One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy (5 page)

She was an excellent friend of his.

Her goggles were not as ugly or utilitarian as most — her frames were translucent and stylish.

She also dyed her hair blue — as long as Hieronymus had known her, and that was since the third grade, she was the little girl with the electric blue hair.

And through all the school years that followed, her hair never changed. It was always blue. And it rhymed with her name, which was Slue. Sometimes people called her Slue-Blue. A nickname.

She was the girl with the blue hair.

And it was secretly and deeply important to her that people noticed the electric blue hair first.

It was the essential part of her fashion scheme to distract from the initial impression she was a One Hundred Percent Lunar Girl.

Slue Memling was the same age as Hieronymus. They were both sixteen. There were only five kids in their entire school of two thousand students who were classified as bearing lunarcroptic ocular symbolanosis, but none of them ever spoke to each other. By habit, or by force of nature, or by two hundred years of social engineering, the ones with the goggles habitually distrusted and avoided their own kind. And of course it was always in the back of their minds. The unspoken spectre. To look at each other without the goggles. Death in the neighborhood, in the area, whenever a pair of goggles pointed in the same direction. Final punishment for daring to imagine.

They were all so ashamed of themselves. The inexplicable eye color hidden behind their goggles made them all desperately wary of who they really were.

Slue was the exception. She succeeded, by way of her hair color, her fancy (imported from Earth, made in Italy) goggles, and her sheer enthusiastic force of personality, in putting her One Hundred Percent Lunar stigma several notches below the cosmetic attributes she invented. And it worked extremely well — the first thing everyone noticed was her blue hair. And her eyewear was too chic to be classified as anything but high fashion. Lunarcroptic ocular symbolanosis was not the first thing people thought when encountering Slue.

You’re kidding! Slue-Blue’s a One Hundred Percent Lunar Girl? How about that! I had no idea!

She was tall. She was very striking. She was very funny. An excellent student.

All the boys were in love with her.

Hieronymus had forgotten, but Ringo remembered the time his son came home from school back in the third grade.

Da, there is this really beautiful girl in my class! She has blue hair, and she is just like me. She wears goggles too…

Hieronymus himself was not immune to her undeniable charms, but he kept it tucked away and hidden, annoyed with himself that he had let their friendship slide into this confidential yet platonic, brother-sisterlike point of no return. He secretly, ever-so-slightly fancied her — but it was too late. The definitions were made: she was his excellent friend, and just a friend, and in that static zone it stayed. And probably for the better.

Still, there were always those repressed thoughts whenever two One Hundred Percenters just happened to pass each other on the street or in a corridor or got stuck face to face on a crowded subway car. It entered his mind, phantom-like, every time he saw her.

Of course it’s not true! We won’t die! We can look at each other! We can!

And what would we see, if we did look at each other without the goggles?

They may have both thought that, but the question never came up between Hieronymus and Slue. Whenever they were together in class or in the cafeteria or the library, the other students stared, but only for a few seconds.
How unusual — two goggle-freaks actually talking to each other.

And except for the goggles — and what they meant — Hieronymus was almost a normal student. Almost a typical high school student. In a typical public high school. On a typical part of the Moon. Almost.

But.

He led a double life of the most bizarre proportions.

Extreme Academic Schizophrenia
was how his guidance counselor once described it to his father during a parental meeting. “Your son excels is some classes. In literature, for example. Ancient literature. He is beyond the other students. In fact, I would recommend that he begin university coursework just so he won’t get bored. The same is true for his standing in history class. In philosophy, well, he might as well teach the class himself. He is astonishing. Your son has the makings of an excellent researcher in the humanities, should he someday decide to go into those fields.”

Ringo was ready to pop open a champagne bottle and do headstands.

“But that’s wonderful!” He laughed.

“That part is wonderful, yes, indeed it is, Mr. Rexaphin.”

“Gagarin University, here we come!” Ringo thrust his fist into the air, and the guidance counselor went red with embarrassment.

“Well, not so fast, sir…”

The meeting went downhill from there. And, of course, Ringo blamed himself. He was essentially a mathematician and a scientist. He had failed miserably to transmit any of this inherent knowledge to his poor, suffering son.

“By law, as a public school funded by the taxpayers of the Sea of Tranquility, we are obliged to place Hieronymus into the remedial math class and the remedial science class and at least one remedial industries class. Your son may be at the top of his class in the humanities, but in science and math, he is at the very, very bottom.”

“Very bottom?”

“Lower than the scum at the bottom of the math ladder.”

“That’s terrible.”

“He will never graduate if he continues on his current course — he won’t even be allowed into the next grade, he’ll be held back. But if we move him to the remedial section, he will at least pass those classes. His average will improve.”

“This is horrible. My son…in remedial…”

“He will have a schedule unlike any other here at Lunar Public 777. Half his day will be spent with the smartest, brightest, most intellectually curious in the entire school — the Advanced Honors class. The other half of his day will be spent with…”

That evening, Ringo tried to find a private school for Hieronymus. He knew someone who knew someone who knew someone who knew the admissions officer at Armstrongington Academy. He swallowed his pride without a thought, and after twisting a thousand conversations twenty-six-seven ways, he secured a quick last-minute interview.

I’m sorry, sir.

