“People try to forget him. They erase records. Choke and twist whatever truths are left. They want to make sure he isn’t remembered. They consider it the greatest shame they ever suffered. The only definite proof of his existence is the treaty. It has stood unchanged for 300 years.”
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“Hey Cary, move!” Cary turned just as he heard his nam- “Move, you’re in the way” and with that, presumptuously pushed aside into the locker beside him by school jock, Griffin Adams, enough to know what the shover thought of him, he didn’t bully him per se, just thought of him like the wind, something to be pushed through whenever it blew your way.
“Yeah, I’ll move no problem...” Cary mumbled to himself, all 1.61 meters of him. At just 44 kilograms, he was the lightest person in his class, girls included. He fit the stereotype; a short, pale nerd. who made up in intelligence for what he lacked in height. He easily made top grades despite spending much of his time in the dark playing video games. Of course, he always played the most muscular warrior he could be in whatever fantasy RPG he was decimating. He excelled at any game he picked up, not just RPGs. A testament to his quick thinking and natural dexterity.
He supposed the determination came from the fact that if he was going to be good at one thing, he better be great at it. He’d naturally tried going pro once, in some MOBA game he picked up, but left as soon as he felt he was going to be picked on.
“Hey Cary, you alright?” He heard a voice behind him, his slightly taller but way heavier partner-in-crime, Caleb.
“Yeah, I’m fine, he didn’t really intend to push me.” Cary naturally lied.
Caleb caught his lie easily, but like a friend that was supporting your addiction, didn’t call him out on it.
“Hurry up or we'll be late for maths class, also I can show you the new game I found yesterday. We’ll be rolling over that baby all weekend!” Caleb grinned. He loved indie games with small communities. It made him feel good when he defeated the casual players.
Cary grinned back. Neither of them acknowledged they were large fishes in a small pond.
Sifting through the rest of the students, it took them almost 10 minutes to reach class.
They, as usual, sat in the back, barely even seeing whatever the professor wrote on the board. They got there just before class started, but the professor was nowhere in sight.
Since neither of them were planning to listen to whatever the professor had to say, because they were way ahead of the rest of the class. Engrossed in a quiet discussion of game strategies, they didn’t notice nearly 10 minutes passing after the bell rung, before the professor walked in.
That was highly unusual.
The university they went to was a prestigious private university. And admitted only geniuses or the very wealthy. The school itself demanded the same genius and professionalism from both professors and students. A professor 10 minutes late to class? very strange.
Mr. Robertson, their old mathematics tea, didn’t seem bothered by his late arrival, but had a steady and relaxed gait as he walked to the podium.
He stood behind it and started speaking to settle down the class that had grown quite rowdy in his absence.
“Apologies for my late arrival, but something relating to this mathematics class has come up. I thought it best to have a speech prepared for this announcement.” He paused and let the now quiet class swallow his words. Then he continued:
“As of today, I will, unfortunately, no longer be your mathematics professor. I am retiring. Because of this, you will, starting today, have a new professor.” He gestured towards the still open door.
A brown-haired woman, in her late twenties at most, walked in, and unlike Mr. Robertson, her gait, Cary noticed, wasn’t as relaxed. She walked steadily, but you could notice her mild insecurity if you looked hard enough.
Cary mused that as she had that many eyes on her, at least a few noticed it.
“This is Mrs. Robertson, and you will address her as such, unless she specifies otherwise. Starting today, she will be your new mathematics professor. Now, normally a new professor would have to spend several classes on figuring out where her students were skill-wise. I've solved that problem, as I’ve showed her the recordings of my classes since the start of the school year.”
He paused and had a drink of water. “She will simply start teaching where we left off last time. I will supervise her this class, and if deemed competent she will, from tomorrow onwards be your new permanent mathematics professor. And yes, I can see the question literally floating in front of me. She is, indeed, my daughter. And Mrs. Robertson, if you have anything to say you may have the podium if you’d like.” He mentioned that bombshell and moved on without pause.
You’re supervising your own daughter as your replacement? Really? That was weird. He couldn’t realistically be unbiased in his judgement.
That would also mean 100% they couldn’t test her this class as they would with other new professors to appraise their composure and wit, so the professor earned their student’s respect. A father’s fury is scary no matter where you go, so it was impossible to actually learn anything about their new professor.
Cary wasn’t really interested. He was at the very front of his class in his studies and didn’t have to anything besides some homework and test; but a new professor meant being forced to pay attention at least as a curtesy for her first few classes.
He watched her walk to the podium and start some 5 minutes speech she’d prepared, and by the time she started teaching, he was bored out of his mind.
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Wanting to be literally anywhere else, he was so torn between listening to the professor and having his head in the clouds; he jumped when he heard the bell ring.
“Let’s go, biology is next, and if I remember correctly, it’s our favourite subject zoology!” Cary quipped to Caleb and smiled when he heard Caleb groan. Zoology seemed to be the most boring useless subject in modern society. What use was there to study animals? They were being left behind; they lost the race to dominance. Better spend the energy to push humanity further ahead.
The walk to the biology classroom was even slower than before. They spent nearly the entire recess having to walk through the crowd to make it to the classroom.
This wasn’t normal, but some idiot spilled a dangerous chemical into the vents, so half of the school was closed for repairs, whilst the other half was filled to the brim with double the normal number of students.
As expected, Cary was bored. There wasn’t a spark in him that thought zoology was fun. Physiology? Sure. Genetics? Fantastic. Zoology? Go fish.
And unlike mathematics, everyone was seated together with their assigned group, so Cary couldn’t even whisper to Caleb, and was forced to simply sit in silence; bored to death.
The group project was terrible as well. No one took responsibility, and Cary sure as hell wouldn’t. He hated being a leader, the responsibility certainly wasn’t worth the reward.
