’m just saying that I know something has to be wrong. So what’s wrong, Nara?’
Nara folded her arms on the railing and used them as a chin rest, gazing wistfully into space like a young female Ovid wondering what might be happening in Rome at that very moment. With the sun bearing down on them, she thought about moths desperately kissing a lightbulb in the hopes of freeing the white dwarf trapped inside; the sun itself was bright enough to kiss and be kissed by the luckiest of gods. Helen leaned her back on the railing and faced the sun while Nara faced the town; for several tranquil moments they remained in those positions, Nara viewing one half of the world while Helen viewed the other. Then Helen gave Nara a sidelong glance and elbowed her a little.
‘Come on, Nara. I don’t know how long I can stay in the washroom for. What’s bugging you?’
‘I don’t know,’ mumbled Nara through the fabric of her sleeves. ‘Some crazy Ape Fissure fan found out where I live. I don’t know.’
‘What does that mean?’ Helen asked. ‘“A crazy fan found out where I live.” I don’t know what that means. Do you mean the comic strip?’
‘Yeah.’
Helen pulled her head back and looked straight ahead at the dandelion clouds above.
Nara removed her arms from the railing and sat down holding her knees. ‘Okay, I’ll tell you. Do you really want to know? Because I’m going to tell you and you’re probably going to think I’m crazy. But this is it – I think there’s some kind of plot going on to hurt my dad. So what do you think of that? It all started when I saw this guy basically standing in front of my house, this guy who was taller than any of the basketball players here, and I went up to him to call him out on it and he basically told me he was a stalker, and that Ape Fissure has to be in the papers again “or else”. I think the “or else” means doing something really bad to my dad. Anyway, I tried to shrug it off and went to the arcade, and then Billie and I, we saw this like escaped convict playing Street Fighter and he basically threatened to kill Billie. It was just all too surreal; in fact everything is surreal right now, like everything is shaking or blurring or something. We saw this kid getting beat up afterwards so we helped him out, but I know that that’s not connected to anything or anything. Maybe none of this is connected but then again maybe some of it is. I don’t know. How could I possibly know? I’m just a girl – I’m not a detective or a super hero; I’m not anything at all. Helen, what do you think I should do?’
Her friend vacuumed the air around her before she spoke. ‘Well, if you’re so completely serious then why haven’t you gone to the police about it? That’s the first thing I would’ve done.’
Nara shook her head. ‘It’s all so strange,’ she said, her voice a fragile, anachronistically brittle leaf caught in a summer breeze. ‘None of it feels real. Why would I go to the police about something that doesn’t even feel real? I just need to be told that everything will be okay and then everything will be okay. Okay?’
‘Everything will be okay,’ Helen said, gently running comforting fingers through Nara’s hair. ‘I should run back to class now; I’m just going to tell the teacher that I ate a really bad pineapple or something.’ She knelt down to squeeze Nara’s hands. ‘Try to show up if you think you can. You never know, it might help keep your mind off things.’
Nara nodded slowly. Bye, she said.
Take care of yourself.
3.
Eventually Nara reentered the school and waited outside of the English room until history ended. The bell rang so loudly and quickly that it sounded as though it was being shot at with a machine gun; she had to protect her ears from the piercing noise by holding onto them until it dwindled into heavy echo that sunk into her body and sped up the beating of her butterfly heart like a really good song sometimes does.
Almost simultaneously, the classroom doors opened into the hallway and hundreds of students filed out of the classrooms like a colony of ants bent on retrieving nourishment. Nara closed her eyes and felt what seemed like a thousand strangers brushing past her. She held her breath and counted down from twenty before allowing herself to exhale and open her eyes again – the hall was noticeably emptier now and she slipped into class before she could be marked down as a second late.
She sat by the window so she would have a pleasantly auriferous distraction from the white-haired teacher’s impossibly monotonous voice. Mr. Hubert mumbled unintelligibly to himself as he counted the heads of everyone in the room, then proceeded to crack open a large hardbound teacher’s edition of Don Quixote. Everyone else opened the mangled student editions that had been placed on their desks, some seeming as though they had ventured into the very depths of hell itself and survived, however barely.
