Chapter 2: Business as Usual?

Alex woke on Wednesday morning feeling well rested and refreshed. He rose from his bed with uncharacteristic cheerfulness, and it was only when he opened the window that he realised he hadn't looked at the clock. On the horizon, the sun was just beginning to move into view, casting its first rays onto the house. Now he looked at the clock, and saw that it was 5:14 in the morning. Despite the time, he felt better rested than he ever had keeping his normal hours, and there was no urge at all to go back to bed. Since he was up half an hour ahead of his parents, he figured he'd cook breakfast. He couldn't wait to see the look on their faces.

Since he was aiming for shock factor, he decided to go all out — bacon, eggs, toast, freshly squeezed orange juice. He was surprised how little work it really was — so little, in fact, that he was getting bored of turning the food in the pan to keep it from burning by the time they arrived, and the butter had congealed into a slick on the cooling toast.

Despite that, they were both surprised and impressed. When he admitted that he hadn't planned it, but had just woken up unusually early, it didn't seem to make them any less pleased with him. When he left for school at 7:30, it was with a smile on his face. The sun was warm and bright, the sky clear, and he felt full of energy.

At the same time, something seemed different about the world around him. He kept turning the feeling over in his head, but nothing ever came of it. It just didn't feel quite the same. He was still pondering the feeling of strangeness when he arrived at the school, and as a result wasn't paying much attention to where he walked.

Suddenly something struck him in the side, and he was falling. His head cracked against the ground before he was oriented enough to do anything, and a wave of nausea swept over him. He looked and saw what hit him — a car door swinging open. Stepping out of the car was Brad Michaels, his face sporting his patented superior smirk as he looked down at Alex. "Watch where you're going, retard. You could have damaged my paint job!"

Before Alex's head had cleared enough to begin to frame a reply, Brad had turned away. Alex might not qualify for personalised bullying, but Brad was an equal opportunity bully — he was an asshole to pretty much anyone who couldn't kick his ass, and he was the star of the wrestling team, so that included most of the school. He was a fore-runner in affirmative action — he didn't discriminate based on sex, race, religion, or social class. His asinine behaviour was handed to his team mates, girlfriend, sister, and complete strangers in perfect equality. Indeed, Alex was often left staggered at the sheer ridiculousness of the fact that Brad had a gorgeous girlfriend and all he had was his left hand. How could he possibly be THAT unappealing?

Alex pulled himself to his feet and assured himself that his head was free of blood. He took a deep breath, swallowed his impotent rage, and gathered up his dropped books. His knee was hurting, and he was in danger of being late to class. Not having many friends, and living near the school, he always timed his arrival pretty close to the beginning of class, and he wasn't up to running.

Alex began limping his way to the school nurse, but by the time he was halfway there, the movement seemed to have loosened up the joint and he was walking almost pain free. Cautiously, he lengthened his stride and headed for class, and by the time he arrived at English he was fine again. Only the embers of his anger, smouldering in the pit of his stomach, marred his good mood.

English had never been his best class, or his favourite. He understood learning foreign languages, but studying literature seemed pointless to him. Why read fiction based in the real world, when history almost always had something just as good to offer? Still, he dutifully read the stories and finished the tests and took home the As to his parents, because it wasn't particularly difficult, and it made them happy. He just wished he could have used the time to take a useful class instead.

Luckily, he had quickly discovered that all he had to do was make five or six insightful remarks in class during the first week, and he could coast through the rest of the year virtually effortlessly. The sole saving grace of the class was the teacher.

Combining a long and apparently very interesting life with a habit of digressing on long tangential anecdotes, he would one day be telling you about pranks played with landmines back when he was in military training, the next about when he was a teacher in Zimbabwe, and owned a slave (the institution of slavery had apparently become a lot more civilised in Zimbabwe, since the 'slave' was paid a wage, and by the sound of it a good one.) No one had a clue if any of his stories were true or not, but they were much more interesting than the ones he assigned them to read for class.

Unfortunately, this class yielded no tales of adventure. Instead, it was all about Macbeth. He listened anyway — it would be on the test. Finally, it ended, and he was free to move on to his favourite class — History, naturally. Mr Blaine, the history teacher, was a straight forward, no nonsense type of guy, who appreciated sincere interest in his field. He knew his stuff, and he attempted to pass it on to the next generation. That class flew by, as usual. He never had any problem staying focused and alert in this class. Hell, he thought he might even be able to stay focused for Mrs Pierson, if she only taught history. Well, more focused anyway.

