Heart Shaped Boy
Theodore Thursday stood at the entranceway to his old elementary school, his shoulders bent, checking the air for danger is blew through the loose hair on the top of his hair. After a few moments standing there self-conciously, peering wide-eyed into the darkness, his face a heart-shaped chalk balloon, he still had no identifiable reason to run home to safety.
His hands were working their way carefully and without purpose through his pockets. It should be colder in December. With an unsteady breath of false irritation in his voice, he posed the question aloud: what are you so afraid of? Receiving no reply, he asked again in a few minutes, this time stressing the second to last word to make the question into an insult. The insult wouldn’t stick; he had a perfectly good reason for being afraid – he thought he was about to be murdered.
The thing about murder is that there was no way to protect against it other than to fear. You couldn’t, Theodore knew, look both ways for assassins before crossing the street. It made no difference whether you waited thirty minutes after lunch before returning to the pool, not if someone was waiting out there to kill you. A determined killer, bored and pruny in the shallow end, would just climb out of the water, come inside, and kill you where you sat in your place at the kitchenette counter, dutifully watching the clock. Even the one piece of advice commonly distributed specifically to thwart murderers, the warning not to talk to strangers, was designed to protect you from getting tricked and kidnapped, driven away to be murdered in private. That advice only worked for some killers, though, killers who prioritized not getting caught, who had the time and the energy to engage in small talk before acting. Theodore was unwilling to just assume that all the people who wanted to kill him would have that concern; he refused to make those sorts of assumptions not because he assumed that there were people out to kill him, but because he knew anyone who did want to kill a thirteen year old who never bothered anyone would be crazy, and thus couldn’t be counted on to follow even established murder patterns.
By a similar logic, Thedore had to worry just as much about someone shooting, stabbing, or bludgeoning where he stood on the cement walkway that connected this building to the annexes off to the right, which had been built since he had moved on to middle school, as he did in the dark corridor he was hesitating to enter. So he might as well walk on in, right? Wrong. What you don’t know yet about Theodore Thursday, and what Theodore Thursday knew about himself more than and before anything else, is that he was the fastest boy he had ever met, that he was ridiculously fast. This speed was an interesting thing, it both succeeded and failed in separating it’s boy from the rest of the children in his class, but although he had given that strange combination of special and not special a good deal of thought, it wasn’t what Theodore had on his mind at the moment. What he was thinking was: as long as I have somewhere to run to, somewhere clear and away, I am faster than I am frightened, even though I am very, very scared.
His hands were working their way carefully and without purpose through his pockets. It should be colder in December. With an unsteady breath of false irritation in his voice, he posed the question aloud: what are you so afraid of? Receiving no reply, he asked again in a few minutes, this time stressing the second to last word to make the question into an insult. The insult wouldn’t stick; he had a perfectly good reason for being afraid – he thought he was about to be murdered.
The thing about murder is that there was no way to protect against it other than to fear. You couldn’t, Theodore knew, look both ways for assassins before crossing the street. It made no difference whether you waited thirty minutes after lunch before returning to the pool, not if someone was waiting out there to kill you. A determined killer, bored and pruny in the shallow end, would just climb out of the water, come inside, and kill you where you sat in your place at the kitchenette counter, dutifully watching the clock. Even the one piece of advice commonly distributed specifically to thwart murderers, the warning not to talk to strangers, was designed to protect you from getting tricked and kidnapped, driven away to be murdered in private. That advice only worked for some killers, though, killers who prioritized not getting caught, who had the time and the energy to engage in small talk before acting. Theodore was unwilling to just assume that all the people who wanted to kill him would have that concern; he refused to make those sorts of assumptions not because he assumed that there were people out to kill him, but because he knew anyone who did want to kill a thirteen year old who never bothered anyone would be crazy, and thus couldn’t be counted on to follow even established murder patterns.
By a similar logic, Thedore had to worry just as much about someone shooting, stabbing, or bludgeoning where he stood on the cement walkway that connected this building to the annexes off to the right, which had been built since he had moved on to middle school, as he did in the dark corridor he was hesitating to enter. So he might as well walk on in, right? Wrong. What you don’t know yet about Theodore Thursday, and what Theodore Thursday knew about himself more than and before anything else, is that he was the fastest boy he had ever met, that he was ridiculously fast. This speed was an interesting thing, it both succeeded and failed in separating it’s boy from the rest of the children in his class, but although he had given that strange combination of special and not special a good deal of thought, it wasn’t what Theodore had on his mind at the moment. What he was thinking was: as long as I have somewhere to run to, somewhere clear and away, I am faster than I am frightened, even though I am very, very scared.
posted by Jeremy at 1:05 PM
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