Chapter Four: Wandering

Forbidden. Evan is slowly succumbing to Hale and he is mad at himself for doing so and leaving San Francisco behind in the process. However, his new friends are making it all the more difficult.

FORBIDDEN

 

BY: J O S H U A  D O N A H U E

Chapter Four

Wandering

 

I remained stationary. I had homework from several of my classes that I needed to complete, but I didn’t. The bedroom door was shut, the blinds were blocking out all sunlight, and I was relaxing on my bed while staring up at the dark ceiling. I was going to be lazy for the moment. After all, I had been through a lot the entire weekend and my first day at a new high school, which is why my mom had offered to make me my favorite dinner tonight: Italian pasta. (My stomach was very pleased by the sound of it because I was starving). She was downstairs working on the dinner, and yet, here I was: doing absolutely nothing.

I’m crazy, I thought to myself. Not only did my mind keep floating back to when that girl walked into history class, but I kept thinking of every aspect about her. The way she glided over the floor as if floating. The way she remained perfectly motionless, and yet, moved so delicately. Her green-hypnotic eyes kept flashing back into my head, allowing me to see her even longer. She seemed familiar though. It was something in her actions and her appearance that was oddly similar to someone else, but I couldn’t exactly pinpoint it.

I shook my head in hopes of releasing my brain from her chains. Whatever. I need to do this homework, I told myself.

In hopes of releasing my thoughts, I rolled to the edge of my bed and snatched up my book bag, dumping its contents beside me so that I could begin.

I began flipping the pages of my history book, browsing for the right page number that I had scribbled down for my assignment. But I stopped on a particular page that had a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge with a glorious sun behind it in a blue sky.

I groaned.

Damn!

I threw the history book across my room, colliding it against the wall, and I fell backwards onto my bed.

How could I let myself get so wrapped in Hale? I asked my stupid self. I felt like I had betrayed San Francisco and my friends back home. Here I was, beginning to enjoy my new friends and family and my new life, while San Francisco remained on the other side of the nation missing me. I felt horrible inside.

Smashing in on my guilt, my mom called me down for supper. I got up and made my way downstairs, not really feeling up to Italian pasta anymore.

At first, there was mere silence looming in the air. Both my mother and I sat at the dinner table, with her on one end and me at the other. Our forks clanked against the glass plates of food, with mine not even bothering to stab the food onto the end, but merely slapping it around a bit. I knew it was only a matter of time before she finally�"

It started.

“So, how was your day?” she asked me.

I had a feeling in my gut that this terrible moment would come�"that I would be bombarded down with loads of questions about my day. Of course, I wanted to spill out everything! All of the friends I made. All the people I talked to. My classes. The school. But she was my mother. How the hell could I ever tell her those things? Again, I was disgusted with myself for even thinking those things and enjoying them. I gave myself a mental slap.

Being the reasonable teenager that I was, I simply said, “Fine.”

“Did you make any friends?”Another question of purgatory.

“Yeah.” I wanted to keep the answers short and mysterious because these were things that I would have to deal with alone as a sixteen-year-old. No adult intervention anymore.

“Mm…I see.” She pursed her lips, which she seemed to do quite often lately. “How were your classes, then?”

“Fine.”

Finally, it seemed that she had gotten the picture because she backed off for a few minutes with a distraught expression on her face; although, she hid her feelings quickly�"as always. I didn’t want to hurt her emotionally, because she was…well, my mother. But that was also the reason why I had to hurt her feelings. This was something that I needed to face by myself. Meaning if I made a mistake or if things were a bit too tough on me, then so be it. But this was how we learned, wasn’t it?

So, to help her shrug away the feelings, I tried to turn the tables by saying, “So, how was the interview?”

Immediately, I realized I had succeeded: her face lit up like a light bulb on Christmas.

“I got the job!” she squealed delightfully.

Obviously, there couldn’t really be any competition for her considering the limited population that was in the area, so it was a no-brainer. But I still acted surprised and ecstatic for her, which made her all the happier.

“Yeah. I couldn’t believe it. It’ll be fun! I get to be a waitress at The Golden Nugget! I sampled some food, and it tasted pretty good. I start tomorrow, which means I can swing by on my break and pick you up after school, bring you back home, and then make it back to the restaurant in time.” She seemed to be calculating the time in her head. I agreed to the plan and continued to fumble with my Italian pasta in silence�"thankfully.

