Chapter 2: Another Day, Another Holler

The next morning, my alarm went off promptly at six o'clock. I groaned in frustration, not because I had been drawn out of an awesome dream, but rather because I didn't want to leave the comfort of my bed. As odd as it seems to my parents, I can get up well before dawn if I'm going to enjoy myself skydiving, racing tri, or touring on my motorcycle; but when it comes to waking up before the sun has risen to participate in the drudgery of high school, the knowledge of upcoming boredom simply acts as an anchor.

Knowing that the day wasn't going to wait for me as much as I would like it to, I rolled myself out of bed and went to the bathroom to brush my teeth. I then went back to my bedroom, tossed on a pair of running shorts and, since the sun hadn't yet come up, elected to go without a t-shirt for my morning jog. I grabbed my watch and my iPod, still in its exercise jacket, and moved my way to the door. I waved to Ange as I put on my running shoes in the foyer, then opened the door and hit the road.

In the three years I've been a competing athlete, there's nothing I've found more to be a better wakeup than a workout. Some people will swear by coffee, others by a cigarette, and yet others again by some form of chocolate, but I refuse to believe that these things compare in any way to the natural high caused by endorphins. For one thing, it's one hundred percent natural, created by the body's adrenal glands in response to physical activity. For another, it helps stimulate the heart and lungs, ensuring increased cardiovascular health. And while some have declared it to be addictive, calling thrill-seekers and athletes "adrenaline junkies," no one ever suffered from lung cancer or renal failure because they exercised.

I'm fortunate that my house was on a circle in the Catalina Foothills, because it made it impossible for me to get lost before I had a real chance to learn my way around Tucson. The loop measured a solid mile and a half, and I managed to pound in three loops in just over thirty-two minutes. The roughly seven-minute mile pace to which I kept was a little slower than my race pace, but I had a full day of school ahead of me, and I figured it wouldn't bode well to fall asleep in my classes on just the second day.

The sun was just beginning to rise as I entered the house. I let out a heavy sigh and then charged to my bathroom, skinning off my shorts, and jumping into the shower. I made sure the water was sufficiently hot, and then luxuriated in the cascading streams.

Ahh, I thought to myself, there's nothing like a soothing shower after a morning workout.

I must have lost track of the time, because what seemed to me to be only moments later, I heard a loud knocking on my bathroom door.

"Hey, knucklehead!" Dad yelled. "Get moving, or you're going to be late for school!"

Day Two at Catalina Foothills unfolded in a fairly low-key fashion. I had an easy time parking my Yamaha and attracted minimal notice on my way to my locker, N115. Sketchy had done a reasonable job of showing me around the school, because I had no trouble finding my way there. Dumping my helmet and gloves in my case, I grabbed a notebook, took a moment to rearrange the closing loop on my skydiver's closing pin necklace, then shut it and got moving.

My first class of the day was Calculus, and when I got to the classroom I presented myself to the teacher, Mrs. Lucia Martinez.

"Buenas dias, Señor Gordon," she warmly greeted me. My Spanish wasn't up to the level of my French, but I understood enough to get by, and smiled at her. She handed me a textbook, and then she pointed me to one of the desks in the rear of the class. I guess it's common practise for transfer students to be relegated to the back rows, given that all the other seats were taken, but I didn't object in the slightest.

"Thanks," I said, and made my way to the back of the room, sitting down in a semi-slouch which, over the course of generations, has been genetically engraved into the DNA of the male species. I then took a moment to survey the classroom and the students slowly filing in. Thankfully I wouldn't have to deal with any meatheads, as idiocy tends to be a disqualifying factor for advanced mathematics. That being said, high schoolers do tend to have wandering minds and to chat in class; I promised myself that if it happened around me, I'd just zone out and close my eyes.

"Good morning, class," Mrs. Martinez greeted us as we were all finally seated. The class gave a monotonous reply. "I hope everyone had a pleasant day yesterday. But first, I'd like to introduce a new student to the school." She smiled as everyone briefly turned around in their chairs to take a look at me. "This is James, and he's joining us from... whereabouts?"

"Boston," I replied. I kept my answer short, being the private person I am. I gave a noncommittal smile to my classmates, which seemed to pacify them. I took another moment to observe them, and they looked pretty much like any other group of high school students. Sighing mentally, I figured it would be more of the same as back at Quincy — nothing new, nothing exciting. Something caught my eye for a fraction of a second, putting a small tickle on the brain, but I slightly shook my head as if coming out of a daydream and pushed it out of my mind.

"Well, welcome to the Catalina Foothills," Mrs. Martinez said. "And now, on to business. If you'll open your textbooks to page one seventeen, you'll notice that we'll be building on our previous unit's material on polynomials..."

"Oh my God, my brain hurts."

