On the first day of high school three years ago, I joined the Chess Club.
Now, now, before all of you groan and commit me to the crazy and loser box, you should know that at Trinity High, the Chess Club was actually quite respectable, as was shown by the prime spot reserved for us in the school quad.
Even now, right under the shade of the old, gigantic tree that has been there since forever, my club-mates were working out their cognitive abilities and exercising their mental muscle.
The teachers thought that the reason the chess players were left alone was because the Chess Club had won several chess tournaments, proving that we were in fact a group to contend with. The main reason why we did not suffer cruel acts of punishment and humiliation was because of the underground poker game we held each year.
For the past three years, the undisputed champion of said poker game was, surprisingly, our very own chairman, who used his winnings to procure lovely collector’s item chess sets of both Alice in Wonderland and The Lord of the Rings.
Even I had to admit, the money was well spent.
After nodding at some familiar faces, I hunkered down my spot under our club's usual tree and lied on my back, watching the way sunlight danced through the thick green leaves. Usually, I preferred to be in some dark corner of the school where there wouldn’t be too many people wandering around, intruding on my time and personal space, but that was nothing that stylish shades and a well-chosen playlist couldn’t help.
If only this method worked against them.
But no, they were too bright, too loud, too involved to be ignored, muffled or avoided.
That was one of the first things I had learned. There was no avoiding them. Wherever there were people, there they were, watching, observing, listening…influencing.
And considering the fact that Trinity High was teeming with teenagers, susceptible and impulsive, they swarmed the place. I couldn’t turn my head without seeing one or two, or in some special cases, three, hovering around someone or another.
I tried shutting my eyes, closing my ears, and numbing my senses, but nothing worked. I just had to work around it like my mother and my Uncle had told me to, and pretend that I couldn’t see them, that I didn’t know about them.
I wondered how long I could keep this up before I joined the padded-cells brigade.
I ran my tongue over my teeth and swallowed when I tasted…sunlight; bright, golden, and hot, and knew that one was close. That was the trouble, my talent didn’t just stop at seeing or hearing like my mom’s, I could literally taste their presence, sense them in the air. Even now I felt heat creeping up my arm as if I was standing in the sun instead of lying in the shade and I felt the urge to open my eyes and see—the way a character in a horror movie would feel when there was someone or something breathing down their neck; and instead of running they turned, only to find an axe murderer or some kind of evil beastie.
I felt my heart pump faster and I could feel sweat gathering at my temples, despite the shade. I tried to steady my breathing—it wouldn’t do to attract attention, and they would hear and notice my elevated heart rate and my clear distress—but the more I pulled breath into my lungs, the more I could smell them, the more I tasted them, and that jacked up my heartbeat even more.
I pressed my lips together to stop myself from mumbling incoherently, and my thoughts shifted to the Triplets. They could calm me down, they could take my mind off my panic, but I knew the Triplets would be holding court by now and would be too busy to take care of me. The Triplets were popular, they were the very symbol of the High Court of Trinity High (triplets, Trinity, big laughs all around). They were what other people thought would never have existed. They were popular and they were nice.
So, being nice and being related to me, they would of course stop whatever they were doing to baby their weird, crazy cousin; but today that didn’t cut it for me, and because of that I didn’t stand up and run to the Triplets. Instead, I kept quiet and did mental visualizations.
“Ah, sleeping beauty.”
I almost cried in relief at the low, familiar voice, and did in fact feel my eyes sting when the voice affected me the way it always did. The raspy, almost touchable tones changed vowels and consonants into a web, a filter, a cocoon that blanketed my senses.
“Are you really sleeping?”
I concentrated on the cadences of that sweet, sweet voice, and almost melted to the ground beneath my back. I saw the brightness pulled back from my eyelids, tasted nothing on my tongue but the banana pancakes I had eaten for breakfast and felt the heat smothered by the moist coolness of the early morning rain.
I rolled my eyes behind closed lids when I felt a finger poke my shoulder. “Hey, are even you alive?”
I opened my eyes to meet pale green eyes framed by sooty lashes, those mischievous eyes in sharp relief on the strong, tanned face.
“Gabe.” I kept my supine position on the grass but crossed my legs at the ankles and added a smirk for good measure. My nod was polite enough, but the body language was insolent and challenging.
His smile grew an inch wider.
“I thought you weren’t going to come home for two more weeks.”
He shrugged broad shoulders. Even in the morning before class, his white uniform shirt was already wrinkled, his striped blue-yellow tie stuffed into his pocket, and his sleeves pushed to the elbows. The build under the shirt was slender but hard muscled, the type that you didn’t get by working religiously at a gym but by sheer, laborious, field work. Same goes for the tan and the gold highlights on his raggedly cut brown hair, which was now pulled into a half ponytail. No sitting in the salon for Gabe; he got it the old fashioned way, spending lots of hours beneath the glaring heat of the sun.
