It is 6:35 AM.
It is always 6:35 AM.
Sometimes the world gives the appearance of it being not 6:35 AM--being, for instance, 6:36 AM, or 3:45 post meridiem--but you're wise to its tricks. Any non-6:35 o'clock you see is a ploy to trick you into lowering your guard. You hear a noise in the bushes, you go to investigate, and bam, it's 6:35 AM again.
There's no rest, no respite, there is only 6:35 AM.
Day after day after day.
The piezoelectric buzzer within your alarm clock is an unfortunate creature.
Really, you think, squinting doggishly at the glowing display, it's nothing so much as a victim of circumstance.
Shrill and loud, like a 22,000 lb burrowing Grand Slam explosive--perfectly engineered to penetrate the skull and camouflet the amygdala--, the piezo could do no harm and perhaps much good were it affixed to such a device as a smoke detector. Likewise, it could go far announcing catastrophic mechanical failures within a space ship or submarine. Or be of great service screaming at the President from atop his desk to announce an imminent nuclear strike or alien invasion.
If aliens were invading, you expect that the president would like to know. And what better to notify him?
You nonetheless loathe the hateful device and have resolved one day to destroy it.
You and your alarm clock share a bedroom with a set of younger sisters.
Naturalists have observed that the older a human gets, the less they are permitted to sleep. (The rule of thumb is that for every five years after birth, school begins one hour earlier in the day--and extrapolating the trend, it's easy to see how Somer's Rule poses one of the greatest hurdles to the field of human life extension.)
This all to say; your sisters' school begins later in the day than yours, and a request is made of you that you "TURN OFF THE ALARM."
...And you were about to, but now you're tempted to let it ring.
Self-preservation proves stronger than malice; you disable the alarm with practiced fumbling efficiency.
The clock reads 6:35 AM. There was an alarm.
According to one popular theory, this means you should shortly observe yourself rising from bed.
But it seems your observations don't quite square with the theory. Like eclectic Mercury's orbit putting the lie to Kepler and Newton, except if--rather than a difference of 40 arcseconds per century between theory and practice--Mercury just stopped in mid-ether like a baseball in the catcher's mitt.
Oh, and also if Mercury hit this same exact snag and has every single day for as long as you can remember.
This probably calls for a new theory.
It can't be that 6:35 AM exerts no gravitational pull; if it didn't at all you wouldn't be awake and squinting at glowing red numbers.
But perhaps the lift provided by the pull of 6:35 AM--or by superego and fear of punishment--is matched by drag.
You can't remember what the word is for things which might be equations or inequalities, but think that it might be "relation." On one side of the relation, in your mind's eye, you write "6:35", and on the other side you list tiredness(t) + dread(d) + temperature difference(td) + hunger(h) + friction(f) + Earth's own gravity(g).
6:35 can be simplified as 6-in-41, which... this would be faster if you had a pencil. Six-in-forty is three-in-twenty is one-point-five-in-ten is one-point-five-by-ten is 0.15.
So now the question is whether t+d+td+h+f+g sums to point-fifteen--or, rather, when they will sum to 0.15, since they observably don't at this time. It occurs to you that tiredness and dread will only increase as a function of time that you spend lying awake in bed. Hunger increases as well, or, rather, decreases and becomes a greater negative number (you guess that you probably put it on the wrong side of the relation), but from just eyeballing it you don't think that hunger is going to be a determining factor here.
The clock says 6:40 AM.
6:40 is 6-in-46, which is a smaller number than 6-in-41, which is at odds with how 6:40 has a greater pull on you than 6:35 ever did. (However illogical that might seem in light of how--as established five minutes ago--o'clocks like 6:40 are lies and deception.)
It now seems quite likely that in converting 6:35 from an odds ratio into a fraction, you got the numerator confused with the denominator.
6:35 was 35-in-41, and now 6:40 is 40-in-46.
You may have made an arithmetic error in your fake math, but it didn't stop you from intuiting the answer: you'll start your day at 6:41.
You promise.
You're getting up in just one minute.
But first you'll take just a moment to close your eyes and mourn your dreams all shredded into constituent antimemetic atoms and scattered by the piezoelectric blast.
And you'll take another moment to sob without noise or water.
And to dread the coming day.
Just a blink, really.
You open your eyes.
The schoolbus arrives at 7:05--or at least so goes the claim, and who are you to gainsay it?
A school bus is never early, nor is it late: it arrives at 7:05, and if it wasn't 7:05 before it arrived surely it must be after.
Gilbert Huph claims in The Incredibles that a company is like an enormous clock in that it only works if all the little cogs mesh together.
But you don't work for Gilbert Huph at Insuricare. You don't work for anyone. You are not a cog in the machine.
You should be so lucky.
You're not the sprocket-wheel of a bicycle: you're the playing card clipped to the spokes. (Seven of spades, have a nice day.)
Your life consists of walking from waiting room to waiting room, swept along by the implacable hands of the clock.
According to mormon scripture, humans have "agency" and can choose for themselves between good and evil.
According to rationalist sacred tradition, humans are "agentic" and can move house to San Fransisco.
You are neither possessed of agency in the mormon sense, nor agentic in the lesswrong sense.
You are an e. coli bacterium mechanically chemotaxiing along a chemical gradient, and you roll off your unframed mattress to rise to dress in the dark.
You will walk to the bus stop--this isn't a decision that you've made, it's just that to do otherwise would be a stone rolling uphill. As yesterday, so tomorrow, and overmorrow, and forever.
You're the oldest of your sisters, which means no hand-me-downs, which today means no clean long pants which fit.
You look to the window. It's black as night outside. There's frost on the grass. The window is fogged with condensation. Your face is colder just for facing in that direction.
You select your warmest skirt and socks like Powell and Donovan picking the shadiest patch on the bright side of Mercury.
You collect your school binder and chemotaxxi out of the room along the shortest path to the kitchen sink.
Taped to the window above the sink, a paper placard reads:
Do NOT leave dirty dishes in the sink (even temporarily)!