‘I want every student to have a turn at reading today,’ Mr. Hubert said to the class’s collective groaning. ‘I’m sure everyone has been enjoying their half day; most of you must be utterly exhausted from playing sports and whatever frolicking you do nowadays, so I’m going to go easy on you for once. No homework today. Now, let’s start with you, Sarah. Page three hundred one, please.’
Sarah stood up to read in her little Lolita voice; she was clearly Mr. Hubert’s favourite pupil. From time to time she would bite her lip and brush back stray strands of hair from her face, reading her selection with the same level of cognition that a small child has when asked to recite Shakespeare. Mr. Hubert’s stoneface made the inner workings of his mind impervious to easy interpretation, but then again that was probably a good thing given the circumstances.
The cloying coos of Mr. Hubert’s private songbird filled the classroom’s stuffy air. Nara watched the teacher’s mountainous façade for any discernible movement or moment of emotional weakness, but found none; he was as immovable as Mount Fuji, frozen to the earth.
Nara suspected Mr. Hubert to be a failed writer – as all high school English teachers are – for she precociously surmised that all failed writers housed a mandatory predilection towards their failing pupils. But let’s leave it at that, she thought. Let’s leave it at that.
Everyone had a turn at reading thanks to Mr. Hubert so expertly inventorying the time like a chronological stock agent. Nara herself gave a particularly dry reading of dialogue between Sancho Panza and a stupendously stupid innkeeper; she had lost the thread of the plot after so many of the other kittens had tangled it up and knocked it under various desks and tables. Obviously this was to be expected when such a daunting tome was placed in the hands of teenagers, the majority of them scoffing at anything past the pop song length of two hundred pages.
Some minor shuffling occurred behind Nara and the window beside her vibrated as though it had been prodded by a rudely pointing finger. ‘Look!’ came an excited whisper. ‘Isn’t that William Petal? He’s the youngest student to ever get the lead in Exiles! But what’s he doing out there? Is that his dad with him?’
Trying her best not to appear too interested – a typically teenage habit that she wished she could shake completely – Nara turned her head ever so slightly and looked through the window: There, walking with a middle-aged man along the snow-white stone pathway that led across the school’s verdant front field, was the boy whom Billie had rescued in an unexpected act of heroism. The man wore a striking green suit that would camouflage him completely if he ever stepped off the path; he wrapped a paternal arm around William’s shoulders in a comforting half-embrace. William Petal deserves far more than this, Nara thought. Such an easy target for bullies – but what can anyone do about it?
Nara spent the remainder of class with her chin in her hand and a disconsolate sidelong glance out the window. All of her thoughts were tangled in the multicoloured ribbons of a technicolour daydream starring William and his green-suited father as they discussed masculinity; the events in her mind played out panel by panel and she realised she could fold them into a comic strip if ever the fancy struck her. Surely her father would approve. The green suit would be a most memorably imaginative touch of visual comedy clover.
Using the front half of a broken pencil she found on the windowsill, Nara began doodling a caricature of William’s dad on the inside cover of her Don Quixote. She had to take liberties with his face, as she never got a particularly good look at it, but the end result was as fine a doodle as she had ever crafted out of boredom or distraction. As a finishing touch she circled his head with a halo of rose petals like twisted thick fingers and wrote the name Petal beside him. Satisfied, she gazed at her creation until he began to blur in her vision, giving the subtle impression of being animated. What else could she do? Well, since she had Petal, which was only one part of a rose, perhaps she could create a few more characters in order to keep him company. After a bout of zoning out completely, she alighted upon a most recent memory, that of the tall man outside of her house. Stem! She decided it in a flash of brilliance, the lightbulb above her head almost fit to bursting. With rushed movements of her nimble fingers she doodled the tall man as she had remembered him. What else? She felt on a roll now and indeed Thorn came next, a shorter man than the others with a huge scar across his throat as though it had once been a trough for vampires.
