Society Dysfunctional

3. The (Hypothetically) Irrational

Chapter Three - The (Hypothetically) Irrational

Joshua

You can say that, after my books, solitude is my best friend. I was born and raised lonely, though I cannot think of a better way to have spent the early years of my life. I was without the company of friends—which, admittedly, I have never had—and Mom was never here for me as she was “working late” all the time, though I have always doubted that. If my mother actually did go to work, we wouldn’t have been living on welfare. If my father had never left us, we would have been getting by much better.

Still, I was a good child. I took care of little Hanna. I nursed Mom back to health every morning when she stumbled home, incoherent. I went to school and came home with my A-pluses in all subjects and the sounds of the bullies jeering after me still stuck in my ears. The teachers had called me a prodigy, urged me to transfer to the gifted program. Mom didn’t sign the forms—I guess she was too busy to take a break from her hard work to sign her name on a single line—and instead I stayed at school with the fools.

But I was used to it. I was accustomed to being surrounded by these stupid people my entire life. My mother, my father, the teachers, the bullies that would empty the garbage cans to throw trash at me while I walked home from school. They weren’t anything like me, and they didn’t try to be or think like me. So I became a recluse, curling up in the corners and drowning myself in book after book after book, the only things that seemed to understand me.

At the start of ninth grade, things got worse. I couldn’t ignore the mammoths that my lifelong tormentors had become and how much more daring they were now that we had entered our teens. Spitting their insults laced with cuss words into my face. Throwing me onto the ground and threatening to pummel me until I became a mere stain on the soccer field. Ridiculing me in front of the girl I loved.

I am a person of the maths and sciences. I devote my life to logic and reason. But I loved her, despite the fact that there wasn’t any logic or reason to it.

Elora Evans. I still get cold shivers running up my spine when I hear her name, which I repeat to myself occasionally.

From a distance, you could not really see anything that distinguishes her from the other girls in my grade. In fact, she was on the uglier side of the class. But once you spoke to her, she came to life. She was the only intellectual in the school besides me, and there was this quality she had when she was immersed in conversation. I still cannot place my finger on it. But her eyes would come alive, her lips would curve into a smile. And her laugh was beautiful. It still is.

I was … obsessed with her, you can say. It was like I finally found someone who had a mind like mine. But Elora was more than that. Unbeknownst to her, she was brilliant in her own right, in her own way. A genius apart from my own.

I never knew that she loved me too, and I never wanted her to love me. I didn’t want to be that boulder connected to her by a rope around her neck, sinking her to rock bottom with me. I was too frightened for myself, too. Her brother was my arch nemesis, my biggest bully. Despite that, I didn’t control myself in the halls one day. I kissed her.

But our relationship didn’t escalate after that. My hypothesis was that kissing her would give her the courage to “make a move”, as they call it, but…well, nothing happened. It was a failed experiment and I took the inaction as rejection. So I rejected her myself. Well, I tried to. I had no idea of Elora’s family issues then. I was too caught up in my own.

Mom was becoming more and more unstable. She would complain of pains in her abdomen and fierce headaches that stopped going away. Of course, who couldn’t blame her for drinking the nights away instead of taking care of her children? Who couldn’t blame Father for walking out that door with his things, to go after his mistress? It’s like they had no regard for Hanna and I, their own children. It’s like they only looked us as things that took up space in our little basement.