Either:
1) put them in the dishwasher OR
2) wash them by hand
Beneath the placard, piling dishes overflow the sink and sprawl--molding and precarious--all across the countertop.
The cabinets and dishwasher have apparently been emptied of glassware to make room for an emergency supply of breathable air.
That'll prove handy if anyone opens a window and exposes you all to hard vacuum, but it's a touch inconvenient in the moment.
The drinking fountains at school taste more like crayons than crayons taste like crayons, and you aren't nearly that desperate; you'll drink when you get home.
The chemical gradient carries you through the living room towards the shoe rack through the front door.
It's cold.
Your legs are cold, your ears sting, breathing through your nostrils hurts your nose, breathing through your mouth hurts all the way down in your lungs. Your breath comes out in great steaming plumes but you resist the temptation to warm your face with them--the accumulating moisture isn't worth it in the long run.
The air against your eyes feels dry and sharp, so you scrunch your eyelids and activate your x-ray vision.
The sky above shows bottomless black, save icily distant pinprick stars.
Eternity lurks behind each sunwashed blue day sky, as polished and clear as a black OLED screen.
Beneath the infinite majestic heavens shrink the overgrown yards, decaying tract houses, pitted asphalt, and street-parked RVs of Tanglewood Court.
Autopilot charts the shortest path to the street, and your legs execute it, cutting a line of crisper darker green against the frosty grass.
Shel Silverstein describes a land where the sidewalk ends, but before the street begins.
He says that there the sun burns crimson bright, and the grass grows soft and white, and the moon-bird rests from his flight to cool in the peppermint wind.
He describes an escape from this place where the smoke blows black and the dark street winds and bends, past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow, to the place where the sidewalk ends.
He claims that the children can guide, for the children, they know--the place where the sidewalk ends.
There must once have been a time when you knew the route to the moon-bird's summer-bright resting spot.
But this is the mark of your maturity: the only things you can see between the sidewalk and the street are the curb and gutter.
Stomping along, you hang a right on Maplewood and an immediate left onto Sycamore Street.
A parked truck obstructs your view, and you have to walk a little bit out past it before you can look both ways--you're annoyed but hardly concerned; you're not exactly crossing Main Street here. In terms of traffic, there's nothing but a yellow school bus--and it's parked all the way down at the far end of the street, where people can get on it--so you can shuffle across without fear.
The proverb says that slow and steady wins the race.
After your late start today it's too late to compete on the strength of your steadiness, but that's no reason to fail with abandon--half credit is better than nothing.
There are two bus stops on Sycamore Street, one at either end, roughly equidistant to your own position.
In Around the World in 80 Days, Phileas Fogg was said to be so exact that he was never in a hurry--although the most deliberate person in the world, he nonetheless always reached his destinations exactly when he intended to.
In the 1993 film Groundhog Day newscaster Phil Connors displays similar powers of unruffled punctuality, but in his case it's due to the time loop he's trapped in.
You've lived this exact day, with minor deviations, five times a week for something like eight years. You missed your shot at the nearer of the two bus stops, but if you point your toes at the other you've an unbeatable lead on the competition.
Frigidly, you shuffle down Sycamore Street. The speed limit is 25 mph and it's too early in the morning for you to be bothered with footracing motor vehicles, so the school bus will gain on and overtake you--but you'll catch up when it stops to admit passengers.
Sycamore Street is cut from the same cloth as Tanglewood Court.
This house has tin cans in the yard.
This house has police cruisers parked outside, and people making loud noises within--you feel a bit boxed in while passing through.
This house is well-maintained.
You shift your binder to your left hand, and hold your right hand to your right-hand ear.
The school bus blows past you like a train without rails, ten tons of steel and moving parts groaning and shrieking in exertion.
You shift the binder back to your right hand.
Your fingers are cold and inflexible.
Your ears feel like solid ice.
You've been walking for something like ten minutes.
The bus stops at the end of the street and students swarm it--pitiable wraiths, wreathed in gloom and mist.
Why were you ever worried?
It's because the clock faked you out with made-up numbers like 6:40 and 6:52--to throw you off your game--just to see you scramble and sweat--and you fell for it like a sucker. Probably you could have slept until the display read nine or ten before even setting out and you'd still have caught the bus in this same timeless liminal moment, this ostensible seven oh five o'clock. Any memories you have of having missed the bus on other days--of watching it drive away from you--of running beside it and knocking futilely on the glass door--were probably surgically implanted, false memories to make you sprint and suffer.
You even slow your pace slightly to avoid having to wait in line.
You wait until the stairs are clear before grabbing the banister and clomping up them in one go.
It's warmer inside the bus, but louder. You wouldn't call it an improvement on net.
You pass the bus driver--a little old lady who exudes power and an authority neither of you would ever dare to test--and muse on how in all the books you've read which were written from a first-person perspective, the narrator will interrupt their stream-of-consciousness inner monologue to comment on things which they've seen a thousand times before and have no logical reason to describe to an audience.
(This is something that you think about a lot, in the early morning.)
You could describe entering the school bus's innards--rife with intestinal parasites--as pushing through a solid wall of noise.
But here's a better metaphor: in The World Set Free, H. G. Wells imagines a bomb which, rather than detonating just the once, explodes continuously--with a half-life of seventeen days.
No thin wall to be pushed through, the noise is more solid and real than you are; you're an intangible ghost, incorporeal, coterminous with it.
Or perhaps a gas, theoretically made of atoms but feeble and flexible.
You'll take the shape of your container.
In this respect the human ape is much like Wells's "atomic bombs"--no instantaneous combustible, we.
No, the fire dies by stages.
Your accustomed seat is directly behind the bus driver, and you have it to yourself. (It boggles your mind that no one ever fights you for it; it's the best seat in the house. Right by the exit.)
You'd throw your binder on the bench beside you--lots of people do, to discourage anyone from sitting next to them, while others cram three to a bench, and yes you can disdain the seat-hoarders while being one yourself you contain multitudes--but this was the last stop on the bus route and there's no point. You pin the binder between you and the wall; when all else is equal you like to keep a tight grip on your things.
