03. Deliver us from Belmonte

Most of the other students in Leila’s class came from two very prestigious private elementary schools in her city. The kids were “upper, inner circle”, as she liked to call it: upper for high-flown, and inner for stuck inside their lush, expansive egos. It was expected that Belmonte students would be funneled through these two very well-known schools, although once in a while they would reach out and flaunt community awareness by taking in special talents from other schools through scholarship programs. Although Leila's family was by no means scraping by, they would not have been able to even consider Belmonte as an option if not for the grant. Even half the cost of tuition was putting a bit of a strain on the family finances.

She walked into school grounds that morning and kept her head down, back to thinking about her dream now that her father was not in her immediate surroundings. The slight late October chill brought her out of her thoughts and she stroked a forearm with her opposite hand as she looked up from the school’s central courtyard to the stark, four leveled circular building that housed offices and classrooms, and was the pride of Belmonte. The architecture always reminded Leila too much of cold government offices to garner her admiration. 

She looked up at the sky and lost a beat as she noticed something. She glanced around as if to gauge if anyone else was seeing the same thing, but when she saw nothing but students carrying on being upper and inner, she looked down and decided to keep walking before anyone noticed her being weird. As she looked down she stared in wonderment at her skirt which also seemed to have acquired a new particularity. She grabbed at her backpack straps and made herself move along to her classroom as casually as she could, even though she was sure the sharp giggling coming from a table behind her was very much at her expense.

“Evelyn!”

She took her seat in front of her best friend’s quickly and carelessly, without even bothering to take off her backpack. “Evelyn, did you see the sky this morning?”

“Well, good morning to you too, Leila”. Evelyn regarded Leila with her permanently bemused beady green eyes and flashed her dimpled smile. She offered Leila a folded tabloid-sized newspaper with dark blue type. “I knew you’d forget so I grabbed you a copy of the school paper from the office. I have to say, this is your best yet.” She continued with a grin, “Were you thinking of anyone in particular when you wrote it?”

“You know I never think of people when I write, Ev, just feelings.” Leila spoke urgently as she spared a look at her words and allowed herself a few beats of pride. It was easy to understand why anyone would think she wrote it with someone in mind. People could be dense like that. One just needed to see the first few verses to jump to conclusions.

I cry your name at the wind

Hoping you’ll hear, hoping you’ll care…

She put the paper in a folder and stuffed it in her backpack. She sighed in aggravation as she remembered the sky. “Well, did you? See the sky? Come here, tell me if it seems weird to you”, Leila grabbed Evelyn’s hand and led her to the high-set window on the side of the classroom that faced the outer circle of the building. She suddenly felt quite ridiculous for what she was doing, if this were anyone but her best friend she would undeniably just stew in her suspicions all morning. “Well?”

“Well what? Did your mom spike your milk or something? Hey, did you finish the History outline? Mine’s about half the size of what Miss Epps asked for but she’s just gonna have to deal, you know? As long as the dates are right who cares about the details.”

Leila felt dejected. She could feel her face morphing into a mask of disappointment but decided to stay on track with the conversation her friend had started, although it was, aside from wrongful realizations, the last thing she wanted to think about. “No, I didn’t finish. I can’t seem to edit anything out, I mean if an author wrote something it means they think it’s important, right? Who am I to judge?”

“Girl, that’s like, twenty percent of our grade, you know”, Evelyn tried to contort her face to read like genuine concern but all Leila saw was crow with a side of relish.

“Yeah, whatever, I had another weird dream last night, this one kinda stayed with me for a change.” Smooth she thought.

They walked back to their desks as the conversation continued. “What was your dream this time? Were the giant purple giraffes about to take over the world again?”

“God, it’s like I can’t tell you anything”, Leila scoffed, “no, the giraffes were a weird dream, but this one was more of a scene than an actual dream.”

“I think I dreamt about you this week. Not last night, like two or three nights ago”, Evelyn mused as looked up from her desk, where she was working on fixing the spiral of her History notebook.

