December 2

          Pete sat in English class, listening to a heated discussion about the meaning of the beast in Lord of the Flies.  Is the beast nothing more than a dead parachutist?  Once we have convinced ourselves that there is a beast, does the beast actually become real?  Is the beast real whether or not we believe in it?  What if we have never thought of the beast at all?  If we haven’t thought of it, does it not exist?  What if only one person has the idea of the beast?  Can it still hurt the rest of us?

  He looked at his copy of Lord of the Flies.  The face of the blond boy on the cover was surrounded by leaves; disappearing into the jungle.  It looked like such a normal face:  good, straight nose, a square, no-nonsense sort of chin, but the intense, staring eyes, barely showing through the jungle foliage – those eyes were scary.  He tried to imagine meeting somebody who looked like that in real life – somebody who really had such a normal face with such intense eyes.  Somebody who wasn’t just a drawing.  

What would happen if a bunch of regular kids were plopped down on a tropical island to fend for themselves, not knowing for sure if they would ever be rescued?  He looked around the classroom.  What if this class, for example, was shipwrecked on an island?  It could happen.  His school took trips in the spring – kids went in groups of twenty to exotic places to sightsee, or to do service work.  What if the plane wrecked?  OK, so they didn’t take charter jets.   They flew on regular, commercial planes with everybody else in the world who happened to be going to Bali, or Katmandu that day, so they couldn’t wreck in quite the same way as the kids did in Lord of the Flies, leaving a bunch of kids and no adults to survive on a deserted island -- but what if?

         The girls would make a difference, he decided.  In the book it was just a bunch of guys.  He couldn’t imagine quiet little Chinese girls like Bei Xian Wong, and Jasmine Chen running around with burning torches and sticking spears up the rear ends of pigs.  Eddie Ma would probably have trouble taking anything seriously, and Jasper Chang looked like he could get mean if you pushed him. 

And what about the Gwilo kids like him?  Would the Westerners turn scary, like the boys in the story, who were all British after all?  Robert Smith, who sat in the front row, was like Ralph in the book.  He was president of the freshman class, and he was a starting forward on the JV soccer team.  He would be the one with the conch trying to organize everything.  And what about Pete, and his friend George?  They would just go along, right?  Keep the fire burning?  Try to catch fish?  Try to make things work until they were rescued.  They were too old to run around playing wild Indians.  There was no beast, right? 

But he wasn’t shipwrecked on a tropical island right now, so he didn’t have to worry about that. 

No, he was in English class, and there was a Socratic seminar happening, and it was getting away from him.  He hadn’t contributed since the beginning of class, and Mrs. Moore graded on your contributions.  He flipped back a page in his notebook, hoping to find something in his notes that was worth contributing.  He read:

December 2

"Hey, are you OK?"

"What's the matter?"  Akelmeyer gently touched the doe's shoulder.  "There, there, now."  The wiener dogs looked at each other sheepishly, and then again at the deer.

         Peter shut his eyes and his notebook before he could read any more.  What was going on?  This was not his notes on Lord of the Flies.  He realized that the whole class was looking at him.  He had shut his notebook a little too violently.

         “Is everything all right, Peter?”  Mrs. Moore was looking up from her grade book.  Looking right at him.  And he had nothing in his mind except dogs and a deer. 

         He had to say something.

“I was just thinking that the book would have been different if the pigs could talk.” 

Everyone was looking at him. 

No one was responding. 

He didn’t know why he thought he had to keep going, but he somehow felt compelled.  Compelled to fill the oppressively empty verbal space.  “And play basketball.” 

He held his breath, waiting for the ridicule to come crashing down on his head.

         “Thank you, Mr. Meren.  That’s a very unique observation.  And in what way would it have been different?”

         Pete forced himself to breathe.  He opened and closed his mouth a few times, hoping something would come out, but nothing did.  It turned out not to matter that he didn’t have anything to say, because Elizabeth Martin nearly flew out of her seat at the chance to raise her grade.  “Oh!   I think he’s saying that the beast is more likely to surface when we see others as others.  Different from ourselves.  If the boys had seen the pigs as living creatures, with feelings, and hobbies?”  She looked at him questioningly,  “Like basketball?”

He shrugged, and nodded, tentatively.  

