Film excerpt - chapter one

[The following is an excerpt from the completed, unpublished novel Film by JD Fox]

Childhood and youth are ends
in themselves, not stages
(Friedrich Nietzsche)

It takes a shabby kind of arrogance to survive in our time,
and a fairly romantic nature to want to.
(Edgar Z Friedenberg)

Week One

01 Film: Declination

"Do you want to see my penis?"

Seth jolted awake and looked side to side.

He sat at the very back of the room, near the far corner. On his left, the far corner itself was occupied by a serious-looking boy with a shock of hair so dark, its black would scare the moon and stars away. The boy gazed straight ahead, eyes locked, like he were willing the hands on the clock behind the projector screen to move.

To his right, a girl with artificially blonde hair and personality to match frowned at her fellow classmates like their eyesight not being focused on her was an affront to all that is right with the world. She caught Seth's look and favored him with an acid scowl, like her non prima donna seat position was all his fault. Absurd guilt surged through Seth and he almost apologized. Before he could do so, she huffed and went back to her own, presumably Seth-free, world.

For different reasons, Seth could understand her unhappiness with where she sat. He occupied his present seat position not by choice; he usually tried to sit somewhere in the middle. By virtue of stolidly average genes – reasonable intellect, cardboard-brown eyes, similarly nondescript hair, and a height stubbornly staying just under five feet – a moderate amount of study enabled him to get decent enough grades without trying real hard. Why shake the tree? Both the back and the front of the room made too much of a scholastic statement.

By virtue of the sadistic design of the four-story building, he arrived late. Again.

One would think after a week at the new school, having gone to his seven classes five times each, Seth would be a navigation master.

Brekdale Middle School, however, was seemingly four times as big as Cedar Elementary and laid out like an Escher wet dream. With his class schedule firmly slid inside the plastic outside cover of his Trapper Keeper for ease of reference, he theoretically knew where he needed to go, just not always the actual location of that particular where or the best way to travel to it. As another safeguard against getting lost and other misfortune, he had inserted a page-sized lithograph he found of a gothic-style church underneath the plastic cover and behind the trusted schedule. Irreligious, Seth didn't know what particular denomination attended the church nor cared; he just liked the wicked looking griffin-like gargoyle dominating the image and projecting its stony protection.

Still, he missed the security of having his own desk.

A few of his classes had teachers that were sticklers for seating assignments, allowing for a form of desk stability, but it wasn't the same. Being mere temporary stations, the students gathered up all personal items at the end of class and left the desks to be populated by the next wave of hungry minds.

The week had passed in a disorienting blur of lockers, classrooms, and the daily, all too short, cafeteria pit stop, where he regrouped with fellow post-grade-school confidante Ralph Mewthakis to eat, horse around, and rant before trudging off to fifth period math together.

No recesses occupied the middle school student's schedule. A well-funded playground full of dipping, syncline slides, bottom-conforming swings, and beautifully constructed, seductively torturous monkey bars exploding vertigo-high in sudden bursts of tangled metal taunted them from across the street. Recombinant sighs followed forlorn, window-shielded glances as their school busses, painted ubiquitous yellow with obligatory black lettering, pulled up against the curb and disgorged them.

Friday found Seth exhausted, already homework-overloaded, irritable, and more than ready for the weekend.

Maybe he had imagined the question.

Indeed, most eyes were forward. Those that weren't were either closed in a far deeper sleep than Seth could manage on the best of nights, or they were directed across the aisles; their owners engaged in clandestine conversations about life, the universe, and the more enigmatic, sudden appearance of enthusiastic, vanguard zits on otherwise unblemished skin.

None of the eyes stared at Seth, nor gave any indication of having spoken thus.

On the pulled-down screen, a taciturn man rumbled on in a hypnotizing voice about either the nobility of proletariats or their stupidity. It was unlikely that the strange inquiry had spewed forth from the gentleman's no-nonsense lips. Seth settled back into his chair, dismissing what he heard as another random pubescent thought; many of which he seemed to be having with increasing and often inconvenient frequency. He was glad this was the last class of the day.

His fingers idly ran along the edge of his Trapper Keeper. Eyes adjusted to the dim light of the projector, he studied his schedule as if mentally reinforcing the room numbers could make up for the general disregard of sequential numbering the labyrinthine school possessed.

