[Original Novel] Pariah of the Little People, Part 2

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Part 1}

Naturally I picked the seat next to the prettiest girl. It happened as though on autopilot and I regretted it even as I began to sit, remembering what sort of trouble I’d invited. It turns out I’d gotten well ahead of myself though, as she initially wouldn’t even let me sit there. “Ew” she muttered. “Go sit over there.” She gestured dismissively to a table with no obvious open seats.

“It’s...It’s full up” I whispered. “I don’t mean any disrespect. I’d just like to sit.” She heaved out a disgusted sigh. “Fine, whatever. But don’t look at me.” So I didn’t. It was difficult, as she really was intensely lovely. A shocking sensation to feel after all this time, in spite of my conviction that I was no longer capable of it.

Scandalous how little control we have over that. The body just picks someone out of the crowd and decides that’s who it wants, wrestling the uncooperative brain into submission using hormones. However you consciously know that it’s a poor choice, the body just indifferently plows ahead until it tumbles over a cliff.

“Don’t mind Heather. She’s like that to everybody. My name’s Tyler.” A very sharply dressed, distressingly skinny boy next to her extended his hand. I took it and shook vigorously, relieved to be welcomed by anyone.

Though he had a crooked nose, his hair was immaculately combed, his teeth sparkled when he smiled and I glimpsed a pink plastic barrette behind one of his ears. “That’s a nice hair clip. Is that a butterfly on it?” He froze and looked panicked. The principle turned to look at us, then came over.

“We talked about this Tyler. You know I’ll have to tell your parents.” He plucked the hair clip from the boy’s head and pocketed it. “If you have any more, tell me now.” Tyler’s lip quivered. I couldn’t understand why a piece of plastic was of any importance. When the principal left, Tyler appeared resentful until I apologized and insisted I didn’t remotely understand what just happened.

“It’s alright, I believe you. That was my favorite though.” He got up looking morose, and took his empty tray up to the counter for washing. Heather snickered. Here for five minutes and I’d already upset someone. A personal record. Keen to make friendly conversation that the incident might be forgotten, I looked around for some clue as to what the popular fads were at this school.

“There’s no Pocket Creatures” I said absentmindedly. The boy next to me, spotty faced and with a patchy mustache beginning to come in, explained that Pocket Creatures are based on evolution. I pretended that explanation made perfect sense to me and, with some sense of what they didn’t like, moved on to ascertaining what they did. Every other student had a Bible open on the table before them.

That was someplace to start. “So, the Bible huh. There’s a lot of stuff about the concept of God that makes me wonder. Like, what is God made out of?” Mustache kid looked at me like I had two heads.

“That’s a silly question” he asserted. Oh, so it’s common knowledge? But when I pressed him for the answer, he clarified that the question itself wasn’t valid. “God’s not made out of anything. God is just God, don’t overthink it.”

How could something not made out of anything exist? It didn’t line up for me. “So wait, how does God receive our prayers if he’s not made out of anything but we are? A prayer is brain activity, our brains are made out of atoms, so-” Mustache kid cut me short, informed me that you simply pray and God hears it, then called me a weirdo.

That seemed to settle the matter for him, but I’d never actually gotten an answer. So it excited me to learn that the next class would involve Bible reading followed by writing a short essay about what we read. Finally, some real answers! We filed into a classroom that a sign on the wall informed me was “core”, the general purpose room most of our classes would be held in.

Before I sat down, the teacher informed me there was “assigned seating”. That explained why everybody paused to study a wall chart on the way in. The concept delighted me as I could see how it would break up the disruptive cliques that otherwise form. But it also meant that should I make any friends, I’d not be able to sit next to them consistently. Fair trade, I concluded.

Once seated according to the chart, I and the other students were instructed to open our Bibles to Genesis. As it was the start of a new school year, she explained for the new students, we’d start with the first book of the Bible and progress through it at the rate of one full reading per year.

I love to read. It’s one of my precious few escapes from monster world. A good book is a kind of nourishment, so the prospect of immersing myself in what looked to be the thickest one I’d read to date tantalized me. At school, no less! We were to remain silent during this period too, a nice respite after the relative bustle of the cafeteria.