She continued confidently, “.  .  . they might have still had to kill them for food, but they wouldn’t have made a game out of it, and turned into beasts themselves.”

         Someone reminded her that one of them had suggested killing a little’un for fun, and then one of the slower kids asked what a little’un was, and then the bell rang.  Pete hoped that he would at least get a C for introducing an interesting idea.  Well, it had been interesting once Elizabeth had gotten ahold of it anyway. 

         English was the last period of the day, so he hurried down to the bench by the sports field, and took out his notebook.  He opened it slowly, only about an inch and a half.  Just enough to get a glimpse of the writing inside.  Not enough to commit himself to reading it.  He squinted.  He wrinkled up his face.  He shut one eye.  He looked.  He shut the notebook again.  It was there all right.  More wiener dogs.  He took a deep breath, and opened it a little further.  The handwriting wasn’t his own.  It was blocky, and very uniform, as if someone was trying to copy a computer font, or disguise his handwriting.  Or as if someone had blocky, uniform handwriting, he reminded himself.  Everything didn’t have to be some kind of conspiracy, or deception.  It was just a story.  In his notebook.  A story that he hadn’t written in his notebook that hadn’t been out of his sight, or his backpack, or his locker all day.  He shook his head to see if it would rattle his thoughts around and re-settle them in a way that would make things clear.  It didn’t.  He took another deep breath, opened the notebook, and read:

 December 2

"Hey, are you OK?"

"What's the matter?"  Akelmeyer gently touched the doe's shoulder.  "There, there, now."  The wiener dogs looked at each other sheepishly, and then again at the deer.

"Oh dear.  Oh, oh, dear, oh dear," sobbed the deer.

"Yes, you are, you are a deer," thought Akelmeyer, but realized the pun would be inappropriate just then.  Not that such a realization always stopped him.  That he was quick to poke fun, that he relished irony when it presented itself, that he took neither himself nor the world very seriously, reflected a depth of character rather than a shallowness.  He sometimes remembered that not everyone was thus enlightened, and tempered his comments accordingly.  Sometimes.

The doe blinked.  "Who are you?"  The doe blinked again, and shook her head slightly.  "Oh, dear.  I'm seeing double again."

"No, ma'am, there are two of us," said Malchisedech.  Deck, as his brothers called him for short, was matter-of-fact.  The two young wiener dogs did favor one another a great deal, and were in fact often mistaken for twins.  They were brothers, from the same litter, and had the same coloring and features.  But, if you looked closely, you would see that Malchisedech's features were sharper, more chiseled.  And his nose was perhaps half an inch longer than Akelmeyer's.

"Oh, well, then.  That's good.  Yes.  That's good."  The doe looked relieved for a moment, and then anxious again.  "But, still -- there will be no Christmas this year.  No Christmas at all!  And no one cares.  No one can help.  Oh, dear.  Dear, dear, dear!"  The doe began to cry again, in earnest now.

Akelmeyer and Malchisedech looked at each other again. 

"Hey, it's all right.  It will be okay.  There, there."

"What do you mean, no Christmas?  Of course there will be Christmas.  Christmas comes every year.  It's like Groundhog Day, or Labor Day...it comes every year.  You know, time marches on and all that.  The Earth rotates around the sun, time passes.  Except at the speed of light.  As you approach the speed of light, time slows down, or was that in a black hole? Time can't get out of a black hole.  You stretch out.  Maybe time is a form of energy, like matter.  Einstein, right?  No, wait, it's space-time.  The space-time continuum.  Of course, Einstein was Jewish.  Did he celebrate Christmas?" Akelmeyer often babbled incoherently about physics and cosmology.

"No, no.  Oh, dear, oh dear," sobbed the doe.

"Why don't you come inside, and have a nice glass of charcoal filtered water.  You can tell us all about it.  Maybe we can help."

"We are intrepid adventurers and solvers of mysteries.  It said so in the introduction."  Akelmeyer sometimes failed to fully suspend his own disbelief in the fact that he was an anthropomorphic fictional character in a story.  It sometimes made the reader chuckle, but invariably caused the fictional listeners, bound as they were, in the reality of the story, to look at him in puzzlement.

Malchisedech and the doe looked at Akelmeyer in puzzlement.  (See?)

