HAYNTA-1
Part One: The first ten years of my life passed uneventfully.
Part Two: The eleventh through fifteenth years of my life, I passed in a state somewhere between misery and angriness, leaning towards misery. I was a vagabond. A misfit, a ne’er-do-well, an oddball, a clown, an idler, an ingrate, a bum, an underachiever, a weirdo, an outsider, a bumbler, a bungler, a fatso. You name it, I was it. Part of me was proud of being such a vagabond, if I may condense all of these lovely designations into one marvelous word, but mainly I felt bad about it—isolated, unaccepted, guilty, ashamed.
Part Three: Near the end of my fifteenth year, I was sent to Clarks Hill Institute. The next two years I spent in a state somewhere between angriness and misery, tending as time went on towards misery after an initial surge of angriness. There was a brief interlude of giddy excitement during the latter half of my second year, but it was marked by such anxiety that it could almost be called misery, itself—a different sort of misery, but misery nevertheless. During that same period of time, there was also the palliative of my Reading, Writing, and Language class; but being no more than an hour or so per day, and not even every day, at that, its effect on me, while not inconsequential, wasn’t enough to nudge me over the line from miserable to not miserable.
Part Four: Things changed, oh, about the tenth day of my third and final year as a student at Clarks Hill. That’s when my awareness that I was going to have to be my new room-mate’s guardian and protector materialized, or I should say, reached full consciousness. I had been half-aware from the moment I’d met her that she needed somebody to look after her, and that I was going to have to be the one to take that mantle from her quite obviously loving, indulgent, and over-protective parents, but this consciousness, as I say, of my duty hadn’t yet crystallized in my mind into something that I could put into words. It hadn’t become an imperative. It had remained a raw, unformed conception, or not even a conception, truly, but a flicker. A quantum fluctuation, as Jumpere might say. (New word: trystirris: a fluctuation within the mind which guides an entity even before it is conceptualized, and once conceptualized becomes a directive that is consciously pursued. Plural: trystirri.)
But on that tenth day, we, that is, my new roommate and I, were sitting on the lawn in front of the Offices/Library building, which was a popular post-supper student gathering place during the cool humid evenings of Oliaza and Valakial, among a group of boys and girls who were gabbling on and on and on about the most banal drivel one could imagine. I won’t insult your intelligence by cataloguing any of that gabble here—if you’ve ever been in the proximity of a mixed male-and-female group of fifteen-to-seventeen-year olds, you know the gist of it—other than to say that at some point somebody said to somebody else, “Well, you’re as mean as a mudman!” in response, I quite imagine, to a flirtatious rather than insulting remark. By mudman, in case you’re not from around here (as the saying goes) that is, not from a part of Lenima where the myth, or superstition, or folk-tale, whatever you want to call it, of the mudman is “everyday knowledge,” the speaker was referring to the large lumbering humanoid creatures said to roam the northern forests of Lenima stealing children and wreaking havoc on crops and livestock.
Little Bolo, as I called my new room-mate, spoke up then. She said, “I think you mean Nilfnin.” I called her Little Bolo in honor of Ruogg and Toli, a couple of imaginative boys who’d lived in my hometown of Tindop when I was a little girl. These boys were fond of creating words to describe concepts for which our language has no succinct encapsulation, and among these were a set of terms, zombo, zondigo, and bolo I can recall, and there may have been others, that referred to a wild, random, kinetic, make-it-up-as-you-go kind of energy, each with a different slant to it, and bolo having a certain fairy-esque quality about it that was manifest in Little Bolo’s personality.
Confused eyes turned towards her, and she added, “They’re Nilfnin. That’s what they call themselves. And they’re quite friendly. All the ones I know anyway. We just think they’re going to be mean when we first see them because their appearance doesn’t match the set of features that we associate with friendliness.”
A girl who was pretty in a stereotypical way but too fox-faced for my tastes, asked, “And just how many mudmen—or, what was it, Nufnen—do you know?” To my ear, she was attempting a suave, sophisticated sarcasm that was far beyond her ability to effect and which as such came off as juvenile in the extreme; and yet a couple of her companions seemed well-satisfied with her remark.
I whispered into Little Bolo’s ear, “Bolo, you should probably just, you know…” I could see that the direction of this conversation would lead to disaster and yet I didn’t want to say to her, “They’re going to be mean to you,” when she was unaware that they were going to be, and was, frankly, unaware of meanness, period, so I was somewhat at a loss as to how to get her to desist from the flight of fancy she was now sharing with these near-strangers.
