III

Entering the classroom, a vitality befitting an English lesson greeted him. The teacher, Ms. Abigail, turned to look at the latecomer. She expressed some surprise at seeing him come in so late, but only in a slight lifting of the eyebrows, which she promptly lowered as she ordered Joshua to take a seat at his desk. Josh complied, walking past the despondent souls of the first two rows, and seating himself next to Owen, his friend from childhood. He sat down in his seat, where the extraneous chatting and murmuring of the back row could be faintly heard behind him. Ms. Abigail returned to teaching the lesson nobody was listening to.

‘Hey,’ whispered Owen from Joshua’s left, ‘you good?’

Owen, much like Ms. Abigail, recognised it was not common that Joshua was late; so uncommon, in fact, his first reaction was to express worry when he was, though that was also partly due to his nature, which was surprisingly caring when the situation demanded it.

‘Yeah, I’m fine,’ assured Josh, ‘just stayed up so late doing the assignment,’ he explained, which to him felt like no lie: the exertion surrounding the previous evening proved far more tiring than the typical exhaustion that came with time, and his body believed he had in fact gone to bed later than usual, though in reality he had gone some two hours more reasonably than was his custom. ‘Has she collected them yet?’ he added.

‘Alright, that’s good to hear,’ responded his friend, abandoning his ephemeral empathy and returning to his normal disposition. ‘I was worried you might have been laying around decapitated in some ditch,’ disregarding his friend’s question.

‘Decapitated in a ditch?’ reacted Joshua, who was still too dazzled and tired to tell if his friend was joking. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘Oh, you haven’t heard?’ answered Owen. ‘The police found a dead body at the train yard. Head ripped clean off. They’re saying it was definitely a train accident, that some homeless man walked onto the tracks in the night, but I like to think it was a murder, and the police are covering it up.’

‘Of course you do,’ answered Josh, almost disappointed, both at his friend for leading him to believe there was something serious to worry about, and at himself for believing it was possible in the first place. 

When they were younger, Owen always had crazy morbid theories that he would share with Josh, and Josh would always spend hours and hours explaining their nonsensicality to him, eventually helping him see a little reason. He had grown out of it even before they started secondary school, but the muscle memory for crafting his crazy theories remained, and, seeing how much they annoyed Joshua even after all those years, he could not help teasing him with one every once in a while.

‘Stayed up late for the assignment?’ Owen returned to the relevant topic. ‘What assignment?’ he asked, as he regarded Josh with genuine confusion.

Guess that means she hasn’t collected them, thought Joshua. 

‘The poetry assignment is due today, Owen,’ he said.

‘Poetry assignment? Is that so? How much is it worth?’ Owen asked.

‘Ten percent of the final grade.’ Joshua answered.

‘Oh. Okay, nothing big then,’ his friend concluded, as he relaxed in his chair. ‘Why did you stay up so late writing it?’

‘This is the third ten percent that’s been ‘nothing big’’ Josh retorted, ‘that’s thirty percent. Which is quite big, Owen.’

‘Well I only need forty, don’t I?’ Owen retorted in kind. ‘Why did you stay up so late anyway? Aren’t you meant to be Mr. Prepared? How’d you let this one slip through the cracks?’

Disregarding the slight jab taken at his preparedness, which he did expend effort into making a defining characteristic of his, Joshua replied simply.

‘I don’t like poetry,’ he said. 

Ms. Abigail turned around from writing on the blackboard to hush everyone that was talking in the class, and was paid exactly no heed by anyone. One of the students in the front row fell asleep, slumping down and hitting his head off the desk, snapping him back into his unfortunate reality.

‘You really don’t, huh,’ responded Owen, as he returned to quietly daydreaming till the end of the lesson. 

Joshua, who gave some attempt at maintaining a healthy education, lasted about thirty seconds of paying attention before being afflicted with the same murderous boredom that crippled anyone who was ever unfortunate enough to endure the fifty five minutes of Ms. Abigail’s English class. His mind felt it needed to shelter itself, lest the vampiric monotony of her noteless voice drain all optimism and youth from his heart, and he started daydreaming himself, thinking of just about anything else to block out the barren echoes of her empty soul.