*      *      *

Here I was jammed yet again in history class with me and Jessica murmuring back and forth�"well, Jessica was murmuring, I was just listening to her remote voice. My eyes kept spying on that mysterious girl every so often, but she never looked back my way. Other than that, however, it was just another school day.

Lunch was a bit of a different story earlier today. While at lunch, I saw the girl. She had just left the machine with a bottle of water as she headed to sit down, only I had no idea where she was headed to because there were no tables on the second level except where they sat. And as my gaze followed, she sat with all of the nature girls. Shock and pure disbelief had stung me, because I had no idea. There was something oddly familiar about her that I couldn’t place when I first saw her, and now I knew: she resembled the nature females. She was one of them. But in some exotic way, she was different. There was just something�"and I couldn’t quite place what�"that caused her to stand out from the crowd. I couldn’t explain it, nor did I want to.

My new friends, who were then seated around me at our lunch table, noticed that I hadn’t answered Austin’s question about music�"Greenday, I think that’s what he was talking about�", so they followed my eyes as they stared up at the so-called “chick band.” All of my friends stared at them, realizing that the table was now full. The seventh girl that had been missing from the nature girls yesterday was now there, assuming her rightful role.

I tried to think of her name then, realizing I hadn't even identified the girl yet. What was her name?

Nothing.

What was her name? Why couldn't I remember it?

“The wicked witch is back,” Mitchell had muttered just loud enough for only our table to hear.

“Damn straight,” Cheyenne had replied. “That Summer girl is here.”

Summer! Finally, I remembered her name.

Thankfully, nobody in the group had noticed the intensity of my interest towards Summer, so I had just glanced away nonchalantly as if I hadn’t even been staring at her at all.

I pulled myself out of my thoughts about lunch earlier�"which was perfect timing, because Mrs. Miller was staring at me, waiting for an answer. “Um…,” I glanced down into my book hoping to get a quick answer, “Anne Frank?”

“Exactly. The Holocaust, you see, was…”she continued on with her lecture. Thank God I had remembered that from grade school.

I slipped a sideways glance at Jessica that said Whoa! That was a major close one along with a smirk. She returned the same look, but I didn’t pay much attention, because something else caught my eye. It was a pair of eyes that were glistening intensely and were filled with the texture of an evergreen forest that appealed to me, inviting me into their very depths, with miles of enchantment. They were Summer’s eyes.

At first, my slow brain didn’t quite register what they were seeing, so I did a double-take. But when I looked up again, her eyes seemed to be glued to the chalk board that Mrs. Miller was now scribbling on. It was as if she hadn’t even turned her head a single inch to look at me. Maybe my eyesight was getting the best of me.

After all, why would she have been looking? Maybe I had something on my face that attracted abnormal attention. Maybe she was merely looking at something next to me.

I came to the final conclusion that it was in fact an act of my imagination, and that I needed to push her away and out of my confusing mind.

Later, I found myself residing in literature class when a note fluttered down onto my desk in the form of a paper airplane. I glanced into the direction that it had come from: Austin.

Cheyenne was smacking on bubble gum (even though Mrs. Stanley had caught her twice in the past twenty minutes and ordered her to dispose of her previous pieces); Mitchell was doodling on notebook paper, making funny impressions of us around him; and Mrs. Stanley was paying the least bit of attention to us at the moment. She was too busy writing literature assets on the blackboard.

On the airplane, there were letters on the one of the wings that instructed me to open it. Inside, I saw:

Hey, we’re gonna hang out today after school (me, Luke, Chey, Jess, and Mitch). Wanna come?

With enthusiasm, I scribbled back the simple reply:

Sure. Just text me.

Then I jotted down my cell number below the message. I folded it back up into its original shape, and flew it back to my right�"while Mrs. Stanley wasn’t watching, of course. He read it, wrote something else, and flew it back.

Ok. We we’ll walk over to your place and get you, and text you when we’re almost there. Luke knows the way. We can give you a little tour of the place. Sound good?

Typically, a good child would consult with an adult before making plans to go out, but right now, that was at the farthest crevice of my mind.

Perfect.

It flew back across to Austin. He gave a smirk after he read it. Then he stored it into his pocket, and he began making other paper shapes from his notebook paper. Now I really felt terrible for allowing Hale to easily consume me in its joyful people, but I couldn’t back out now.