Counting her fingers in thoughtful remembrance she said, with due innocence, “Well, there’s Wimdachuchuh, Yoogaistrifuchgghuy, Oonlashchichoodchych—he calls himself Boris among humans, though—and…” Mumbling, she counted the others out on her fingers, and concluded, “Okay, just seven; but they’ve all been nice. Kind. Kind as a white-robe. Yoo—that’s what I call Yoogaistrifuchgghuy—gets a little grumpy, sometimes, but even then he’s friendly.”
Nobody seemed to know how to react. She was so earnest, and seemed so young—she was a first-year student who, small and freckly, looked younger than her age—that, I assumed, they didn’t know whether to react to her as they would to a child, or to laugh at her or mock her. There were a couple of giggles from a couple of boys, and then one of them, a humdrum sort, asked, “Do you know any Forest Elves?”
“The Jaji? Oh, yeah, lots and lots,” she said with absolute earnestness, “They’re pretty shy, though, by human standards, even Towon, who’s probably the most sociable Jaji I know. Some people would think they’re standoffish, but they’re just quiet. They’re private, and a little distrustful of humans since we’ve chopped down so much of their forests. Waween’s the only one I know all that well, though. How about you?”
A few more astounded giggles arose in response to these claims, and someone else asked, “What about pixies? Do you know any pixies?”
This was getting perilously close to segueing into full-out mockery. I tugged at her arm; but seeming not to notice, she asked, “Pixies?”
“Oh come! You must know some pixies!”
She frowned. “No, I don’t think so; what, um…?”
“You know, wee high, wings…”
“Oh, you mean the Kee!” she clapped in sheer delight, “Of course, out in the meadows! I was confused because I’ve never heard them called ‘pixies.’ ‘Fairies,’ sometimes, but not ‘pixies.’ Yeah, ha ha! The Nokans hate them because they’re always playing tricks. They’re hard to know, don’t you agree?” Getting no immediate response, she went on, tacitly accepting that nobody else knew any Kee, “They don’t trust humans at all, so they’re not very straightforward when they talk to you. Anything they say is liable to be a lie—well, I shouldn’t say that; let’s just say, open to interpretation.”
Full-out laughter. “The Nokans?”
“Yeah, you know, some people call them cows; but they’re not cows, really. The Nokans; yeah, I guess most people don’t realize that they’re sentient. They’re just as intelligent as humans, but in a different…”
Someone interrupted, “Now, how did you learn a word like ‘sentient?’” and I thought, “Uh oh, here it comes,” but then a janitor dropped a sack of bricks from the roof of the Offices/Library. The bricks, a square load of dark orange ones, shattered with an ear-splitting crash on the walkway in front of the building’s double-doors, by the sheerest of luck not hitting any students, this commotion diverting the group’s attention long enough for me to draw Little Bolo away by brute force. So, no harm done; but her need for protection and guardianship now clear in my mind.
I met her the first day of my third year at Clarks Hill. Not only that, it was my leap day—my 17th. And to get the full effect of the story of how I met her, you should realize that Clarks Hill was awful. An awful school. It had been awful my first year, it had been awful my second year, and 69 days of break, for Sporch, Mowta-Wan, and Hobwan, had done nothing to improve its awfulness.
My first year there, especially my first half-year, I had, as I said, tended towards angriness. I was angry at life for being so miserable, and on top of that, I was angry at my father for sending me to Clarks Hill, even though, paradoxically, I didn’t in a thousand years want to stay home with him and my brothers.
I was angry at my teachers for turning what could have been interesting subjects into mindless borefests, and then making us do ridiculous assignments and acting as if we were ne’er-do-wells if we didn’t want to do them. And I was angry at my fellow students, first of all for going along with all of this teacherly nonsense with no more resistance, or demand for freedom, than to delay beginning their assignments until hours before their teachers had instructed them to have them completed and then to brag about how they’d finished them just in the nick of time; secondly, for acting like sex-crazed idiots pretty much every second of every day from dawn until dusk, and probably in-between too, the boys and girls alike fawning and drooling over each other like preenbills, and spending their lives with trying to impress one another as the primary of any activity, and the activity itself the secondary; and I was angry at them, thirdly, for not liking me.
But pretty soon, my combined state of angriness-misery, my misang, pendulumed away from angriness, towards misery. At some point, I realized, hey, I don’t have any friends. I’d had no friends back home—that was one of the primary reasons I’d put up as little fight as I had about coming to Clarks Hill—and I figured moving away from home could be a new start, with no baggage, and no expectations about who you are based on who you’ve been. There’d be nice, interesting people to meet and to get to know, and we’d help each other with our ridiculous schoolwork, have comical adventures together, and fall into bed at night tired and happy.
But somehow, it hadn’t happened. Nobody liked me. Of course, to be fair, I didn’t really like anybody, either; but at the time, I didn’t think of that. Nobody actually disliked me, they just didn’t like me, which in a way was worse. To dislike somebody, you have to notice them; to be disliked you have to be worthy of notice.
