The Lovely Shadow (27 page)

I was hurt, offended, disgruntled, and galled
that June would assume that I had done anything, but I listened
very carefully to what Mr. Tinken had to say next, because I really
wanted to know what I’d done as well.

Mr. Tinken laughed and said, “No, no, Miss
Devon, Johnny hasn’t done anything wrong. Here, please, have a seat
and I’ll tell you why we’re here.”

June and I sat in the chairs in front of Mr.
Tinken’s desk, and he sat in the chair behind his desk. He leaned
forward slightly and placed his hands on the desk in front of him
with his fingers intertwined.

“Miss Devon,” he said, “Johnny has been
tested in all areas according to his age group and grade level, and
he has passed far beyond any scores I’ve ever seen during my tenure
at this school; except for math. While he is not scoring
exceptionally well at math, he is still above average and is
picking it up much faster than his classmates.”

June’s tight face relaxed as the tension
drained out of it and she finally believed that I was not a
hoodlum. I’m fairly certain that my face relaxed as well. She
reached over and patted my leg and gave me the proudest smile I’d
ever seen.

“That’s really wonderful news Mr. Tinken…but
why are we here?” June asked.

“Well, Miss Devon, we are here because Johnny
doesn’t belong here.”

My heart leapt inside my chest. When the
faculty says you don’t belong in school then your guardian has to
listen to them, I thought, and wondered for a second why I’d never
tried the ‘I don’t belong there’ approach earlier in the year.

June gave Mr. Tinken a quizzical look and he
continued, “I’m afraid his intellectual maturity, and vast
knowledge of subject material far beyond his grade level, serves
only to place him at a distinct disadvantage in the classroom. He
is not really ‘learning’ anything here, and he is not able to
communicate well with the other students because, quite frankly,
they are from different worlds.”

I was so elated I was shaking. Here I was,
having finally conceded victory to June in regards to my going to
school, and my defeat was now being handed back to me as a victory
by my principal, simply for being a good student.

“So, what do you recommend, Mr. Tinken?” June
asked, in a concerned voice.

“Well, Miss Devon, we have three options as I
see it. The first option is to do nothing. If we do nothing, and we
leave Johnny where he is, he will suffer socially and
intellectually. The second option is to move Johnny ahead several
grades next school year so that his grade level matches his
performance level, but that would be putting an eight year old boy
in the eighth grade, and while this may satisfy his intellectual
needs, I fear it would not do much for his social needs.”

My heart was sinking as Mr. Tinken kept
talking, I was silently willing him to either shut up or mention
homeschooling as a viable option.

June looked distressed. “What is the third
option?” she asked, in a voice that hinted that she was certain the
third option would be equally horrible.

“The third option is the Rising Star Academy.
It is a private school for exceptionally gifted children, and they
will not accept a student until the age of eight at a minimum so
Johnny would not be able to attend until next school year
anyway.”

“They are prohibitively expensive, but they
do have a scholarship program, and I hope I have not overstepped my
bounds, Miss Devon, but I already sent in an application for
Johnny, along with his test scores and a letter of
recommendation.”

“And…?” June asked, looking more hopeful than
she had a few moments ago.

“And they accepted him, full scholarship, for
the entirety of his tenure there!”

Mr. Tinken was positively beaming, and June
was squealing with delight, and I was sinking deeper into my chair
feeling sorry for myself. Victory had been so close I could taste
it, and then it was snatched away, leaving a bitter taste in my
mouth.

June turned to me in rapturous joy and
grabbed my thighs, shaking them wildly, “Isn’t this awesome,
Sugar?” she squealed.

“Yeah, great,” I mumbled in return.

I finished out the last few weeks of the
school year with all the normal glumness that had accompanied the
first part of the year and looked forward to the summer break with
great anticipation.

As miserable as I was at the prospect of
starting all over in a new school, I was determined not to let it
ruin my summer vacation.

Summer had taken on a new beauty for me. The
previous summer had seen my deliverance from the dank darkness of
my mother’s basement (and the dank darkness of her twisted mind),
and the current summer was seeing my deliverance from the Hell
known as ‘elementary school’.

I was not about to take a moment of the
summer break for granted. I spent great amounts of time sitting in
the shade of a great willow tree that grew beside a natural pond
that sat about a hundred yards away from the house reading
books.

I became great friends with Tom Sawyer and
Huck Finn that summer. I also revisited Bilbo Baggins several
times. I was introduced to Tom Joad and his family as they traveled
West during the Great Depression, and I spent some time getting
friendly with a misfit named Charlie Gordon and his good friend
Algernon, the mouse.

I did not only spend my days that summer in
lackadaisical relaxation around the pond. June taught me to ride
horses, and Miss Lilly taught me how to cook. I explored every
square inch of June’s fifteen acre property, watched countless
hours of television.

I also taught myself quite a lot of French
with the help of a French/English dictionary that June bought for
me, though I was beginning to doubt that I would need that
knowledge. There had been no more strange occurrences since the
night I learned of my mother’s death and I began to suspect that
everything that had happened was either my imagination or had a
perfectly rational explanation.

But through it all, in the back of my mind
there was a certain fear of the unknown. A fear that grew
considerably the closer summer drew to an end.

I desperately did not want to start all over
at a new school. I had only barely learned to manage the bullies at
the public school, and now was going to be sent off to a place
where rich bullies could torment me as well.

June was empathetic to my fears of the new
school, but after listening to all my whining the previous school
year she was not willing to tolerate any of it for this new
academic year.