At approximately 10:53, Ms. Abigail concluded her torments, finishing with a final request for all afflicted parties to hand up the – relatively undemanding – assignments they were given two weeks to complete. Most of the class did not stray from their distractions, with the exception of two students, who obligingly removed the relevant papers from their bags and situated them lonily on their desks.

As if submitting to the disrespect being shown to her, Ms. Abigail did not protest to the students’ unresponsiveness, and adroitly marched to the complying students’ desks as though they were the only ones in her class. She collected JOshua’s first, without as mcu has a glance at it, then walked over to the other student, one Josh unrecognised from that very class, but could not remember a name for. He wore his hair long and shaggy, and had the context not helped dissuade the notion, one would have easily found in him an unfortunate young teen stricken with the throes of poverty and homelessness.

The student’s assignment, unlike Joshua’s, consisted of a volume of pages, all stacked onto a novel-like pile on his desk, that their teacher struggled to raise cleanly, even when assisted by the provider of the mess.

‘Jesus,’ said Owen, who just returned to acknowledging the material world. ‘Is that his assignment?’

Joshua’s primary concern was removing himself from the present situation and finding himself in another one – any other one – and he didn’t as much as react to Owen’s remarks.

Ms. Abigail eventually managed to handle the cluster of inspiration, and walked back to her desk with all two provided assignments. She dropped both of them on the desk, where she intended to leave them for herself to struggle through at a later time. As she slotted herself back in her chair for the remaining few seconds of the allotted time, she determined she might as well take a glance at one of the assignments – namely the shorter one of the two – and start to alleviate almost half of her workload (from an aggregate perspective, of course.)

She removed the thin single sheet of paper from the stack of stationary, and started reading. Joshua was paying her no attention, and had his eyes trained on the clock just slightly above her head, which promised to set him free in three, two, one…

‘This is absolutely magnificent!’ exclaimed Ms. Abigail, jumping out of her chair as she did. Everyone in the class was getting up and starting to leave, and did not mind her. Josh was looking directly at her, his eyes still fixed where they were to watch the mounted clock.

His teacher was looking directly at him, a sparkle in her eyes too youthful for her advanced age, and Joshua was uncomfortable at the suddenly enforced connection, almost delighting at each student who would pass between them and break their line of sight.

The other student who had participated in the assignment walked over and stood expectantly by Joshua, looking at Ms. Abigail like he wanted to redirect her gaze unto his own eyes.

‘You like it, Ms. Abigail?’ he asked prospectfully. ‘You like my poem?’

‘Joshua, could you come up here quickly please,’ directed Ms. Abigail, ignoring entirely the other student.

‘Oh, what’s this now?’ said Owen annoyedly, who was standing next to his friend, waiting for them to leave together. ‘You did the assignment, and now you have to wait even after class. When will you learn there’s no point doing anything in this class, Josh?’

Joshua continued dismissing him and walked up as he was told. The apt pupil, who refused to be excluded from anything that was happening, followed quietly behind him.

‘Yes?’ Josh asked politely, but with a spice of annoyance in his intonation.

His teacher looked at him, then looked back down on the paper in her hands, shaking her head in disbelief.

‘This is unlike anything I have ever read before,’ she said. ‘I mean, the meaning, the message, the passion. Did it really only take you two weeks to write this? Is this something you’ve been working at for some time? I mean it’s, it’s—it’s simply stunning; breathtaking.’

Josh attempted to conceal a look of extreme dumbfoundedness. His face did not change, but his mind wanted to ask What?! He looked down at the paper his teacher was holding: yes, it was indeed his own work, the blue scrawlings he had produced in a spiteful daze the night before. He looked back up at Ms. Abigail, who was awaiting a response.

‘Yes,’ he said, not knowing a different course of action. ‘I wrote it in two weeks.’

‘Incredible,’ responded his teacher in awe, ‘simply incredible. I mean your technique, your use of metaphor,—how you so beautifully juxtapose mortality and poverty: that the soul is but a blue stain on a page which will be taken away by death.’

This time Josh could not help himself.

‘What?!’ he exclaimed. 

He moved over next to Ms. Abigail to better see the poem she was holding, which he was certain could not possibly be his own.

