M. Buehrlen: The 57 Lives of Alex Wayfare

Yeah. The prick.

So back in the gym, I squeeze my phone in my fist so hard that this time I nearly bruise my palm. I was right about the cannibalism. Not only had I read eyewitness accounts at the library, but I’d actually seen what those people were reduced to during the Starving Time. That’s what my visions do – they show me the past in vivid, stomach-wrenching detail. I don’t know how it works, or why it happens. All I know is when I was fifteen, I had a vision that made me feel like I was there, like I was one of the starving colonists living in Jamestown. I wandered through the settlement, my stomach yawning with such hunger that even the leather on my shoes looked appetizing. I saw a mother rocking a dead child in her arms. I watched a man climb into a grave he had dug himself, resigning to death. I looked on as another man was hung by his thumbs for carving up his dead wife like a Thanksgiving turkey.

I still feel the sting of that vision. I live with the terrifying bite of it every day. My dreams are plagued by it. Especially after a few days at the library proved all those horrific things I saw actually happened. There really had been a Starving Time, and there really were eyewitness accounts of all I had seen. Somehow that made the nightmares worse. So for Mr Lipscomb to say it never happened, to look me in the eye after class that same day and refuse to let me prove I was right… Well. I just thought I deserved a bit of justice.

So I dial his number.

His phone rings in his pocket. The vibrator motor stings his thigh, and he shrieks into the microphone. He actually shrieks. The ringtone peels through the gym, the rapper rhyming about beating up his cheating girlfriend “because she deserved it” and dropping the F-bomb every other word. The entire student body bursts into howls of laughter. Mr Lipscomb’s face is as white as his starched collared shirt, and he swears as he fumbles to rip the phone from his pocket. Not once or twice, but half a dozen times. Each explicit word amplified through the speakers. Then, as if that weren’t enough, his foot slips off the back of the box he’s standing on. He topples to the floor, still swearing.

By this time, the gym resembles the primate house at the zoo. Whooping, hollering, feet beating on bleachers. Mrs Gafferty, our principal, and three other teachers gather around Mr Lipscomb and escort him out the side doors. Mr Caswell, the boys’ gym coach, manages to calm everyone down with his drill sergeant voice and glare. The rest of the assembly is canceled, and soon we’re all filing out into the hallway in uniform lines to the tune of muffled laughter and countless retellings of the Mr Lipscomb Incident.

Part of me feels awful for him. My little prank was supposed to make me feel better, but seeing him shriek and swear and fall like that… It didn’t bring me any satisfaction. All it did was make me feel like I couldn’t breathe right. Like there was something heavy and cold sitting on my chest.

Not even an hour after the assembly, Mrs Gafferty called me into her office. I guess Mr Lipscomb only has one enemy.

THE WHOLE TRUTH

After I relay all this to Dr Farrow – all but the part about actually being in Jamestown; I’ll save that for later – her expression softens even more. Almost like she sympathizes. “Was this your first time to the principal’s office?”

“No.”

She makes a motion with her hand, inviting me to elaborate.

I heave a sigh, then hand it all over to her. “There was the time I wired the bell to ring two minutes early for each class. By the end of the day we all got out of school like fifteen minutes before we were supposed to. None of the teachers complained, but Mrs Gafferty knew it was me.”

“Why did you do it?”

“Because Mr Lipscomb always holds us after the bell during last period. Half the kids always miss their bus. The parents call and complain, but he keeps doing it. I don’t think that’s fair.”

Dr Farrow lifts her pointed chin. “Anything else?”

I pick at the loose flap of rubber on my sneaker again. “I may have posted a few of Tabitha’s personal text messages on the cafeteria’s scrolling message board…”

“How did you…?” Dr Farrow holds up her hand and shakes her head. “Never mind. I don’t need to know.”

I sink lower into the couch cushions.

She hovers her pencil above her notepad. “Tell me what you like to do, Alex. What are your hobbies?”

“I don’t know. I guess I like to fix things.”

“Yes, I gathered that you’re tech savvy. But what else?”

I think about that for a long while. Normal girls would say they liked volleyball or texting or going to the mall. I could lie and say I liked those things too, but I don’t. I tell the truth again. “I like to stay in one place.”

She stares down her thin nose at me. “What do you mean?”

“I mean…” How can I put it in terms the PhD with dozens of framed degrees and certificates wallpapering her office can understand?

Dr Farrow squints her eyes and sucks in her cheeks. She looks like she’s trying to bore a hole in my brain and pluck the answer out herself. I wonder if she learned that technique at Johns Hopkins.

“Do you mean you prefer to stay at home?” She says it like she just uncovered one of my major secrets. By simply staring at me.

I shrug. “I guess that’s one way to put it.”

She scribbles something onto her notepad. “What do you like to do at home? Watch TV?”

It would have been so simple to say yes. Yes, Dr Farrow, that’s why I’m a pariah of my own making. That’s why I have no friends and I’m failing eleventh grade. I’m obsessed with television. Totally consumed by it. Is there a cure?

“No,” I say. “The only time I watch TV is during movie nights with my family. And even then, I only watch the same few classics over and over. Arsenic and Old Lace, Gone with the Wind, Casablanca. Those kinds of things.”

“Do you play video games?”

“No.”

“Read, then?”

“Never.”

She lifts an eyebrow. “Not even for school?”

I tug the sleeves of my navy blue sweater down over my wrists and clutch them in my palms. “Well, some. Only when I have to, or if my sisters want me to read to them. But I never read on my own. And never any fiction.”

“What do you do when you have a literature assignment?”

“I find the summaries online. That way it’s fact, not fiction. Gatsby did A, B, and C. That’s as far as I go.”

“And you find that results in adequate grades on your assignments?”

I look down at my fingernails. “I get by.” I’m not sure why I lie that time. Dr Farrow knows I’m failing my junior year.

She tilts her head to the side, moving on. “What’s wrong with reading fiction?”

I shift on the couch, and the leather squawks again. “I don’t like being someone else… slipping into someone else’s life. Fiction takes me too far away. To other places. Other worlds.”

I get enough of that already, I want to add.

She nods slowly. “And you like staying at home. I see.” She flips a page on her notepad and scribbles some more. When she finishes, she looks me in the eye. “It sounds like you may have a fear of imagination. Of role playing. That’s why you try to stay away from anything fictional. Television. Video games. Books. You want to stay in the real world. Am I right?”

Not exactly, I want to say. It’s not like I fear fictional things. It’s that I fear what kind of vision they’ll bring on.

When I don’t answer, she continues. “And I suppose that’s why you’re OK with reading history, like you did for Mr Lipscomb’s class. History isn’t fiction.”

A slight smirk hitches on my lips. “I’d hardly call what we learn in history class fact, Dr Farrow.” I peel the piece of flappy rubber sole from the bottom of my sneaker and flick it onto her carpet. She follows it with her eyes, frowning.