As we were filing out of Mrs. Martinez class, the statement caught my ear and I chuckled. I won't lie and say that calculus comes to me easily; in fact, I have to work through enough examples of a particular style of equation before it registers in my brain. Fortunately for me, the material of the day registered and I wasn't left frustrated.

Since we had five minutes between classes, and because my locker was fairly close, I elected to dump off my calculus textbook in my case. On my way, I mustn't have been entirely looking where I was going, because I bumped into someone.

"Sorry about that," I apologised. I looked at the guy I had hit, and came more or less face-to-face with a bulky letterman who, despite my sincere apology, elected to be extremely pissed off.

"Watch where you're fucking going, fresh meat," he snarled. A tall blonde, dressed in a cheerleader's outfit, looked down her nose at me and tsk'd, as if somehow my mere existence upset her mood. The jock then put his arm around her waist, and the pair walked down the hallway together.

Whatever, I thought to myself. I sighed; I hadn't even finished a full day of classes, and somehow I had already managed to gain the unwanted and unwarranted attention of one of the Foothills' self-proclaimed badasses. Hopefully, my day would improve, or at the bare minimum, not get any worse.

I checked my schedule, which I had taped to the door of my case.

English, second period, I thought to myself. Hopefully whatever it is we're doing isn't going to suck... I'm absolutely fed up of Jane Austen.

When I got to my English classroom, I noticed that there weren't any regular desks to speak of. Rather, the classroom had several long tables connected into a horseshoe shape with the teacher's desk at the head of the horseshoe. Regular chairs, as opposed to the chair-desk combinations I was accustomed to, lined the tables.

"What the hell?" I asked myself softly. Then, the structure of the classroom began to make sense. As people would fill the seats, everyone would be able to look at everyone else; the classroom environment was naturally predisposed to facilitate discussion... I was conflicted — I generally enjoy a lively intellectual discussion, and I even enjoy participating in them from time to time, but given my absolute lack of tact and tendency to attack the heart of an argument when it's flawed, I piss people off. I never really understood why; if I said something that made absolutely no sense whatsoever, or was entirely false, I'd like someone to tell me outright.

I presented myself to an elderly-looking woman sitting behind the teacher's desk. Naturally, I assumed her to be the teacher, and introduced myself.

"Pardon me, ma'am... I'm a transfer from Boston," I said.

She looked up at me from her papers and looked at me with what at first glance appeared to be a steely gaze behind horn-rimmed glasses. The woman's full-length and flowing grey hair, for lack of a better term, gave her the appearance of a banshee. It was unsettling, and I felt just a little uncomfortable, but then her gaze softened and she smiled.

"Oh, hello dear," she replied. "I'm Mrs. Eishorn, and I teach the English classes to juniors and seniors. I'm assuming by your being present at this place and time that you're in your final year?"

"That's right, Mrs. Eishorn," I answered. "I'm James Gordon, and I guess I need a seat and a copy of whatever it is we're studying at the moment."

"Don't worry about that just yet, dear," the woman replied. "We've just finished reading Shakespeare's Julius Cæsar, and I'm going to be handing out some reading to do over the weekend to start our discussion next week. As for your seat, since I've gotten to know all of my students' names, there isn't any assigned seating; chairs go on a first-come, first-served basis."

"Nice," I said. "Unconventional... but nice." I made my way to a corner of the square horseshoe, pulled a chair, and sat down with my back to the door, waiting for my classmates to come in. After another minute or so, it seemed like a herd rush as students jammed their way through the door, picking chairs and sitting down. Then the bell rang, and Mrs. Eishorn stood up to address the class.

"Good morning, class," she said cheerfully, smiling at us.

"Good morning, Mrs. Eishorn," the class responded. They were generally jovial. I guessed that it must be because everyone had the chance to finally wake up. Momentarily, I pitied poor Mrs. Martinez, who not only had the double whammy of teaching first thing in the morning, but having to teach calculus at that. But then, I gave another moment's consideration and realised that every teacher had a first class, and no matter the teacher, that first class of the day was going to be replete with catatonic teenagers.

"Now, as you'll remember," began Mrs. Eishorn, "we finished our discussion of Shakespeare's Julius Cæsar yesterday. I promised something quite different, since I'm certain we've all begun to be a little tired of that 'famous English Bard.' "

We all laughed. I liked this woman already.

"Fastforwarding a thousand years after the death of Julius Cæsar at the hands of Brutus, the Roman Empire had long since been a forgotten memory, dismantled by the barbarian hordes coming out of the Asian steppes," she spun. "There was no real central power in Europe; Charlemagne tried to re-establish the glory of Rome in the early ninth century, but failed. The Holy Roman Empire, which Charles the Great had established, became torn apart by his children, and not even the Pope could hold together what the Carolingian King had created.