The door hasn't closed but you're already beginning to thaw--it'll hurt a little at first, like pins and needles, and you know from experience that it'll hurt more in a few moments.
You have what's been termed an "overactive imagination" by people who've wetted their toes in the tidal zone of a vast unfathomed sea... well, wetted their toes or had their toes roughshod wetted, and if the latter is inhuman you've at any rate stopped doing it--these days you pretty much keep to yourself.
In The Hatchet, the main character holds pretend conversations with people he knew. For some reason that always squicked you out a little; you're more comfortable with the Cast Away solution of bleeding all over a volleyball and naming it Wilson. For your own part, you like to pretend that you're being possessed by the ride-along phantoms of historical figures or by characters from fiction or by your alter-ego from the timeline oracles see and tech-geniuses pull their blueprints from. Sometimes you imagine that they can hear your inner monologue too.
How long would it take Thomas Paine, if he dropped in behind your eyes and has been silently lurking there since you woke up, to realize that he was in the future? In America? Would he be proud of it? What would he make of the bus's vandalized faux-leather benches, with their foam innards exposed? Would he be able to place the smell of burnt gasoline that infuses the bus from emergency ceiling exit to the bolts of the undercarriage? Would the deranged madhouse screaming bother him too? Would he know what it is about school buses in particular which inspires people to howl like vulgar baboons? Whence the insipid screaming?
You jam your fingers in your ears.
You rest your head against the window and glower at the street outside--insofar as you can see it past your own reflection.
Your frozen ears feel like they're melting. Like they're turning into water and dribbling down the side of your head. Would you be able to tell if this time they really were? Your fingers don't have much sensation.
Well, you suppose you could check your reflection in the window.
They aren't melting.
It's occurred to you that idly wondering what Thomas Paine would think about one's life as one goes about their day could be a convenient trait in the viewpoint character of a book, to make exposition more natural. You've even toyed with the idea of giving it to a character, though you're by no stretch a writer.
(You're pretty sure that writing things takes capital, and anyway don't publishing agencies reject one hundred and twelve percent of manuscripts?)
Now, the thought continues, the character--on realizing that they have such a useful trait for a viewpoint character--might wonder at its providence. And now it entertains you to question whether, by the same logic, you should wonder about the root cause of it in yourself.
(Obviously this is all sillyness you're generating to entertain yourself--a parrot that gave up on pulling its feathers and retreated into its mind--fictional characters don't have the same rich internal experience that you can directly observe having. (Well, unless, perhaps, they're animated by readers with sufficiently active imaginations...?)
Not to mention that any story in which you played a starring role would be... unreadable, for many reasons. Your life is unrelentingly tedious, and you're unlikeable. Empirically. (And, to rebut the obvious counterpoint apropos Harry Potter, you're not a high-minded hero who only knows Dursleys; you're petty and vicious. You exist in the proximity of group discussions in Language Arts class, and trawl the comments on Line Webtoon; antiheroes--in the original sense of the word--make your age cohort see red.)
And you've never actually read anything using a device like this. To be fair it isn't needed: the standard first-person-limited thing with its acceptable breaks from the word-for-word monologue wherever you need to include the main character's background knowledge (and what they think and feel about it) probably makes for objectively better literature, as long as you can do it unobtrusively; something something art is meant to be truer than life. Don't get the words you're writing in the way of your own story.
And you're not sure that the standard first-person-limited thing is generally supposed to be taken as an internal monologue anyway; something like half of people don't have internal monologues and people still write books about them. And, if you recall correctly, only 60% of internal monologuers use the literary-standard first-person pronoun of "I"--and you aren't one of them. So if you were a viewpoint character, you'd need your raw thoughts edited anyway, if only to match the house style.)
You're looking through a window with the light behind you. If the story of your life is filmed or drawn or animated, the likeliest place to place the camera is right behind your shoulder--where the audience can simultaneously see your expression and whatever it is you're looking at. (Nothing. You aren't looking at anything; the bus isn't moving.)
Being a visual-medium character wouldn't explain your Paineful daydreams, but it doesn't cost you a thing to twist in your seat and wave at the camera.
...And you're suddenly put in mind of how when Howard Dully was a kid he'd daydream audiences who watched him like an actor on the silver screen; his stepmother had him diagnosed a twelve year-old schizophrenic, and lobotomized.
Your superego is an icepick in character if not scope: you stop making weird faces and turn sullenly back to the window.
It's slightly odd that you're not moving yet; you sit taller to see the bus driver, who's apparently looking out through the windshield down a tributary of Sycamore Street.
That one girl who wears a knit-giraffe hat--you share some classes, and her locker is near yours--is running late, sprinting helter-skelter for the bus.
Despite that giraffe-girl is holding up the bus for everyone, you don't have it within you to resent her for it. Life is a series of miserable events which are foisted on you one after another, but school lets out at the same time every day; you're riding out the clock. As yesterday, so tomorrow--giraffe-girl running a little late isn't enough to budge this elephant from its post.
(You do feel momentarily superior to her--because today you were on time--but, small mercies, the moment ends. You resolve to, once you get home, tear out your brain out and replace it with something more useful, like a rock tumbler. You glare at your reflection with longsuffering exasperation and some contempt and some bemused affection. When Ender Wiggins truly understood his enemies, he couldn't but love them--you don't perfectly understand yourself, but you sure are self-centered enough to make up the difference.)
Huffing and puffing and clambering up the stairs onto the bus, giraffe-girl says "sorry, sorry, I'm so sorry," and the bus driver says, "mmhmm," and the doors close and--
--it happens too fast to react, but why didn't you see this coming?--
--the bus starts moving before giraffe-girl has found a seat and she squeaks like a chew toy and grabs the back of your chair to stabilize herself and now it's too late because she says
"Do you mind if I sit here?"
"It's okay if the answer is no!!"
It isn't okay if the answer is no, and no one can make that the case just through asserting it.
"I'm told it's a free country."