*      *      *

I received a text from Luke and the gang not long after my mom dropped me off at home and rushed back to Golden Nugget to resume her job. They were just around the block, Luke informed me via text message, so I did a quick change of clothes to go roaming the town. I was done within mere seconds; then I eagerly awaited my friends.

I sat on the living room couch flipping through the channels of the cable just like a book when the doorbell rang. I chunked the remote down, leaped up out of my seat, and opened the door. My friends.

I locked the door behind me and joined them.

As we walked down the sidewalk, my friends pointed out all of the neighbors’ names, their houses, relatives, and people from school, and so on. We walked all through town and down the side streets. I was officially introduced to: the town’s church, the post office, Golden Nugget, the movie rental store, the hardware shop, the mechanic shop, and two gas stations (where, at one, we stocked up on junk food like sodas, candy, chips, and ice cream). Not to mention, Cheyenne and Jessica snatched a few extra pieces of bubble gum and stuffed them in their purses, while Austin and Mitchell took a pack of fire balls and crammed them into their pockets, and Luke snatched a Snickers bar. Me? I wasn’t in the mood, so I didn’t take anything. But all along the entire tour of Hale, potentially every pedestrian that we saw (whether they were going for a jog, walking a dog, or riding on bicycles) seemed to know Luke and the rest. That was the biggest clue ever to truly knowing the size of Hale.

*      *      *

We made it to the town’s park�"astonishingly, it had one of those too. Everyone was at the picnic tables while I sat down on a bench alone.

“So, what do you think of the town, Evan?” Luke asked me, coming from the picnic tables.

I gazed out over the park, looking over the small town. “It has a lot more features than I thought, but…”

“But still not like San Francisco, huh?”

“No.” The town was small, content. It did give me the feeling of being secure and protected, but I had always been free. Not once had I ever felt like a stranded bird caught in a cage. But now…I was in Hale, which was just like my own personal cage.

“Don’t worry. It’ll feel like home soon enough.”

I doubted it. This wasn’t my home. San Francisco�"

San Francisco. My beloved city.

“I hope so,” I muttered.

“Just give it some time. Trust me,” he reassured. “Now let’s go see what everyone else is doing.”

We walked over to our friends, who were all looking down at the picnic table they were seated for some unseen reason.

I saw a poorly drawn creation of a wolf on the table. Jessica and Cheyenne had apparently carved a graphic into the wood picnic tables with their nail files. It was a little odd, so I asked: “What’s with the wolf?”

They equally shrugged. “We’ve both been hearing about them. People have spotted a few of them, you know,” Jessica answered.

“I haven’t heard anything about a wolf. I think you girls have been sniffing on your perfume too long,” Austin said.

“Oh, hush! My cousin saw a wolf in her backyard a few weeks ago. And Cheyenne says her aunt saw one run across the road in front her car,” Jessica said.

I glanced at Luke with a questioningly look. At first I saw an unknown expression on his face, but then he caught my eye and said, “Aw, those are just rumors. People just want a little excitement around here, that’s all. Everyone knows wolves don’t live around here.”

“I know! That’s what I keep telling Chey. That’s why I think it’s not a wolf at all!” Jessica said.

Austin then said sarcastically, “So it’s not a wolf, eh? Then what the freak is that a picture of? A rabbit?”

“No, stupid. It’s really a picture of you!” Cheyenne giggled at Jessica’s joke. “But seriously, I don’t believe it’s a wolf. I think it’s a werewolf!”

“What!?” We all said in unison.

“That’s right. A werewolf,” Jessica said.

“But those things aren’t really real. Everyone knows that, Jess,” Mitchell said to her.

“Well, who said so? Just because a stupid scientist can’t prove it, that makes it a myth? Hardly,” Jessica argued.

Once again, I looked over at Luke, and he had that same expression on his face. Something was definitely up, something secretive. But the instant Luke saw me looking suspiciously at him again, he seemed to compose himself.

He said with a steady voice, “It doesn’t matter if it’s a dog, wolf, or even a werewolf. Why would they come here? To go to the huge mall down the street or to go dine on homeless people?” He chuckled at his own joke. This seemed to make everyone else loosen up as well.

My suspicion grew. There had to be a reason that he was changing the subject all of a sudden, and I was going to find out what that reason was.

I was hoping Jessica would continue the argument of werewolves and their existence, but she seemed too consumed by further smart remarks by Austin and Mitchell.