‘Here,’ she said, following the words with her finger as she read them:

‘‘Blue ink, blue stains//Blue hands on the clock’ – you are combining the concept of action and consequence: you begin with blue ink, and this blue ink produces blue stains; but what is truly stunning about it is how both seem meaningless and futile when overshadowed by the looming inevitability of mortality: ‘Blue hands on the clock//Tick tock – tick tock’ – I,— I simply have no words for what I am beholding before me.’

Indeed, neither did Josh, who stood there with his mouth slightly ajar, trying to comprehend what his eyes and ears were suggesting was happening. Before he could think of anything to say, and hopefully stop his teacher before she praised him any further, not for his own work, but for her own personal delusion, she spoke again.

‘And this – oh my, this is simply marvellous!’ she continued. ‘The regret, and reminiscence in old age of what was and what could have been: ‘Where time flew//For this little blue’ – it sends tears to my eyes, truly, how time flies by and years pass, only for us to have so little to show for it; some little blue that remains when the dust settles, and we realise we have been lost all along, and we do not truly have anything we thought we possessed. We are the pauper.’

Ms. Abigail had to take a second to recompose herself. There were single tears running down her cheeks, and she was beginning to choke from the intense emotion that had taken over her.

‘Oh, I cannot believe you wrote this. It’s like you reached into my mind and snatched my thoughts, and put them down on this piece of paper.’ she said. ‘Just only a week ago, I was thinking: ‘How much of my life has gone, and what do I have to show for it?’ – Nothing, was the answer; nothing, but some measley English degree, and a class of students that don’t respect me. Not even only the students, either. The whole school hates me. Did you know I was meant to be fired back in March, but the principal never went through with it, because she did not want to talk to me that much?’

Josh had not known it, though he did find it tragically amusing, and he would be sure the rest of the school found out soon enough.

‘In that moment, when I was looking back, you know what word came to mind, Joshua? Do you know how I described myself?’ she asked.

Ms. Abigail almost gave Josh a moment to answer, though the question was so clearly rhetorical.

‘I thought to myself, just then, that I was as poor in my life with anything of any meaning as a pauper is of their possessions. That’s what I thought Joshua, and here you have written that exact same thing on this page of paper, and I could not help immediately think to myself when I read it if you hadn’t somehow read my mind.’

This last idea seemed to remind her of something, as her teary eyes began to glisten with inspired certainty.

‘Have you heard of dream sharing, Joshua?’ she asked him.

‘No, miss,’ he told her. He truly did not know, but he could not help but worry what the name suggested she might be getting at.

While the two were engaging in this conversation, Owen was still waiting at the door of the classroom, in just about as much discomfort as Josh. He wondered what his friend could have possibly written in the poem that would have justified such a response from the person he believed to be the closest a living human being could be to resembling, more in demeanour than appearance – thought not entirely excluding the latter – a walking, waking corpse.

‘Dream sharing,’ explained Ms. Abigail, who was becoming increasingly more passionate as the conversation progressed, ‘is when two individuals, no matter who they are and no matter where they find themselves on the globe, have the exact same dream as one another. I was thinking, maybe it’s possible we had the same dream, and our minds connected?’

Josh concealed an internal sigh as he confirmed his imaginings were not far off the mark.

‘No, that’s unlikely Ms. Abigail. I haven’t had a dream since I was five years old,’ reacted Josh – not entirely truthfully – before she could go any further. He was beginning to feel sympathy for his teacher after she opened up, so although she was starting to speak complete nonsense, he tried to sound as polite as he possibly could.

‘That’s not possible,’ said Ms. Abigail. There was no conviction in her voice, as though despite the fact she was about to defend her stance, she knew it was too unlikely to be true. ‘Everybody has dreams, but you don’t always remember them. You can still share dreams even if you don’t remember them,’ she said.

‘My doctor told me I don’t have any dreams of any sort, even the ones you forget,’ blurted out Josh, not watching what he was saying so long as it pushed him closer to the end of this particular component of the conversation.

‘Your doctor?’ asked Ms. Abigail in disbelief.

‘Yes, my doctor,’ Josh confirmed.