"Thanks."
You are forced to conclude that giraffe-girl thinks "personal space" a term as refers to a patch of the infinite cosmos enclosed within a chain link fence. Behind, perhaps, posted signs which read "Private Property" and "Beware of the DOG"--the Boötes Void, maybe.
You flatten yourself against your window-seat wall and let the hate flow through you.
While it's true that you've never actually read George Orwell's 1984, it's also true that never since the year he wrote it--not a single time, as the generations churn and nations rise and fall--has not having read George Orwell's 1984 given even one Homo sapiens pause in comparing their situation to it. The wisdom of your ancestors is in the simile, which your unhallowed hands dare not disturb: this is literally 1984.
You'd rather giraffe-girl simply said, "I'm sitting here." Or, if she wanted to be polite, she could have said, "I'm sitting here, sorry."
Or just sat without a word.
At least then you wouldn't be complicit.
If a question only allows one answer, it's not a question at all--it's some entirely different maneuver.
And you hate being pushed around. You'd trade in all your own people-pushing privileges if that's a trade you could make.
You'll live in the Boötes Void, autarkic.
Feeling angry and righteous is a warning to check your thinking--twice.
Zooming out:
This random kid--fresh from nearly missing the bus--went for the first available seat because said bus was moving underneath her, mouthed the appropriate social nicety, but was met with silent condemnation, while the bus was still moving, and voiced the first mentally available apology.
And here you are, frothing over with resentment, spitting castigations and renouncing the whole human species.
You've clearly lost the plot.
The inflexible bus fights free of your tangled neighborhood's twisty streets.
It's dark outside the window.
You live your life according to a clock, and it's The Man's clock, not Nature's.
You boarded the bus at 7:05 AM--that's what 7:05 AM means.
The bus trip takes something like half an hour--starting and stopping and plodding along--starting from, as you've said, 7:05 exactly. Although sometimes the bus arrives twenty minutes into 7:05, or, more rarely but much worse, 7:05 comes quicker than you feel it really ought.
The sun rises today at 7:36--one minute later than it did yesterday. The cafeteria closes at 7:40. Classes begin at 7:50.
It's dark outside the window: on Tuesdays the sun rises at a quarter to four post meridiem.
And in November the sun sets by six.
...But it's ridiculous to feel sorry for yourself: you're riding the same bus as kids who live a five-minutes' drive from the school--and the bus picks them up first.
Not to mention, like, there are people starving in Africa and soldiers dying on the moon.
The sky grays.
Some irrepressible hominid part of you is cheered by the light.
You're waking up; you feel it in your bones.
Your ancestors worshiped this lightening sky, and it's easy to sympathize: left to your own devices you'd probably build a monolith or a ring of a stones or something.
Finally free of winding residential streets, the yellow bus trundles powerfully down Cross Traffic Does Not Stop Avenue.
Scrub brush and corn fields are split by tracts of housing old and new--separated from Traffic Does Not Stop Street by old wooden fences with missing slats, or shiny white plastic ones, or weathered chain link, or stone or steel or iridescent forcefields. Nature is healing; the older and more dilapidated the houses the taller and less ruly the trees--and the yellower the lawns the more biodiverse the underbrush.
Four-story apartment buildings are scattered hither and thither in no discernible pattern. Here's the LDS church, sparkling-white and spiky. Now cows and cows and cows--you're too phobic to look right at them. Horses. There, towering tree-houses that must have been grown by a licensed biokinetic. A church sign says RELOAD FROM HIS SAVE POINT and the flip side sign reads VISITORS WELCOME, MEMBERS EXPECTED, SUNDAY SERVICE 1030.
Giraffe-girl never ceases to exists on the periphery of your awareness.
She's too close, and keeps making weird noises.
Is she trying not to laugh? A sidelong glance confirms it; she's reading something on her phone.
She catches your eye, which is awkward, and you look away.
You're nearly at the school.
You want to draw her hat.
"Can you hear me when I whisper?"
"On this bus, with your ears plugged!"
After three and a half billion years of evolution, the results are in: allegedly thinking creatures who, on confirming that whispering works, shout.
You press your tragii into your skull and rue every act of meiosis which brought you to this point.
"Sorry."
Your rule is that, for fairness' sake, what you contempt in others you excise from yourself. Most people, when they get upset, are led along by the emotion--like a thousand pound bovine with an itty bitty nosering; a little force goes a long way against someone who isn't trying to resist it. Wrath is a pro wrestler; it needs your help with the throw. Kids, you can just say no to chokeslams.
So you try to be reasonable.
But at the end of the day you can't say that it's made you any happier than the average person.
You read a book in class called A Monster Calls where the protagonist goes on a rampage--ripping down shelves and destroying furniture and smashing a clock into little pieces. (Not that you're comparing your life to his. You're well-aware that your life's objectively great. It's just--somehow the knowing doesn't help.) And, after, he has regrets--but also found it therapeutic. He shouldn't have done it and wishes he hadn't, but he was at his breaking point before, and beneath his breaking point after.
Wouldn't it be interesting if having greater self-control just means that you go longer and endure misery more before you snap? On this model, life continues happening to people until they reach their breaking point, and fly into a cathartic rage, and from that point on they wobble back and forth across the threshold. The difference between you and those with quicker tempers (or with less control over themselves; you're a hard act to follow when it comes to quick tempers) is that you'll fill your bigger glass with more misery before it overflows, and be forever more miserable.
This model, if true, would justify your every irate action, which is like being correct.
Obvious solution is obvious: scream at and hit giraffe-girl.
...And now you're imagining what would happen if you actually did that--the face she'd make--the noises--would she try to fight back how and how would you prevent her from preventing you from hurting her--and your brain bounces like a beach ball in the way of a locomotive.
You guess you're not cut out to randomly attack people.
That might close off some careers.
"It's fine," you say, because it isn't that big a deal.
You're aware that she might not hear your exact words over the din inside the school bus but you're not about to shout over it to be heard.
