The Noise

Chapter 25: The Noise

 

 

 

 

His eyes shot open. Nothing going on in his room. Daylight outside, a new school day, nothing new to see through the halls of Woodend. Piecing together the groups standing around for no reason, the irony being he wasn’t planning on speaking to anyone in the immediate frame. He went to the library with little time to spare. Trevor wanted to get a book. He’d no idea what, just something that piqued his interest. No distinct organization by genre here. That was one of the problems with the school library. Unless you already knew what you wanted, it was hard to find something in a reasonable amount of time. He leapt to a deep part of the fiction section. Kneeling down, scanning the shelf that had fat books on the mid-row. Thick ones weren’t always good. He needed something like what he’d read previously. Teenage or young adult life, science fiction, worldly adventures, or semi-thrilling romance. He was finding only long adventure novels. It was undeniably frustrating. He took a few steps back, looking down. Just above the end of the bottom row. Sandwiches between two medium sized novels was a book titled Finding Farraway. Sounded simple enough. He picked it up, read the cover summary and decided upon it. Seemed like his type of deal. Guy meets girl. Girl is intriguing. They don’t end up together but some kind of interesting deal about human relations is learned. He went to check it out, nobody around. It was early morning. The person assigned may not have made it yet. He loosened up slightly and went around the counter. Trevor was a library assistant the previous year, so he knew how to do this. Checking it out expeditiously and racing to the halls and on to first class.  The day was a bore. He read his book all day and loved it to the extent he read up until last period. It kind of reminded him of the story he wrote the day before, only much less dreary. Novel in its own right. Not so grisly as he’d envisioned things, as he already knew reality could be and in many sorts harsh. But, that was not the skin he lived in and he assumed most he ever knew did not. As his mind began to wander he stopped reading and set down the book where it was.  Fixating on the teacher for a few who was grading and passing out papers, they started doing a worksheet that Trevor just collected and laid on the desk. He decided to do it quickly before the end of class. Today was no laughing matter. Tomorrow was finals and he was in all feasibility prepared, choosing not to worry (not like he’d planned on doing that anyway). Roping in some food during lunch. Eating alone, he dug in fastidiously. No time for unwelcome sitting around when he could be working toward acing finals. Then, like he had forced the opposite to come to be. The same girl from the shop at the festival came up and asked him a question. She said., “Hey, do you have the review packet for next period?” he said he did, and then didn’t utter anything else. He simply reached in the binder inside his backpack and pulled them out. Giving them to her. It was certainly the only copy he had, but, he didn’t care. He liked her smile, but something about her made her unchallengeable. Like she had the greatest bucket list in history all lined up and ready and no one else mattered. So he gave them to her and thought about how she was a much higher level student than he and she needed them. He probably wasn’t planning on paying attention in class anyway, or maybe, he would. He would listen intently and try to absorb everything said and gone over. She smiled at him as he pulled away from this thought and gave her some kind of look. He wasn’t really sure. There she still had a reservedness about her, though it wasn’t shyly. He couldn’t help thinking it was something else. Trevor finished up his lunch and got up. He went ahead to class and sat down. Started reading his book and resting his legs, she or anyone was not in here. It was calm, yet unnerving how empty the space was. Class began in fifteen. He guessed there wasn’t a single soul in here before his. “Obviously.” He told himself. Ten more minutes of reading. He slowly closed the book as students began piling in. The teacher entered, and posted up at her desk. No words or assignments. She kept standing there looking through things at her podium. Otherwise, other students looked at each other in misunderstanding. Trevor spotted she who he’d seen in lunch and she was entrained on the packet. He didn’t care. It’s not that he was flustered. Just he wasn’t sure how to go about getting all this information stored without questions or paper. But, he believed he could. So as time rolled on the class awaited the teacher to do something. But, she wasn’t.  In fact, she wasn’t moving or breathing. Stopped there. Not ruffling pages, or calling out answers. He guessed it was he who’d stopped time. “I mean who else would it be?” He guessed without realizing, he looked again at the girl who still looked in motion. Not an easy task in that he had to shift his eyes with a strain that he could feel in the back of his eyeballs. He looked again at the girl who still looked in motion. Scanning the pages of the review in earnest. Not looking up for a moment. Eerie. Trevor couldn’t help but be startled. She didn’t stir, other than that doing her studying, or so to speak.

This time there was no blurred visualizations in his time-freeze freeze-frame. Too late to care, he hadn’t tried to do this and there was no treasuring this time. No reason for it to be. The ill-feeling that it gave him was unbearable. It may or may not have been draining his energy. So he took all his determination and uncouth and pushed it out. Like a bird spitting food into its nest for the babies without any regard for itself. He could sharpen this image and fill his surroundings with it. Something to be remember for future reference. Now there was only knowing how to turn it on. Rubbing his pencil on his head in something like relief or ambiguity. The teacher finally stirred. She started going over the packet, the girl was re-following along like nothing had happened. Trevor was apathetic to the entire incident. He wrote down the questions he knew he would have problems with for the test a few days from now. During finals, it was one test per day, so he decided to be prepped thoroughly. Though he was halfway ecstatic, he was about to be done. Going on through graduation and on to real life in modern society. No brakes, no daily gathering. Just pure non-peer oriented living. Trevor almost forgot about his phenomenal exploits he would have to maintain. As he started thinking about this, he grew dreadful. It was dreadful, and so did he feel. Nothing comforting about having to kill things to save his own skin. But, either way, it wasn’t something that could be avoided, or at least not evaded forever. He didn’t need to be going to destroy before he was ready to fight conflict he couldn’t win. “Right? Right.” He confirmed to himself.