Post by Trish on Jun 9, 2014 1:30:17 GMT -5
By the beginning of the second grading period of tenth grade, Rafael Ink was in yet another new school.
This was just another town with just more people in it to Rafael. He generally never bothered to learn the names and faces so one shuffling crowd of strangers was the same as the next. The welcome was the same; no one knew who he was, no one was advised who his father was. This went as far as his new classmates; he could tell by the way the homeroom teacher stayed out of arm’s reach and kept her eyes on him that the faculty had, as always, been informed. The people around him failed to catch his eye, but what did pique his interest was a lack of person to his right.
The desk next to him sat empty. It hadn’t been empty long, though; there was no dust on it. There was a chewed pencil in the tray, and some books and papers in the basket under the chair as if someone was either certain they’d return or had left in a hurry. The desk was clean, no chiseling or drawings, and it was polished on either side as if by soft sleeves. The missing person was a girl. Somewhat interesting.
Sadly, it was not for long that Raf could concern himself with people who were not there and had to deal with people that were. It didn’t start out bad this time; it was a busy day and the only people who paid him mind were the girls taking a pleasant eyeful of the tall dark stranger. He moved silently among the sheep, not disturbing their flocking and bleating. As days in Rafael’s life went, this one was alright.
The next day, there was a body in that seat to his right. A pretty girl with long dark hair and strange blue eyes. She did not dress well, letting her hair hang down straight and hiding her figure in a big black sweatshirt. She was busily filling in the answers on a worksheet, likely from her day off, and if the paper was to be trusted her name was Cassidy. Rafael dropped into his seat next to the girl.
“You weren’t here yesterday.” Rafael did not have much to say to other people, and with this lack of practice the quality of what he actually said was prone to suffer.
She turned her eyes on them, blinking. He was taken by her eyes; from the angles before they appeared an odd blue, but straight-on they looked more like violet. She blushed faintly and returned the conversation. “Yeah. I was, ah, sick,” she lied. He did not comment on it, instead reaching over and taking her hand.
“Rafael.”
“Cassidy. You’re new here.” It appeared he was not the only one out of practice in the conversational arts. Cassidy zoon realized that what she’d told him was as pointless as what he’d told her, and she blushed a bit more.
“Cassidy. Well, Cassidy. I’ll see you here tomorrow, if you’re not sick.” He slipped his hand from hers just as the bell rang and she lost him in the sea of adolescence that drained out of the classroom door.
Geography was particularly pointless that day. The teacher passed around a paper and everyone was to write their home town on it. It got to Rafael quickly and he saw the list of each student before him putting the same town, the same town the school was in. Where was Rafael from?
Shady Meadow crawled into his mind. He pushed it away; Shady Meadow was not his home, it was not where he was from. That place wasn’t any part of him; it couldn’t be. He wrote something fake; Sun Valley, Idaho. No one would care. The dumb blonde girl next to him took the paper, and his pencil, writing down the local town and passing both items to the row behind her. He should have grabbed that pencil and shoved it into her temple, maybe get some airflow to her idiot brain.
Wait, no – he shouldn’t do that. What was he thinking? Rafael shook his head lightly to dislodge the demon. His pencil would make the lap and come back to him and everything would be fine. Alas, it didn’t; a thick-necked hick whom he had come to know was named Randall Gold got it. He wrote down his name and the same town as everyone else, and then he pocketed the pencil. People make mistakes.
Rafael drew a long, cool breath. As the teacher collected the form and turned her back to uselessly put a pin in the map to mark everyone’s hometown, Rafael rose. Long, calm strides took him across the room to Randall’s desk. He leant in. “Excuse me. You seem to have my pencil,” spoke Ink.
“Nuh’I don’t.” Another lie. Rafael recalled having let one of those slide already this week. Another cool breath.
“I saw you put it in your pocket. Just give it back.” A simple request. Simple enough for this corn-fed second-string football player to process.
“Naw, I don’t got it.” Willful disregard for his own situation. Darwin would frown on this talking animal. Albert would put him against the wall and take a knife and… no, forget what Albert would do. He was dead, and Rafael was not him. A third pitch was tossed.
“Give. It. Back.” Straight over the plate, above the knees. An autistic kindergartener could have hit it out of the park.