"You might have already thought about this but I'm willing to endure some awkwardness on the chance that you haven't and I'd feel bad if I didn't bring it up but why don't you wear earplugs? To free up your hands."
Because I don't have earplugs?
Communication is exhausting and never worth it.
You shrug your shoulders.
The two of you sit in awkward silence for a moment, until she says "okay" and goes back to her phone.
"Sorry for bothering you."
No, you're sorry for bothering her.
You feel like you did something wrong, somehow, although you're not sure what.
The bus pulls into the bus loop.
It just now occurs to you that giraffe-girl is between you and the exit.
Furthermore: at some point during the ride giraffe-girl ditched the hat and coat, and took off her gloves. She'll want to disentangle those and put them back on.
So unless she moves with your customary haste--starting now--the equally eager people in the rows behind you--on their feet before the bus stops, pushing and shoving to escape their confinement five seconds sooner--are going to overrun your position. You'll be trapped behind people filing past. You'll leave after the kids in the very back.
Giraffe-girl is puttering about collecting her stuff.
If you had to borrow someone's seat, you'd keep your gloves on the whole time. You wouldn't want to put them to any trouble.
It doesn't look like she's in any particular hurry.
You hold your binder close and despair.
But at least you can be ready to go when she is.
Tense as an Olympian runner waiting on the starting pistol, you face the aisle with one foot on the floor and--because the other doesn't fit--one knee on the bench.
"Sorry for holding you up!"
"And for being loud."
In Fablehaven: Grip of the Shadow Plague, magic creatures are affiliated with either light or darkness. Light things are often kind or helpful, where dark creatures are often cruel and dangerous. There are even magic curses which can change a creature's light-darkness affiliation, one-eightying their whole personality and all their values. But a distinction is drawn, by one of the characters--an old man, whose life's work was protecting a place where different magic creatures could live safe from humans and each other--, between "dark" and evil.
A dark creature simply acts according to its nature--no more morally culpable than a hungry bear. If a bear ate your leg, you'd be upset with the whole situation, but--goes the claim--you wouldn't blame the bear the way you'd blame a human.
Magic creatures are a fact of life, in the world of Fablehaven, like bears and inclement weather. You can appreciate them on their own merits--from a safe distance--and you can even want the best for them. But you won't get anywhere by expecting them to be something other than what they are, or condemning them for not.
And that's why you'd lying if you said you accepted giraffe-girl's apology. You don't consider her a moral agent in the relevant way.
Giraffe-girl is gathering her things more rapidly now.
You feel guilty of this. Well, you are guilty of it, which you feel guilty about.
You regret that giraffe-girl's morning has been worse for having you in it.
And for what.
The bus is still slowing, but already there are those out of their seats and moving forward.
Most humans have zero qualms about elbowing themselves into a moving crowd, packing in tight like the atoms of a neutron star, cutting each other off. But you find the idea aversive. Giraffe-girl will get off the bus quicker for having scrambled for her stuff, but that wasn't a priority of hers.
This is why you dread Christmas and your birthday--thoughtful people going to unasked-for lengths to deliver subtly useless gifts.
Or maybe your mistake is taking her apology as anything more heartfelt than a social lubricant. She wants off this bus, to get away from you, and then she'll get on with her day because you're not the center of her universe.
Giraffe-girl--awkward on her feet--rises, her eyes on the rows which were behind her, but doesn't elbow into the crowd until the vehicle comes to a complete halt.
You watch with dispassion. It's too late for anything you do here to matter.
Giraffe-girl stands in the aisle beside (and just a hair behind) you.
And stops.
There are dozens of people behind her.
She meets your eye.
She looks at the door.
You don't need to be told twice.
You rocket away, a snake in a can, and find somewhere unoccupied to stand and breathe and steel yourself.
You stop and watch the sunrise, vivid and colorful and full of promise. The light makes you stronger, more able to withstand. You find dawn renewing, and not just because your gifts are solar-powered.
Plummeting across the sky at ludicrous speed and a three degree angle comes Malachai Hanson in his goggles and bicycle helmet. He lands out on the oval track, shouting "heads up!" to the no one around and jogging to slow down.
That can't possibly be good for his knees.
Malachai would have left home after 7:36--or maybe on that exact minute. You don't like your odds of making it to the cafeteria before it closes.
You tear your gaze back to Earth.
Sundew Meadow Middle School, like an ogre, consists of concentric layers.
First come chain link fences--topped with barbed wire, to deter egress. (Like the Iron Curtain, the machine guns point in.)
Tracts of grass and dirt for student enrichment, most of which was marked off with paint and declared out-of-bounds. A big dirt square and an oval track.
Tumultuous parking lots--precarious Celtic knots made of asphalt and paint and special cases and Byzantine procedure. One of these days someone's going to get off their bus and get flattened by a car. (Also there's a juvenile t-rex, seven feet tall and twenty-odd from tip to tail. It's fine, she's a student here.)
The portables: a city of drab white buildings in the parking lot, two classrooms each, drafty and unheated, hauled--like trailer homes--into position; a temporary solution become permanent fixture. A tangle of stairs and elevated metal walkways grow like cobwebs betwixt and about them.
And Sundew Meadow itself, the antlion in its pit.
Hulking, gray, prison-like, with bars in the windows, steel security doors within and without for your protection.
After decades of detaining recalcitrant teenagers during the years they're likeliest to develop their gifts, there's much more to SMMS than concrete and linoleum.
The anomalous Zone from Roadside Picnic is lethal to the ill-prepared, where Hogwarts from Harry Potter is a harmless--if inconvenient and confusing to the uninitiated--eccentric of a genius loci. Sundew Meadow sits somewhere in between them. It's impossible to deny the hand of a cruel intelligence at play, but the school does at least seem reluctant to utterly break its toys.
It's possible that SMMS is held in check by that same mysterious optimization process that connects human brains with superpowers they can use and make sense of.
...You feel compelled to add, for the benefit of any ride-along phantoms from centuries past or from the other timeline, that the last sentence was a joke.
...And also some of the other sentences.