Petal, Stem and Thorn gazed up at their creator like inquisitive children questioning their newborn existence. This sudden brush with creativity raised her spirits more than any words by her brother Billie or rooftop Helen had been able to, not to say that those words hadn’t been welcome. Still, the figures before her were merely lifeless doodles – harmless voodoo dolls of the most random assortment of men.
Only after she was the last one remaining in class did she realise that the final bell had rung a long time ago; she left the classroom as dejectedly as Raskolnikov during any given stage of his bleak existence, though her own existence could never be as bleak as a protagonist out of Russian literature. For this at least she could be thankful.
Billie was waiting outside the door with a bundle of folded white paper, a sad bend to them typically seen in flowers for a long lost lover. ‘Hey, Nara,’ he greeted her, giving her arm a friendly tap with the bundle. ‘How were your classes?’
‘Gosh – slow, dull daydreams,’ she answered as she eyed the paper baton. ‘What you got there?’
‘Oh, this is all homework,’ he explained, lifting up the bundle as if producing evidence from a crime scene.
‘Looks like a manuscript for a novella,’ quipped Nara, sincerely impressed by its volume despite the masquerade of wit; she felt along the bundle’s crease with widened eyes, carefully peeling back the corners of random pages as though she had been given special permission to fondle the most yellowed edition of the holiest scripture.
‘They’re just taking advantage of our cancelled classes,’ Billie told her. ‘I can’t say that I blame them, but I do and will.’
Nara took her hand away from the bundle to look back into Billie’s eyes, and she nodded. Caught in wavy reflections on the thin sheens of her delicate orbs were the most heartbreaking sparkles of unspoken sincerity, such a look of intent focus that caused Billie’s heart to sing a tremulous song that would forever be muted by eternally regrettable platonic understanding. Divulging in the expository records of their shared history reveals that exboyfriend Jeremy had stolen the diaphanous innocence of Nara’s blown glass heart from not only the lady in question herself but Billie as well, because he had loved her, too. As the very thought of a soliloquy made him tremble, we are allowed this compromise. The Jeremy incident was one they no longer wished to discuss.
‘School is the wound and homework is salt,’ Nara said. ‘So I guess graduating heals the wound until another one opens up, like university or college or a job.’
‘We’re perpetually wounded creatures,’ Billie agreed, then added almost absently, as though he realised he was saying something that went without saying, ‘In more ways than one.’
‘I think that’s enough high school philosophy for one day,’ said Nara as she turned on her heel and began walking down the hall. Billie shrugged his shoulders and followed along beside her; their decidedly contrasting appearances – coupled with the dim lighting of the lengthy hall – made the pair look like a prisoner being escorted by a prison warden.
Soon they reached the end of the hall and passed through the golden stairwell; the act of finally exiting the school was as duly revitalising as a jailbreak.
‘Listen, if you ever need anything,’ Billie started.
Nara nodded. ‘Thanks, Billie.’
‘I’ll probably be studying all night but you can always call me up at any time,’ he told her. ‘I’m sure I’ll appreciate the distraction.’
They parted ways amicably across the street.
After a moment of seemingly silky silence Nara realised that something felt terribly wrong. Her head felt like an answering machine filled with too many messages from too many people; the best thing she could do was go over the words that Billie had left with her and ignore the others. This rewind and play continued as she journeyed towards her house using the usual ten minute route, and the songs of summer birds heralded her arrival home – this time the coast was clear, free of any foreboding fins or tall men with newspapers.
Her home was still as picturesque and welcoming as she had left it, a veritable fortress of peace of mind. However, the walk up the lawn sped up her heartbeat for no reason that she could fathom. Was it fear of any repercussions from her talk with the tall man? Was it the unshakeable feeling that an audience had all eyes on her? As soon as she reached for the doorknob the door automatically opened itself, causing the most arctic shiver to trek rapidly up her spine.
