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Summertime Somnolence [O1] 

 

JS Jones

 

Let every man be master of his time.

-William Shakespeare

 

Chapter One: ???[O2] 

 

1.

            Midnight. The evergreens shivered in a cool spring rain. Noah Hanson, a young man with a thin frame, wiry glasses, and dark brown hair, sat silent, holding his high school diploma in two shaking hands in front of his parent’s suburban home. The purifying smell of rain cleansed Noah’s mind and he turned his attention to the pull of gravity fastening him to his seat. Darkness enveloped a landscape he’d spent his entire life existing in the middle of.

​            Lowering his head and beginning to study his palms, Noah heard a rumbling sound coming from behind him.

​            It was his mother Beth.

​            ” Come on inside, babylove,” whispered Beth. Her hair was a smooth silver, cut short and in a bun.

​            Beth unsealed the polished oak door. Noah repositioned his body and raised on two stiff legs, deconditioned from weeks without jogging. Heartbeat thudded deep within his chest.

​            Though he’d placed himself underneath the covering[O3]  of the Hanson’s front deck, Noah noticed pockmarks of rain all across his grey t-shirt. The diploma also had a few beads, but it was laminated so he simply wiped it off with his sleeve. He was in pajamas, no shoes, and a University of Montana baseball cap slanted sideways on his head.

​            After pivoting to stretch his back, Noah started toward the door"a dim, orange light pouring out. He began to adjust, and his heartbeat gradually slowed down. Silence, beside the tapping of raindrops and a wheeze in his breath.

​            Stupid asthma.

​            Reluctantly, Noah entered the home. His parents, both internal medicine doctors at one of the two local hospitals in Missoula, Montana had done a massive renovation in the eighties on the once single-story dwelling, adding in a basement, an asphalt driveway, and a three-car garage. Because of its size and elegant layout, the neighbors had nicknamed it “The Hanson Mansion”. 

​            As Noah walked in, he shifted past his mom with a weak smile on the side of his lips.  To the right of the door sat a bracketed shelf where he placed his diploma at the top. The rich smell of Mom’s lasagna filled the rooms around him, but that night, Noah wasn’t hungry.

​            “Off to college in the morning!” exclaimed Beth. Facing toward Noah, her arms stretched out. He drifted toward his mom and held her in a warm embrace for five seconds.

​            Noah wouldn’t be starting classes at the University of Montana until the coming fall. He would, however, be moving into a large college house for the summer so he could adjust. The day was Sunday, May 23^rd, 2006. He had graduated from Sentinel High School just a week prior with a 4.0 GPA. 

​            But could he keep that up in college?

 

2. 

 

​            Fifth grade. Seven years before. Noah stood on the side of a group of kids huddled next to a basketball hoop on a snow-covered playground. His eyes struggled forward. Yearning to fit in. The air around was a cacophony of young voices"playful and ignorant, screaming and unsettled. Noah kept still. Blank.

​            The playground was small in proportion to the school. In preceding years, Skyview Elementary had sat on a five-acre lot. During a board meeting, however, Missoula County Public Schools decided to subdivide so students at recess could be in closer proximity to their supervisors.

​            Kids being kids, formed artificial groups, clustered together, not allowing anyone else in. 

​There were the normal social clichés. The popular kids. The nerdy kids. The smart kids. The athletic kids.

​            And then, there was Noah.

​            Snowflakes drifted in the sharp winter air. Kids were required to wear thick winter boots so they wouldn’t slip. Standing there, Noah began to drift off and let his mind wander in no particular direction. 

​            Imagination. One day, he would be a singer. The next, a teacher. A day later, an artist.

​            Without warning, Noah suffered a disquieting crack!! to the side of his skull. Where had it come from? Where was he?

​            The boy staggered on unsettled feet. His eyes began to water, and he could see the mist rising from his warm breath.

​            Heart pounding, he looked out through two cobalt blue eyes so he could try and see where he was and what had happened. Drawing his right hand to and from an ache on the side of his head, he discovered a small amount of blood on his fingertips.

            Gazing in every direction, Noah sought an explanation. But his vision was so blurry and mind so obscure, he couldn’t make one out.

            Eyes squinting, Noah looked down one more time at the blood on his fingers.

​            Gradually regaining awareness, his first instinct was to drop to his back. But then again, that would show weakness, and weakness was like blood in the shark tank of Meadow Elementary.

