The Firefly Field Theory

|13| Red Bulls and Revelations: Part II

PART II:

With my head pressed into the little white pillows I bought, I sip from my icy can of Fanta and munch on a cracker. Only an hour left to go. The temperature keeps dropping and scenery keeps intensifying in its magnificent beauty. We drove off the highway at the intersection; Omi rolled the van onto a broad, unpaved flat land scrapped through forests of sturdy pines. There are so many vans and jeeps driving by us to our mutual destination. Their wheels flatten the laid out dusty unpaved road, for the people who might visit in the later years. And they don’t even notice.

The road heavily populated with charged drivers and excited passengers, unwinds this way and that. And the minivan; being anything other than a minivan, is a considerably hard butted cow to steer across the bumps. The fresh air mingles with the scent of burnt wood and cheesy cheetos. The expanse containing the crowd of evergreen, spade shaped trees flaunting their heights forms a ragged and irregular boundary that follows through the length of the road. The scene is like another painting.

“Hey Sam, you’re supposed to be guarding the fanny pack with your life remember?” Z extends his hand and drops the fanny pack onto my lap, “There’s nothing special in here.” I complain.

“She’s right, I just ate the peanuts.” Wall-e adds.

“Fine, Omi you put the keys of the minivan in there, okay?” Z instructs, and then almost too quickly he asks me, “Sam, I have a question I wanna ask you, do you mind?”

I inch back a little, to look into the back. Bravo has earphones plugged in her ears and Wall-e is reading something off his phone. “Okay, I don’t mind. What do you wanna ask me?”

“You said something about a dude named Steve, who was he? And why’d he hate you so much?”

This weather is the weather I imagine Heaven to have all the time. The stiff cool breeze gnaws at your nose and the warmth of the Sun feels like warm hands pressed to your face.

It’s the weather of new beginnings; not sentimental talk about ends. It’s supposed to be soaked up to the extent that it penetrates the cellophane thin human soul and gets etched across the failing wall of memories. Forever ingrained, to be remembered as longest as one possibly can. I can’t stain it with disturbing thoughts of my high school bully couple. That’d be an insult to the weather of the heavens.

And though I have a reservoir of information on the directed question, I find myself at a rather heavy loss of words; the weather and the beauty have me confused. So I start from the truth. The truth makes them gasp. I tell them, that Steve was biologically a woman, and no one knew her real name, I tell them I suspect; like most of the kids who graduated from Edgewater High School, that Steve had actually vaporized the kids who knew her real name. I tell the strangers about Steve’s anger management problems and the medically approved disease that didn’t allow her to speak in volumes perfectly audible to human sense.

I tell them, that she loved Martha, her-freakin-worse-half, and they were the perfect match for a tag team championship. Just not that well cut out for high school. I then move on to Martha’s gossip dipped, notorious past. I tell them how she was rumored to be an ex-emo because some girls saw cuts on her elephantine arms, an ex-prisoner because she harassed a basketball player from one of the teams she was competing against and finally an ex-basketball player because nobody likes to play with or against Godzilla, even if the school mascot is actually a reptile. I feel all ears directed to me as I narrate the glorious homosexual bully couples’ antics.

Then too fast for me to hold, I make a little mistake. I mention the list. The list I wrote down to get every single bully back. And this little spark is enough to start a fire. Z almost pounces me with his excitement, Bravo shovels aside her headphones with wide eyes, Wall-e drops his cell and makes no attempt to pick it up because apparently he has lost himself in my eyes and Omi lets go of the wheel to plant his hands on his head.