Margaret
Bopplebottom was named after her grandmother. It was not a name she
particularly liked and had considered changing it when she came of
age. Sometimes people called her MARGE. She hated that name. MARGE.
To her it sounded like a noise you made as you wretched up your
supper, vomit in the toilet, swirling swirling as it was flushed
through the pipes. That was MARGE to her. Puke in a washroom. MARGE.
As it was now,
Margaret sat in her 5th period class. Absolutely
positutely PUKE free.
It was her final
year at Miss Lady's High School for Young Women… more like Miss
Lady's Penitentiary for Young Women.
She propped her
head up on her hands as Ms. Tongestone talked about the Emperor
Penguin breeding cycle in Antarctica. Apparently, the chicks (which
seemed a very strange word to associate with penguins) hatch in July
after a rather odd courting dance between male and female…
Other girls yawned
all around her. Margaret's legs dangled under the hard-backed chair.
She wanted to draw or write but mostly wanted to flee into the
wilderness. That's where she felt most at peace-- in the trees, by
the gargling whatevers and spirits and the unknown planet.
Ms. Tongestone
continued, voice clipping along like syrup seeping from a Canadian
maple tree. The chicks are itty bitty little birdies, only between
150 and 200 grams. And mommy and daddy have to risk their necks for
that itty bitty little birdy birdy or their lineage will die, bones
bare on the Antarctic coastline, porcelain white for eons and eons.
There are only a few ways to become immortal, her literature teacher,
Ms. Smithy, had said: build something, get loved by a lot of people
so they won't forget your sorry butt, or have kids. Mister and Missus
Emperor Penguin can only do one of those things, they can only breed
in April (what the Australians call Autumn) and hope that some of
themselves stick around into the endless future, of pain and hurt and
what is the point? Margaret Bopplebottom's 17 year-old mind was
wandering.
She was a pretty
girl. “Pretty average” she heard Betsy Miller whispering in her
head. She had dusty blonde hair, a nice frame, a cute voice, and the
boys liked her. She didn't like them back, at least not until she
graduated college, and then she could like some cute, perfect boy.
Ms. Tongestone drawled on… blah blah into eternity. The classroom was rather
stuffy, like a being inside a small car, and the sunlight shone
through the windows which lined the northward facing part of the
room. It came in green, vivid light as a tree blocked most of the
view. It danced against her face. What she wouldn't do to be out
there instead of in here, fishing, hiking, just running around the
thick Oregonian vegetation. She was only child, raised by her father.
She never had met her mother in her life, and the only family she had
met beside her pops was her aunt and her naughty nephew, Dora and
Pippen, respectively. She pictured her curtsying downward to the
earth, curtsying forever and forever. Hello, Pippen, she had said,
nice to meet you, extending her hand forward. “Who are you?” he
said, “I never saw you before.” Pippen looked around in the
memory. “This place is alien.”
“Margaret!” She
heard the name pierce the drowsy air.
“Margaret!”
Margaret twitched
her right eye, shook her head and stared into the face of Ms.
Tongestone. “There is someone here to see you, dear.” Ms
Tongestone's face, which was almost always the picture of chiseled
stone, looked concerned. Two police officers were near the green
chalkboard, looking nowhere in particular. One was a fat white man,
the other a fat black man. “They want to speak with you about
something.” Margaret nodded, emerging from her dreamscape
imaginings like a mystic.
She stood, still in
a daze, putting her notes and pen into her trapper keeper, and then
held the binder close to her chest. The policemen now turned to her.
Something was wrong
here.
She looked behind
her, at the other students. They could tell so too. She heard Betsy
Miller again, “She was taken right out of class. Probably her dad
again. Probably blew up that lab of his. Freaks, the whole lot of
them.” Margaret could feel the sweat building on her forehead, and
her stomach dropping. What was going on?
The police escorted
her outside the classroom.
The halls were
lined with lockers, and a younger girl saw them, bathroom pass
dangling in her hand, and quickened her pace. “What- what's going
on?” She asked, this time thrusting the words into the physical
world. It felt weird hearing her thoughts aloud.
One of them began,
“Your father-”
“What happened to
my father?” she said, quiver in her voice.
The two men looked
at each other and smiled. “Were you dozing off in there, Gar?”
“Wha-?” Only
her dad called her Gar. It was nickname they came up with one time
when she was real young, fishing in the smooth waters of the Columbia
river. Gar, like the fish. They continued unopposed down the halls,
heals clicking on the tan tile, the blue uniforms foreign in this
space. “I did it,” one of the men said. No, the words seemed to
be coming from both their mouths. “I figured it out, Gar. I know
what they are doing now. I know the danger we are in. We have to
run.”
“But father,”
she said, because it was clear now that's what these men were, some
sort of apparition, daemon, her father had created in his makeshift
lab. She sighed. Betsy Miller. Her father was embarrassing her. How
was she supposed to get into college this way? “I can't do this
right now--”
“No,” the
voices said, “you can't go back. It's now or never!”
“Dad, I love you,
but I can't do this right now.”
One of the fat men
grabbed her arm. She turned toward him with a smile that wasn't a
smile, not a real one anyway, one to placate. But the facade was
fading for both her and the men-- the police officer's face was
turning a ghoulish gray. There were pimples, no warts forming on the
skin, growing from his pores, and his nose was transforming into the
shape of a lush pear. “Father,” she pulled her limb away. “Not
now!” She fled down the hallway. Her father had been claiming the
end of the world was around the corner her whole life. She couldn't
return to class. That would look too strange, Betsy's rumors…
“Wait!” Wait!”
behind her, but they did not follow. She knew the spell her father
had used to craft those beings, and she knew its limitations. She
slowed as she neared the entrance, holding her trapper keeper near
her chest, and walked out the school's glass doors, avoiding the
secretary's watchful eye. The cool air filled her lungs, but from the
tree, something stared at her, hungrily, lustfully, wagging its
inhuman, wolf-like tail. Soooo it begiiiins.
To be continued...
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