goldenmesh-blog

[goldenmesh-blog]

Reblog if you have met someone online that you would love to hangout with but they live too far away.

[goldenmesh-blog]

Take my survey, please!

Hi, guys -- My next Lexicon Valley piece is about prepositions (!!!), and I've decided to collect a little data to see if I can flesh out what I've observed and read about so far. It would be super helpful to me if you could take this quick survey, and pass it on to as many people as possible. Obviously, the wider the sample size, the better. So, here's the survey: "On Prepositions." Share liberally, please! Thanks!

[goldenmesh-blog]

brutal en pointe shots

Oh dear. I review a documentary about child dancers that...isn't that good.

Toe shoes and bromides critiqued, here.

 ‎(But ugh if the review didn't get editorially sandblasted into benignity.)

#self-promotion #film

[goldenmesh-blog]

social anxiety and chocolate, plus farce

Still low on the totem pole of (DVD) reviewers, which means I got to review Les Émotifs Anonymes instead of of Coriolanus. But this one was fun to do. Super whimsically visual, which is often what happens when people make movies about stuff like chocolate. But anyway, here's my review of a French farce about socially anxious chocolatiers.

[goldenmesh-blog]

Uncanny Valley High Reading

New York Tumblrites: On two occasions this week, you can hear me read from Uncanny Valley High.

• Tuesday, March 20, 6pm: Cornelia Street Cafe in Greenwich Village 

AND! 

• Friday, March 23, 8pm: Uncanny Valley performance space in Long Island City. (This one in especial is very recommended, as it will be a double feature with the marvelous Mollycule Theory, who'll be reading from her satirical serial, "Creighton Crossley: Lazy Intellectual Vampire Hunter.") 

Come drink, eat, and listen to sympathetic and satirical tales of the paranormal!

[goldenmesh-blog]

We Like to Watch

I have a new piece up on 3 Quarks Daily. Kant, Laverne & Shirley, tricuspid valve repair, and more! — all noted in a single essay on friendship porn: "We Like to Watch: Friendship on TV."

#3QD #self-promotion

[goldenmesh-blog]

Of adolescent ankles and awkwardness

I'm still too much of a newb at PopMatters to be allowed to review Young Adult, which would have been an appropriate follow-up, but here's my first review for them, of The Myth of the American Sleepover (upon the occasion of its DVD release). It's no Dazed and Confused, but at least (thank god!) it's not American Graffiti.

#self-promotion

[goldenmesh-blog]

Chapter 22

N.B. Which is just to say that I did not wimp out on the 22nd and final day of Januariad. Just that my at-home internet access went psycho, and work and etc. has made it impossible to post until now.

I know everyone was just champing at the bit for this latest installment.

-----------------------------------------

AP calc to AP physics. The same steps, north hall to west hall, every morning. That day, the smooth planes of a tanned face surfaced from the crowd of similars. He saw the manicured arc of each eyebrow, set in the immobile forehead of its perfectly neutral face. As all the others had, it floated before him for a moment, as familiar as the theater masks that hung, undusted, in the drama room. Then he saw only flames.

*

Locker trashed again. The padlock smashed, his clothes and shoes reeking of urine. 

They avoided his eyes. Price and Price grinned without looking at him. Lockers were sprung open and slammed shut. In the showers, someone had left a thin spray of water running. It echoed as it trickled to the drain.

Motherfucker. The words ran together. He hit the metal hard with his fist. He yelled until his voice didn't feel or sound like his own.

Nothing. Only the trickle of water down the drain. They walked by him without looking, onto the court.

*

A football player, dumb and placid, held a liter bottle of Gatorade above his own head and patiently let the stream of liquid blue drip from his sodden head down his blank face and the back of his thick neck and broad shoulders.

The girl who drew horses in her spiral notebook was now sketching them, red and black, on the sun-faded whiteboard. 

Two blonde twins whom no one could tell apart were quietly, drowsily singing "Row Your Boat" in a round.

The doughy woman subbing for Mrs. Fowler was addressing Christmas cards at the squat-legged desk in the corner. 