But don't get in the habit of expecting you to clearly sign-post these things--it's your internal monologue, by Jove, and you'll spin your wheels whatever way entertains you most in the moment.
You chemotaxxi across the parking lot.
And into the gloom of the building.
By the light of flickering plasma rods you walk the grimy linoleum, dodging cheerful clumps of loiterers and a centaur wearing a horse blanket en route to confirm that the cafeteria is closed. You're not entirely unrewarded; every complete breakfast comes with a bottle of milk, and not everyone cares to drink theirs. There's a designated table for unwanted dairy--to divert what would otherwise be tossed--and you scoop up both palatable chocolate-flavoreds on it.
You head for your locker--you need a textbook from it for second period, and won't have time to open your locker between classes--, dodging loiterers and PDAs and a big bipedal turtle who is walking very slowly.
You put the combination in carefully.
These old lockers can be picky.
Oh-six, three-oh, oh-five.
It won't open.
Oh-six, three-oh, oh-five.
Still no dice.
Oh-six, three-oh, oh-five.
Oh-six, three-oh, oh-five.
Oh-six, three-oh, oh-five.
Oh-six, three-oh, oh-five.
Oh-six, three-oh, oh-five.
Oh-six, three-oh, oh-five.
Ripping the locker door off its hinges would be as easy for you as opening a cardboard box of cereal.
But then you wouldn't have a locker.
You have to remind yourself not to destroy the locker by accident.
Oh-six, three-oh, oh-five.
Oh-six, three-oh, oh-five.
Oh-six, three-oh, oh-five.
Oh-six, three-oh, oh-five.
Oh-six, three-oh, oh-five.
Oh-six, three-oh, oh-five.
The five-minute bell rings. You're increasingly alone in this hallway.
There is a dark calm on the far side of frustration, and you've reached it.
Life will continue to happen and there's nothing you can really do about that.
The chemical gradient says to continue with what you're doing. Either it'll eventually work, or it won't. Either way, it's out of your hands.
But it seems you've gathered an audience.
"Can I take a try?"
You step to the side and gesture--with a sweeping arm--that she's free to make the attempt.
...Wait, how could she "take a try" without your combination?
Someone failed to think this through and it might have been the both of you.
"Annnnnd - it's open!"
"Is that the master key?"
"I couldn't make out what you said there, sorry."
"Is that the master key?"
"It's a wave rake."
You don't know what a wave rake is--
(although the etymology suggests some manner of seaborn ne'er-do-well, like Long John Silver or Captain Jack Sparrow)
--but can infer the meaning from Context Clues.
"Why do you have a lockpick?"
"To open locks."
Well.
Can't argue with that.
You're feeling a bit wary of giraffe-girl. She did just break into a locker in front of you. And while you're certainly grateful she did in this specific case, it reveals a disturbing ability.
But your discomfort goes further than that. What she just did, you didn't expect at all.
How, then, can you anticipate what she's going to do next?
Sufficiently harmless creatures, like cats and tiny dogs, can be unpredictable without being frightening. They can even be simultaneously cute and vicious. With bigger animals, though, and with humans, you feel safer when you can fall back on your Phil Connors clairvoyance to know in advance what they're likely to do.
Are you forgetting your base rates? Sanity check with made up numbers:
Most people can't pick locks. Let's say one in a hundred. Probably those who can, are disproportionately criminally inclined--temperamental and uninhibited. Let's say that however likely standard-issue humans are to have tools--ability--inclination--, volatile people are five times as likely. For five in a hundred, or one in twenty.
Now suppose that ten percent of the population are volatile in the relevant sense. That sounds about right--a lowball estimate, if anything.
By your understanding--using these guesstimates--the same way how on observing that someone's dangerous you can expect one chance in twenty that they can pick locks--, if you observe that someone can pick locks you can guess that there's one chance in... one chance in two that they're dangerous.
Maybe you should try to avoid existing as a feature of giraffe-girl's mental world.
"In particular, I wanted a way to open my locker without having to enter the combination! Did you know that if you shave just five seconds off something you do twice a day, you'll save five hours over five years? I'm rounding of course, and it's an overestimate because there's weekends and summer break but it's an underestimate too because I bet you're saving more than five seconds in the median case and way way more in the average, locker opening-outcomes form a fat-tailed distribution, uh, a distribution with one fat tail, and the 99th percentile bad outcome is really annoying and the 99.9th percentile bad outcome is you have to get a janitor to open it for you and you're marked tardy and that'll ding your grades because people assigned worse lockers should have worse GPAs that's an accurate assessment of their scholastic merit there's some real equality of opportunity going on speaking of which do you need to get going because if you do you should."
Giraffe-girl comes across as earnest. And friendly and smart and interestingly novel and if you were inclined to debate her on the value of pinching seconds--just to kick the idea around, you don't exactly disagree--you'd say "the time passes just as quick either way" and there's a part of you which wants to know how she'd respond to that and a part of you which--hope springs eternal--is convinced that she'd hold up her end of the conversation and that you'd learn things from her and that she'd be interested in learning the things which you already know and there's a part of you which feels like a sunflower growing towards the light that leaks through a boarded window and always feels this way and always has that hope dashed.
Realistically, half of your impression is pure halo effect, because you like her hat and subconsciously like her hair, and another half is that you're caught up in her energy, and the final half is that someone is actually talking to you and when was the last time that happened?
Does any of that quintuple your confidence in her? Probably not.
But in any case, giraffe-girl helped you.
"Thank you."
And--
"I'm sorry about earlier."
That's your line.
"Me too."
That came out wrong.
But it doesn't seem like she took offense?
She runs off with a wide smile and an "I've got to get to class!" and an "I'll see you in PE!"
She seems nice.
You don't wear a watch, or carry a phone, but Sundew Meadow Middle has carved into your soul an intuition for how long five minutes lasts. If you don't yourself run, you'll be late to first period.
You feel a very stale sense of urgency.
But what power fear once had over you--and what power you, through fear, had over yourself--was broken by long exposure. The minute-hand of the clock pushes against your back, propelling you forward, but inertia resists it--you will be swept over, dragged beneath the wheels.