Back home, everyone disliked me. Well, they didn’t respect me, they didn’t understand me, and they disapproved of me, all of which sort of meshed into something that very much resembled dislike. Which meant that they noticed me. If I didn’t come home for a couple of days, they’d come looking for me, and berate me when they found me. If I didn’t do what I was told to do, or what was otherwise expected of me, they’d lecture me about how lazy, maladjusted, or ungrateful I was. If I made a piquant observation about the stupidity of someone or the silliness of our society, they’d tell me I had a lot of learning to do, or something similarly condescending.
At Clarks Hill, nobody noticed if I was gone. If I didn’t show up at class, or didn’t do my assignment, the teacher would just give me a zero for the day. If I made what I considered a humorous statement about someone’s behavior or the state of the universe, nobody was likely to hear me, and even if they did, they would ignore me. (I must admit, I seldom make my comments at a commanding volume—I’m shy, and sort of a quiet talker—so the chance of my voice being heard above the din of the busy-ness of the lives of ambitious students and harried teachers was pretty negligible, notwithstanding my personal unnoticeable-ness. But still…)
I was just the weird fatso perhaps to be mentioned in an offhand remark made by one person to impress another person, but without any malice directed specifically at me. Nobody nursed an active dislike of me other than in perhaps the vague repulsion many feel for people who just don’t quite fit in.
My first-year roommate Pindy Jorse hadn’t disliked me. She might have thought me “just weird” (which was a phrase she used among her friends, to describe anything from a boy’s behavior to a difficult class assignment), or she and her friends might have sniggered amongst themselves at some viewpoint I happened to share with them while they were yapping in Pindy’s half of our room (the other half) about themselves or about boys or some rival for the affection of some boy; but she didn’t dislike me. She didn’t think about me at all, I don’t think, except when I was present in the flesh, and in close proximity to her personal space (as was unavoidable, in the tiny rooms they provided for us at Clarks Hill). She didn’t perceive me as a part of reality except as a physical presence, and after awhile I think she stopped perceiving me even as that: She and her friends would gather on her side of the room and gabble until the cows came home, incognizant of me, whether I was idling or studying, awake or sleeping.
My second-year room-mate (Pindy had, of course, paired up after our first year with one of the many friends she’d made), Turta Pirto, who I think was from a well-to-do family of House Armadillo, or maybe it was Porcupine, didn’t dislike me, either. She ignored me right from the beginning, not out of malice, or because she’d heard from Pindy and the gang that I didn’t exist, but because she was too wrapped up in her own world of studies and boys and friends that she’d already made to notice anything that didn’t have a direct bearing on that world.
The bottom line, though, was that I’d blown it, this new chance I’d had at this new place. I was dimly aware that the reason why nobody liked me, students and teachers alike (being different or unusual, while perhaps limiting your number of friends, wouldn’t keep you from having any), was partly because I made no overtures to them, and partly because, sullen and angry, I no doubt seemed unapproachable; but the better portion of my awareness just didn’t get it. There was no reason for it; I was a nice person, an interesting person, a funny person, and I hated everyone for not liking me, and hated the world for being a place where nobody liked me.
But at the same time, I thought there must be something wrong with me, some essential component within me that was flawed or missing, which people must sense, and which must make it impossible for me to be liked, or loved, or for people to be able to relate to me at all.
So, my anger waxed and waned, my misery waxed and waned, gradually deepening, my misang swung back and forth, tending more and more towards misery, for a year and a half, with the promise of night and a potential sweet dreamland romp my only solace. (More often than not, my dreams would turn into distorted and teeth-grinding re-enactments of the more stressful events of the day, but not always: sleep offered hope—of happiness, of a romp, of an enjoyable sojourn of some sort, alone in most cases, but, if I were lucky, accompanied by likable and like-minded companions who liked me.) I would look forward to going home just to get away from Clarks Hill, and once home, would look forward to coming back to Clarks Hill just to get away from home, only of course to be disappointed when I returned to either place. Before my second year had reached its midpoint, I was about to just quit: to stop doing anything—stop doing my assignments, stop going to classes, stop making my under-the-breath comments about the ridiculousness of the world, stop existing. This was only in part a conscious decision: my body, indeed my being, was beginning to resist being told to do anything if it wasn’t going to be rewarded with any sort of joy; and even when I wanted to do an assignment, I found myself just sort of staring at the pages in front of me, unable to commence. Two things happened which staved off, as I saw it, my inevitable fall from existence, however: Mrs. Camden took over the teaching of my Reading, Writing, and Language class, and Nolk joined the janitorial staff.