The deer sniffed, and got control of her crying.  "Oh, but I am being rude.  I am sorry.  Dear me.  I just...  It's just.  Oh."  She sniffled again.  "Yes, well, so sorry.  Indeed.  Ahem.  Er, my name is Chloe, and thank you for your kind offer.  I just had some water, from that trough right over there.  It didn't help."

Akelmeyer frowned.  Yes, there was a trough right in the middle of the path.  THAT had never been there before.

"Hey, that wasn't there yesterday," said Malchisedech.

To be continued.  .  .

*   *   *

         “Hey, what’s up?”

         Pete yelped, jumped, and slammed his notebook shut.

         “What is it, dirty pictures?  You shouldn’t be looking at them here.”  It was Brittany, George’s little sister.

         “You shouldn’t sneak up on me.”

         “I was just walking home, and I stopped to say hi.  You know – being neighborly?  What’s your problem?”

         Peter started to tell her that he didn’t have a problem, because that’s what you did when somebody accused you of having a problem, but that was the kind of answer that would lead to arguing, and he didn’t feel like arguing.  Also, he realized that he kind of did have a problem. 

Another section of this ridiculous story had appeared out of nowhere INSIDE his own notebook.  Actually, all three sections were there: the introduction, December first, and December second.  Not pinned to his door in an envelope, or handed to him by a teacher, but actually attached to the spiral binding right in there with his notes from English class.  That was a problem, because it couldn’t be explained logically.  Not even by some wildly unlikely or improbable twisting of possibilities.

Except, of course, that there actually had to be some logical explanation, because everything had a logical explanation.  Everything.  He just couldn’t think of it right now.  That was all.  George was the one he usually talked to about his problems.  George was very logical.  He would recognize the logical explanation that was eluding Pete. 

“Is George around?  He wasn’t in school.”

         “Yeah, well, he stumbled in, literally, stumbled, at ten o’clock last night.  He wasn’t with you?”

         “At ten o’clock?  On a Sunday night?  Are you kidding?  My whole family is in bed by nine.”

         “Well, he looked like he had been through some kind of a war.  Torn clothes.  Pale.  Circles under his eyes.  You really don’t know what’s going on?”

         “No idea.”

         “And then you’re all jumpy, and slamming your book shut, like you’re guilty about something.”  She grabbed his notebook, held the spiral spine, and shook it.  Nothing fell out.  “OK, no dirty pictures.”  She gave him a shrewd look, “unless you’re drawing them.”  She flipped through the notebook again, glancing briefly at the pages.  Nothing incriminating.

         Pete grabbed the notebook back.

         Brittany asked what was wrong, but Pete just shook his head.  There was no point in explaining his delusions to his friend’s little sister.  Those pages couldn’t be here.  And since they couldn’t be here, he decided that he would think about them later.  When he was by himself.  “Nothing.  It’s just -- ” He started to tell her, but reminded himself that he wasn’t going to think about them right now.  “It’s just weird.  Let’s go see if George is up for visitors.”

         It was easy to forget about the mysterious wiener dogs when he saw George.  His friend was curled up in a ball on his bed, but when he saw Pete he sat up, leaned against the wall, and told his sister to go away before he made her regret that she was alive.  Brittany told him that this was a lame threat, but she left, and she closed the door.  Pete wondered if she had closed it because she was actually following her brother’s instructions, or if she had closed it so that she could press her ear against it, and listen unobserved.  He didn’t really care about Brittany, or what she heard.  He wanted to know what was wrong with George.

         George -- who was sitting on his bed, leaning against his wall.  His elbows were propped up on his bent knees.  He flopped his face into his hands, and started rubbing his dark red hair.  “I so messed up.”

         Pete sat down in the desk chair.   “What do you mean messed up?  What did you do?”

"Let’s see, what have I done that was stupid since I saw you last?"

And he went on from there, starting with Jennifer on the beach.  He sounded tired, and hollow.  Pete really hadn’t been happy about what had happened at the beach.  They were supposed to have been on an adventure, sure, but to be honest; Pete had anticipated more of an anthropological adventure.  He had wanted to watch what went on, to observe, to analyze, to criticize even—not to actually participate.  But he guessed George had had other ideas, because he had gone off with Jennifer, even though neither one of them had ever had anything to do with those fringe girls who wore ripped jeans, and tank tops that showed their pierced belly buttons.