"Now, you remember that Europe at this point in time was extremely superstitions," she emphasised. Every last one of us seemed to hinge on her every word. "Religion and myth were..."

She paused and cocked her left ear towards the door. I couldn't hear anything right then, but seconds later, I heard a pair of girls giggling and shrieking as they ran down the hallway towards the classroom door.

"Quick, get inside!" one whispered rather loudly. I looked over my shoulder and saw a pair of cheerleaders enter the classroom, acting all self-possessed and unconcerned that they had interrupted Mrs. Eishorn's lesson. One of the two was the same leggy blonde who had tsk'd at me earlier, and accompanying her was an equally leggy brunette. Reasonably attractive girls, to be sure, but I was still pissed on account of the interruption, and it seemed my classmates weren't pleased either.

We weren't the only ones.

"So good of you to join us, Beth and Erin," Mrs. Eishorn said. Her face was sincere, but I could detect the glint of sarcasm in her eyes.

"Thank goodness we're not late," the blonde gushed. "That was a close call!" I wondered, did she honestly think we were that stupid? Turning my back to them, I rolled my eyes as if to say, What a moron!

"No dear, you're not late," Mrs. Eishorn said. "Late is what you would have been three minutes ago. No, what you are right now is owing me a lunchtime discussion for disrupting my lesson."

"But Mrs. Eishorn," the blonde whined, only to be cut off.

"Now Erin, don't whine — it's unbecoming of a young lady. Take a seat, and we'll get back on track." The two girls grabbed the remaining two seats, and I couldn't help but feel a bit of satisfaction seeing the blonde, Erin, being put in her place. She pouted like a scolded six-year old, and it wouldn't have been so pathetic if I hadn't seen girls just like her get away with murder at Quincy for doing the same thing. Fortunately, this Iron Maiden of an English teacher was impervious to childishness.

"As I was saying before, religion and myth played an immense role in the lives of the common folk. Heroic stories were told at festivals, during the holidays, and even before children would go to sleep, much like parents read to their young ones nowadays," Mrs. Eishorn continued. "One of the most famous of these classic mythic tales was Beowulf."

Quietly, and internally, I cheered. Beowulf was one of my all-time favourites; I had even found Michael Crichton's rendition of it in the Eaters of the Dead, which later became a featured film starring Antonio Banderas as the Thirteenth Warrior, to be fairly respectable adaptations.

"What I've done is make sufficient copies of the entire epic poem for everyone," Mrs. Eishorn explained. "For the next twelve class periods, we'll be exploring an episode of Beowulf in depth to discuss its symbolism and meaning, and how it relates to the broader genre of epic poetry as a whole." She passed a stack of photocopies to a redheaded girl on her right, whom I recognised from my calculus class, who in turn began circulating the copies around the horseshoe. She noticed me looking at her and smiled briefly before passing out the papers.

"But, for today, what I want you to do is to silently read the first episode to get a feel for the poem's cadence, rhythm, and style," Mrs. Eishorn continued. "Then, I want you to individually write a single-spaced page on your first impressions and on what you think will be coming next. I'll be picking these papers up at the end of class for writing credit, so make sure you watch your spelling and essay structure."

A few moments later, as I was reading about Shield, son of Sheaf, I felt that same tickle at the back of my neck. It made my hackles stand up for a moment or too, but I shook it off again. In all likelihood, it was just a draft coming from somewhere in the school building. Once gone, I got back to my reading and slowly began composing my thoughts.

Third period proved to be another mental exercise, as I was taking a physics class. Making my way into the classroom, I once again presented myself to the teacher who then directed me to an empty seat. Much like most science classes in any given high school, they weren't desks to speak of, but highly polished black raised tabletops with metal-legged wooden stools for chairs. As soon as I eased myself into the chair, Sketchy came into the class porting a stack of books and notebooks, and made his way to sit next to me.

"Brilliant," he said. "I'm your lab partner."

I chuckled, and shook his hand. "It's nice to see a friendly face," I replied. "So, you're the one who's going to help me pass this bitch, eh?"

"Me help you pass? I thought you were going to help me!"

I shook my head and laughed. "So what is it we're going to be covering today?" I asked.

"Yesterday Mr. Wolfgang briefly addressed Newtonian principles," Sketchy replied. "So I suspect we're going to be going over gravity and the mathematical sequences related thereto. But nevermind that, how has your day been going so far?"

"It's been... interesting," I said, not quite able to find the word needed to describe the combination of the day's experiences.

"How so?"

"Well, I literally bumped into the school's resident meathead between first and second period and got tsk'd at by some blonde cheerleader, and I got the impression from him that he wanted to stuff my head up my ass, neverminding the fact that I apologised to him immediately after," I answered. "Then, I watched my English teacher, Mrs. Eishorn, destroy that same cheerleader for being three or four minutes late to class — something I very much enjoyed, I might add."