“Nuh, nuh, man. You musta left it at your desk.” His yellow teeth sneered. He tugged it from his pocket and flicked it; it hit the linoleum and skittered under the desks, ending up vaguely where Raf had begun. Another cool breath.
Rafael’s hand dropped to Randall’s desk with a thud, landing on the cover his geography book. Quiet, calm, Rafael spoke in short sentences. “Look. I understand that you feel like a big deal in this piece-of-shit place. I know you don’t know who I am. I don’t want to tell you. I –will– tell you that I’m definitely not her to take your place as top piece of shit on the pile. I am instructing you to keep me out of your stupid little games, and I intend to otherwise stay out of your way when you play with the other kids. I am going to walk away from this one. You will not be able to walk away from the next one.” With that, Rafael stood and pivoted and walked to his desk, retrieving his pencil and retaking his seat. Randall glanced down at the four white gouges where Rafael’s nails had bitten into the cover of his textbook.
Raf didn’t have to wait for the next day to see Cassidy, because as Geography let out he found her rooting through her cluttered locker in the hallway. He appeared next to her, getting a better look at her shape as she was standing. Catching his eye was a black spiral-bound notebook cradled in her elbow. It was worn with the corners of the cover fluffy and the black coating scratched and the metal coil kinked and uneven; it had been loved for some time. Rafael knew the signs of prolonged affection, but the feeling was a distant memory. He touched it, perhaps to claim some of that love. “What’s this?”
Cassidy jumped; the movement under her sweatshirt indicated her figure was probably worth a closer look in the future. She glanced up to him and that blush spread across her cheekbones. “This? Ah – well, it’s like a journal.”
“Dreams? Plans? History? What are you keeping track of?” His finger penetrated the pages, trying to tease the book open, though Cassidy’s elbow was keeping it shut.
The girl glanced nervously back and forth, secrets inside her wanting to escape. Something about this dark new boy made her feel comfortable – the exact opposite effect the majority of people felt in his presence. Rafael watched her lips as she spoke. “Sometimes I… SEE, things. It’s not a dream, more like, a vision? Maybe, a message?” This was not a lie. “Anyway… whenever it happens, I write it down.”
“Write anything good lately?” He moved his hand to the back of the book, his knuckles brushing into the curve of her breast. Startled, more of the book slipped free and the stepped back to leaf through it.
“Well, yesterday I was writing in it – no, I guess I was drawing in it. With my red pen. I was sort of zoned out, and then… I don’t know what happened. I woke up in the doctor’s office, they said I’d had a seizure. They increased my medication, but I don’t think it will help.” She frowned, then returned to the topic at hand. “Anyway, when I got my bookbag back and took the notebook out, I’d written all this.”
She spread her pages for him. The page revealed has a long eastern dragon sketched on it with deep strokes of red ballpoint. However, all around it, words were written in black.
The Slayer of Men is Coming.
The Slayer of Men is Coming.
The Slayer of Men is Coming.
Rafael slammed the book shut with his palms. His arms trembled, pressing that message closed – a cool breath. He opened his eyes, looking at Cassidy whom he had startled yet again. A little smile was forced. “That’s nice, Cassidy. Hey, I’ll have lunch with you,” he instructed, before pivoting and striding off to clearer air.
Lunch came soon and Raf followed the stink of minestrone and white bread. He was issued his tiny carton of milk and his dry slice of bleached flour and his Styrofoam bowl of soup. As Cassidy was the only face he cared about, it did not take him long to see where she was sitting alone. Quick strides carried him over to her, and in a smooth motion he simultaneously began to pull his chair out with one hand and set down his tray with the other.
Midway through this was when the hands came against his back. Randall gave him a shove, attempting to send him tumbling over the desk and his soup flying at the weird girl. His attempt failed; an invisible adjustment of his foot and tightening of his calf steeled Rafael’s posture to the point that Randall may had tried to shove one of the support beams holding up the cafeteria roof. Rafael did not spill a drop, and once his tray was securely on the table any similarities to him and a support pole ended. Faster than Randall could realize his plan had failed, Rafael turned and landed a fist on his jaw so hard that his skull lurched over and broke the eye socket of the hick standing next to him. Randall had brought friends.