However, right away I spotted problems. The narrative laid out an order of the creation of the universe which even I knew to be wrong. The Earth was created before the sun and all other stars in this story, birds before land animals, plants before sea creatures as well a number of other, smaller errors. I raised my hand to ask the teacher about it, but when she came over she just told me to include the questions in my essay.

So I did. Anticipating eventual clarification, not the trip to the principal’s office that I got. I’d turned in my essay nearly an hour ago and was enjoying an interesting history lesson when a teacher’s aid appeared in the doorway and beckoned to me, frowning. Some of the other students looked at me the way they tend to when they know you’re in trouble.

“Would you care to explain what led you to write this?” The principal peered at me over his bifocals as I fidgeted nervously, dwarfed by the swiveling leather chair I sat in. “I dunno. We were told to read as much of the Bible as we could in an hour and write down our thoughts, so I did.” He sighed, then stared expectantly as if I’d been obtuse.

“I agreed to give you a chance here under the assumption that you’d make some effort to grow, spiritually. These answers come from a place of rebellion. A boy your age is in no position to say that the inspired word of God is wrong about anything. I fear your thinking may be backwards.”

I explained that the sun could not have originated after the Earth as planets form by gravity building up discs of captured debris and dust around them which gradually amass into planets. “And has anybody seen this happen?” he pried. I said that in fact they have, and photographs of distant accretion discs taken by space probes could be easily found online. This only further incensed him for some reason.

“What you’re doing is looking at the world through a secular lens which assumes no creator exists. That’s the starting point of the atheistic false scientists who’ve made such a mess of our country.” To me, that seemed to be the conclusion which observation led them to rather than their initial assumption, but I bit my tongue as he continued.

“Instead, use the Bible as your starting point. Look at the world through a Biblical lens, with the guidance of the Holy Spirit.” I asked if he meant I should first assume the contents of the Bible are true, then fit everything else I encounter into that framework. He perked up. “Yes, that’s it exactly. But it is not an assumption, it is a fact.” I asked how he knew this, and was instructed to have faith. It was a frustrating non-answer, like the one I’d gotten from that kid in the cafeteria.

When I returned to class I found I’d completely missed the rest of the section on the Roman aqueduct and other crude technologies. It really put me out as the topic fascinates me. I recalled building similar contraptions for the Homunculi settlement. The smile that it brought to my face was swiftly erased by resurgent memories of the forest fire. I suppose sometimes you can’t have the good without the bad.

As I studied the textbook before me, I imagined teams of little guys swarming all over it, taking notes before cooperating to laboriously turn each page. Some cried out as the falling page draped over them and despite myself, I chuckled. It elicited a strange look from the girl next to me. When I returned my gaze to the book, they were gone.

So instead I peered out the windows. A whole wall was comprised of them, inviting distraction. The field of tall, dry grass waved as a gentle wind tossed it about. On one side, the parking lot. On the other, a playground with a small forest immediately next to it. The only divider was a modest wall of stone blocks perhaps up to my waist, easy enough to surmount.

Something jumped out at me from the corner of my vision. A detail of the field I’d overlooked at first. I looked over it again, and again. Until I noticed some strange tangled mass near the center, laying atop the grass. Somebody’s kite? A model airplane, maybe. The teacher’s shrill command to return my attention to the front of the room interrupted my speculation. Oh well, it can wait until recess.

The textbook cover read “A.C.E: Accelerated Christian Education”. Sounds good to me I thought, seeing no downside to learning more quickly than usual. The font looked larger than I’m accustomed to, and each page was replete with cartoon illustrations.

Some took the form of two or three panel comic strips stressing the virtue of obedience. “You cleaned your room so well!” a mother says to her daughter. She replies “Yes, I am glad I obeyed. Obedience makes everyone happy. Can we go to Bible study now?”

A few were pretty abstract by comparison. The one that caught my eye depicted some sort of laughable amalgam of animal parts with a caption that read “The missing link???” What did the artist mean by it? I knew of no such creature proposed by science and couldn’t see how anything remotely like it could fit into established taxonomy.