“Johnny, Honey,” she said to me with a firm
but gentle tone in her voice when I began to attempt to get out of
going the first day, “you have endured horrors and tortures that no
other person—man, woman, or child—should ever have to endure. You
not only endured them, but you managed to pull through them
unscathed with your incurable optimism and amazing wits. I will not
allow you to become a coward and a failure now. Do you
understand?”

As clever as I thought I was, June was far
cleverer. She managed in one breath to make me feel proud, smart,
and ashamed. I hung my head in shame. The idea of letting June down
in any way was not something I would ever be able to cope with. I
would have faced a thousand bullies before I let her down.

“Don’t be ashamed, Baby,” June said to me,
while gently lifting my chin with her fingers—forcing me to look
her in the eye. “It’s ok to be scared, Doll, but true bravery comes
from being scared and going into battle anyway. And you, of all
people, are the bravest man I’ve ever met. You’ll be awesome, just
like you always are.”

I smiled at June. I couldn’t help myself. She
always made me feel amazing inside. I was still afraid, but knowing
that swallowing my fear would make June proud was more than enough
to get me motivated.

“Let’s go,” I said cheerfully, and jogged
through the door and out to the car.

As it turned out, my fear was completely
unnecessary anyway. The Rising Star Academy was nothing like the
public school had been. The class sizes were considerably smaller;
the individual attention that each teacher was able to lavish on
each student was considerably more.

The curriculum at the Academy was actually
challenging. We, as students, were not simply challenged to
memorize facts, we were challenged to think.

For every major event in history that we
covered, we had to write a paper discussing how we thought the
present might have been affected if those major events of the past
had not happened or had turned out differently.

We were introduced to many classical novels
and had to write reports about each one, discussing not only the
plot lines and major characters in each book, but also the themes
that were present in the novel; overt themes as well as more covert
underlying themes.

We had to form debate groups where current
events and politics were heatedly argued back and forth. We played
weekly quiz show style games where the only reward was having your
name prominently displayed on the wall through the following
week.

The other students at the Academy were unlike
the students in public school as well. Simply having money was not
enough to ensure a student a place at Rising Star; a superior
intellect was also required.

The preliminary testing included not simply
facts and figures that needed to be regurgitated, but also more
than a few essay questions that revealed a potential student’s
ability to think through complex situations, and also a bit about
how the candidate viewed the world around them and responded to
various situations.

The testing assured that only the most
intelligent and morally sufficient students were allowed into the
Academy, which meant the student body was comprised almost entirely
of decent kids. There were no bullies to be found anywhere on
campus, and in fact, any bragging or other type of behavior that
remotely resembled condescending or insulting behavior towards
another student was swiftly dealt with, generally in the form of
“marks”.

The major tenets of Rising Star Academy were
Respect, Honor, and Sagaciousness. These were highly esteemed
ideals that the Academy took very seriously, and any flagrant
disregard towards any of these tenets resulted in a mark.

Marks followed a student through their career
at Rising Star; not for one semester or one school year, but
through a student’s entire tenure at the Academy. If a student
accumulated five marks during their tenure they were expelled from
the Academy with no hope of having the judgment overturned.

At the Academy, all students were made to
feel that they had value to themselves, each other, the world at
large, and the Academy. Every student wanted to be a part of the
school and the idea of being punted was repugnant to each and every
student.

During my entire tenure at Rising Star—which
lasted nine years—there was not a single student who ever
accumulated more than two marks.

I thrived at Rising Star. I remained a little
introverted, though and did not really develop any close
friendships, but I did develop casual friendships, and got along
quite well with everybody I encountered there.

My favorite course at the Academy was a
once-a-week workshop style class where we were given a grab-bag
filled with all kinds of different items, and then presented with a
theoretical ‘situation’ that we had to resolve, using only the
items in the bag.

Often the items in the bag were mundane items
like staplers, duct tape, scissors, and a set of playing cards. On
other occasions, especially as I got older, the items became a bit
more complicated and exotic and included things like a baggie of
zinc oxide, hydrogen peroxide, cannon fuse, and a “ticket” allowing
me to use the Bunsen-burners, or other lab equipment that was
readily available in the classroom.

I truly loved attending the Rising Star
Academy, but still looked forward expectantly towards the day when
I would graduate, and be completely free of all the structure and
rules that the Academy imposed upon my life.

I had no idea what I wanted to do with my
life as I was learning and growing at school, but I knew I had no
desire to be a professional student. If I had known where my life
would lead so soon after graduating, I might have been more open to
the idea of never growing up and staying in school forever.

Although one summer of my life had been jaded
by some very painful memories, in the end that summer had become a
season of triumph and joy, and every year I looked forward to
summer breaks from the Academy with all the wide eyed excitement of
a fat kid in a candy store where everything is free.

Summers were mine to control and to conquer.
As it turned out, summers also seemed to be when the strangest
events of my life took place.

By the time the summer rolled around in the
year I turned fourteen I had pretty much completely forgotten about
Miss Lilly’s declaration that I had ‘the eye’. I had seen no
shadows, smelled no roses, and had no odd events happen in my life
for nearly seven years—not since the summer of 1990.

The summer of 1997 was a summer of changes
though. Not only within my body, as puberty took hold of me and
began to run wild, but also in my sensitivity to the weirdest parts
of the world. The parts nobody understands and most people don’t
believe in.

The weirdness began on the first day of that
summer break. I came into the kitchen around seven-thirty in the
morning to grab a banana and a glass of milk before heading out to
the pond with a new book. Miss Lilly had long since stopped trying
to force us all to eat a good breakfast and had instead gotten in
the habit of sleeping in rather late.