‘What doctor do you go to for that?’ she asked.

‘The, uhm…’ Josh gave himself a moment to think of something that sounded truthful and credible. 

‘The sleep doctor,’ he said.

‘The sleep doctor?’ echoed Ms. Abigail.

‘Yes miss, the sleep doctor. He told me I have a brain condition that means I absolutely cannot have any dreams at all.’ explained Josh.

‘That’s what he told you?’ asked Ms. Abigail, the hope in her voice escaping like air from a punctured tire.

‘Yep,’ said Josh, without but a hint of conviction in his voice; he had clearly run out of it many sentences ago.

‘Well, that’s unfortunate then,’ said his teacher despondently. ‘I really thought we might have shared dreams, because then that would mean, in some way, we both wrote this poem. And I’ve never written anything this… this beautiful myself…’ 

There were more words ready to leave her throat, but she started tearing up and choking again.

Josh felt the confusion had stretched long enough, and wanted to clear up the absurd misunderstanding surrounding his poem.

‘I’m sorry miss, but it was all me,’ he said. ‘I wrote the poem, but I need to tell you that everything you said before, about all those meanings and metaphors about time and death and poverty, it was all…’

‘It was all some of the most… most exquisite poetry I’ve ever seen produced, and it deserves full marks.’ said his teacher.

‘…most – yep, most exquisite, that’s – I was just about to say the same thing.’ said Josh, biting his tongue and letting the madness unravel itself.

‘But I don’t think something of this calibre deserves the normal full marks of a mere poetry assignment,’ continued Ms. Abigail. ‘I think the only thing that could possibly begin to give this justice,’ she said, ‘would be if I give you full marks for the year, including the final winter and summer exams. I only think it’s fair, though nothing I could ever do will truly express my gratitude for your bringing such glorious art into the world.’

Josh was completely stunned at what he was hearing, and a quick glance at Owen showed he shared his amazement. He was terrified that if he did not follow along now, he would stumble and lose this heavensent miracle.

‘Thank you so much, miss. I’m really happy you liked it.’ said Joshua.

‘No, Joshua, thank you.’ his teacher replied. She put the page back down on the desk with undue care and gentleness. Then, standing up from her chair, when Joshua was least expecting it, she wrapped her arms around him in an embracing hug.

The same fear of messing up kept Josh completely silent through the inappropriate hug, which lasted about ten seconds longer than it should have, lasting ten seconds in total. Ms. Abigail’s tears soaked his t-shirt as she silently sobbed into his shoulder.

‘Anyway,’ she said, finally stepping away. ‘I have kept you much longer than I should have. There are other parts of the world that need your brilliance. Go, Joshua! Bless the world with your brilliance!’

And with that, Joshua was set free from Ms. Abigail’s clutches. Trying not to seem too elated at his release, he carefully turned around and started to march joyfully towards Owen. On the way over to his friend, he passed by the other student who had submitted an assignment, who during the whole conversation had been standing silently, practically invisible, inside the room. His face had turned bright red, and his eyes shined with a shattering glare, which would have sent a shiver down Joshua’s spine had it not been devoid of any kind of threatening intention. The glare followed Josh in the same silence it had held up until that point till he left the classroom, where he lost it by closing the door and breaking their line of sight.

‘What’s his deal?’ asked Owen when they walked a few steps down the hallway.

‘No idea,’ said Josh. ‘Do you even know his name?’

‘I thought it was Adam or something,’ answered Owen. ‘I’ve never talked to him, he seems to always be alone in some corner. Also, I think he talks to himself? Just weird in general.’

The two walked a few steps in silence.

‘And the sheer volume of his assignment,’ continued Owen after the short pause. ‘Do you even think any of those pages make any sense? Or do you think he just wrote complete nonsense for a thousand pages?’

‘Yeah, must be,’ answered Joshua dismissively, who didn’t care to make known how the same comment could be applied to his own work.

‘Well at least you got those marks you wanted so badly,’ said Owen after another short pause. The two reached the end of the hallway and stopped by their next class, where their fellow classmates could be seen waiting through the thin window of the classroom door.