         George’s story didn’t make much sense.  He talked about being mean to his little sister, as if anyone cared about that.  Brittany was better than most little sisters, in Pete’s opinion, but George was always mean to her, and it had never knocked him off balance before.

But it got worse.  He had met some girl.   A “total babe” he called her, and he went on about disappointing her in some ambiguously dangerous way that he couldn’t explain, and about getting in a fight with Ilo Senza, this seriously big junior with dark curly hair who went around scowling all the time, and hardly ever talked, but you always heard about him beating people up.  And George wasn’t talking about the kind of fight where you yelled clever insults at each other, but the kind of fight where you actually hit each other, and somehow George was saying he had won this fight, which was completely insane because George was about the most non-aggressive person Pete had ever met.

        

And then there had been Jennifer again, and this time he was talking about a party, and making out, which Pete thought was one of the most disgusting images he could think of.  Jennifer had been smoking when they had seen her at the beach, and for the few minutes she had stood there in the little shop with her arm around him, dangling her lit cigarette in his face, her breath had been this foul combination of cigarette smoke and alcohol that had made him want to retch, and on top of that, her face was always covered with make-up in a way that probably looked good in pictures, but that was revolting in real life if you thought about actually touching it or, God help you, tasting it, and if you then pictured who she had probably been kissing last – well, the guys she hung out with were the druggie low life type.  OK, so their parents must have money if they could pay the school tuition, which meant they probably bathed more or less regularly – and their clothes were probably already artistically ripped up when they bought them.  Pete still thought the pierced eyebrow and tattoo image was just a little too disgusting for words.  But George was confusing him by calling them the cool kids.  What made them cool?  They didn’t do their work.  They didn’t learn anything in school.  Ok, so maybe it didn’t matter because some of them – the Asian ones anyway – would just inherit their dads’ companies, and the gwilos like Jennifer and Ilo Senza would probably benefit somehow from family money or family connections, but they were jerks and losers, and he had always thought George felt the same way, but here he was clutching his head like he was in pain, and expecting Pete to be jealous that he had been kissing Jennifer.  And then it was Triads, and possible suicide, and wanting to find the babe-girl again but not knowing how.

Pete tried to figure out what George was talking about, but none of the answers made sense.  Did the babe-girl go to their school? Was she involved with the Triads’ organized crime syndicate?  Where had George met her?  Where had he lost her?  What exactly was he supposed to do for her?  Why didn’t he just go do it now, instead of sitting in his room moaning about it?  Why would he have been fighting with Ilo Senza anyway?  Did Pete know this babe-girl?  But when the answers degenerated from coherent nonsense into incoherent mumbles, and George stopped trying to tear his own hair out, and curled back up on the bed in a fetal position, Pete decided that this was not the time to bring up re-appearing fictional wiener dogs, and he left. 
       

*   *   *

         Pete’s feet stuck to the floor when he walked into his flat.  “What happened?” he asked, picking his feet up gingerly, one at a time, listening to the crackle as the rubber soles of his Reebok knockoffs parted with the highly polished teak floor.  The trail of sticky stuff led all the way into the kitchen. 

“Oh, yeah,” his mother answered from the computer.  “Your brother tried to open a bottle of soda on his own.  I’ll clean it up as soon as I’m through with this.”

         “Since when is he allowed to drink soda?”  The mess had obviously happened ages ago.  It was completely dry.  His mom had either been at the computer for hours, or she had just been ignoring the disaster.  Possibly both.

         “Well, I’m not going to clean up his mess for him.”  Peter tiptoed over the sticky parts, trying to step only on the clean floor.

         “No one expects you to, darling.  I’m almost done here.”

         “Where is he now?”

         “Oh my goodness, I forgot I sent him to his room.”  And she jumped up from the computer to rush straight through the stickiness, tracking it up the stairs.

         Pete went to the computer to find an open e-mail from Uncle Duane, announcing that the hole was now three feet deep.  He typed “how wide?” and hit send.  When he minimized the e-mail window, he saw that his mom had been grading papers comparing the Salem Witch trials to the McCarthy hearings.  Unlike Mr. McAllister, his mom embraced technology.  Her students e-mailed her their papers so that she could run them through anti-plagiarism software.  He saved the one she had left open, so that she wouldn’t lose her comments, figuring she had probably forgotten to do it herself.