As his concern was not with the friends, Rafael ignored them and allowed them time to re-evaluate their relationship with Randall, instead putting his efforts into establishing his own relationship with the other boy. A blow to Randall’s right side cracked a rib and propped him back upright. Raf’s hand gripped the boy’s head by the back, nails biting in, and slammed his face down on the opposite table so hard that a dozen bowls of minestrone sloshed out part of their contents. Raf dragged Randall’s head to the side, revealing that he’d turned the boy’s nose into a red magic marker.
From the sidelines, two teachers watched. The janitor stepped forward to intervene, but one of the teachers gripped his shoulder and stopped him. “Stay out of it! Don’t you know who that kid is? We don’t want another Shady Meadow on or hands.” The janitor agreed internally. He wouldn’t want to clean that up.
Randall’s three friends who had not had their eye sockets broken moved to try and accomplish something, but Rafael did not afford them time to so much as reveal their intent. His left hand still on Randall’s head, his right elbow drove into the neck of the closest one. His eyes bulged in pain that his vocal chords could not find a sound to express, and he fell to his knees with a dry squeak. A backwards fist to the second one scattered a spray of blood and collection of teeth onto the table near Cassidy. A hook of his foot behind the final one’s ankle yanked his leg out, sending him falling; the back of a chair caught him between the shoulder blades before he joined his friends on the linoleum. They did not get back up. They were better learners than Randall.
Randall jerked his greasy head loose and rolled over, his once rustically handsome face now looking like something from a bad horror movie. He stood up and threw a punch; Rafael gripped the arm and routed the punch away, adding his own power to it until it impacted one of the cafeteria support beams. The sound of the many little bones crunching against each other made Rafael smile for the first time since he’d come to this school.
The smile was soon gone; he had business to finish. He’d told Randall the outcome of the next game, and a man is only as good as his word. Randall’s head was bounced off the support beam as Rafael calmly pulled out a chair. A punch to the jaw spun Randall around and he keeled forward, his chest landing on the seat, his knees on the ground, his body suspended between the two. Rafael raised his own foot above his head, and snapped his heel down at the small of Randall’s back.
By the end of the second grading period of tenth grade, Rafael Ink was in yet another new school.
This was just another town with just more people in it to Rafael. He generally never bothered to learn the names and faces so one shuffling crowd of strangers was the same as the next. The welcome was the same; no one knew who he was, no one was advised who his father was. This went as far as his new classmates; he could tell by the way the homeroom teacher stayed out of arm’s reach and kept her eyes on him that the faculty had, as always, been informed. The people around him failed to catch his eye, but what did pique his interest was a lack of person to his right.
The desk next to him sat empty. It hadn’t been empty long, though; there was no dust on it. There was a chewed pencil in the tray, and some books and papers in the basket under the chair as if someone was either certain they’d return or had left in a hurry. The desk was clean, no chiseling or drawings, and it was polished on either side as if by soft sleeves. The missing person was a girl. Somewhat interesting.
Sadly, it was not for long that Raf could concern himself with people who were not there and had to deal with people that were. It didn’t start out bad this time; it was a busy day and the only people who paid him mind were the girls taking a pleasant eyeful of the tall dark stranger. He moved silently among the sheep, not disturbing their flocking and bleating. As days in Rafael’s life went, this one was alright.
The next day, there was a body in that seat to his right. A pretty girl with long dark hair and strange blue eyes. She did not dress well, letting her hair hang down straight and hiding her figure in a big black sweatshirt. She was busily filling in the answers on a worksheet, likely from her day off, and if the paper was to be trusted her name was Cassidy. Rafael dropped into his seat next to the girl.
“You weren’t here yesterday.” Rafael did not have much to say to other people, and with this lack of practice the quality of what he actually said was prone to suffer.
She turned her eyes on them, blinking. He was taken by her eyes; from the angles before they appeared an odd blue, but straight-on they looked more like violet. She blushed faintly and returned the conversation. “Yeah. I was, ah, sick,” she lied. He did not comment on it, instead reaching over and taking her hand.
“Rafael.”
“Cassidy. You’re new here.” It appeared he was not the only one out of practice in the conversational arts. Cassidy zoon realized that what she’d told him was as pointless as what he’d told her, and she blushed a bit more.
