Chapter Two

Damian saw a spectral-looking girl coming down the hallway, lit in the pallor of fluorescent lights whose reflection shimmered like astral creatures in the faux-marble flooring.

It was Mira. He recognized her from his acting class, and the way she always seemed… well, odd. He could never really place what it was. 

After a moment, he realized he had been looking at her for an unusually long amount of time, and his mind snapped away and he began rummaging through his bag. 

He pretended he was lost in the cacophony of student’s voices and slamming lockers, and that there was no world outside of his backpack, as if he had disappeared into its somewhat neatly ordered depths. 

He was looking for something: a small notebook his dad had given him, quarantined in a front pocket away from the potential to be obliterated by a rogue history tome, were unseen forces to loose it to wreak havoc on everything else around it.

    He noticed the world around him had grown quite quiet. Mira was gone, and so were most of the students. Damian flipped open the notebook.

    “Apotheosis,” he muttered, writing the word down. He’d remembered hearing it earlier and then lost it. 

    His father had told him to always make sure to keep a list of words that he thought were good. “You’ll want those words someday,” he had said, reverently, “when you realize that you speak from something ineffable in yourself, and that what is precious in the world is anything that can approach that quality of self that seems out of reach to the ministrations of the mundane.”

    “I don’t understand anything you just said,” Damian remembered telling him, affecting a dismissive tone.

“To be honest, I don’t either,” his Dad, Aidra, said with a shrug, sinking preposterously into his office chair until his shoulder blades nearly touched the seat. His feet up on an empty shelf, otherwise populated with books about arcane subject matter, he seemed like he was morphing into the furniture. 

“You look like the last person someone should take life advice from,”  Damian said, amused.

“Uh, excuse me–” his dad said

“You also look like a beanpole.” 

“Uh, excuse me, excuse me…” his dad said, with mock offense, becoming harder to hear as his upper body was compressed. 

Damian was impressed by the way he didn’t seem to move around all that much, but somehow stayed flexible like that.

“Alright, look, son. Insults don’t hurt if I don’t know what they mean.” 

    “You don’t know what a beanpole is?” asked Damian.

    “If it’s a pole beans go on, then I know what it is. But I’ve never bothered to look it up, so to answer your question, no, I don’t know. And that’s my last piece of advice for you today: the wisest people are not the ones who know the most, but the ones who can tell the difference between what they know and what they don’t. No matter how obvious something seems… well, sometimes especially because of how obvious something seems.”

    In the hallway at his school, Damian smiled to himself. He had written “beanpole” in his list of words. There was nothing particularly meaningful or expressive in the word itself, but it reminded him of his dad. 

    “Hi Damian,” said a mellifluous voice.

    “Oh Perseus!” he cried, his pen launching out of his hand and across the corridor. 

    When he looked up, he saw it was the girl from his acting class.

    “Oh hi,” he said, “I’m sorry, you scared me. Well, you startled me, anyhow,” he said, remembering the word that more appropriately described the situation.

    “I’m sorry,” said Mira. “You’re in my acting class, right?”

    “Yeah,” said Damian hesitantly. It was strange, he had never really talked to her before, or even thought about her. But just minutes earlier, he’d had to snap himself out of an almost trance-like state he’d been in looking at her, so that she didn’t think he was staring. And suddenly it occurred to him that something had felt so significant about that moment when he first looked at her… and he realized what it was.

            “You know,” he said, “you seem like such a nice person… Like, so nice it’s almost hard to believe anyone could be that nice. How come we’ve never talked before?”

            Chapter Three