The social studies classroom he now sat in was number 234A. The "A" apparently stood for Hidden Alcove. 234 proper belonged to an eighth grade advanced trigonometry class he stumbled into on his first day, much to the delight of its students and teacher.

"Do you want to see my penis?"

Awake, and more alert now, Seth heard the question again. Louder and clearer than before, yet still whispered, it definitely came from his left. Seth jerked his head to the side, his mouth open, ready to respond to his rather rude interrogator.

The gangly boy sitting next to him stared straight ahead with that same intense focus as before directed at the droning film pontificating at the front of the room, the ticking clock behind the film, or some heretofore unmapped dimensional space only masquerading as a clock or a film.

Seth closed his mouth and started to turn forward again. Instead, in a burst of inspiration, he jerked his head immediately to the left.

He caught the black-haired boy staring at him, shadows wickedly skipping across his inscrutable and roughly sculpted face as the film flickered. Seth thought the boy would turn his head away, embarrassed. Instead, the kid smiled. The darkness of his hair, dropping down over his forehead in thick, oily bangs, overshadowed his eyes.

"Do you?" the boy whispered.

"What?" Seth asked, a filler question as his mind worked at processing what his ears had already heard twice before.

He also tried to remember the boy's name from the two times earlier that week Mr. Furney, the social studies teacher, had called roll. No seating chart, here. Both times, the teacher had made cryptic annotations in a steno book, nodded his head, and acknowledged each student as they responded to his calling out their name. After that, he strolled into class, glanced at his steno book, glanced at the students, made a few notes, and began teaching.

Whatever mnemonic devices he conjured up with that maneuver worked; from then on, he always called the students by name.

Seth had no such inherent ability with names. Having a room mixed up five different ways this week made such a memorization feat all the more daunting.

Through daily exposure, the students in his classes began taking on a visual familiarity. Attaching actual names to those faces was another thing altogether. The ones he did remember were largely coincidental.

Like Sandra Egan, who sat in front of him in Mrs. Pratcher's English class, courtesy of the alphabet. Or Ellen and Alvin Ganger, fraternal twins from Cedar Elementary with the morbid distinction of both parents being dead.

And, of course, he knew Ralph, who was thankfully in two of his seven classes: second period gym and fifth period math.

The boy seated next to him was not in any of his other classes nor from his former elementary school. He looked directly at Seth and said, in a hushed yet enunciated voice, "Do you want to see my penis?"

As if to make sure his question was understood, the boy hooked a thumb underneath the waistband of his pants, near the buckle, his knuckle scraping against the green Oxford he wore.

"No," Seth snorted and faced the front again, shaking his head. It takes all kinds, his parents always said. Now that was an understatement! He snorted and tried to focus on the film. Blahblahblah, said the narrator, then followed that non sequitur with something equally illuminating about revolting industry. The only person remotely interested in what was playing at the front of the classroom was the brown-haired boy working the projector; and even he seemed more fascinated by the continuous spinning of the reels themselves rather than the resultant images such steady motion produced.

After a few, perfunctory remarks, Mr. Furney had disappeared once the film began. The bored, blonde girl sitting on his right examined her fingers either for dirt, boogers, or rough edges. Whatever it was, she evidently didn't like what she saw: she frowned and let out a huff.

Near the final clicks of the clock, the entire classroom began to squirm.

"This has been another edition of America: Amber Waves of Grain," the narrator concluded. Mr. Furney, who had materialized from the 4-D space of a secret teacher's lounge, switched on the lights.

"OK, class, that's it for the week! There might be a quiz on Monday over chapter one, along with some questions regarding the wonderful film you just saw. Have a great weekend!"

Groans permeated the room like the rumble of Mount St. Helens. Have a great weekend. Oh, and don't forget to study for a quiz on Monday. Yeah, right. Bastard. Gathering his faithful Trapper Keeper and America: A New Beginning textbook, Seth stood up. He turned to his left, mouth open, thinking he might make an additional comment or two to the matter-of-factly salacious boy.

The questioning youth was already halfway down the outer aisle, worn backpack slung over one shoulder. Seth's mouth closed.

He got up and followed the crowd out of the room.