Becks was reciting something soundlessly. Her lips moved dryly as she hunched against the window, watching the empty sky.

Boe watched the room from the very back. He was eating fun-size peanut butter cups, smiling faintly as he chewed.

"The smile gives him away, doesn't it?"

Becks could see a reflection in the window pane. Will Lux was leaning on a desk behind her. She glanced over at Boe.

"He pretty much just uses his powers for stupid." Then she caught herself: "You know what he's doing?"

Will shrugged. "It's kind of obvious." 

Becks looked at him a moment. He was squinting into the outside light. The corners of his eyes creased; he seemed much older. 

She turned her face to the window again. "A murrain on thee," she said, almost to herself.

"Pardon?"

Becks smiled to herself. "Must I endure this fellow's insolence?"

Still no answer. 

"Sorry," Becks said to his reflection. "I have a tendency to quote obscurely."

She watched him watch her reflection in the window.

"Okay, Teiresias." She finally turned to look at him. "Don't blame the messenger, huh?"

He nodded.

Becks checked her watch. "Why are you here, in a tenth-grade social issues class? Aren't you supposed to be at a basketball game?"

He said nothing.

"Away game? Valley versus Hills?"

"You an avid basketball fan?" He was teasing her a little. "I didn't take you for one." Or mocking her. She couldn't tell which.

She shook her head. Trying not to remember him naked in the parking lot. "So what's your message?"

Will watched her. She seemed perpetually fatigued, like her eyes were open only because it made no difference if she shut them. Right now, she was resting her head on her knees, her face turned toward him but her eyes not quite focused on him. Other than the purple below her eyes, it was a face devoid of color or ornamentation. She wasn't ugly, he decided. Just strange.

"Okay," she said, as the twins launched into the chorus of "Row Your Boat," one voice lapping against the other's. She glanced at the substitute, whose stack of red and green envelopes was growing. "Evidently, you're a reluctant messenger." She was feeling uncommonly bold.

The white board now bore a resemblance to the caves at Lascaux. Becks rolled her eyes away from it. "But I need to get out of here." She tapped her head. "Too much noise."

With that, she straightened her legs and slid down from the counter. She had nothing with her, and so she loped straight to the door without pausing. If he followed, it was because it seemed he had to. How had that happened?

*

A padlocked chain made it impossible for anything bigger than an underfed cat to slip between the double doors of the old gym. They creaked, predictably, when pushed. Becks peered into the space between the heavy doors. There was only dimness and echoes. 

Will waited behind her. She was like some kind of melancholy hound, he thought, nosing under a fence for what it sensed was on the other side.

"You know, there's another way in," he finally said. 

One hand still on the padlock, she turned, sighed. "You could've said." 

Through the rusted sinks and scarred wooden benches of a windowless locker room, he led her to another heavy door, industrial and grey, that pushed open into the contained space of the gym. Daylight filtered through the narrow windows near the ceiling.

"I've never liked gyms," Becks said. It was necessary to whisper. "They make me feel so exposed." She folded her arms to her chest as they stared. "It's just like…this complete void that they put walls and a ceiling around."

Will looked at the bedraggled silhouettes of the basketball nets at either end of the empty floor. The bleacher were folded flat against one wall.

He trailed Becks as she began to walk the perimeter of the floor, her arms folded tight against herself, as if she were expecting an ambush from the shadows. When she stopped, at the far end from where they'd come in, she kicked at something with her foot. It made a hollow sound, so different from the sound of sprinting feet on the gym floors he knew. Then she crouched down. When he crouched down beside her, her fingers were resting on a simple metal handle, painted red to blend in with the red boundary line it was on. 

He waited for her to pull it. And when she didn't, he reached his larger hand on top of hers and yanked. 

#januariad #uncanny valley high #notmyfaultitslate

[goldenmesh-blog]

Chapter 21

Berta waited in the bleachers. Just visible through the morning gloom were the dead hills, blotched with dark shrubs that, from a distance, looked infectious. From the very last row, she could see the moving, shifting knots of teenagers, bunching and thinning as they circulated. These knots took on their own existence, swelling and fraying, absorbing any latecomers, shedding and forgetting their smallest components. 