‘By the way,’ said Owen, stopping Josh in his tracks as he was about to open the door – ‘what was your fantastic poem? Why did Ms. Abigail get so emotional? I wasn’t sure she even had emotions, and there you go, making her have so many all at once. She might have gotten her life’s worth of them out in one go…’

Joshua was just about to come clean to his friend about the sheer nonsensicality of it all, and how a miraculously beautiful conclusion came from a puzzlingly enigmatic misunderstanding of precisely that poetic absurdity which he had considered the night he wrote his masterpiece, when, like a bolt of lightning mixed with a gust of powerful wind, another person seemingly materialised right beside them.

‘Just who do you think you are?!’ the presence roared.

Shocked and stunned with confusion and uncertainty, Joshua and Owen swiftly looked to see who had rushed over next to them so quickly. 

The arresting words had come from the thundering voice of Adam, rupturing like a dormant volcano after an eternity of silence in the English classroom. The aspiring student was just as red as he was when he stared Joshua down outside the classroom, and red tendrils were starting to form from rage in his bloodshot eyes.

‘Who do you think you are?!’ he repeated, taking an additional step towards Joshua, bringing their faces only a few centimetres apart. It was clear from his heightened state of upset and frustration that he was trying to appear threatening to Josh, however, for all he tried, Joshua simply could not feel threatened by the homeless-looking teenager, whose voice squeaked and cracked once it left its comfortable octave range. In fact, it took some effort for the two friends to not start giggling like possessed schoolgirls, but the two of them kept quiet and listened to how the peculiarity would unfold.

‘That was meant to be my moment,’ Adam continued, ‘I have been working on that poem for a whole year now, crafting, planning, recrafting and replanning, awaiting and anticipating the moment I could show it, and just when that opportunity shows itself, you come in and you, and you, you… you steal it away! like a, like a, a… like a thief! A stealing thief!’

The student’s fluency and eloquence brought once more into question the quality of the poetry he devoted half a forest to immortalising, but in order to give him some benefit of the doubt, his agitation was blamed for arousing him beyond the capacity of articulate speech.

‘Woah, slow down,’ said Josh, who still was not in the slightest worried about the raging thunderstorm contained in the dishevelled teacup before him, and was only that much closer to laughing at the pathetic display. Nonetheless, he was still hoping to attend his next class on time, which he was already nearly late to, and wished to help dissolve the hopeless antics.

‘Slow down?!’ Adam squeaked, nearly shattering the thin pane of glass in the door. ‘You, you, you… y-’

He started stepping on his own tongue with all the words he wanted to express all at once, and stepped back to recompose himself. After ten seconds of his frustrated silence, which were interrupted in the background by the lesson starting on the other side of the door, Adam finally calmly released an intelligible sentence.

‘You know what?’ he said, all prior fury evaporated completely from his voice, ‘it doesn’t even matter what Ms. Abigail thinks. What does she know anyway? Nobody in the school even respects her.’

The two friends started to feel relieved the insanity had concluded so quickly, vanishing as rapidly as it materialised, and the two were about to ignore any subsequent words that would drift out the student’s mouth and walk into their next class; but Adam was not finished talking.

‘All that matters is what our majesty Queen Nia thinks, and it will be her judgement that is final,’ he added.

Joshua and Owen could not help looking one another in the eye to confirm they were both hearing the same insanity leave the student’s mouth. When each look assured them they heard the exact same thing, they both burst out into gut-shattering laughter.

‘‘our majesty’? ‘Queen’?’ Josh and Owen managed to slip certain words into the pauses in their laughter.

The display of disrespect and ridicule helped revitalise some of the rage Adam managed to subdue earlier, but he now suddenly found a confident purpose in his most recent assertion, which helped him rise above the mockery of those below him.

‘Just come meet me behind the building after school. Then, and only then, will we see who the true poet is,’ he uttered, and saying no more than that, he quietly walked away down the hallway, and left the two hysterics laughing before the classroom door.

The friends continued their laughter for a few moments more, before the door they were standing by violently opened, and Mr. Cristo – their geography teacher – berated them for causing such a noise disruption outside his class, and rushed them to come inside and take their seats. 

The two let out a few more muffled chuckles, and without being told twice, quietly followed the teacher’s instructions.

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