“Were you listening to me in your dream?”

“God, it’s like I can’t tell you anything!” Evelyn mocked.

Leila chuckled, scoffed, and then glared at her friend.

“Okay, what was the scene?” Evelyn crossed both of her arms on her desk and faced Leila straight on. Leila knew she had to take advantage of this moment of undivided attention because if Evelyn was true to form, it wouldn’t last long.

“I was sitting on a rock in the middle of this little spring, it was nice and cool, I guess maybe because the weather is also getting nicer now so it’s a little chilly at night, you know?” Evelyn gave a quick, swift nod and Leila went on “well, anyway, everything was blue, and completely silent. It was weird because I could feel the breeze but I couldn’t hear it acting on anything. And although I felt like I knew this was strange and impossible, it didn’t matter. Then I looked at the sky and the moon was about this big”, Leila curved her hands and spread them apart as wide as the top of her desk and noted that she was starting to lose Evelyn. She continued anyway, at this point she was doing this more as an exercise in recollection than an informative update on her thrilling subconscious life.

“So I look up and there weren’t any stars, just the big moon, and I’m still not feeling afraid, but when I looked down I knew before I saw the water that I was going to see something, and when I did I started screaming, and… right then I woke up.”

Evelyn was about to speak when Miss Epps walked in and greeted the group in her usual grave, slightly harassed tone, “Good morning students, at attention please.”

While everyone shuffled over to their seats and started preparing for class, Evelyn tapped Leila’s shoulder and whispered, “Hey, I know why you got scared in your dream.”

The tone of her statement should have been enough for Leila to perceive a setup, but she was so worried about what she was going to say to cover for her missing homework that she just managed to quickly utter a “What, why?” while she continued to fish in her backpack for her History notebook.

“You probably saw your face reflected in the water”, Evelyn quipped and flashed a cheeky grin.

“Huh? Oh, not now Evil-lyn.” It really felt like the worst time to make that joke. Evelyn had a tendency to do that, find the humor in a situation at the worst possible time. If she didn’t know any better Leila would have written it up as meanness a long time ago, but she trusted that her friend just had a rough time identifying the situations that actually benefitted from humor. Right now a joke about Miss Epps’s flamenco-inspired black pumps would have made her feel a bit more at ease than a quip at her expense, she thought. Finding some sort of fault about the teacher who was about to pummel her to bits over her homework could have perhaps made her feel better about herself.

Miss Epps stood upright, tilted her chin up and regarded the classroom. She was on the small side, but her size was easy to miss. The lady knew how to carry her tiny self with importance, and even her obvious fashion slights like shoulder pads and flamenco pumps were minimized by her effortless self-possession.  It was impossible to guess her age, and Leila for one couldn’t imagine one brazen enough to try.

After a few beats Miss Epps sat at her desk and scratched a few notes on her planner. Leila knew this was the way she took attendance, because she disliked risking loss of time and group control by doing it the old-fashioned way. Still sitting, she once again scrutinized the class and started taking in a clear voice that carried to the very back of the room, “All right students, I will be checking your outlines while you work on the section review for unit 2 on page 125. Remember I want clear, complete answers to the essay questions. Pass your notebooks to the front of the line and please bring them to me.”

Leila seriously considered not turning in her notebook. The idea was summarily dismissed when she pictured her teacher asking why her work was missing from the pile. No thanks, Leila thought, I’d rather just get pantsed in the courtyard. So off the notebook went as Leila wished it would just get sucked into another dimension; it or her, same thing.

She opened her battered History book, dropped it once on the floor and barely caught it a second time. Everyone looked at her as she tried to scoff it off in a mediocre imitation of that dismissive sound her female classmates made all the time. Hannah and Frieda exchanged a few words and turned back to their books while doing that thing that Leila hated, that thing where they opened their mouth and twisted their tongues to hide their mocking smiles. She felt like she was trying to swallow a fist-sized paper ball. On the third try she took a deep breath, gathered herself and managed to tear off the review pages from her book and shakily scrawl her name and the date on them.