A recorded metallic clangor split the air, and the various bunches and knots converged, swelling into one bulge that slowed at the double doors. She had seen bees, maybe ants, do something similar.

Minutes later, the new teacher let her in by that same door. "I'll just be half an hour," Berta told her. The new teacher nodded, eyes set — watchful, if not hopeful — before disappearing into one of the rooms that lined the halls.

It was quiet. There never seems to be a mid-point between chaos and desertion in a school's hallways. They are like desert gulches, flooded in a flash and, just as suddenly, still and barren.

Berta walked the empty hallways, aware of murmurs from behind glazed doors along the way. The beige linoleum was over-shiny. Track lighting that ran the length of it was reflected as a mirage down the middle. At regular intervals, doorways separated the rows of green metal lockers, indistinguishable save for their tiny numbered plaques.

It must have been over a decade since she'd been in a high school. She couldn't remember any time since her own graduation. She walked. There was a familiarity to these hallways that was uncomfortable. These over-shined floors, the rows of lockers repeated into the vanishing point. How many hallways, in how many high schools, were there, identical to this?

She stopped for a moment, hugging one side of the hall, suddenly too exposed in the open range between lines of facing lockers. The air felt close. Was there always that sense of accidentally exposing too much of yourself in these halls? The shooting gallery of these hallways that exploited any misstep. And she had never made any. By any measure, there had never been one at all. She'd been good at things. That was lucky. Long jump and high jump. Solving equations and calculating reactions and conjugating verbs. She'd gone to proms and had a boyfriend and tried a few things but not too much or too often. She'd never misstepped. Yet one had always to be painfully alert to the possibility. All those years in that funny but common space of not being able to exist unconsciously.  

With the clangor of the bell, like a spell had been broken, the sound of chairs were scraping the linoleum, there was movement, there was speech again. They filled the halls all at once, and Berta found herself pressed against a wall, her arms folded. And they moved so smoothly, like creatures in a dream. She had to force herself to watch their faces, their unvarying expressions, uncomplicated and unbroken.

There was something her grandmother had liked to say, and she thought of it now. God is in the details. She could never make sense of it as a child; it had seemed like an unfinished thought. But now, looking into these faces devoid of the kind of detail that makes each face its own, she saw how empty they were. There was no life in them. It was almost as if they'd been un-made.

#januariad #uncanny valley high

[goldenmesh-blog]

Chapter 20

"Must I endure this fellow's insolence? A murrain on thee! Get thee hence! Begone... Avaunt! and never cross my threshold more."

Becks recited from Oedipus Rex. They were back in the stairwell. 

Boe poked pimentos out of olives with a toothpick. "What's a murrain?" 

Chloe placed a stuffed baby heirloom tomato in her mouth.

"And then he also says to him, a bit lower down: Vile slanderer, thou blurtest forth these taunts...And think'st forsooth as seer to go scot free." Becks recalled this to them as if she were remembering the details of a police report. "Oh, and also: No one loves the messenger who brings bad news. That's Antigone. 276 to 277." She had consumed the suite of Theban plays while her mother was catering a bridal shower the night before. It was okay to read in the van between setting up and clearing.

"So Will Lux is a messenger of doom?" Boe had tired of the olives and was on to a container of smoke-cured pigs in phyllo dough blankets. "So what? Who isn't?"

Becks looked at him from where she was hunched.

"I mean," he said, spraying pig and blanket crumbs, "I could tell you a million doom-laden things if I wanted to."

"And all before breakfast," Chloe said. 

He looked at her blankly. "You could, too," he said.

Chloe looked down at her baby heirlooms. 

"Anyway," Becks said. Her stomach gurgled. She realized she had been confusing eating the catering food last night with right now.

"I sort of think he's okay," Chloe said. She said it very quietly.

Becks snorted. "That's because you had earplugs in the entire time he was in the art room yesterday."

