The Beverly High Chronicles: The Immortals

The Immortals

'Tis true, 'tis certain; man though dead retains

Part of himself: the immortal mind remains.

-          Alexander Pope (1688-1744)

One

   “Oh gods-hey, what did you say?-no, no-aaah!-hey, what the…?-hey, get out!”

   I scrambled as I bolted right up into my bed, breathing rapidly while I rub my eyes against the back of my hands.  Once again, as usual every morning, I’m annoyed.  My dreams always ruin by tight, beautiful, sound sleep.  It wakes all my particles, my atoms, my molecules, and all the other tiny things you could imagine (inside the body).  Just like today, I dreamt about this microscopic organism climbing up to my eye, mumbling something very creepy underneath its breath.  Of course, like what any other normal human being would do, I swatted it away, down my shoulder, my elbow…but then it climbed up again from there.  Obviously, that’s annoying to someone who’s asleep.

   I tried hard not to think about gnomes, trolls and pixies, gods, whatsoever they are called when I returned back to lying down and covered my face with my pillow.  It’s hard not to think about them when all you dream about every night is….well, them.  They keep on destroying my mental things, my mood and my mornings or sometimes my midnights.  They trouble my brain so much that sometimes I look around my room to search for one.  I was about to get up but a knock vibrated through my door.  Mom called: “Chris, are you awake?  Field trip today, dear!  Come on, I made you pancake for breakfast!”

   “Yes mom,”

   “Are you coming?”

   “Coming,” I managed.  I stood up uneasily from my bed.  I looked around my room once again when a screeching sound echoed from behind my closed window.  I gazed at it.   Ploooweeetch!  Plooow…hitichi! , it shrieked.  Terrified, I got out quickly from my room then down to the kitchen table.

    Unlike the usual days, we had pancakes, waffles, and a jar of M&M candies, two boxes of pizza, a tray of mixed cooked and overcooked hotdog, and a pitcher of iced tea.  The pancakes tasted great, with all the syrup and extra waffle and all.  It was delicious in a different kind of way.  But I guess I wasn’t digging that much today.

   “What’s wrong?  Come on, tell me,” mom, who was washing some extra dishes in the sink from last night, dried her hands and sat across me.  I tried to smile but then…she’s a mother.  She knows when I’m faking it.

   “I don’t know…honestly,” I said as I scooped another spoonful slice of the pancake.  I wasn’t lying.  Actually, I have a feeling something wrong is gonna happen to me today.

   “Emotionally or physically?” she asked.  And when she said ‘physically’, that’s when I realized a tiny hole in my thumb.  It looked sore, and as I stared at it, a tiny amount of blood emerged.  I immediately covered it with my index finger.

   “I don’t know.”

   “Well then,” she started rising from the seat and probably back to her dishwashing chore, “Just tell me if you want to talk, okay?”

   “Yeah, sure,” I muttered as another surge of blood came out from the hole in my thumb.

   I hurried along, tugged my backpack across my shoulders then ran to catch the Number Three train.  I sighed, and then breathed; telling my brain that today would be good.  And as usual, I have no idea how wrong I was.

   I want to know what will happen to me today in Beverly High, I want to know if it would be normal our unusual.  But as far as I’m concerned, the day started out to be fine.

   Beverly High is this private school down midtown Manhattan, New York.  To be exact, East 34th Street, a tunnel away from Long Island Sound.  Like any other school around, we get grades, we sit on desks and we have lockers and a cafeteria.  The thing is that the teacher’s get to wear anything they like; sometimes they come to school in a pop star outfit, then swimsuit the next day. It’s all normal to us Beverly High kids, we’d gotten used to them.  It’s fine with us; though I’m sure it’d look weird to the eyes of the other students from the other schools.

   School was always dull…and it got worse from the first day.  Every period was boring and the teachers were always speaking those equations like they were easy topics, like they think we are too smart to understand their lessons in a short span of time.  Take Mrs. Recky, my Science teacher, for example.  She talks about Einstein’s Theory of Relativity in a manner us, sixth graders don’t understand.  She spends about 5 minutes and a half explaining it, then gives a 50 item test about it…50 questions about one topic, I don’t know how she does that.

   First period English was crazy.  Mrs. McKay, who wore a balloon costume, made us recite John Milton’s Paradise Lost by pair.  And I was paired with Pauline Diaz – Beverly High’s hottest, as they would say.  Pauline is this girl who has those sparkling eyes, red lips, china doll like skin and a brunette waistline hair.  She’d speak in fluent French and Spanish, broken Mandarin and Italian during recess and lunch time.  Yes, she’s pretty, but I don’t like her – never will.  Last year, during Yearbook day, she made Alicia Levine drink an entire glass of mud, clean the entire school bathroom, help the lunch ladies, and served as a janitor the next day.  Alicia, who was known to be Pauline Diaz’s Number One Fan agreed to do the torture, and as a result, she got a bad cause of trauma.

[to be continued]