THE SHOW

Evan knew, like everyone knew, he wasn’t normal.

“If you could look inside his skull it’d be like two hundred day-glow ping pong balls bouncin’ around in a microwave,” his dad would say laughing.

“He’s like a rat on crack”. That’s what one of his teachers told the principal during one of his many visits to that guy’s office.

The problem, they said, was his lack of focus. That’s what everyone thought. Only Evan knew that focus was not a problem, rather prioritizing all the various things on which he could focus simultaneously.

Like, at any given moment he might be, in no particular hierarchy, eating a pop tart, watching a gaming walk-through on his Iphone, listening to two of his buddies’ voices in his headset (the ones with the “b” of course) tell him about their latest level-ups, and watching, for the umpteenth time, Spongebob and Patrick chase jellyfish on the flat-screen.

But then, what is normal...really? And who gets to decide? Do only “normal” people get a vote? And who voted for them? Seems like the pool would diminish over time with that criteria doesn’t it? There was a time when hanging someone from a tree in the woods at night was normal. And who were those grinning faces in the torchglow? Normal people? Did they get a vote? Seriously? Normal?

Evan lived in small Tennessee town by a lake. Everyone pretty much knew everyone and everyone pretty much had issues with everyone....that small. The mayor wouldn’t have been the mayor if he could have had health insurance any other way. The main source of community pride was that there was no wheel tax, city nor county. All the politics were handled by old men whose family names took up two columns in the local phone book and who still thought polyester was modern and cool. The high school hadn’t won any version of an athletic championship since the single-bar facemask days. But high school wasn’t Evan’s problem. Middle school, on the other hand, was killing him.

To begin with, there was the facility itself. Constructed some time in the middle of the last century, it was a patchwork of patch jobs and short-sighted short term solutions which turned into long term problems. It had been created in the heady social engineering era of the sixties. It had no permanent internal walls and a floor plan that only a minotaur could love. Temporary dividers were implemented in the eighties as a stop-gap fix and endured to the present arranged and rearranged according to the ebb and flow of the bitter battle between departments.

Then there was the smell. It was somewhere between the aroma of grandpa’s jockstrap (which could very likely still lie amouldering in one of the rusted-shut PE lockers), and cabbage boiled with mothballs. Dylan Roberts, one of Evan’s buddies, had been sent home for wearing a WWII surplus gas mask to school on one particularly dank November morning. The fact that the school’s designers, in an attempt at forced focus, had opted to build sans windows did little to help. Evan and his buddies called the place “the gulag”. Evan was the only one of them that didn’t think that name came from a video game. It was just one of those places that made anything that bothered you bother you more.

And lately it seemed like things were having to get in line to bother Evan. Fourteen’s hard. The kid that he wasn’t any longer was still in there wanting to be kid silly and still having embarrassingly kiddish reactions and uncontrollable childish emotions and just mostly refusing to fade away.

But this new guy, the one he was becoming, had no use for the kid. He, this new guy, wanted different stuff, and the hard part was that some of the things the new guy wanted were weird and hard to understand. Like time just to think, clothes just so, and wanting to know why about the strangest things....and girls! Where the heck did that come from? Girls? For real?

And, of course, there were all the garden variety of social issues that were inherent in his fourteenness. Since Evan was, at best, mildly ADHD and reading-obsessed, he was blissfully ignorant to all but the most pressing issues. Take bullies, for instance.

There was a zero tolerance policy regarding bullying at the middle school. Problem was, there was also a zero awareness policy which pretty much nullified its effect. A wink and a nod were the most common sentences handed out to the offenders. This left Evan on his own to navigate the “get your butt whipped” landscape. Being the third tallest (excluding girls) in school helped and his comedic talents often diffused tension, but, bullies being bullies, they persevered. It was during one of these encounteres when Evan first found out that there were things hidden in him which were......surprising.

He had just been bounced around and ridiculed in a school restroom by three “camo-bots” (Evan’s nickname for the compound bow crowd). As they exited laughing and shoulder punching each other, Evan found himself clutching the sides of the lavatory, staring into the mirror. The eyes looking back at him were unfamiliar. Normally a pale hazel, these eyes were a color largely unknown. Maybe a welder trying to cut a particularly exotic metal would recognize it.....molten jade! Evan had to look away.

But this, like all the real-life happenings in Evan’s day-to-day world, was just so much white noise to him as he navigated his other existence, books. Books were his portals, games were his wormholes and his imagination was the pied piper leading the way.

And not just a world....a cosmos populated with fantastic creatures, crackling with adventure and challenge, moved by strange and wonderful forces beyond measure and magic! Yes! Magic! A place where death was a minor setback. Spawn, spawn and re-spawn ad infinitum. Why should he bother himself with the unimportant things going on about him which were random and chaotic and over which he held no sway? Better by far to move in a realm where everything was eventually revealed to him and where he was dominant over all. That’s the thing about vicarious experience, the outcome can be amended to please. And...in the case of books, can play out with soothsayer foresight and intel unavailable to a mere protagonist.

This was Evan’s context. But, exponentiality was just around the cosmic corner.