Boe chortled. "Does he have bad smells, Chloe?" He had come to terms with the artificial blueberry scent of his own voice.

The girl's face was growing flushed. Pink blotched her hairline and rose in her cheeks.

"C'mon, Chloe. What's his big smell?"

Chloe shook her head from the depths of her embarrassment.

"Dead bunny," Becks said. She was feeling spiteful.

Boe laughed in asthmatic fits. Chloe buried her face in her hands.

Becks gave Boe a look. "But you've seen him, right?" 

"Yeah." Boe snapped the lid on the empty pigs in blankets container. "And so has Chloe."

"And you don't think it's weird?"

"What?"

"That he looks like us."

They both looked at her. Strictly speaking, what made them different from the smooth faced, dream-swimming rest of the student body was not something they talked about. It was just one of those unspoken little crosses they had in common.

"I mean, that he doesn't look like everyone else."

Laughter and footsteps from the floors above funneled down the stairwell.

"Do you think he's maybe like us?" Chloe was looking at her lap again.

Boe snorted. His hair was looking more atomic lately. "What's his party trick? Self-styling hair? Infinite rebounds?"

"I don't know," Becks said. She was looking toward the old gym.

#januariad #uncanny valley high

[goldenmesh-blog]

Chapter 19

  Will Lux drifted near the art room three times. He slowed and glanced in and held off again, during three different free periods, before finally walking in. It smelled of paints and glazes and charcoal. Maybe a residue of weed. Very faint. It was dimmer than the other rooms.

Both girls were there. The strange one daubed black paint on an already-black canvas. She did it with the rote motions of a fence painter. The other girl, the small one with bright hair, painted her canvas with bulging color. They stood next to each other, but didn't speak.

He watched the slick accumulation of brush strokes on the black canvas for a while. He couldn't tell if she was high or making a statement. The visible layers of black on the butcher paper were slightly unnerving.

"So…you'll warn me if I get too close to the event horizon?"

Becks' hand stopped in its downward stroke. She was aware of him beside her, but she didn't look at him.

"…or not." He wished that she would speak, or look at him. Her self-contained stare only made what he'd seen feel more terrible. All he could do was watch.

"So you're not a big talker."

She neither confirmed nor denied this.

"Okay." He knew that people were looking at him, wondering why Will Lux was in the art room. "I just wanted to say thank-you."

She had begun the up-and-down motion of her brushstrokes again.

"Thank you for untaping me last week."

"It's fine." Still wasn't looking at him.

She had come to seem strangely familiar to him, as if he knew her from another time or place. People you've come upon in a dream seem subtly marked afterward, as if your having seen them without their possibly knowing has made them vulnerable. For weeks now, after having seen the drawn face of this spider-limbed girl beside his own, he felt how he'd held it inside himself. Stalking the halls, closing off his head in the workout room, returning to it in a classroom while his eyes appeared fixed on the differential equations on the white board. It seemed to have gained its own existence inside his head.

"And…so…I'm fine." Would he just keep up the patter until she looked at him? "The hair will grow back. Thanks for asking, though."

She had tuned him out. The brush moved steadily and she stared vacantly at the black.

"Are you okay?" He ventured a hand on her shoulder, just the tips of his fingers.

Now she turned her head, shrugging him off.

And as she watched, he was suddenly turning himself in half, his hands grasping his ankles, his face smashed into his knees. In this contorted position, he began to hobble slowly away.

"Boe." Becks hissed at the three-footer, who was smiling at them from the table where he sat carving a set of figurines. "Knock it off, Boe." She threatened his figurines with the back of her hand, and he hastily gave in. 

Near a wall of student self-portraits, Will Lux had righted himself. He examined each of his limbs like a man who has found himself in the act of mugging himself. Identical silhouette studies in orange, fuchsia, and cyan framed him.

"You'd have been better off slipping a thank-you note in my locker." Becks had dropped the paintbrush and was standing next to him.

"What was that?" He gestured to his legs, lifted his arms. "What the hell?"

"I think you're probably better off going back to the basketball court, Will Lux."

"You think I don't want to?"