​            To his reprieve, Noah heard the shrill whistle of one of the recess duty teachers and he knew it was time to come inside. He paced toward a line forming next to the steel chain link fence facing on the side of the building. With each step, Noah could hear the scratch of his oversized snow pants. The line formed, Noah in the back. 

​            His fifth-grade teacher Miss Olson, a younger woman with ashy blond hair and square glasses, pointed out her finger and counted each child behind. Nearby, another woman with a stout body and grimacing scowl, opened the school’s back door and the kids followed Miss Olson up one flight of stairs and into their class. 

​            The school day routine would be the same as always.

​            But that day, Noah was different…

 

3.

 

At 7 am, eighteen-year-old Noah was fast asleep in his bedroom. Clothes were strewn all over the floor and he had a desk littered with countless random papers. Lying there motionless, he was startled out of a deep sleep by a ringtone he kept meaning to change. It was the sound of Christmas bells and a heavy train he had picked out the previous December. Glaring at the ceiling above him, resentful it meant he had to get up for his first college house meeting, Noah rolled over, desperate for a cup of coffee. 

​            As he reached the second level of the oversized home, he could smell the stale dish soap his mom always bought at a grocery store nine blocks up from where they lived. His ears perked at, however, at the sound of the family’s silver coffee machine starting to grind.

​            Noah hurried to start his routine of heading to the downstairs bathroom, showering, and getting dressed. He knew eating breakfast was a healthy idea, but because he was never a morning eater, he would tend to procrastinate and pull lunch out of the fridge hours later. Cheese sandwiches were his specialty. He didn’t particularly like them, and he realized they contained little nutritional value. But at that point in his life, he was slim with a high metabolism and didn’t give it much thought.

​            Noah’s mom was early for everything. Often at doctor’s appointments, staff would talk amongst themselves about how unusual and predictable it was for her to show up an hour premature and sit in the waiting room, flipping through the same sets of magazines she always did. Before Noah could slip on his denim jeans, Mom was already in the car.

​            “Noah, it’s time to go!”

​            “Okay, Mom.” Noah said, wondering if she could even hear him since his tone had been so low and frog- like.

​            Noah sauntered up the steps toward the garage where she was waiting, grabbed a jacket, and then shoved himself in the passenger’s seat. The garage door opened with an abrupt jerk, and the silver Mercedes Benz began to back out. Noah swore that he could hear the music of a funeral dirge playing in the background.

 

4. 

 

The house he planned to stay at that summer, and throughout college, was called the Alpha Omega House. Analogous to its name, the AO House was a Christian fraternity/sorority that housed up to thirty students during the fall and spring semesters, and about twenty during the summer. It was a four-story brick building one block up from the college on University Avenue. As Noah approached, uncomfortable as usual that he was being driven by his mother and conscious that they’d probably be the first ones there, he felt apprehensive, but with a light sparkle of hope. Even though he was technically an adult, he’d only had his driver’s license for a little over a month. All around him, he could hear the hum of lawnmowers attending dozens of other similar houses. Each street was overhung by branches and green late spring leaves. Deciduous trees uniformly lined along sidewalks paralleling the streets.

“Did you want to grab your coffee before we go in?” Mom offered as she struggled to parallel park between a large Ford truck and a beat up, ‘eco-friendly’ wagon. There were several cars parked in front of the House, but still no fellow students in site. Noah had heard from college advisors who had met with him that spring that parking at [O4] the University during fall and spring semesters could be competitive; now he saw why. The young man, who’d gotten a Subaru wagon for his birthday in April, felt discouraged and apprehensive at the taxing parking situation he would have to face the next fall. Luckily, summer parking wasn’t as bad.

            Pondering backwards, Noah thought of the countless times Mom had visited his high school and tried to talk teachers into letting him stay inside for lunch because of his asthma. Since The Day, it seemed like she had forgotten how to smile.[O5] 

            “My little Noah can’t tolerate the cold and no one will be his friend.”

            Since graduation, it felt like Mom had changed.

            “Noah! I can’t sit here all day. I have things to do at home and you haven’t packed half your stuff. Now get out of the car and get used to your new house.”  

 

Author's Note

Is there enough telling and not showing? Grammar? Punctuation? Does the story keep tension. Thanks!