         The doorbell rang.  “Wait a minute,” he called.  And he went to the kitchen for a wet rag.  Obviously, nobody else was going to clean up the mess before it got tracked all over the house.  They had a Filippina maid named Mimi, but she only came three days a week, and judging from the state of the floor, it didn’t look like this was her day.  The door opened, and it was Brittany.  She didn’t seem to think the mess was as disgusting as he did, but she helped him clean it up without being asked, which was really nice, since Joey had obviously dropped or maybe vigorously shaken the bottle before opening it, and then walked around in a big circle with it bubbling over, before setting it down in dismay.  Pete found the two liter bottle sitting next to the wall, about two-thirds full, and he had to assume that the rest of the liquid had landed on the highly polished teak floor.

         He offered Brittany some of the remaining soda, which she accepted enthusiastically, saying that they didn’t have it at her house, and they sat down facing each other across the dinner table.

         “So,” she asked, leaning towards him on her elbows, “What’s going on?”

         Pete smiled at the earnest eagerness on her round, open face.  Her long shiny black hair grazed the rosewood table.  She might be pretty in a few years, when she traded her glasses for contact lenses, but right now, she looked really young and kind of pudgy in a long sleeved T-shirt, and loose athletic shorts.  Not like those middle school girls who tried to look all hot like they were living in some teen show on the Disney channel. 

There was no point in pretending he wasn’t on to her.  “Weren’t you listening at the door?”

         Brittany didn’t pretend either.  Pete liked that.  He liked it when people were direct, and calm, and didn’t try to hide things.  “He was too quiet.  I couldn’t hear.”

         “Well, I can’t be much help.  I don’t even get it.  Something about some kids we don’t even know.  Kids I don’t even like, and I thought he didn’t either.  Something about a fight and a girl.  I don’t know.  You better let him tell you himself.”

         “Yeah, like he’d ever do that.”  She leaned in closer.  “So what’s up with you then?”

         “What do you mean?”

         “The notebook?  The questions about me using your computer?”

         “Oh yeah.”  Pete sighed.  He might as well tell somebody.  George obviously wasn’t going to listen any time soon, and he was nearing the point of doubting his own sanity, which made sense, because stuff like this just didn’t happen.  Charming stories did not just appear, already written, inside the English notebooks of unsuspecting teenagers. 

“It’s just – well – here, read this.”  He opened the spiral notebook to the “introduction” he had read on November 30, and slid it in front of Brittany. 

He got up and walked around the room while she read it.  She was just a kid.  There was no reason not to show her.  Unless, of course, it was really only his notes on Lord of the Flies.   Then she would read the speculations about the beast, and wonder what the big deal was.  What if he was only imagining the wiener dog story?  Mr. McAllister had read the introduction too, so Pete knew that that was real, but what if that introduction had really been some weird kind of mistake, and he had gotten so interested that he was imagining subsequent installments that weren’t there at all?  What if he was writing it himself without realizing it?  By showing the notebook to Brittany, he was exposing the fact that he might just be insane.  And she might find out.  And he didn’t even really care if she knew, but what if she told her parents, and they told his parents, and he had to go to a psychologist?  He didn’t want to go to a psychologist.  Did they have English-speaking psychologists in Hong Kong?  It had been a British colony, after all.   But it didn’t matter if they spoke English.  He didn’t want to go. 

No, he was being ridiculous.  The story was there.  She still might think he was insane, but all he had done was find the pages, three days in a row.  They were obviously right there.  He wasn’t imagining them, and he hadn’t written them.  There had to be some logical explanation.  George had never acted like Brittany was really big on logic, but showing her couldn’t hurt, could it? 

He couldn’t watch her read.  He walked to the full-length window that opened onto a miniscule balcony overlooking a lush, ivy-covered hillside, with Tai Tam bay sparkling in the distance.  He walked back to the white front door.  He walked back to the window.  He was on his way back to the door when Brittany looked up.

“Wiener dogs?” 

Pete stopped pacing to see that she had finished reading the first page. 

“You mean, like Dachshunds?”  Brittany looked understandably puzzled.