She was tall enough that she could look him level in the eye, but there was always something unfocused about her gaze.  

"Then why are you here?"

He could see the same white face, eyes dead. The tiled floor behind her.

"Yeah, I dunno. They have you read Oedipus junior year. Look how bad the messenger gets treated."

He shrugged past the wall of monotone portraits and loped out of the door.

#januariad #uncanny valley high

[goldenmesh-blog]

Chapter 18

  The new teacher was watching her tenth graders. Crooked rows and columns of desks filled the stowage of the classroom. Most everyone was always faced with the back of someone else's head. They were used to it. 

You could hear the industrial clock tick. The first 12 minutes of Block 6 were for SSR. Each tick was weighted with the uneasiness of involuntary silence, the hallways heavy with the suspended animation of every classroom.

Their smooth faces were turned down, looking at, or pretending to look at, the pages of open books. But they fidgeted like swimmers forced under water for too long. They shifted heavily in their seats. The room filled with the unacknowledged circuit of their sideways glances. In the closeness of the artificially induced silence, every movement and every sound was over-freighted. She remembered sitting in high school classrooms waiting for her name to be called, the tension of how a single monosyllabled response would surely be weighed and evaluated by every other person in the room.

But there was something worse in the blankness of these faces, in the barely discernible blink of their eyes. She could feel the same blankness on her own face, how somehow the smallest movements of its musculature didn't correspond to her intentions, until the intentions were slowly let go and forgotten.

"These are cases that have gotten buried," Berta had said. "They're not resolved, and nobody's doing anything about them anymore."

A girl in the back row watched the heavy seconds of the clock. Throats cleared and settled back into uncomfortable silence. 

"People call it Ops, or they just pretend it doesn't exist." "Ops, like OPS. So, there's an Office of Solid Waste, an Office of Toxic Substances. Etcetera." She remembered how Berta pronounced every syllable of the word. "They call us OPS. Office of Phantom Substances. Like what we're investigating doesn't actually exist. It's in our paranoid little heads." Berta's glance at her seemed very brave just then. "Or, as I prefer to think, it's made to look like it doesn't exist."

The new teacher's gaze fell on the small copper head of a girl whose mobile face was always registering some intensity or other. Her eyes were wide at something in the book she held at a distance from herself.

There were those few faces in her classroom that somehow still furrowed and creased in correspondence with their voices and emotions. The odd girl, Becks, who'd memorized all of Finnegans Wake when the new teacher gave her the book overnight. You could see exhaustion in her face. 

And people avoided them. Of course they would. But there seemed to be something else that the over-sensitive apparatus of the others sensed.

The recording of a bell sounded, and she saw Chloe's face tighten. The classroom filled with sounds of books being shut and put away, zipped back into backpacks and set under desks.

"I've re-opened the case," Berta had said. "Not that anyone knows yet."

#januariad #the new teacher #uncanny valley high

[goldenmesh-blog]

Chapter 17

Berta watched the new teacher's hands, helpless and dumb, twist each paper napkin. It was easier than watching the woman's face as she cried. She made the sound of sobbing, and tears welled from her eyes, but her face remained otherwise unmoved. In fact, it was strangely placid, in a way that was far more disconcerting than the contortions we're used to seeing wrung from a face in tears. 

Berta glanced up for a moment and thought of the glistening eyes of a soft featured doll she'd had as a child. The doll had been supposed to wet when you gave it water from a very small bottle, but if you held it upside down, tears would leak, strangely, down the the doll's round, impassive face.

"You can't even look at me," the new teacher whispered. Her voice quavered. "Why did you come looking for me?"

"Well." Berta was still looking at the other woman's hands. The napkins lay twisted between them, as if they'd once been living things.  Berta took a breath. "I came looking for you," she said, "because I'm investigating the school, and I saw your name on the list of faculty." 

The new teacher took in Berta Cooper's neat up-do, her trim charcoal suit, her careful tone.

"The school has…a history."

The new teacher was completely still. She had stopped sobbing and was only listening. It was hard to think.