The questions might as well have been in Chinese. She had managed to not quite read, but rather let her eyes stroll through the lessons while attempting to do her outline, but just like every other topic that did not manage to gather her interest, they had just been words. Words committed to paper that she pitied, because instead of forming beautiful mental images, evoking strange and wondrous worlds, or challenging her with provocative figures of speech, they were just stacked and stood in cold formation, stating facts in the most insipid way possible.

Why can’t history books read like Jules Verne or Jack London? Or anything that made this feel like it really mattered, in any case. If any of these people had interesting life stories I feel so bad for them that this is how they ended up being told.  

Minutes crawled by, feeble sentences took the place of what should have been complete paragraphs as answers for the essay questions. Leila swallowed bitterly each time Miss Epps moved down the pile of notebooks and came one closer to hers. Finally, she took it from the pile and Leila felt the blood pounding hard in her ears. At that point she was just pantomiming the act of composing long, thoughtful answers on her review pages, but her eyes ricocheted from her phony answers to the teacher’s desk trying to read her reaction.

Miss Epps’s eyes also did a dance once she found the page with her pupil’s woefully incomplete work. The brows knitted a bit, then furrowed. She turned the page, as if expecting to see more, and then looked over to Leila’s place, where she avoided her gaze by a fraction of a second. When the girl looked down at her page, she saw that she had set down a wondrous set of garbled, heavy handed hieroglyphs on the page while she wasn’t paying attention. Her meager little arm felt considerably heavier than it was as it fell into her backpack to look for an eraser. As she was straightening up she noticed Miss Epps writing something on her notebook with a red pen.

Leila gripped the eraser as she rubbed it with the joint of her thumb and fought back tears. It shouldn’t have to be such a big deal, it was just homework. Just one assignment… that meant, along with all the others she had neglected to hand in that term, that her failing grade in this class was just a mediocre exam away; her second failing grade in this class, in just as many evaluations. She rubbed her eraser against the page in the place where she had made her unsightly scrawl and on the third rub the whole page collapsed into a jagged accordion. Mustering as much care as her nerves allowed, she smoothed out the page and as she did, it happened again.

The highlighted words on the review page were a dull medium blue color, or had been. Now -like the sky and her skirt had seemed to do earlier- that blue was bright, as if propped on a glowing surface. She repeated the smoothing motion and now the blue seemed to respond under her touch, darkening under the warmth of her fingertips, and gleaming like moonlit water at their passing.

 This can’t be possible, but it’s the third time this has happened today. Imagined or not, this is important. What do you want, blue? What do you want from me today? Are you visiting again from my dream?

A nudge on her shoulder brought her back from her thoughts. Evelyn was peering at her with a quizzical look, handing over her review pages. “Pass them forward, doofus!” she whispered in a brusque breath.

Recalling hurt. Her head felt like a particularly busy beehive. This is still nothing. This is not the beginning. This is hardly even the setup to the setup.

There was a reflection at the end of her entry for October 24. This was not uncommon for her, to mix the simple retelling of her day with slices of whimsy or cryptic roundabouts of her deepest thoughts. It seemed a clever way to keep her most precious thoughts guarded, but now that she was relying on her own recounting to call back her memories, she disliked her own hermetic grasp on her reasoning.

This was not the end of October 24. Blue was the game Clay played to gain access into my mind. A bridge was built, and I wish I could understand how it was done. I wish I could understand him. I wish I could see him again, the gossamer vision with the glance of a precious stone and the grace of a million billowing veils.

“Clay” she said out loud as she finished reading the passage. She dug deep in her mind and came up empty for a memory at the mention of the curious name, but something in her reacted to it nonetheless. Her emotions and even her body responded subtly enough that she might have missed it if she wasn’t so deeply aware of herself. She tingled inside as if she were being stroked by downy feathers and something very much like urgency tugged at her chest. There was something important there, something that screamed to be discovered.

The medication was making her drowsy, and as she laid her head on her pillow, her intention took her back to the day she met Clay.