After history came lunch, and Alex went to find his friends. He hung out with a few other kids at lunch, the smart kids (geeks to most people.) They at least accepted him, and the alternative would be to sit with the fat guy who wore four layers of plaid and never bathed, and the weird Asian girl who was rumoured to have been arrested once on two counts of arson, and to have stabbed her boyfriend.

When Alex arrived, Matt and Andrea were already there. Matt was a computer geek to the core, from the addiction to stimulants to the complete absence of social skills. He made up for his occasionally embarrassing behaviour by being not only willing but ecstatic to drop everything and fix a computer on next to no notice. Unless he was working on a project, he could always be counted on for help or information, within his domain. It was like he had given up all hope of ever succeeding in any other field, and had committed himself simply to revelling in every success he could wring from the one part of life that he had mastered.

Andrea was a... Alex blinked. Andrea was beautiful. He wondered how he had never noticed before. It was strange, because nothing had changed — she still had the same terrible frizzy hair, the same old lady clothes, the same stammer inducing shyness. Suddenly, though, his eye was drawn to other things — her bone structure, the near-perfect symmetry of her features, the way the clothes draped her form, an unconscious grace in her movements. Alex couldn't quite define what it was, but she was definitely beautiful. Why had he not noticed this before?

Andrea was language girl. She was smart in other ways too, but her ability to acquire new languages was phenomenal — she was his age, and spoke six. The downside, was that she mostly spoke them only in theory — Andrea talked slightly more often than she made eye contact, just as more people are killed by lightning strikes than by meteors. Everyone knew she was a genius — Alex had a pretty high opinion of himself, and he figured Andrea for his equal, at least.

Right now, she was staring at her food, oblivious even to his presence. For some reason, he was imagining her with her hair cut a lot shorter. The image was a very pleasant one, he had to admit. Matt was saying something about the chip architecture on the PS3, but Alex was barely paying enough attention to nod when Matt paused. Definitely not enough attention to notice Chris coming up behind him.

Chris was his closest friend of the group, primarily because they had the same obsession — history. Where they differed was that while Alex preferred fact, Chris was intrigued by the occult, by weird games with numbers and strange rituals. He was an expert on his particular field of history — religious and mystical beliefs. He was intending to joint major in history and cultural anthropology, come three years time. More immediately important, though, was the fact that he had just walked stealthily up behind Alex and grabbed his shoulder.

The shock helped bring Alex back to earth, and he had a relatively normal lunch. The only change was how uncomfortable he suddenly felt with Andrea, and luckily that made little difference — she rarely said much anyway. They had been talking for a few minutes when he reached for his drink.

"Hey, that's a nice ring!" Matt noticed it first. Alex had forgotten about it until then. "Where'd you get it?"

"Oh, from Nancy. She got a bunch of stuff in, and I found this ring in a pile of stuff she was throwing out, so she said I could have it. Unbelievable, eh? I guess it must be fake, but it looks good, for sure."

"Can I see?" He looked up at Andrea in surprise when she spoke, and then held out his hand in the middle of the table.

"It's stuck, so you'll have to look at it on my hand." Alex smiled at her as he spoke.

"That's okay." She smiled back, and leaned over to look at it. Chris leaned in as well, from the side, while Andrea took his hand in hers and turned it slightly, examining the ring. Alex swallowed — her skin was so soft, her touch light and uncertain, but somehow charged with potential. He was torn between relief and regret when she let his hand go. "It's beautiful."

Chris spoke "Hey, those markings on the scales. They look like some kind of writing. Do you mind if I copy them down?"

"Knock yourself out."

So Alex sat with his hand on the table, while Chris examined his ring with a magnifying glass and made marks on a piece of paper. Every so often, Andrea would look up at him, meeting his gaze for an instant before her face flushed and her eyes dropped back to her lunch. On the other side of the table, Matt continued to chatter away about revolutionising the gaming industry. Pretty soon lunch was over and it was time for computer science, the only class he shared with a friend — Matt, in fact.

Computer science was an easy class, because the teacher really didn't know much more than him, and Matt could run circles around both of them. The result was a lot of time spent playing games while they waited for other students to catch up. There wasn't much the teacher could do about it, short of standing over them all class, and they weren't disruptive, nor did they fail to get the work done. Matt really did enjoy fixing other peoples computer problems, and was always willing to give the teacher a hand, which had bought him some slack, so they played Mah-jong and Net-Risk.