Other strips depicted conversations between eerily wide eyed children in old fashioned clothing with a sort of forced quality. Not the sort of conversation anybody would ever actually have, but the one the artist wanted to portray for whatever reason.

“Tommy, may I introduce you to my dear friend, Jesus?” The other boy excitedly welcomed it without question, though Jesus was not physically present to meet with anybody. There was no punchline and I wondered if the author had forgotten partway through that comics are supposed to be funny.

Another below featured a woman holding a bundle of several protest signs, hair frazzled. Her infant daughter sat at her feet, asking “Mommy, now that you’re liberated, who is going to feed me?” I didn’t get any of ‘em so far, so I gave up on it. The relentless focus on total obedience unsettled me for reasons I could not yet articulate.

“Now at the time”, the teacher explained, “it was falsely believed that the Earth was flat. This is just what the scientists of the day believed. They keep getting it wrong, but still want us to believe them. It was also widely believed by scientists that flies and maggots are spontaneously generated from within meat. This was their theory of how life began, later renamed the theory of evolution.”

None of that seemed right. To my knowledge, science didn’t exist until relatively recently in history unless very loosely defined as “attempts to figure things out”. On top of which I’d recently read a detailed description of a flat Earth covered by the vault of the sky, within which the sun and the moon move about...in the book of Genesis. Somehow I doubted science was to blame for that particular error. But she pressed on.

“Today we are meant to believe that all life originated from rocks. Rocks! That one day, nothing exploded, then pieces of it started circling around each other for no reason. Then lightning struck a slimy puddle on the early Earth and some rocks in it came to life, turning into fish, then frogs, then lizards, then mice, then monkeys. And then us! From goo to you, by way of the zoo!”

Everyone else laughed at the last part but I only sat there staring, intensely disturbed by the spectacle. Either the blind leading the blind, or willful deceit. “This belief that we’re only animals, that man can be his own God and nothing matters, is responsible for every ill in the world today. Before long, if we’re to save this sin cursed nation, Godly men will have to rise up and take control of it back from the secular humanists.”

I’d never heard of secular humanism before then, but based on the tone she took while talking about it, I assumed it must be something like a mixture of leprosy, acid and angry bees. “Besides which, it doesn’t even stand up to the simplest questioning! Like for example, if human beings came from monkeys...then why are there still monkeys?”

More laughing followed. The discontent percolating within me until then finally boiled over. I simply couldn’t sit there listening to lies forever without saying something. “It was apes”. The teacher was the only one to hear me over the laughter.

“Could you speak up?” I hesitated. I don’t do well when under the spotlight. But standing there, wondering whether to continue, I recalled something I once read in a book given to me by my father: “Speak the truth, even if your voice shakes”.

So I did, firmly asserting that humans descended from apes and in fact taxonomically still are apes. Also that we did not come from modern monkeys but rather share a common ancestor with them. “Other primates still exist for the same reason that wolves still exist even though we have dogs now”, I concluded.

Several awkward seconds of silence passed. Basic science was always something Dad made sure I knew alot about, as his Dad also made it a focus when he was my age. It’s why my birthday and Christmas gifts have always tended to be educational. Little model steam engines, telescopes, crystal radio kits, stuff like that. I wondered now if it’d been a mistake.

That’s when I first heard it. A low, experimental chant at first. As if she was testing the water. Heather from lunch, I think. “Monkey boy” she said. “Monkey boy. Monkey boy. Monkey boy.” Other students near her began chanting as well, and it took on a rhythmic quality. “Mon-key-boy! Mon-key-boy! Mon-key-boy! Mon-key-boy!”

I looked around in horror as it spread. Tears welling up despite every effort to hold them back, my worst fear now realized. “MON-KEY-BOY! MON-KEY-BOY! MON-KEY-BOY! MON-KEY-BOY!” Everyone was doing it. Jeering, pointing, laughing at me for being so foolish as to suggest that humans descended from apes.

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 3!}