Michael v - Unnatural

“So, gaytard! Heard you’re going to an all-boys school in England.” Mauro had come to bid him farewell. “You must be creaming in your pants.”

Michael slammed his locker shut. He didn’t think about the choice, he just made it. “Shut up, Mauro.”

“Ooh, the gaytard finally talks back!” Despite his surprise, Mauro laughed and so did the group of kids who had gathered to watch the final round between Michael and his nemesis. In a strange way, he took power from his mother’s last action. Was she a coward, was she brave? It wasn’t for Michael to decide, but she had made a decision and that gave Michael strength. He could not allow Mauro to have the last word, not this last time, so he decided to follow in her footsteps and do something.

“I said shut the fuck up!”

Eyes widened, Mauro was truly shocked, but in no way scared, and when he spoke again, he took a few steps closer to Michael. “And who, Miss Gaytard, is gonna make me?”

Again Michael followed gut instinct and not thought. He dropped the pile of books he had been holding, turned to face Mauro, and shouted, “Me!” as he pushed him back against the lockers. Using the element of surprise, Michael pushed him again, this time harder so Mauro’s books tumbled to the floor and he lost his footing. It was then that he saw something he had never seen in Mauro’s face, a tinge of fear. “Me! The gaytard’s gonna shut you up!” Michael shouted.

Before the words stopped echoing down the hallway Michael threw a punch at Mauro’s face with such force that he bounced into the lockers. It didn’t matter that the punch only clipped Mauro on the chin, it didn’t matter that the only reason Mauro didn’t pounce on top of Michael was because one of the janitors pulled his arms behind his back; all that mattered was that Michael fought back. He faced a demon, this bully, and he didn’t cower.

Shaking a bit and red-faced, Michael saw that the crowd of students was looking at him differently. So this was what it was like not to be looked at like a fool, not to stand alone. It wasn’t the exit he had planned, but it met with his approval. He wasn’t the only one who felt that way. “Better late than never,” Mr. Alfano said, stooping down to help Michael pick up his books, smiling with that same look of respect he had given him the day before. “Good luck to you, Michael.”

“Thank you, sir.” But to the rest of the students, the ones who until that day had made his life miserable, who didn’t take a moment to reach out to him, he said good riddance. He had planned on being equally cavalier with his grandma, but when the moment arrived, he couldn’t be that disrespectful.

His grandpa had already shaken his hand roughly, told him to stay out of trouble, and was now waiting in the airport bar having a beer and so Michael sat among the other travelers with only his grandma as companion. “I will miss you and Grandpa,” Michael said, trying to sound convincing. “It’s just that … well, Archangel Academy really is a much better school and, you know, he is my father.”

True to her nature, his grandma remained silent. Michael never could figure out if she was a woman of so few words because she had little to say or because she had learned as a young woman that no one listened to her when she spoke. Ah, well, another mystery that would stay unsolved. She did, however, place her hand in his and together they sat in silence until it was announced that his plane was ready to depart.

Michael turned to her and he thought she would break tradition and offer some words of love and wisdom that she had failed to say all the time he had been living with her, but instead she hugged him tightly, and when she pulled back, she placed a folded envelope in his hand. “This is for you” was all she could say before the lump in her throat interfered with her speech. Michael stood there and watched the short, gray-haired woman, wearing clothes that she made herself, clutch her pocketbook and walk slowly away. He knew it would be the last time he would ever lay eyes on her.

He couldn’t wait any longer. He had wanted to read his grandma’s letter when they were flying over the Atlantic Ocean, but that wouldn’t be for another hour. Thousands of miles above Kentucky or Pennsylvania or some landlocked state, his curiosity proved stronger than his discipline and he pulled the envelope out from his backpack, where he had stuffed it upon boarding the plane. Before he opened it, though, he knew it wasn’t from his grandma. He recognized the handwriting as his mother’s.

He waited for his hands to stop trembling and then he used his index finger as a letter opener to break the seal. There was only one page, one page of his mother’s scribbled handwriting, dated the day she killed herself. Dear Michael, I don’t have much time left, but I have to say good-bye. I know I wasn’t a very good mother, not the kind I had hoped I would be. I had so many dreams for our family, but somehow—well, I can’t explain away my actions, why I did the things I did, and none of that really matters now anyway. All that matters is that you know that I love you and everything I did was to protect you. I know you hate it here and you feel like you don’t belong and in many ways I feel the same way. That’s why I know you’re going to leave. When I’m gone your father will want to take you back home with him and I know you won’t be able to resist his invitation. Just like I couldn’t. All I can do is beg you to be careful. Yes, England is an exciting country, like none you’ve ever seen, but remember not everything is what it seems. And neither are people. I can’t blame you for wanting the adventure of a new life, and nothing I write will make you want to stay in this town, but just remember that no matter where you go, you can’t run from who you truly are. Your mother

Tears fell onto the paper without warning. Michael turned to face the window, shielding his face from the other passengers. Even in death his mother was a mystery to him. What did her letter mean? Protect me from what? Warn me about England? My father? Michael didn’t understand. I can’t run from myself? So she knew. She knew and she never said anything. Why would she waste her time writing something like that minutes before she put an end to her own miserable life when she never took a moment while she was alive to say, Yes, Michael, I’m as unhappy in this place as you are or I understand what you’re going through? Her letter, like her life, made no sense. So Michael chose to ignore it.

Just as he crumbled up the letter into a tiny ball, the pilot announced that they were now flying over the Atlantic Ocean. Finally, he was going to be separated from his past. He wasn’t running from anything, but moving toward something greater. Michael brushed away his tears; he didn’t need them any longer. He didn’t need to feel sorry for himself or conceal his truth and he definitely didn’t need his mother or her insane instructions. Because on the other side of the water, his life was about to begin.

The Beginning

Outside, the earth was new.

The moment Michael stepped off the plane, he knew his life had changed. He was not in Weeping Water, Nebraska, any longer and try as he might he couldn’t conceal the smile on his face. It stayed there even when he saw the text on his cell phone from his father’s assistant advising him that Vaughan was called away to Istanbul for an emergency meeting, so his father’s driver would be picking Michael up to take him directly to Archangel Academy. That was a change in plan. But his own driver? Istanbul? He had definitely entered a world in which the town of Weeping Water didn’t exist.

His smile remained even when he had a flashback to when he was seven or eight and his father had promised he would visit so the two of them could spend the week together, just them, fishing, camping, doing the type of father-and-son stuff that Michael had seen fathers and sons do on television and in the movies. But as Michael lay in his bed, dressed in his fishing outfit so he wouldn’t have to waste time getting dressed in the morning, Vaughan called to cancel. Loose business ends needed to be tied up. For a moment, standing alone in the airport, time halted and Michael was that little boy again, disappointed but determined not to show his true feelings. “That’s all right, Dad, I understand,” Michael said back then alone in his bedroom before crying himself to sleep. And that’s what he said now.