“I guess so, little dogs with short legs and long noses.”

“Playing basketball?”

“Whoever wrote this is cracked.  Obviously.”

“I thought you wrote it.”

         “You gotta be kidding.”  He came back to the table to look at her.  Nope.  No sarcasm in her wide, dark eyes.

         “No, it’s really cute,” she assured him.  “I like it.”

         “OK, so, you’re a little weird, but I didn’t write it.”

         “But it’s in your notebook.”

         She looked at him uncertainly, and then she looked back at the notebook.  He could practically hear her thinking.   He must have written it.  It was in his notebook.  It could even be his handwriting.  She would have no reason to know what his handwriting looked like.  But why would he be saying he hadn’t written it?

         “Somebody else in your class?”

         “I don’t think the notebook was ever out of my sight.”

         “Ever?”

         “It was in my locker, or in my backpack, or in my hands, and the only one who knows my locker combination is George.”

         Brittany dismissed the George idea.  “He can barely brush his own teeth right now.”

         “OK, so you tell me how the story got there, because this is really freaking me out.”

         Brittany looked at the notebook again.  She jerked up her head and opened her mouth, and took a breath, as if she had an idea.  Then she closed her mouth again.  Maybe she didn’t have an idea after all.   Maybe she didn’t like her idea.  She sat there, her elbow on the table, her chin cupped in her hand, tapping her lip with her finger.

When she did speak, the words came out very slowly, as if she was considering the situation while she talked.  “I think you’re making fun of me.  You’re trying to make me believe that there’s some big mystery, and then you and my brother are going to laugh at me for being gullible.”

        

         “Trust me.  I’m not that bored.”  He reached for the notebook.  “But if you don’t want to read any more.”

         “No.  I didn’t say that.  I like it, remember?”  Her voice turned thoughtful.  “Gruff means angry, but the Wiener Dogs Gruff sounds kind of like a fairy tale name, like the Brothers Grimm, but would there really be basketball in a fairy tale?”

         “Just keep reading.”  The Brothers Grimm?  Interesting connection.  He hadn’t thought of it.

         She read December first and December second with such rapt attention that Pete found himself wishing he had written it.  Her eyes were shining when she finally looked up.

         “OK,” she said.  “This is truly cool.”

         “It is?”

         “You’re sure you didn’t write this, because it would be really awesome if you had.”

         “I swear, I didn’t write it.”

         “And you’re sure you’re not playing a joke because I’m a little sister and I’m only in the seventh grade.”

         “Hey, as younger siblings go, you’re not that bad.  I mean, you could be Joey.”

         “What’s the matter with Joey?  Joey’s cute.”  Oh no.  Now Brittany was yelling.

         “You can say that after you cleaned up all that soda he spilled?”

         Joey and his mom came downstairs before the exchange morphed into a true argument.  His mother was explaining to Joey that he wasn’t in trouble for spilling the soda.  Accidents could happen to anybody.  He was in trouble for having a temper tantrum after he spilled the soda, and for distracting his mother from her grading. 

“Yeah, and where did the soda come from in the first place?”  Pete complained.  “You never let me have soda when I was seven.”

“You never wanted soda when you were seven.” 

Pete started to tell her about a story he had seen on the internet about how teenagers who drank two cans of sugar soda per day were more likely to be violent towards their peers, but she didn’t hear him because she was off and running with the story about the time when they had lived in Manila, and they had been stuck in an ancient mini-bus for six hours straight in traffic with a bunch of other families, and how the only thing they had to drink was soda, and everyone else had drank the soda, and it had made them sick, because it was so sweet and the shocks on the van were so bad, and blah, blah, blah, and so hot and humid and even with the windows open no fresh air, blah, blah, blah, breathing diesel fumes, and blah, blah, blah, and he hadn’t drank anything, because he didn’t like soda, and he was the only one on the whole trip who hadn’t thrown up. 

He had heard the story before.  It still wasn’t fair that Joey was drinking soda now.

He and Brittany agreed that they would meet tomorrow to talk about the next installment, if it showed up.  In the meantime, Brittany would keep his notebook.  Maybe the third day would appear there overnight, and then she would know for sure that it wasn’t a joke on her.  Or maybe it would all go away, and George would start acting like himself, and they could all go back to normal.