“Cassidy. Well, Cassidy. I’ll see you here tomorrow, if you’re not sick.” He slipped his hand from hers just as the bell rang and she lost him in the sea of adolescence that drained out of the classroom door.
Geography was particularly pointless that day. The teacher passed around a paper and everyone was to write their home town on it. It got to Rafael quickly and he saw the list of each student before him putting the same town, the same town the school was in. Where was Rafael from?
Shady Meadow crawled into his mind. He pushed it away; Shady Meadow was not his home, it was not where he was from. That place wasn’t any part of him; it couldn’t be. He wrote something fake; Sun Valley, Idaho. No one would care. The dumb blonde girl next to him took the paper, and his pencil, writing down the local town and passing both items to the row behind her. He should have grabbed that pencil and shoved it into her temple, maybe get some airflow to her idiot brain.
Wait, no – he shouldn’t do that. What was he thinking? Rafael shook his head lightly to dislodge the demon. His pencil would make the lap and come back to him and everything would be fine. Alas, it didn’t; a thick-necked hick whom he had come to know was named Randall Gold got it. He wrote down his name and the same town as everyone else, and then he pocketed the pencil. People make mistakes.
Rafael drew a long, cool breath. As the teacher collected the form and turned her back to uselessly put a pin in the map to mark everyone’s hometown, Rafael rose. Long, calm strides took him across the room to Randall’s desk. He leant in. “Excuse me. You seem to have my pencil,” spoke Ink.
“Nuh’I don’t.” Another lie. Rafael recalled having let one of those slide already this week. Another cool breath.
“I saw you put it in your pocket. Just give it back.” A simple request. Simple enough for this corn-fed second-string football player to process.
“Naw, I don’t got it.” Willful disregard for his own situation. Darwin would frown on this talking animal. Albert would put him against the wall and take a knife and… no, forget what Albert would do. He was dead, and Rafael was not him. A third pitch was tossed.
“Give. It. Back.” Straight over the plate, above the knees. An autistic kindergartener could have hit it out of the park.
“Nuh, nuh, man. You musta left it at your desk.” His yellow teeth sneered. He tugged it from his pocket and flicked it; it hit the linoleum and skittered under the desks, ending up vaguely where Raf had begun. Another cool breath.
Rafael’s hand dropped to Randall’s desk with a thud, landing on the cover his geography book. Quiet, calm, Rafael spoke in short sentences. “Look. I understand that you feel like a big deal in this piece-of-shit place. I know you don’t know who I am. I don’t want to tell you. I –will– tell you that I’m definitely not her to take your place as top piece of shit on the pile. I am instructing you to keep me out of your stupid little games, and I intend to otherwise stay out of your way when you play with the other kids. I am going to walk away from this one. You will not be able to walk away from the next one.” With that, Rafael stood and pivoted and walked to his desk, retrieving his pencil and retaking his seat. Randall glanced down at the four white gouges where Rafael’s nails had bitten into the cover of his textbook.
Raf didn’t have to wait for the next day to see Cassidy, because as Geography let out he found her rooting through her cluttered locker in the hallway. He appeared next to her, getting a better look at her shape as she was standing. Catching his eye was a black spiral-bound notebook cradled in her elbow. It was worn with the corners of the cover fluffy and the black coating scratched and the metal coil kinked and uneven; it had been loved for some time. Rafael knew the signs of prolonged affection, but the feeling was a distant memory. He touched it, perhaps to claim some of that love. “What’s this?”
Cassidy jumped; the movement under her sweatshirt indicated her figure was probably worth a closer look in the future. She glanced up to him and that blush spread across her cheekbones. “This? Ah – well, it’s like a journal.”
“Dreams? Plans? History? What are you keeping track of?” His finger penetrated the pages, trying to tease the book open, though Cassidy’s elbow was keeping it shut.
The girl glanced nervously back and forth, secrets inside her wanting to escape. Something about this dark new boy made her feel comfortable – the exact opposite effect the majority of people felt in his presence. Rafael watched her lips as she spoke. “Sometimes I… SEE, things. It’s not a dream, more like, a vision? Maybe, a message?” This was not a lie. “Anyway… whenever it happens, I write it down.”