You begin walking.
The bell rings.
You are now tardy. If you appeared in your seat this very second, you'd be no less tardy. (You know; you've seen teleporters try.)
If you spent ten minutes doing something else, you'd be no more tardy. Knowing this doesn't slow you.
You don't really care whether or not you're marked tardy. That's not the thing which moves you. You don't care whether or not you're learning. You don't care whether or not you're passing classes.
In your life, the bell rings and you walk from one room to another. It's not any deeper than that.
You arrive before your name is called in the rolecall. The teacher makes sure you know she didn't miss your entrance and that you'll be marked late nonetheless. This fails to deeply affect you; you're riding out the clock. The teacher says more words. You hear them without listening. An indeterminate amount of time passes. Now an assignment is being passed around; you take one and pass the rest of the stack on. You write your name on it, and the date in month-day-year format--11/12/13. If giraffe-girl hadn't been at your locker writing those three numbers would be a strong candidate for the highlight of your day. When you are done with the assignment, the class is told, put your heads down silently on your desks. No, you may not draw. No, you may not read. This is so the teacher can tell when everyone is done. It is, you are told, the most efficient way to use class time.
The assignment has questions on them. You read the questions. They don't seem hard.
You doodle giraffe-girl's hat in the margins. You doodle other things besides. You wait for all but one person to put their heads down, at which point you begin to worry that he's doing the same thing and waiting on you, so you put down yours (but he doesn't his).
At the end of class, you submit your blank assignment.
The class rises in unison, collecting their things.
"The bell does not dismiss you, I dismiss you!" protests one cog in the machine, unaware--or in denial--of the simple fact that every speck, every iota of her own motive force is derived from the clockwork upstream of her. "Okay," power proven, "now you can go."
The bell rings, and there's walking, and sitting, and the bell rings again--the first period. Your second period class is on separating the waters above from the waters below--well, either that or Social Studies. Either would be equally dry.
Your ride-along phantom might have noticed by now that you're not a very good student.
You wrote a paper in school, once--in the sixth grade, before you stopped writing papers--, about a world where they taught Ice Cream Studies in school. In that world, ice cream was universally despised, and the people who liked it were seen as weird nerds. Your teacher called it "insightful" and praised it, to your discomfort, in front of the entire class... although looking back, you think it was poorly written and rather on the nose; but then again, sixth-graders are dancing bears--the marvel is that they write, not that they write well. And then she ("but please don't be discouraged!") gave you a failing grade on it because you hadn't conformed to the rubric.
This to say, as you hate Hell, all Montagues, and Language Arts, so you hate Social Studies. Nor are you alone in this. Rowling chose Magical History to give Professor Binns. You're aware of a rap song about how, rather than learn useless things like human history, the indignant singer wishes they'd been taught about the tax code.
And you have to wonder whether to someone from a world where they don't teach history--of all things history! fencing fighting torture revenge giants monsters chases escapes true love miracles and every single campfire story that made it this far, passed from one generation to the next--whether to a person from a world where they didn't teach history in school, and let people learn it unmolested, would your world seem poorly written? Would your world seem too on the nose?
But at least--this year--in second period you just learn history; you could be in a really tedious class, like Music or Arcane Arts.
"I'm not going to take attendance, we'll just be interrupted halfway through by the morning announcements."
The class chatters, relatively quietly.
You wonder how it is that some teachers can reign in a class with their presence and others incite bedlam worse than the students get up to left to their own devices.
If you had a book you would read it. You have your social studies textbook, but you've already read it. You could walk to the library and return with a book before your name is called for attendance, but you may not.
Sunlight streams through the bars in the window.
"Okay, it looks like they're going to be late with the announcements. Zachery Baker."
"Here!"
"Solomon -"
The intercom crackles and your teacher groans.
A student on the other end of it reads, word by disjointed word, "GOOD. MORNING. SUNDEW. MEADOW. MUTANTS. MY. NAME. IS. RODNEY REMINGTON. AND. TODAY. IS. TUESDAY. NOVEMBER. TWELVE. PLEASE. STAND. FOR. THE. PLEDGE. OF. ALLEGIANCE."
You rise, a spinal reflex, and all chorus, "I pledge allegiance. To the flag. Of the United States of America. And to the republic. For which it stands. One nation. Under God. Indivisible. With liberty and justice for all."
"OUR. FACULTY. OF. THE. WEEK. IS. MISS. MURPLE. MISS. MURPLE. I. WOULD. LIKE. TO. NOMINATE. MISS. MURPLE. FOR. FACULTY. OF. THE. WEEK. SHE. REALLY. CARES. ABOUT. HER. STUDENTS. AND. GOES. ABOVE. AND. BEYOND. FOR. US. I. WON'T. GET. INTO. THE. PARTICULARS. THANK. YOU. MISS. MURPLE."
"TODAY. WE'VE. GOT. AN. IMPORTANT. ANNOUNCEMENT. ABOUT. ONE. OF. OUR. STUDENTS. CONSTANTINO. ALVAREZ. AT. THE. WRESTLING. MEET. AGAINST. KILMORE. CONSTANTINO. UNFORTUNATELY. SUFFERED. SUBSTANTIAL. INJURIES. INCLUDING. THIRD. DEGREE. BURNS. AND. NOW. HE'S. IN. THE. HOSPITAL. CONSTANTINO'S. DETERMINATION. AND. FIGHTING. SPIRIT. WERE. THE. REASON. WE. WON. AGAINST. KILMORE. MIDDLE. WE'RE. ALL. HOPING. HE. MAKES. A. SWIFT. AND. TOTAL. RECOVERY."