Because of this, the group simply handled everything the bureaucratic way, and talked endlessly among themselves about distributing the tasks so they could be done efficiently, which they did inefficiently.
Still, solo assignments carried more weight, and group assignments could only ever pull you up, not down, so Cary had no interest in taking charge.
This carried on for quite a while, distributing 15 tasks between the 5 of them took an hour and a half, cause some tasks were worse than others they bickered constantly, doing compromises, bribes and low-key blackmail to get the easier tasks.
Cary, having said nothing, got all the worst ones, which was fine by him. He’d breeze through them, anyway.
The third class for the day was his worst nightmare manifested into reality.
PE class.
Cary deliberately walked slowly over to the training fields, hoping to delay the nightmare that was to come. Gone was the careless foremost student. Standing in his place was the typical insecure nerd.
Cary hated PE class with a passion. And unlike a certain someone in the family, wasn’t particularly gifted in the physical department. If his external appearance wasn’t clue enough, he had asthma and the sickle cell trait, the combination of which made him almost pass out from a quick run if he didn’t drink plenty of water beforehand and was careful to maintain an ideal body temperature. It was bad enough that he couldn’t exercise worth a damn without having to take dubious amounts of anti-inflammatory medicine, but he had to do it, while looking weak and fragile in front of the entire class. He hated it.
Walking towards the locker room was like presenting yourself for humiliation. He couldn’t avoid it, as absence was heavily frowned upon, and he’d already skipped as many PE classes as he could.
Opening the door, the stench of sweat and manliness, 2 things he very much disliked, immediately assaulted him.
It was rowdy, as you’d expect, everyone was getting pumped to be ready for whatever physically demanding game the coach had in store for them, and in the same lane, the people that weren’t already pumped were feeding of off the atmosphere to psych themselves up.
Everyone except for Cary. Cary could logically understand the need for exercise. Hells he even liked some aspects of it, but why in the world did it have to be done whilst acting like cavemen, competing for dominance? Humanity had come remarkably far in some areas, not so far in others, such as PE classes.
The humiliation started when people started glancing at him whilst he was changing. They sent brief glances his way when they thought he couldn’t notice, but there were so many of them that he would inevitably see some.
It was always terrible. People wanted to look at the short skeleton and wonder what he was doing here. To be fair, the skeleton didn’t know either; forced to be there.
Whilst he wasn’t the only anomaly, he was the one that stood out the most. Here was the moderately famous genius getting humiliated at PE.
Cary tried to change into his gym clothes as quickly as possible without it looking obvious that he was hurrying. Since he arrived late, he’d just finished changing when the coach walked in and talked about what they were going to do in this class.
Again, an unusual class, because the coach decided we were to go hiking in the sultry breeze early in fall. For the athletic jocks, this class was going to be a waltz. It was more of a long walk to them than a hike.
For Cary, it was the worst possible choice after endurance running; genetically predisposed to not be good at endurance activities. For normal people, it was training. For him, it was going to resemble something like torture.
His lungs were going to be burning, his feet like they were filled with lead, and he was going to be wheezing throughout the entire thing
Exactly as he predicted, only 30 minutes into the hike, he was way behind the rest of the group, with only the coach behind him, who was making some motivational speech to Cary about mind over matter and whatnot, completely oblivious to Cary’s pain, whose pace was slowing more and more till he could reasonably maintain it, which with this terrain was almost twice as slow as a normal person walking.
Although Cary hated the coach to his guts, he had to give him some respect for staying with him throughout the entire 4 hours it took to get to the top of the mountain at which point the coach called a taxi for the 2 of them, as school had finished a while ago, and he’d again, passed the entire class on their way down, who’d reached the top after 45 minutes, if Cary estimated correctly.
Cary finally caught his breath whilst waiting for the taxi to arrive. Any goodwill that was raised by calling a taxi voided because he forced Cary to walk up here.
Perhaps the taxi driver noticed the atmosphere, or perhaps he was simply the quiet type, but he didn’t say a word through the entire trip, neither did the coach, which was very nice, as it allowed Cary to simply be in a bad mood by himself.
“It’s only once a week, it’s only once a week, it’s only once a week, it’s onl-.“ Cary repeated to himself internally throughout the entire drive back to school.
He practically burst through the car door when he arrived at the front entrance, only to be stopped by the coach, who said pitifully, “You did good today son, be proud of yourself.” And without waiting for Cary’s reaction, walked out of sight.
“Be proud of myself, huh?” Cary muttered to himself, through gritted teeth, ‘be proud? Proud of what, exactly?’ He was dead last, it took him several hours to finish what the class did in less than 1, he wasn’t getting in any better shape than he was at the start of the year, he wasn’t ever going to get in better shape as long as he was this useless piece of crippled meat.
His musings were interrupted because he’d forgotten to lock his locker, and that his phone was stolen. Probably taken by the underpaid janitor, who’d never admit to it.
‘Great, just great.’
‘Walking it is then…’
Changing out of his gym clothes and into his regular clothes, luckily none of them were taken, changing at his own pace and without incident, which seemed to be something rare today.
‘It’s only 8 kilometres...’ Cary told himself, as he was too shy to ask anyone to borrow a phone at this hour, and all his friends had gone home a while ago.
‘At least the weather's nice.’ He told himself, trying to cheer himself up.
And it worked. The warm fall breeze was a calming wave after what had happened to him at PE, or it was, until it started raining.
Large drops of rain, making Cary soaking when within only a few minutes. The warm fall breeze disappeared, replaced by an icy wind, making him shiver from the cold, and his teeth clattering so much he might as well have been naked, his head was feeling faint, and he thought he might just collapse.
That’s when the damn broke. Tears streamed down from his face, invisible, and his sobs blending with the heavy torrent of rain.