"Possesions" Featured 2/8-15/2k1 goto: Feature Gallery   Also see: "Love as Infestation" Featured 1/7-11/2k1 goto: Feature Gallery   The Flotsam Collection: "The Elite Thirteen" "Love as Infestation" "Possesions" Jabberwocky

The Elite Thirteen       by Andrew Kozma       for BTS            Bryan’s red right eye showed at night, had ever since his thirteenth birthday, and it was hidden like it came, in the embarrassing, secret shadow of puberty. At night, the lights off, he could see a tiny red dot on the wall, on the window, sliding up his blanket, sitting on his hand, wherever he looked. He made it a habit to shut his eyes and keep them closed as soon as his bedroom lights were off. It became an instinct.       A nightlight plugged into the wall next to the window protected him, bled enough light into the room to drown the red dot. Bryan smuggled his childhood light from the attic back into his room, sneaking up when both his parents were out, tracked it down like a Christmas present. Each morning he woke up at dawn, unplugged the light, and hid it under his pillow. He knew his parents wouldn’t approve. He thought he had fooled them.       One year later, after he was in bed, he heard his mom yelling, “I don’t care, I am not going to let my son grow up like this! A nightlight is for kids, babies, for Christ’s sake, and I’m getting rid of it! Tonight!”       Bryan heard his father’s voice soft in response and his mother overruling with noise, her loud steps up the stairs, could even hear his dad’s nervous shuffling underneath. With a gentleness that made him jump, his mother opened the door, slipped across the room, and smoothly ripped out the light.       Through the door, after she closed it, through the hall and down the stairs, after he counted her steps receding, through the living room, from the kitchen, Bryan heard a quick, solid crunch.       Two years later he was a sophomore in high school, had managed to adjust to his eye, the red light it emitted. He had adjusted, but he was still afraid someone else would see, that someone else would know, and it must be a secret, must be kept a secret, or why else had he not heard of anyone else’s light?       Bryan had few friends, was in the outcast clique, whose members all knew each other but rarely became friends. They saw each other through everybody else’s eyes. Only this year, in several classes, Bryan had been forced to interact with a few of the other outcasts. Once for a science project with Lindy, once for a take home geography test with Rick, and for a whole semester he was assigned to be the Snot-boy’s lab partner.       “This is the beginning,” Bryan noted four months later, in the opening volleys of December, “The beginning of an arranged meeting. It was the four of us that met one lunch a week into school, joined each other at one dingy table, one leg shorter than the rest, in the corner of the cafeteria. We didn’t want to sit together. It was in our faces, thieves converging on a leprous millionaire, but we had no choice. Every other seat was taken.”       But it all began with the seating arrangement of Bryan’s Biology class, orchestrated by the teacher, which brought him next to Snot-boy on the first day of class. He didn’t realize what had happened until a piercing snort lodged itself in his left ear and he finally knew who Snot-boy was, and the reason for his nickname.       The boy to Bryan’s left murmured something.       “What?”       “Excuse me,” Snot-boy repeated, still nearly inaudible. He’s normal looking, was the first thing Bryan thought. It was a shock. He stared. Snot-boy stared back. Then they stared at the teacher, paid attention like good students, and managed not to see each other again for the rest of the day, an arrangement aided by Biology being the next to last period.       Bryan didn’t see anymore of Snot-boy, but couldn’t stop thinking about him. He wondered, for example, how he missed Snot-boy’s real name when attendance was called. And how he’d seen the boy countless times before, in the hall, leaving school, at school plays, but never had a class with him, though they were in the same grade and at the same level in most subjects. He worried that when he talked to him, as he’d inevitably have to, he’d slip up and call him Snot-boy, and any chance for a pleasant, or at least trouble free, semester will be gone. Bryan wondered what Snot-boy was thinking about him.       It was at the lunch table, that first impromptu time, that Bryan first learned Snot-boy’s name. Adam D’Arpeggio, last name pronounced with hard Gs. He memorized it, stuck it prominently in his mind, repeated it to himself throughout the meal, but the first thought that came to mind when he looked at the kid was Snot-boy. So incongruous to the way Snot-boy looked: athletic, clear-skin, good haircut, not at all unattractive. But the name was there and it wasn’t leaving, not with the awful sniffing that you could hear over any other noise, loud and clear even if he was at one end of the school and you at the other.       Lindy, Rick, Bryan, and Sno... Adam. They discovered, after a few morose questions, after minutes of awkward silence, that they all lived in the same neighborhood. D-Day. It was a military housing complex with the real name of Normandy Manor, but all the kids called it D-Day. It was for enlisted only, and if you lived there you already had one strike against you.       Strike 1: Living in D-Day.       Strike 2: Being an outcast.       Strike 3: Hanging out with other outcasts.       By the third week they were friends, of sorts, and sat at the same table together every day, even with other seats available. It was a strange camaraderie, born of frustration at having people routinely push you in the halls and ignoring your comments, your questions, your hellos. They didn’t talk much, at first, just slap-happy to be sitting at a table with others and being able to eat without being picked on or having food thrown at them.       “So what’s your deal?” Lindy asked Snot-boy.       “Allergies,” he mumbled.       “Tissue?”       “Don’t help.”       Then they both went back to eating.       Bryan started taking notes.       Lindy DeSoto: 5’11”; walks gangly, awkward, as though trying to walk in a specific but unnatural manner; clothing is generally shapeless, not baggy, but not form-fitting either; speaks hoarsely and carefully, each word considered; walks home everyday no matter what the weather; assumed to walk to school as well, but has never been seen in the act; goes to all the dances but never with a date; assumed to be female, though this has yet to be determined.       “You like video games?” Bryan asked Lindy one day as she was beating him at Street Fighter 3.       “Sure, doesn’t everyone?”       During the fourth week they met outside of school. In the woods, of course, at night, without flashlights or light of any kind. Rick was the only one who wanted to start a fire and, besides the fact that the others wouldn’t let him, he had no matches. Expected one of the others to bring some. He was still convinced that one or more of them should smoke.       “Isn’t that what outcasts do?”       “Shut up.”       “James Dean, you know?”       “Shut up, Rick,” Bryan said, this time with more emphasis. He felt like an officer in the army, a drill sergeant maybe. Either that or a substitute teacher.       “So what are we here for?” Snot-boy sniffed.       “Just to talk. Got anything better to do?” Bryan said.       “Why you wearing sunglasses, Bryan?” Lindy asked.       Bryan stared at Lindy. The effect was somewhat lessened by the sunglasses, more so by the fact that it was too dark to see. They’d moved out of the moonlight.       “Well?”       They stood in silence for minutes, the careful rustling they made when shifting their weight being the dominant sound.       “I don’t know.”       What could he say? He had a feeling, unfounded, baseless, that it was now, that this is the time to start? Bryan didn’t even know what was starting. It was like a switch was flicked in his brain, and he was off and running.       “Why did you come?” he asked them.       “I don’t know.”       “I don’t know.”       “I don’t care what you guys say, I’m going to buy some cigarettes.”       And that was the end of that.             to be continued... 8/2k1