“Write anything good lately?” He moved his hand to the back of the book, his knuckles brushing into the curve of her breast. Startled, more of the book slipped free and the stepped back to leaf through it.
“Well, yesterday I was writing in it – no, I guess I was drawing in it. With my red pen. I was sort of zoned out, and then… I don’t know what happened. I woke up in the doctor’s office, they said I’d had a seizure. They increased my medication, but I don’t think it will help.” She frowned, then returned to the topic at hand. “Anyway, when I got my bookbag back and took the notebook out, I’d written all this.”
She spread her pages for him. The page revealed has a long eastern dragon sketched on it with deep strokes of red ballpoint. However, all around it, words were written in black.
The Slayer of Men is Coming.
The Slayer of Men is Coming.
The Slayer of Men is Coming.
Rafael slammed the book shut with his palms. His arms trembled, pressing that message closed – a cool breath. He opened his eyes, looking at Cassidy whom he had startled yet again. A little smile was forced. “That’s nice, Cassidy. Hey, I’ll have lunch with you,” he instructed, before pivoting and striding off to clearer air.
Lunch came soon and Raf followed the stink of minestrone and white bread. He was issued his tiny carton of milk and his dry slice of bleached flour and his Styrofoam bowl of soup. As Cassidy was the only face he cared about, it did not take him long to see where she was sitting alone. Quick strides carried him over to her, and in a smooth motion he simultaneously began to pull his chair out with one hand and set down his tray with the other.
Midway through this was when the hands came against his back. Randall gave him a shove, attempting to send him tumbling over the desk and his soup flying at the weird girl. His attempt failed; an invisible adjustment of his foot and tightening of his calf steeled Rafael’s posture to the point that Randall may had tried to shove one of the support beams holding up the cafeteria roof. Rafael did not spill a drop, and once his tray was securely on the table any similarities to him and a support pole ended. Faster than Randall could realize his plan had failed, Rafael turned and landed a fist on his jaw so hard that his skull lurched over and broke the eye socket of the hick standing next to him. Randall had brought friends.
As his concern was not with the friends, Rafael ignored them and allowed them time to re-evaluate their relationship with Randall, instead putting his efforts into establishing his own relationship with the other boy. A blow to Randall’s right side cracked a rib and propped him back upright. Raf’s hand gripped the boy’s head by the back, nails biting in, and slammed his face down on the opposite table so hard that a dozen bowls of minestrone sloshed out part of their contents. Raf dragged Randall’s head to the side, revealing that he’d turned the boy’s nose into a red magic marker.
From the sidelines, two teachers watched. The janitor stepped forward to intervene, but one of the teachers gripped his shoulder and stopped him. “Stay out of it! Don’t you know who that kid is? We don’t want another Shady Meadow on or hands.” The janitor agreed internally. He wouldn’t want to clean that up.
Randall’s three friends who had not had their eye sockets broken moved to try and accomplish something, but Rafael did not afford them time to so much as reveal their intent. His left hand still on Randall’s head, his right elbow drove into the neck of the closest one. His eyes bulged in pain that his vocal chords could not find a sound to express, and he fell to his knees with a dry squeak. A backwards fist to the second one scattered a spray of blood and collection of teeth onto the table near Cassidy. A hook of his foot behind the final one’s ankle yanked his leg out, sending him falling; the back of a chair caught him between the shoulder blades before he joined his friends on the linoleum. They did not get back up. They were better learners than Randall.
Randall jerked his greasy head loose and rolled over, his once rustically handsome face now looking like something from a bad horror movie. He stood up and threw a punch; Rafael gripped the arm and routed the punch away, adding his own power to it until it impacted one of the cafeteria support beams. The sound of the many little bones crunching against each other made Rafael smile for the first time since he’d come to this school.
The smile was soon gone; he had business to finish. He’d told Randall the outcome of the next game, and a man is only as good as his word. Randall’s head was bounced off the support beam as Rafael calmly pulled out a chair. A punch to the jaw spun Randall around and he keeled forward, his chest landing on the seat, his knees on the ground, his body suspended between the two. Rafael raised his own foot above his head, and snapped his heel down at the small of Randall’s back.
By the end of the second grading period of tenth grade, Rafael Ink was in yet another new school.