"About twenty years ago, the FBI looked into it." Berta looked at the napkins as she spoke. "There seemed to have been missing students…faculty who disappeared. But it looks like the case didn't hold, like there were no missing persons to actually report. They found something, though, on-site, that made them call in the EPA."

"The Environmental…" 

"Environmental Protection Agency. Yeah. The FBI team thought there was something funny in the water. So the EPA got the case. Just a question of contaminated well water." Berta shrugged. She was tapping one short nailed fingertip on the tabletop again. "The thing is…what they found, wasn't any sort of thing…any substance…they could identify. So they called in the agency that does that sort of thing." Berta looked up for a split second. "That's the one I work for. The one nobody's ever heard of." Her eyebrows rose in their perfect skeptical arch. "But that was almost twenty years ago. The case got buried."

"It got buried…"

"Yeah. It's like it got buried under assays and chromatograms…tests that were inconclusive, or maybe unconfirmed. You can see just see the paperwork, the lab results and the field reports and interviews piling up. Like a big funeral pyre. It never was resolved. So it just got buried." 

The new teacher moved her head. It was a very faint motion. "But you…"

"But I have a funny sort of job." Berta's mild eyes didn't match her quick, sour grin. 

The sky had darkened now. They were bathed in the green glow of the Starbucks sign.

#januariad #uncanny valley high #the new teacher

[goldenmesh-blog]

Chapter 16

  The new teacher saw Berta flinch. It was a split second, the moment's recoil that made the new teacher avoid other people's eyes outside of school. But neither woman said anything.

"Of course I remember you," the new teacher said to Berta. 

Roberta Cooper was still beautiful. The new teacher remembered trying to mimic, as a girl, the way Berta's dark eyebrows rose in a skeptical arc above her clear, mild eyes. Now, as Berta surveyed the strip mall of their surroundings, the new teacher thought of how often she'd once affected that skeptical arc. There had been times when she almost believed she'd taken on the lines of the older girl's face. A glance in the bathroom mirror, though, would puncture the illusion: she lacked the mild eyes and high forehead that lent Daniel's girlfriend her eccentric beauty.

"I'm glad," Berta was saying. "It really took forever to get ahold of you." 

"But you're back in touch with Daniel?"

Berta looked at her. "Daniel was easier to get ahold of. I figured he would have a cell number for you."

Above them, the Starbucks sign began to iridesce. It hummed. Across the parking lot, the pinks and purples of the Taco Bell sign glowed on.

The new teacher said nothing.

"Daniel said no one in your family's heard from you in ages." 

Berta wore her hair in a tidy up-do now. Her hair had fallen down long over her shoulders in high school. How was it she had gotten older? She had, but it was hard to say how. Which lines had been etched new, which had been sharpened or softened, it was impossible to pinpoint. She was an adult now, somehow, the thing neither one of them had been before. And she was a convincing adult. It was hard not to wish for what she had, for how she did it.

"Why have you been trying to find me?"

Berta seemed to be choosing her words. She looked into the last of the coffee in her paper cup, swirling it. "How long have you been at the school?"

"This is my first semester."

Berta tapped one of her fingernails on the table. Her fingernails were plain and short. The new teacher could remember watching her talk through homework with Daniel at the kitchen counter. The tap tap as she thought. She remembered how she, in turn, had felt serious, older, when she tried tapping her own finger over her math problems.

"What do you think of the place? Of the school?"

The new teacher shook her head. For a moment she watched the line of cars inch through the Taco Bell drive-thru. Exhaust was visible in the headlights. When she looked back at Berta, she saw her flinch again.

A sob, her speech deformed, rose from the new teacher's mouth as she tried to answer. She felt the sharp ammonia of tears in her eyes.

Berta put her hand out, pity in her face. "Tell me," she said.

The new teacher shook her head, only low sobs, the speech of the dispossessed, rising from her throat.

From the store kiosk, Berta gathered paper napkins and brought a crumpled stack of them to the sobbing woman. 

She tried again. "Tell me what's wrong."

But the only words that came were I don't know. 

I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.