He sat down beside me, blocking the school building and everything inside it from my sight. “Cut due to some problems.”
I perked up at the mention of ‘problems.’ I knew when it came to my best friend in the whole wide world that these so-called problems would range from (accidentally) setting something on fire to fooling around with a reverend’s daughter. Two things that Gabriel Shannah had been known to do, without a qualm and without remorse. “What kind of problems?” I asked archly, and received a slow wink in return.
“The kind that you don’t talk about if you don’t want trouble.”
“You always want trouble.” I considered pouting, but since it didn’t come naturally to me I decided not to bother. I was too psyched about his presence to complain. “How was Borneo anyway?”
Gabriel brushed away strands of hair from his face and squinted green eyes across the quad, exchanging nods and waves with friends and acquaintances. In spite of him being the chairmen of the Chess Club, or maybe because of that, Gabe was considered one of the cool kids.
“Hot. Humid. Green.”
“Traveled much?”
“Went to Indonesia.” He grinned. “Saw orang utans.”
A gasp of envy escaped my lips; seeing orang utans was on my lists of 100 Things to Do Before I Die. “You did not.”
The cocky, smug grin on Gabe’s face made me wanted to pound him. “Yes, I did. Do you know that ‘orang utan’ actually means, literally, ‘people of the forest’?”
“Actually, I do.” Now I did feel a sulk coming, but curiosity won, like always. “What were they like?”
“They’re very sweet and gentle.” Gabe’s usually bright green eyes dulled. “It’s hard to believe that humans could hurt such an animal.”
“We hurt each other all the time when we actually have the option to talk to each other.” I sat up but paused when I saw him watching me with an indescribable look on his face. “What?”
His long, lean fingers played with the grass by his feet. I started to get nervous as I noted several changes which had taken place in Gabe over the months in which we hadn’t seen each other. He finally took his eyes off of my face and stood up. “Nothing. It’s just that other people would have put that sentence in a different way. They would say, ‘people hurt each other all the time.’” He brushed a hand over the seat of his pants. “They would set themselves apart, rather than use the word ‘we’ like you did.”
I frowned in thought, even as I automatically put a hand in his. I patted my own butt and kept frowning as I slid my hands over my knee-high uniform socks. “Well, I poke at you and the Triplets all the time just for the hell of it, not only when I'm angry at you. So, I’m hardly exempt from the general rule.”
Gabriel lifted a hand to my waist-length hair and shook blades of grass off of it. “That’s true, it’s just that some people won’t admit it.”
“Well, I’m not some people.” Never were there truer words spoken.
Gabriel merely snorted and lifted both his arms over his head, slowly stretching like a big cat after a nap in the sun. I noticed something and caught his arm. “Wait.”
He turned halfway and lifted an eyebrow, and like every other time he’d done that I felt the sudden urge to poke his eye out.
I circled him slowly before finally stopping right in front of him. “You’re taller than me.”
Gabriel blinked and a smile crept onto his face before he threw his head back and laughed. “You’ve always bitched about being taller than everybody else, but now that you‘re not, you’re mad?”
It was true, all my life I had been the skinny, gawky, tall kid. As soon as I noticed that at five nine I’d topped most of the girls and boys in my school, I realized that I should learn to either get comfortable with my height or end up as the Hunchback of Trinity High.
No-brainer.
“What are you? Seven feet tall?” I asked, disgusted.
“Six two actually.” Gabriel preened before my scowling face.
“Freak.”
“Mutant.”
We started walking again, and I realized that he was stealing looks at me.
“You’re growing out your hair again?”
I clutched at my hair. It was real black, the kind of black that had blue highlights in the sun. It was straight as rain, cut with multiple lengths, and ran down almost to my waist. It was the one thing I was really vain about. “Well, I figured you’d grown out of the hair-pulling phase of your life, so it’s now safe for me to have long hair again.”
Gabriel snickered and pulled at a chunk of my hair. “Don’t be so sure. I might have a few relapses now and again.”
“Well, then I’ll just punch you and hope you’ll recover.”
“Thanks so much.”
“What are friends for?”
We approached the school doors and immediately, after flicking feigned disinterested looks at each other, we broke into a fast walk. He reached the doors seconds before me, and with a satisfied look on his face opened the door with a flourish and a courtly bow.
It was one of our things. Gabriel loved to be old fashioned; he liked opening doors, standing up when a woman left the table, he wouldn’t even curse in front of me or the Triplets. Honestly, I didn’t really care about all that—I just liked to needle him. So I speared him with a dirty look before flouncing in through the door. “Sexist pig.”
