Requiem

ii.

The next day was a Thursday.

Over night, I had left Aquaman sitting on my nightstand, and when I rolled over in the morning he was the first thing that I saw. It had been years since I had played with action figures; In fact, I couldn’t even remember where Batman was. It made me sad to think of him lying in some dark crevice of the house, with only cobwebs for company.

Sitting up, I took Aquaman into my hands and studied him. The bright colors I had always associated with him were now faded. He was smaller than I remembered,  too, but maybe I was just bigger.

“Garrit! Are you awake yet? You’re going to be late for school.” My mother’s voice called from the kitchen.

“I’m coming!” I shouted back to her. I slipped off my pajamas and pulled on a tee-shirt and jeans. Before bounding down the stairs, I paused and slipped the action figure into my pocket. You never know when you might need a water-based superhero.

When I came into the kitchen, my mother frowned at me.

“Sweetie, did you comb your hair?” she asked pouring cream into her coffee. Her own   hair was twisted up in a big clip at the back of her head. A few strands fell out as she bent over to inspect my appearance.

“Not really.” I answered finally, running a hand through it.

My mother sighed at me. “I’ll go get a comb. Here, have some of this.” she placed a bowl of cereal on the table in front of me. “It’s GMO-free and sweetened with agave nectar instead of fructose.”

“Okay.” I said, watching her walk away. I didn’t know what agave was, but the stuff floating in the bowl looked a lot like cardboard. I cautiously spooned some into my mouth.

It tasted like cardboard too.

 

--

 

My mother may not have known what good cereal tastes like, but she was right about me being late for school. In the rush, I completely forgot the figurine riding in my pocket. Or at least, until I went to lunch.

 

For me, Lunchtime was usually a pretty solemn affair. Every day I’d walk into the cafeteria and sit at the same table- the second one from the left- and sift through the lunch my mother packed for me. There were really only two kids that sat near me, but there were always empty seats separating us.

The first was a boy named Harriet. Harriet didn’t talk much, (maybe because his name was Harriet)  And all I really saw of him was a birds’ nest of blonde hair as he bent over his textbooks. When he did talk it was always about Calculus or Biology or did-you-hear-about-the-prime-minister? I never seemed to know the right answers to his questions, so our short conversations usually ended in one of his disappointed sighs. I got the impression that he had skipped a few grades, and was a lot smarter than I was.  The other kid at our table talked to me a little more often. (Mostly about baseball). I didn’t know his name though, because when he first introduced himself he sneezed halfway through, and I was always too embarrassed to ask him to repeat it.

 

On Thursdays, my mother liked to make sushi. I’d told her before that I didn’t really like fish, but she always just ‘tsk’ed at me and told me it was good for my brain. So, on most days I just sighed and resigned myself to a seafood-filled fate.

Before I could unwrap the rolls, A loud slam net to me nearly shook them out of my hands. “Is that sushi?” Quem asked, rearranging the textbook she’d just dropped on the table. She grinned from the seat next to me, her two pigtails sticking out at strange angles.