Neither woman looked at the other. They both stared down at the sphinx-like face of the green mermaid.

#januariad #uncanny valley high #the new teacher

[goldenmesh-blog]

Chapter 15

At first there was just one. One empty desk, a kid who didn't show up. Then there were two. The bare desktops like small fallow flats amid the otherwise teeming classroom. And by mid-semester, there were four empty desks: two in the morning AP English class, two in the afternoon. They were gone. 

The new teacher informed the head of the department, who must have informed the principal. It was a big school. The new teacher never saw the kids again.

The new teacher stopped seeing one of the math teachers in the teacher's lounge. His name had disappeared from his faculty mailbox. Nobody seemed to know where he'd gone.

In the new teacher's AP classes, the seating chart was rearranged. Other students absorbed the empty spaces. The new teacher drew a line through their names on the attendance list. Within a few weeks, everything was as it had been.

The new teacher began to wonder if, eventually, she'd disappear too.

When her phone sounded, somewhere on the 101 between Hidden Hills and Hidden Valley, she startled. She had forgotten the sonic blossoming of its ring tone.

Caller unknown.

"Yes?"

"Yes," she said again, when the caller, a woman, asked if it were her.

"Oh, good," said the succinctly female voice. "I wasn't sure I'd ever get a hold of you. That school of yours is like some kind of Bermuda Triangle."

The car swerved slightly. "Who is this?"

"I don't know if you remember me, but it's Berta Cooper. I hope you don't mind. I could never reach you at school, so I got your cell number from your brother…I've been calling and calling." A short, quiet laugh. "Do you remember me?"

The new teacher listened, one hand on the wheel. The hills were disappearing into the late afternoon haze. For a long time she said nothing. 

"Of course I remember you." The other cars blurred in front of her, their headlights like melting stars. It was becoming hard to see the road.

#januariad #uncanny valley high #the new teacher

[goldenmesh-blog]

Chapter 14

The lunch bell split the air. In the crowded hallway, Chloe found Becks. The tall girl nodded. She was shrouded in a hooded white rain slicker snapped tight at the chin. It wasn't raining. Hanks of her dark hair poked from the hood like a trapped thing. They knew to go outside; the halls during spirit week are unbearable. Boe had stayed away from school all week.

Outside, they cut through the parking lot toward the bleachers. It was hot for November; Beck's face was beaded with perspiration. "God, I hate this week," she said, snapping off her hood once they were halfway. She shielded her eyes with one thinhand and walked staring skyward. The blue overhead was deep and blank. She let out a breath.

But Chloe was calling to her. She turned, then, and followed the smaller girl's gaze. 

Chloe started toward the trio of flagpoles in the center of the lot. There are flags flying for the nation, the state, and for Valley High. The grass on the median underfoot is an over-watered green. And that day, in the center, beneath the still banner of gold and white, a boy's entire body was cocooned in silver duct tape, bound to the pole. Eyes closed, hair mussed. He seemed burnished, larger than life. Chloe was close enough to see the crescent of a stray eyelash on one cheek.

Was he okay? It was all she could think to say. His eyes fluttered open. She asked again.

He shook his head, slow, wondering. "Fashion police," he finally said. "They got me."

And Chloe caught her breath even as she smiled. 

"You were smart, though." He nodded at her, at the white sundress she'd dressed in, and the white kerchief she'd wrapped round her bright hair. "You wore the right outfit." 

Now she had to take a step back. The whiff of his voice was the gamey odor that her father would carry back from his hunting trips. Dead deer. Dead rabbit. The truck, on those weekends, reeked with it.

She turned from it and looked to Becks, who had stalked up behind her.

"Basketball player." Becks frowned. "Is nothing sacred?" She gave him a look; he was staring at her with all the solemnity due a holy rite. 

"Hang on." She was walking away, down a row of cars. They gleamed hard in the sun. Noise rose from the new gym. Chloe watched her go, in case he spoke again. He didn't, though. 

When Becks returned, she was carrying some kind of gadget that looked as if it might shoot rays. "Kitchen torch," she said, when Chloe asked.