"BASKETBALL. TRYOUTS. FOR. THE. EIGHTH-GRADE. BOYS'. BASKETBALL. TEAM. ARE. THIS. FRIDAY. THAT. IS. THE. 15TH. OF. NOVEMBER. IF. YOU. HAVE. THE. SKILLS. OR. WANT. TO. LEARN. THEM. SMMS. NEEDS. YOU. TO. JOIN. THE. EIGHTH-GRADE. BOYS'. BASKETBALL. TEAM. YOU. DON'T. NEED. TO. BE. AN. EIGHTH-GRADER. OR. A. BOY. LAST. YEAR. OUR. TOP. SCORER. WAS. A. SIXTH-GRADE. GIRL. ALL. THAT. MATTERS. IS. TALENT. AND. HARD. WORK. IF. YOU. WOULD. JOIN. THE. BASKETBALL. TEAM. BUT. YOUR. PARENTS. DIDN'T. BUY. YOU. AN. ACTIVITY. CARD,. TALK. TO. COACH. MCTAVISH. IN. ROOM. 302. IF. YOUR. GIFTS. LET. YOU. FLY. OR. DO. AIR. DEFENSE. AND. YOU'RE. STILL. ON. THE. FENCE. ABOUT. JOINING. THE. BASKETBALL. TEAM. PLEASE. PLEASE. PLEASE. SEE. COACH. MCTAVISH. PLAYING. SPORTS. WILL. OPEN. DOORS. IN. YOUR. LIFE. TOGETHER. WE. CAN. MAKE. THIS. A. GREAT. SEASON. FOR. BASKETBALL."
"REMINDER. BULLYING. IS. ANY. SPOKEN. WRITTEN. PHYSICAL. PSYCHIC. MAGIC. ELECTRONIC. OR. INEXPLICABLE. ACT. OR. THREAT. BY. A. STUDENT. THAT. A. REASONABLE. PERSON. UNDER. THE. CIRCUMSTANCES. SHOULD. KNOW. WILL. HAVE. THE. EFFECT. OF. HARMING. A. STUDENT. OR. DAMAGING. A. STUDENT'S. PROPERTY. OR. PLACING. A. STUDENT. IN. REASONABLE. FEAR. OF. HARM. TO. THEMSELVES. OR. PLACING. A. STUDENT. IN. REASONABLE. FEAR. OF. DAMAGE. TO. THEIR. PROPERTY. OR. IS. SUFFICIENTLY. SEVERE. PERSISTENT. OR. PERVASIVE. THAT. IT. CREATES. AN. INTIMIDATING. THREATENING. OR. ABUSIVE. EDUCATIONAL. ENVIRONMENT. FOR. A. STUDENT. OR. UNREASONABLY. INTERFERES. WITH. AN. INDIVIDUAL'S. EDUCATIONAL. PERFORMANCE. OR. OTHERWISE. ADVERSELY. AFFECTS. AN. INDIVIDUAL'S. EDUCATIONAL. OPPORTUNITIES. STUDENTS. AT. SMMS. ARE. PROHIBITED. FROM. ENGAGING. IN. THE. FOLLOWING. BEHAVIORS:. PHYSICAL. ABUSE. AGAINST. A. STUDENT. INCLUDING. BUT. NOT. LIMITED. TO. HITTING. PUSHING. TRIPPING. KICKING. BLOCKING. OR. RESTRAINING. ANOTHER'S. MOVEMENT. CAUSING. DAMAGE. TO. ANOTHER'S. CLOTHING. OR. POSSESSIONS. AND. ANOTHER'S. BELONGINGS. VERBAL. ABUSE. AGAINST. A. STUDENT. INCLUDING. BUT. NOT. LIMITED. TO. NAME. CALLING. THREATENING. TAUNTING. AND. MALICIOUS. TEASING. PSYCHOLOGICAL. ABUSE. AGAINST. A. STUDENT. INCLUDING. BUT. NOT. LIMITED. TO. SPREADING. HARMFUL. OR. INAPPROPRIATE. RUMORS. REGARDING. ANOTHER. DRAWING. INAPPROPRIATE. PICTURES. OR. WRITING. INAPPROPRIATE. STATEMENTS. REGARDING. ANOTHER. AND. INTENTIONALLY. EXCLUDING. ANOTHER. FROM. GROUPS. OR. SIMILAR. ACTIVITIES. ANY. UNWELCOME. USE. OF. PSYCHIC. MAGIC. OR. INEXPLICABLE. POWERS. AGAINST. A. STUDENT. BULLYING. ALSO. INCLUDES. ANY. ACT. OF. RETALIATION. TAKEN. AGAINST:. ANY. PERSON. BRINGING. A. COMPLAINT. OF. BULLYING. ANY. PERSON. ASSISTING. ANOTHER. PERSON. PARTICIPATING. IN. AN. INVESTIGATION. OF. AN. ACT. OF. BULLYING. STUDENTS. AT. SMMS. ARE. EXPECTED. TO:. TREAT. EACH. OTHER. WITH. RESPECT. REFUSE. TO. BULLY. ANYONE. REFUSE. TO. WATCH. LAUGH. OR. JOIN. IN. WHEN. SOMEONE. IS. BEING. BULLIED. REPORT. BULLYING. TO. AN. ADULT."
"NO. STUDENT. SHALL. WILLFULLY. AND. OR. MALICIOUSLY. DISTURB. THE. PEACE. BY. CHALLENGING. TO. FIGHT. FIGHTING. INSTIGATING. OR. ENCOURAGING. OTHERS. TO. FIGHT."
"REMINDER. THAT. LUNCH. SHOULD. BE. EATEN. OUTSIDE. OR. IN. THE. CAFETERIA. THE. ONLY. REASON. WE. NEED. TO. EAT. IN. THE. HALLWAY. IS. IF. THE. WEATHER'S. BAD. ONCE. STUDENTS. ARE. DONE. EATING. THEY. WILL. BE. ASKED. TO. GO. OUTSIDE. DURING. LUNCHTIME. THE. LIBRARY. WILL. BE. LIMITED. TO. THE. FIRST. THIRTY. STUDENTS."
"THAT'S. ALL. WE. HAVE. FOR. YOU. TODAY. MUTANTS. THANKS. FOR. LISTENING. AND. AS. ALWAYS. HAVE. A. NICE. DAY."