The Everborn - Nicholas Grabowsky [133]
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Andrew retired to his room early that night, around about nine o’clock. He replaced the clothes he wore all day with sweat pants and a white t-shirt, pulled down his bedcovers, switched off the room light and clicked on the knob of his table lamp. It was the usual routine on a typical Sunday night, but he was unusually tired and bored.
The entire weekend had proven to be uneventful. The small circle of friends in his life had been unavailable, having parent-decreed matters to tend to and Andrew himself had been stuck with yard work alongside his stepfather, Dan. The greenhouse he and Dan built together the previous summer next to the backyard patio was growing increasingly depressing, since the weather had grown cold and his Venus fly traps had blackened and withered. Those plants were his prize and how he’d loved feeding them chunks of ground, beef and struggling red ants with tweezers.
His high school homework was completed and rested in folders amidst textbooks beside his table lamp, below shelves of multitudes of read and reread paperbacks. Emerging into high school was easy academically, but the social complications for a newly initiated ninth-grade introvert expanded way too many unwanted horizons.
Andrew wasn’t exactly hating life; he was merely in post-pubescent purgatory.
He sat upon the edge of his bed and sedately surveyed his room. His bedroom presented a curious feast for the eyes, a feast for a boy or girl of any age. Posters of movies and movie monsters matted the otherwise antique-white walls. The overhead ceiling dripped rubber spiders and space figures of various shapes and sizes, held suspended by shoe laces and string. At the corner desk, a typewriter came up for air amidst a sea of typewritten pages and drawings of original stick-figure-like cartoons. A pile of notebooks upon his bedside table near his school textbooks harbored a handwritten collection of completed and half-completed short stories. Earlier in the day, he’d determined to work a few pages of short story scribblings before he went to sleep, but tonight this just wasn’t going to happen.
Tonight, he was tired and bored. He switched on his clock radio, but even Doctor Demento could not give him solace.
This was a weary, lonely night, and Andrew eventually called it one, and fell into a deep sleep.
Even Bari hadn’t shown herself for weeks.
He hadn’t a clue that Bari would show herself tonight, finally, not to mention a few special guest stars that would make him anything but tired and bored for the rest of his life.
37.
The Playground
Andrew awoke from a dreamless void with a start to find himself shivering from the outside frosty air. Yes, he was outside. Disoriented, his senses gathered to absorb the situation. It was difficult to grasp, being that he was freezing his ass off, being that the last thing he knew was the pillow of his warm and comfy bed in the darkness of his room.
Now, not only was he outside, but as he looked down upon himself where he was sitting, he saw that he was naked.
He was naked.
He sprang upwards in an immediate panic upon seeing this, only to knock his head into a vertical metal pole situated beside him, sending him back down again with his head lowered and into his lap, his hand raised towards the now-throbbing pain coursing above his right ear.
What a fine how-do-you-do to reality.
When he raised his gaze to the world around him a second time, his awareness registered, and he knew exactly where he was.
He was at the playground of the elementary school across the street.
He could not fathom how he got there or why, and since he lacked clothes of any sort, he was frightfully apprehensive. Despite the outrageous lack of reason or sanity in it all, it occurred to him that behind this obscene practical joke Bari lurked in the shadows.
The school grounds were still and quiet and graveyard-dead, save for an