The basketball player was watching her closely.

"There were no knives in my car," Becks said, and Chloe was grateful for the mild chalk of her voice. "It was either this or a hand blender." She was walking slowly round him, thinking where to begin. He and Chloe watched her as she circled him, holding the torch. She was still wearing her rain slicker.

She began at the back, holding the blue flame carefully. They could smell the plastic melting. In a careful downward line, she melted away the tape from the pole, crouching to get the final bit.

"Okay," she said then, and instructed him to step forward. When he did, it was like a pod detaching from its stem. He was still cocooned in the metallic tape. He could feel the heat of the melted edges at his spine.

"Now the worst part." His voice was low. He looked down at his silvered-over body, then at Becks.

Her thin fingers working, Becks began to tug at a strip on his shoulder blade. She could feel him tense. Chloe looked away, at the dead brown of the hills in the deep blue sky. 

"Chloe." Becks tilted her head at his other shoulder. He was gritting his teeth. 

Chloe pulled gingerly at first, then doggedly. The adhesive stickied her fingers. He kept his eyes closed, bracing himself. She willed him not to speak as she pulled away more, stripping it from his bare skin. She was blushing.

When he stood naked and red, the silver tape balled at his feet, he shook his head again, as he had when Chloe first found him. Chloe looked at his feet.

"Thank you," she heard him say, just before the bell split the air. Gagging on his words, she turned back toward the school.

#januariad #uncanny valley high

[goldenmesh-blog]

Chapter 13

In the Prentice Hall biology textbook for ninth and tenth graders, there is a sub-unit on camouflage, which poses the question: How is Camouflage an Adaptive Advantage? There is a color photograph of a brownly mottled flounder, rocky eyeballs askew, dissolving against the sandy gravel of the ocean floor, as well as one of a leopard crouched in forest shadow, and an inset of a leaf insect's symmetrical thorax flattened against the underside of a pale plant. "Some organisms use camouflage as a way to escape predation from other organisms," the textbook tells its reader. "Camouflage allows them to blend in with the background."

Chloe would sometimes turn to the page during class, studying the geometrical green of the leaf insect to distract herself from the sulfurous voice of the teacher. She liked how, in the photograph, the kite-shaped thorax of the insect fits against the leaf's edge, like a jigsaw puzzle piece pressed into place. Even its evenly corrugated carapace is of a piece with the leaf. It made her think of photos of her mother holding her when she was still a little girl, how in these photos her own coppery hair seemed of a piece with the long curtain of her mother's.

*

It was a Friday in late November. Will Lux stared at the gold and white bodies that swarmed the parking lot. A small band of girls in white soccer uniforms skulked by, their faces ghoulish white. A pack of boys in gold warm-up suits pushed through the crowd. One turned his head to yell and Will saw the gold striping his cheeks. All through the lot were only two colors, everyone suited and painted in it and excited as their numbers grew.

Fuck. He let his forehead drop to the steering wheel. He'd overslept, cocooned in puzzling dreams, and he'd forgotten what day it was.

Now he locked the car silently and tried to pass through the moving crowd. A few painted faces looked after him. Some of them pointed. If he could make it to the locker room, he could find a gold warm-up suit there. It would be okay.

There were shrieks and calls. The rows of parked cars formed channels that the crowd pulsed through. Girls giggled. The lot hummed.

He could see the glass doors. And then a dull blow to his back. His chin scraped the pavement and his arms were pinned. There were lots of them, he saw. Their painted faces were pulled nearly shut inside their hoods. Another blow to his back. His head held down. And he realized, then, he wasn't struggling. He didn't know why, but he wasn't.

There was laughter. A rough mass of them got his wrists and ankles. He could see the bright gold of them all around. They pulled his sneakers off, shucked his jeans and shorts and the rough ground scraped at his bare body. 

They stripped him, and as they were winding the tape around him and the pole they'd fixed him to, he saw in the crowd the yellowed faces of Price and Price. He saw them hesitate, but they grinned. 

#uncanny valley high #januariad