NOTE: This is only a first draft.

Chapter 2

At School ‘Neath the Old Oak Tree

 

The next day, time seemed to be creeping along. It felt like a year had passed since the minute hand had gone all the way around the face on the classroom clock. This clock, which was hanging crooked on the wall above the door, made wheezing noises every once in a while and sometimes the larger hand shook a little before it clicked into the next minute slot. The second hand, which was red, for some reason, seemed to move once every ten seconds or so, at least that the way it appeared to Maxwell.

He stared at the clock in his Geography class, unblinking. Mr. Mundane droned on about something or other in front of the classroom, but Maxwell wasn’t paying any attention at all. As he tore his eyes from the clock, he swung his head from side to side looking around the classroom. With a quick glance at the other students, he observed that no one else was paying attention either. Two kids had their heads on their desks, fast asleep. Three girls leaned together, their heads all but touching while they whispered about some boy, or party, or app on their phone. Two jocks in the back of the class were playing finger football. Everyone else was staring at their phones. No one was paying any attention to the teacher . . . well, no one but Georgie Wood, the smartest and strangest kid in Maxwell’s class. Georgie’s left hand was up in the air, as it had been for fifteen minutes, while he supported it with his right hand.

Mr. Mundane blatantly ignored him as he talked about something while staring out the window. His voice was even and flat, with absolutely no enthusiasm about the subject he was teaching. All-the-while, he held the cord from the window blinds and twisted it around his finger; wrapping it up, unwrapping it, wrapping it up, over and over again.

“As the rain falls to the Earth, it gathers in bodies of water,” Mr. Mundane said while gazing out the window at the fountain in front of the school. “The sun warms the water and causes it to turn from a liquid into a gas. In other words . . . evaporation. The gas then floats up into the atmosphere where it starts to cool. The molecules gather together and form a cloud. The cloud then . . .”

Mr. Mundane yawned loudly, barely covering his mouth.

Georgie Wood waved his arm weakly back and forth and also yawned, as he was the only one listening to Mr. Mundane.

“. . . releases the water where it falls back to Earth and the cycle begins again.” Mr. Mundane sighed and turned back to the class. He sighed again when he saw the pained look on Georgie’s face as he attempted to keep his tired arm in the air while he weakly wiggled his fingers.

“Yes, Georgie?”

Georgie’s arm flopped to his desk with a loud bang that made a couple of the students look up from their phones and frown at the teacher’s pet.

“Shouldn’t you also talk about snow and ice? After all, they are also forms of water?”

Mr. Mundane just stared at Georgie, who dropped his arm off of his desk to his side and swung it back and forth trying to get the blood flowing back down to his numb hand.

“Of course, Georgie.” Mr. Mundane carried on monotonically, “Water can appear in three states: liquid, gas, and a solid . . .”

Maxwell leaned back in this chair and closed his eyes. He’d never liked the structure of public school all that much, and high school was such a bore. He loved to read, and he read fast. He loved to discover new things through books, magazines, the internet, just about anything that had words. He even read the sides of cereal boxes as he ate breakfast. Because he had been reading since he was one year old – yes, I said one year old – Maxwell had already learned just about everything this school was now currently attempting to teach him. In fact, he’d finished all of the courses high school could teach him by the time he was 12-years old, which was three years ago, by reading in his spare time. Then he’d moved on to college courses, but had found that he was struggled with some of the more complex theories. Without peers to go to for help, he tried to figure out on his own some of the more intricate ideas that some of these books put forth. Sometimes he succeeded with the help of his well-read and dog-eared his Encyclopedia set, but it was over fifteen years old. He wasn’t much into computers or smart phones.

A couple of years ago, he stumbled upon a fiction book about fantastical creatures and magic. From that point on, he started reading Fantasy books by the masters. He gobbled them up, often staying awake past midnight, turning pages when he should have been sleeping.

Because of the wonderful stories he had read, Maxwell now lived in a fantasy world filled with dragons, warlocks, swordsmen, witches, demons, goblins, and other fantastical creatures. These fantasy beings continuously interrupted his life and he often found himself in situations where he was forced to fight them off, or at least die trying. Using a multitude of weapons and armor, Maxwell always saved the day and was declared a legendary hero by all that knew him. A small smile spread across Maxwell’s face as he thought of his latest feat.

In actuality, Maxwell doesn’t live in a world filled with magical creatures, but he does spend a lot of time thinking about them, and that is almost as good. He often visualizes the creatures that he has learned about, even while he’s at school. They all live inside his head, which is where Maxwell prefers to be, except for when he and Billy are hanging out.

As usual, Maxwell’s mind began to wander, which happens many times a day to this young daydreamer.  Sometimes he thinks about himself being a dwarf, spending all of his days in a mine digging for precious gems with his magical pick that was bestowed to him by a beautiful fairy princess after he saved her from being eaten by an evil wandering minstrel. Other times, he sees himself and a dark elf with long white hair, defending the elven hometree with a sword in each hand as the hordes of viscous blue-skinned, poison-tongued toad goblins attack. He has spent time reveling as he galloped across the grassy plains as a centaur, a sturdy bow strung across his broad and muscular chest with a fletcher full of golden arrows strapped to his hairy back. He even once dreamed he was a lumbering black orc with a black serrated sword who had a trusted goblin friend beside him as they pursued a mysterious human girl that he was somehow attracted to. But that adventure took a turn for the worst and he doesn’t like to think much about that one anymore. The daydream he finds himself reliving the most is one about a group of young adventurers out to save the world from the evil plans of Baron Bar Bannik. In this fantasy, he has many friends that love him, which is something that is lacking in the real world, but at least he has Billy. The friends he pictures are always different, like he struggles with nailing exactly who they are.  They are usually made up of different kinds of creatures, like gnomes, centaurs, elves, dwarves, halflings, and even humans. Today was no different than any other day, and this time he and his companions were in the process of stopping a group of smelly red-nose trolls from smashing down a dam that would flood the valley and wipe out the Halfling town of Toathly.

