INTERFERENCE. Part One: Chapter Sixteen.

Chapter sixteen

            Stephanie's spelling test scores began to suffer. She began to fail spelling tests. Her mother was incredulous.

            'You used to be such a good student,' she would muse in a crippling sorrow. It wouldn't have bothered her, were it not that Stephanie's emotions were troubling her more than they would have usually. Since she had met with Falcon for the third time, she felt strangely as though a chasm had opened within her innerds as though they were merely a holding tubule for some caustic acid. She noted the scientific truth of this fact, yet never before had it affected her this way.

           

            She had not seen him in several months.

            She did not know where he lived. She had to try to find his home.

            One day, she sat on a statue dolphin at the top of the hill where the playground was. She sat atop it for several hours, only interrupted by hypnotic stretches wherein she stepped down.

            Her own heel became fascinating to her as she sank her sandals into the grass.

            The next day, she sat atop this dolphin for only a few minutes. She would revisit it five times throughout the day.

            She found a jungle gym adjacent to the playground. She sat atop it for several hours. The sky sank into a darkness that scraped against her heart.

            Young boys came by and stared up at her. Boys were always obsessed with tiny matters. They had no subtlety. They were like badgers.

            Two approached the foot of the jungle gym. She paid them little attention.

            'Why are you up there?' The voice was from the boy with gray, goatlike hair. He had a constantly nervous desperation in his eyes, which were yellow and gray. His father was in the military. She liked him.

            'I'm waiting for a friend.'

            'Who is this friend?' He could be forceful in speaking sometimes. She did not mind the sarcasm too much.

            'It's a boy. You might not know him.'

            'Is it that Falcon kid?'

            Stephanie's stomach was inflamed with an intolerable pain. It had been the other boy who spoke. He looked up at her curiously. Her eyes glared down at him.

            'How do you know him?'

            Ryan, the other, goat-haired, boy, spoke up.

            'We can tell you where he lives. We just need one thing in return.'

            She was, for once, not entirely paying attention. Her breathing had stopped at the mention 'where he lives'.

            'Where does he live?' she heard a female voice say.

            'You have to answer something for us first,' Ryan responded.

            'What?' came a voice slightly more cutting than she wanted. An angst like the black smoke from the furnace of a nuclear reactor rose into her heart.

            'We want to know. If you do talk to him. What would you do?'

            Her brow furrowed. The clouds were sulfur in the midst of a Sun that looked like the yolk of an egg.

            'We think you like him,' said the other boy, with too much eagerness and curiosity for her tastes.

            What does he know? Even Ryan, probably, regretably, can't know.

            'No.'

            She avoided looking down at the other boy. To her frustration, she could hear him climbing onto the first plank. Ryan was more respectful. Of course.

            She began to cry.

            'Why are you crying?' It was the idiot.

            She jumped down from her ledge and exited the jungle gym by a series of metal bars that stuck out at a corner of the structure that was opposite the gaping entrance that the idiot had entered into.

            She was about to go home, but she could not. Her intestines reprimanded her.

            The sky was all ready setting. She looked back to see Ryan approaching. His voice was concerned.

            'Don't you want to know where he lives?'

            'Just if you both stay away.'

            'Okay,' he seemed calm, but he was holding a lot back.

            She found the door when the night had already set in. The deep violet of the evening seemed more comforting than her mother's womb, as though she were suddenly removed, as she had so often felt in earlier years, from the pains and hassles of being an individual human being. The emotion was not her own but that of something else, however impersonal it may be, as though, for one brief moment, she glimpsed a heart at the center of the Universe clockwork. Blue clouds were visible in the midst of the violet haze. The smell of cooking rice wafted from a neighbouring backyard.

            She rang the doorbell.

            She checked the number of the house. '315'.

            A woman with a mass of hair like a giant corsage opened the door. She was elderly, and she was shocked to find that Stephanie had rung the bell.

            'Yes?' she seemed to try to become amiable, but only as a facade.

            'Is this where Falcon lives?'

            Something in Stephanie's total absence of hesitation or reluctance struck the woman, absurdly, as intrusive.

            'He is busy at the moment.'

            Stephanie stood there.

            'When will he be free?'

            The lady was shocked to hear her.

            'Why do you want to talk to him?' she asked indignantly.

            Some monstrous flame ran up her chasm like regurgitation.

            'Because he's my friend.'

            'Well, he is a very strange boy.'

            'Are you his grandmother?'

            'Yes.'

            'What is strange about him?'

            'He has A.D.H.D.'

            A brief pause.

            'When will he be around to play?'

            'I'll tell him you came by.'

            'My name is Stephanie.'

            'Hello, Stephanie.'

            'Tell him, also, that I will be on the dolphin statue tomorrow and over the course of the entire following week.'

            She grimaced. Hatefully.

            'Okay. Good day.'

            She shut the door rapidly.

            Stephanie stood for another few minutes, looking at it.

            Finally, the door opened again.

            'Can I help you? I'm sorry, but I told you that he is busy right now.'

            'I was just wondering about a question.'

            'Okay,' replied the woman dismissively and began to close the door.

            'Why are adults so eager to close their doors in your face?'

            The door was closed five eighths of its entirety. It paused. Then she opened it again.

            'Listen, young lady. Both you and that boy need to learn respect for your elders. He thinks that he is the boss. He doesn't even listen to what his parents tell him. That boy doesn't even care about his appearance. He just has an answer for everybody.'

            The sheer number of statements was a bit overwhelming.

            'Well, is he right in his answers?' she chose to ask first. The grandmother began to close the door again, muttering.

            Stephanie took her opportunity to ask the next and more important question.

            'Wouldn't a lack of concern for his appearance help him when he is an adult?'

            The sentence had been perfectly phrased. Stephanie could not understand why the grandmother's face seemed to shrivel at the sound of it.

            'You may need to see a psychiatrist. You should talk to your parents about it tonight. I feel sorry for them. Tell them.'

            She shut the door for the last time.

            Stephanie had thought back to that day repeatedly for years. She still could not think of anything the woman might have said that would have been more insulting.

           

Dm.A.A.