“Just because you can pound grown men into the practice mat doesn’t mean you don’t get to be treated like a lady.”
I rolled my eyes at his usual reply, but my lips curved into a smile. We’d been friends for eight years, ever since I moved in with my uncle. Gabriel was literally the boy next door. We hadn’t started out as friends, though. The minute we first caught sight of each other over the fence that parted his parents’ and my uncle’s houses, there had been instant friction. Gabriel was the leader of the neighborhood boys, while I was the strange and mysterious new kid on the block. I was a loner and I hardly ever talked. Gabriel was determined to break me as he had broken all the other kids in our neighborhood, but although I was quiet, I wasn’t the type to lie down and die.
Thinking back, it was a good thing, actually. At the time I was angry, lonely and sad. I had just lost my mother and had to move away from everything familiar into a place completely new and, what was worse, I didn’t get to know anything. No one would even answer my questions.
Who was my father?
Where is my mother?
What happened to her?
Did she leave me?
And what were these weird things I keep seeing, hearing, tasting, and feeling?
Is that what took my mother?
And why does everybody keep looking at me funny?
And even worse, people pitied me because they thought my mother had left me.
I helped around the house, listened to my uncle, did my chores, ate, slept, played with my cousins, but I didn’t cry, I didn’t talk and I showed no interest in doing anything, not even continuing my karate lessons that I used to love so much.
Then Gabriel came and poked and poked and poked and poked…
One day, I just exploded. Red hazed my eyes as I cocked back an arm and punched Gabriel. Being a nine year old boy and a midget with something to prove he punched back, both of us did our best to rip each other’s head off.
But as I hit and clawed and kicked something happened inside me, something stretched and stretched and stretched and finally snapped.
Embarrassingly, I burst into tears, and the tears—not to mention the snot—kept on coming, even when I opened my mouth and sank my teeth into his arm…
…and he let me. It took a moment for me to notice that Gabriel wasn’t hitting me back. I let go of his arm and blinked at him.
His face was a study of misery as he looked back at me.
Then he did something totally unexpected. He lifted the arm that had my teeth marks on it and patted my head, slowly, gently. Again and again he patted the top of my head, and as our eyes met I realized that I had found myself a best friend.
Over the years I became sure that Uncle Jim would have preferred if I had found a good, dutiful female best friend instead since Gabriel was a bit of a trouble maker, and he had a knack for persuading me to be one as well.
Not that he had to try very hard.
It also didn’t take long for me to realize that my friendship with Gabriel brought on a perk other than his ultra-cool tree house, one I could hardly believe. Whenever I touched him, whenever Gabriel spoke, it was like I entered into an isolation chamber where my senses dulled and turned…ordinary.
I couldn’t sense them anymore, or hear them or taste them or feel them. Gabriel was like my ultimate shield and I couldn’t help but feel that we were fated to meet. Gabriel Shannah, my own little miracle.
I elbowed my little miracle in the ribs, hard enough to make him wince. “So, Gabe, scored with any Borneo babes?”
He gave me a look that was part amusement and part scowl. “A gentleman never kisses and tells.”
“I’m not asking you to kiss me, I’m just asking you to tell.”
“Oh, please, the second I pucker my lips, you’ll be all over me.”
I scoffed at him, despite feeling a slight…um, discomfort at where the conversation was headed. “Come on, you told me about Tina Sheffield.”
He arched a brow and sniffed as though offended. “I was eleven and didn’t know any better.”
“Bet you don’t know any better now.”
The insult to his manly prowess was too much for him to ignore. “How much?”
“Why, Gabriel Shannah, are you trying to bet on a lady’s virtue?”
Gabriel almost looked embarrassed. “You’re a bad influence on me.”
“Uncle Jim said that you’re a bad influence on me.”
“Still mad about that motorcycle thing, huh?”
“You’re still banned from our household,” I retorted with mock seriousness.
Gabe rolled his eyes. “This from a guy who let all of us play with knives when we were ten.” He put an arm around my shoulders and gave me a lopsided grin that could melt any woman’s heart at fifty paces. “Then we’ll just have to meet in secret in our tree house.”
I fluttered my eyelashes. “A tryst, how romantic.”
He chuckled before detangling his arm from me and turning left. “See you at lunch.”
Now that he wasn’t looking, I felt it safe to look at him with an affectionate smile, even when our parting made my senses return back to what was normal for me. I popped my iPod ear buds back into place and walked with my eyes on my toes so as not to see anything, taking comfort in knowing that I would meet Gabriel again at lunch.
Surely I could tough it out until then, right?
Copyright © 2012 by D.F. Jules
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