He failed for two reasons. He couldn’t afford it. And even if he could, they still wouldn’t let his son attend their fine institution. The reasons?

I’m sorry, sir. These are the worst math and science grades ever submitted by any applicant to Armstrongington Academy I have ever seen in all my years as an admissions officer.

Hieronymus attracted the worst kind of attention within seconds of walking through the broken-hinged door. Mess. Overturned tables. An odor he’d never smelled before. Not a teacher in sight. Chaos and noise and sudden stares fooded in his direction, because he was new and because of the goggles. Sucked into a strange mini-world of anarchy and gaudy clothes and bizarre idiomatic expressions he could not understand. He was immediately surrounded, and three of them swarmed on him. His first day in the remedial section was quick and violent.

Is it true that you can see the future of anyone you look at without your goggles?

Let go of my arm!

Is it true, goggle-freak?

No. It’s nothing like that!

I heard that when you take your goggles off, you can see colors that no one else can see. And that some of those colors show where people went and where people will go. Is that true, goggle-freak?

Stop calling me that, you filthy Loopie.

What, goggle-freak?

Let go of my arm before I really kick the skuk out of you.

You’re going to kick the skuk out of me? I’m two years older than you, goggle-freak. I’ll wipe the wall with your ugly face.

Leave me alone.

Leave you alone? Not till you show us your goddamned eye color, and then you tell me who is going to win tomorrow between Gratons and Wool so I can get my bets right.

It doesn’t work like that, you fool!

Oh, no? Show us, then!

It was never even a scandal because it was so well covered up. No one cared about Lester — not even his own parents, who never bothered to go to the morgue to identify his body. And the other thugs who helped Lester pull the goggles off were too terrified to speak of it, of that color and what it did to them. No charges were pressed against Hieronymus — after all, they had attacked him, and on his first day in remedial math. The teacher was fired because the teacher was responsible, and the teacher had already been driven out of the classroom by the students. Hieronymus was fourteen at the time — he did not know these kids. They were completely out of control; they had already been through a succession of teachers who could not handle them. They, the boys and girls of remedial math, were not really a class of teenage children. They existed as a collective amorphous soup of instability. They were but a constant barrage of physical and verbal tornadoes. They struck without warning, out of boredom, out of malice, out of love. One side of the brain could not talk to the other side. There was only shouting and shouting and shouting. They were full of mockery, and they had lives at home so miserable they loved being in school even more than they hated it. They beat each other up, they beat up kids from other classes, they robbed people, they drank alcohol, they took drugs, they went to jail, they destroyed property, they wrote graffiti, they lied about everything to everyone, they threatened teachers, they were sent to psychiatric hospitals, they became prostitutes, they became pimps, they became gangsters, they became pregnant, they dreamed of expensive consumer items, and they blew whatever money they came by on clothes and shoes and hats and jewelry. They lived deeply, but only in the brief moment that existed during the time it existed. No peripheral vision, no yesterday, and no tomorrow. No attention span. No short-term memory. They discarded everything except whatever was self-destructive; they swam in currents so illogical not a single moment of reason could last before drowning in a violent whirlpool of chaos. Hieronymus was alone in a class full of these kids. They swarmed upon him. They grabbed him, they threatened him, they pulled off his goggles.

You can’t look at the Devil in the eye. And that boy is a demon who carries the Devil in his eye. All of those Hundred Percent kids are demons. They don’t know it, but they are demons.

That’s not true. You know, and I know, that Lester was high on Buzz. Him and those other two losers were smoking Buzz in the utility closet and they overdosed and Lester died.

That’s what the police say, but that’s not what I heard.

What did you hear?

That that boy — the one with the goggles — already killed a few kids, and that they put him here with us as punishment.

I don’t believe that. He probably got sent here because his grades in math really suck. Which is why you and I are here. Because we suck in math.

I’ll bet he doesn’t suck in math. And what does it matter — those guys with the goggles can kill anyone at will and the police will do nothing about it because the Devil is involved, and the Devil has a way of making things look perfectly fine. And they kill people that no one likes. Skukheads like Lester. Do you think anyone misses that scumbag? I hated him. I’m glad he’s dead, but I stay away from that boy with the goggles anyway because he can kill you and me with just one look from those eyes with the Devil’s color in them.

Man, you are really flying sideways.

I may be flying sideways, but I know a demon when I see one and that boy is one of them. He was sent here like bait, like the cheese in a mousetrap. He was sent here to clean out the nest, to kill of guys like Lester, and he can get away with it because the Devil protects him, and the Devil is in league with the goddamn innacawsing principal.

He quickly placed the goggles back on his face, and then he looked, knowing full well what had happened.

Lester, the boy who had demanded he take the goggles off, was on the floor, dead, his eyes wide open, an expression of pure terror chiseled into his face. The two other boys directly involved in the assault were down on all fours, slowly crawling away, one of them crying and mumbling incoherently, the other one praying just as incoherently. The floor itself was a filthy checkerboard linoleum tile. Several chairs lay on their sides. One of the boys stopped crawling, turned around, and sat, his face so turned inside-out with the harshest dead-fish-in-the-butchershop look of extreme physical disconnection, and he simply bellowed out loud with a despairing sound Hieronymus never thought possible from any human being. The other students piled themselves against the wall, terrified beyond belief — and, for the first time, silent.