I didn’t think I was going to get any farther with it, so I nudged it aside, bringing in a new thought. Since I now knew where everyone at Hale High currently lived, with the help of my friends and their guided tour, I wanted to know about a special group in particular. So I asked, “What about those nature girls, where do they stay at?”

Everyone stopped and looked at me.

At first nobody seemed to want to answer, but it was Austin who said, “We don’t know. They go to school with us, but nobody ever sees where they live or anything. That’s why everyone thinks they live in trees or something.”

“Oh, you were serious about that, huh?”

Mitchell nodded.

“But they must ride the bus or something.”

“Well, that leader girl…What was her name?” Cheyenne said.

“Summer?” Jessica said.

“Yeah. Summer. She drives them all to school. Go figure right? What with the pollution from a car and nature freaks being all about ‘preserving the forest’ and all. But anyways, she drives them to and from school. Nobody’s ever really taken the liberty to find out where they stay.”

I didn’t respond.

It was weird. There’s never been a situation like this before in San Francisco. But then again, this place was utterly different when it came to contrasting the two cities. So I mentally shrugged my shoulders and pushed it to the back of my brain.

“Okay. Enough talk of werewolves and nature girls. Who’s up for a swing?” Luke said with a grin.

Immediately, our inner child erupted from us. We dashed off the picnic tables and raced for the best swing, leaving behind my steadily-growing suspicions that I had of this town and its never-ending secrets…for now.

 

*FINAL VERSION 04.16.11

Author's Note

FINAL VERSION 04.16.11: A much improved version has been added thanks to an English master of mine who is reviewing this for me. (Only grammar/vocabulary edits have been made. Plot changes may be made at a later date). Thanks.

This chapter is sort of an extension of Chapter 3 because it still has to do with Evan's friends and them hanging out, but it goes into Evan's emotions more and what he thinks on the situation. Just let me know what ya think!

If you see grammar issues, please point them out! I would be eternally grateful because I sometimes miss the most obvious things! And I accept GOOD and BAD criticism.

Reviews

[Havatara]

I thought it was kind of confusing when he had been completely zoning out, and then knew that the answer was Anne Frank right away. Maybe he had read some of the teacher's notes on the board, or maybe she had talked about Anne Frank the day before. Either way, it didn't really make all that much sense going straight from lala land to Anne Frank.

Other than that, I really loved the chapter and I can't wait to read the rest of the book.

This makes a good followup chapter, and Since we're still early in the story It's good to not have a Clear plot as to what's going on. I'll have to say though it seems a bit strange during when he sits down at the table. Now, imagine watching two kids sit down at a table, then get up and leave after a short conversation. It's just a little confusing to me, though it probably is right. It might seem a little natural if they were to talk as they walk. though I might've mis-interpreted this part.
There was a part, sorry I didn't write it down, where you could have added more information. Though not COMPLETELY unclear, the part did make me think. You want your readers to experience, not think right? Ofcourse till the end. BUT that's not the point. I loved reading this though, the friend's familiarity made me chuckle a bit, Can't wait to read the rest.

[Onyx_Rayne]

This is moving along nicely. I'm enjoying the dialogue and learning a bit more about each character.

You are a great writer and it is coming through in each word of this piece.

Fantastic :)

[trish420]

Where Evan sits on the bench and, I'm guessing Luke comes over and talks to him you never state who it is; "“So, what do you think of the town, Evan?” he asked me, sitting down beside me." and then the conversation continues without ever clarifying who "he" is. Everything else looked good. I get the feeling once we hit the good stuff it will be much "spicier" though, yes?

[chaotic katie]

loved this chapter fantastic job keep up the good work

[bbb]

I found one grammar error...the part where one of the girls draws a wolf on the table, it should say 'poorly drawn' not drew. As for the story though, it keeps it's intrigue and seems to be building up to something.Nice job:)

[I.M. de Ville]

I liked this one a lot better. The conversation flowed wonderfully and this got a lot more intense... I'm so ready to see what happens.

And, I liked the details you put about the town! It sounds just like mine, except we have Wawa's here, lol. Keep it up!!!

[Amelia Harris]

This wasn’t bad. I like reading your works, but am still wondering where you are going with this story…
Your characters appear to be very well rounded and dialog is well done, but I feel like I need more to keep me interested. All in all, I think you are a good writer. You would do well to have a spicier story line. : ) xoxo