Standing before her in the entranceway was her mother, eyes swollen and holding a moistened handkerchief to her cheek. She looked like she had shrunk down by several sizes.
‘Oh, my little cloud,’ said her mother in the most paralyzing vibrato, ‘Your father’s in the hospital.’
Epilogue.
As always the Risen Roses sat around the table for their meeting, only this time with the notable addition of shards of a shattered teapot strewn about the wooden surface. The legs of Thomas’ crumpled body wrapped around the legs of his chair in a strange, snaky and utterly stiff parody of a mating ritual. Shimmering spots of snow and stars shone in the black oil of his life’s blood that flooded the floor and dirtied everyone’s shoes – everyone had become sick of Thomas and Thorn was both the first and last to do something about it. Basically it had all boiled down to Earl Grey.
‘I received a bill from our friends at the hospital,’ said Petal, his words cutting through the heavy layer of buttery death that had solidified in the air. ‘Terence Darling is currently on life support, but of course this won’t last for long. Thorn, you’ve outdone yourself – the doctors say they’ve never seen natural causes look so authentically natural before. You deserve a golden rose for this one.’
Thorn simply folded his arms and nodded like a genie granting a wish.
‘To the Boss you are, I’m sure,’ Petal added. ‘We should be receiving word from the papers soon on whether or not Ape Fissure will continue its run, and I’m sure it will be given the appropriate period of mourning. So this is mission accomplished, gents. Give yourselves a pat on the back.’
In lieu of such an action they simply stared vacantly at the broken teapot and the floral arrangement that bordered its millions of pieces, a delicate piece of china taken from the frozen pages of A Rebours. Stem picked up a stunningly perfect triangle and turned it over in his hand until he accidentally cut himself, drops of claret mingling with the remains of tea.
‘I quit,’ he said, with such finality and authority that his words could have literally crushed the table beneath them without surprising anyone. ‘We don’t have a soul anymore – we’re just hired goons for madmen. Life is more precious than this.’
Thorn coughed to break the awkward silence that followed. Nobody in the room moved, especially Thomas. Then Stem drew himself up to his full height, an impressive sight indeed, and turned to open the door behind him. The lint that lined their suits glowed in the light that seeped through.
He stood there silently for a solid minute, the gnarled root of his hand fixed fully on the doorknob, then he quite unexpectedly shut the door, causing Thorn and Petal to jump a little despite themselves. Stem pulled his chair out again and sat down with a satisfying thump.
‘What’s it going to be then, eh?’ Thorn asked, spinning random bits of teapot on the table like tops.
‘We have to get paid somehow,’ Stem admitted.
‘That’s the spirit!’ exclaimed Petal, clasping his hands together like an old woman who had just received the necessary ingredients to bake biscuits. ‘Now, what’s a meeting without tea? Let’s have Thomas get us some, just like old times!’
‘Yes, Thomas!’
‘Tea, please!’
‘Thomas!’
‘Thomas!’
‘Thomas!’
‘Thomas?’
P.S.
Nara sat on the edge of the side of her bed with her head in her hands, her rich black hair spilling between her fingers like the finest threads of silk. When she removed her hands she leaned a little to the side and took a heavy breath. Then she sat up straight and stared directly ahead of her, blinking only when necessary. After a while she repositioned herself ever so slightly.
Eventually she moved away from view and then came back to sit down, this time as music began to play. The tune was as sweetly melancholic as required – Closer by Low. She sat staring at the invisible stars of our souls until the song finished. Then she got up again and went to her desk. There was a single sheet of pure white paper centred directly in the middle.
A pencil on the side of the desk rolled a little as she sat down, and she picked up the subtly chewed utensil in her dainty, shaking fingers. From there she drew four empty squares in horizontal succession. After pausing for a moment while holding the eraser end of the pencil to her lips, Nara wrote the words Still In Movement above the first panel. Everything shakes.
Say goodbye to your father. Thank him for everything he's done for you.
Congratulations, you're going to succeed.