Maxwell shook his head, bringing his focus back into the classroom, and glanced up at the clock. It was just a couple of seconds until lunchtime.

Tick, tock, tick, tock.

The lunch bell rang and Mr. Mundane continued to lecture, like he either didn’t hear the bell or just didn’t care. All the kids hopped up, chairs scraping across the linoleum, and practically ran out of the door. Maxwell was the last to leave. He stopped in the hallway just on the other side of the doorway and turned to look back at his teacher as the door shut behind him. Mr. Mundane was still lecturing, his eyes closed, not noticing that the classroom was empty. Maxwell shook his head as he headed down the hallway toward his locker where Billy was waiting.

“Hey, man.” Maxwell spun the dial to the right on his locker set it to 13.

“Yo.” Billy lightly punched Maxwell in the shoulder.

Maxwell spun the dial the other way. He stopped at 31. He spun the dial to the right again.

Billy leaned against the lockers and waited.

When the dial reached 49, Maxwell reached for the handle. He grabbed it with two fingers and then prayed lightly, “Please open this time.”

He pulled up and the locker door swung open.

“Thank goodness.” Billy knocked on his metal lunchbox. “The hunger, it gnaws at me so.”

Maxwell laughed lightly as grabbed the brown bag out of his locker, threw his books inside, and slammed the door shut. He spun about and both he and Billy walked quickly outside to the old, massive oak tree that sat in the middle of the lawn by the Administrative Building. This was their favorite place to eat. The southern California weather was almost always perfect for eating outside, especially in the valley.

“What do you have today,” Billy said, opening his classic Partridge Family lunchbox that his mother had found for him on eBay.

“I don’t know,” Maxwell said, sitting down beside the trunk of the tree.

“Well, I have an egg salad sandwich, some nacho cheese Doritos, an apple, yuck, and a vanilla pudding.” Billy took out his thermos and moved all of the food around in the lunchbox. “Hey, no spoon. That stinks. Do you have one?”

Maxwell looked at Billy frowning. “Now, if I had a spoon, don’t you suppose that I would need it for something?”

“Aw, man. We could just share it. I don’t have cooties.”

“I’ll bet you do.”

“Do not.”

“Do too.”

During this riveting conversation, Maxwell removed a peanut butter and strawberry preserves sandwich, a small bag of Chili & Cheese Fritos, two Cuties, and a cookie from his brown paper lunch bag.

“No spoon. But I do have a pencil if you want it.”

Billy made a face and stuck out his tongue. “I don’t want lead poisoning.”

“That’s not how you get lead poisoning.”

“Yes, it is.”

“No, it’s not.”

Eight minutes later, after Maxwell had eaten his lunch, except for his cookie, he silently watched Billy stick his finger into the pudding and pull out a glob. He stuck his finger in his mouth and moaned appreciatively.

“Pudding is sooooo delicious,” Billy said, sucking the vanilla goo off of his finger.

Maxwell rolled his eyes.

After Billy finished his pudding, he took out his handheld electronic journal and started writing down some ideas, getting pudding all over the screen.

Maxwell leaned against the tree and looked up into the branches with the intent of eating the cookie in his hand, but he started daydreaming. As he always did, he wondered about the life that must live in the tree over their heads. After all, it was a pretty massive oak tree that was hundreds of years old. He guessed that there must be small creatures that never left the tree, living their entire existence in, on, or around this ancient tree. As he often did, he imagined ants with hardened armor and sharpened incisors battling other insects for their right to live on a certain branch. This time, the bumble bees were invading the ant’s home. The bees had metal stinger swords and dive-bombed the ants. They had the advantage because they could attack from above, rather than meeting the ants head on. As they attacked, the bees impaled the ants with their swords. The battle raged all over the largest branch on the tree, the dead tumbling off the branch to land all about Maxwell as he held his cookie in his hand, not yet taking a bite. At one point, it looked like the bees were winning, until the ants massed together to form a giant shield and closed on the dive-bombing bees. Just as the ants were ready to claim victory, a swarm of praying mantis swept down to smash everything in sight with spiked maces. The bees, not to be outdone, flew up into formation and . . .

The end-of-lunch bell rang and Maxwell snapped back to reality. He quickly gathered up his trash and stuffed it inside the paper bag while shoving the cookie in his mouth as he ran toward the trash can. Billy was close behind still trying to put the journal in his front pocket as they avoiding other students. When Maxwell was ten feet away from the trash can, he jumped into the air like a basketball player and shot the wadded bag toward the can. A perfect swoosh!

“Lucky shot, Dweeb-boy!” some jock yelled.

“What a troll,” Maxwell whispered to Billy.

They ran to their lockers and gathered their textbooks and binders for their next class. They had Freshman English together and knew not to be late, for Mrs. Skinner believed in punctuality beyond anything else, and she wasn’t one to be trifled with.