Chapter 4
Later that day, Milton boarded the Transit Worm and was at school in time to go to his English class.
He struggled to sit through Mrs. Lawton’s boring sentence structure lecture. Why not just talk normally to people without making a big deal out of what kind of word it was or what all the rules are? He looked out the window at the clouds and frequently at Amanda Brown, the cutest girl in the class. The lecture on sentence structure was too boring to tolerate, but looking at Amanda was never tiring. Why did people think the clouds were beautiful? Where did Amanda’s beauty come from? Where does beauty come from? Can beauty happen without a God designing it? Who would care if he knew about this sentence structure stuff a hundred years from now anyway? He hated it when people told him he was using bad grammar. It was stupid because they always knew what he was talking about anyhow.
After class and after everyone else had filed out the door, Milton approached Mrs. Lawton’s desk and asked, “Mrs. Lawton, I have some English questions.”
“Really? Who’s putting you up to asking this?” she asked.
“No one. I just want to know. . .”
“Really? Why?”
“I’ve been thinking and I want to know what ‘subjective criteria’ means.”
Mrs. Lawton scowled. “That’s an odd question. Subjective criteria. You just thought of that on your own, huh?”
“Yeah, sort of,” Milton said.
Hmmm . . . Subjective is sort of . . . I guess it means; seems like.”
“Seems like what?”
“No, Milton. Stay with me now. Subjective equals seems like, or maybe an opinion without all the facts. Then you have the word criteria; which means like a standard used to make a decision. Anyway, you put them together and it sounds like . . . a bunch of nothing.”
“I knew it!”
“Who told you to ask this?”
“Just a guy.”
“Well, tell them I’m on to them and I don’t appreciate it.”
“Okay, thanks Mrs. Lawton.” Milton left before he agitated Mrs. Lawton any further.
******
On the worm shuttle ride home, Milton’s neighborhood friend, Randy Klosterman made Milton take notice of his radically altered appearance.
“Okay, I give up. What’s up with the green hair?” Milton asked.
“It’s the new me,” Randy said.
“Okaaay.”
“So, aren’t you going to ask me why I did it?”
“Not really.”
“You aren’t taken aback by it?”
“Nope. Not really. You wanted green hair, now you got it. Congratulations.”
“So you support me on it?”
“I don’t really consider green hair as a cause that anyone needs to support.”
“Why not? You are my friend, right? I’m expressing my individualism.”
“Okay. Fine. I support your green hair. Alright?”
“It started out that I told my mom I wanted to learn something really difficult so I could be special. She said, ‘why bother, when you can just do something freaky to your looks?’ It turns out that she was right, dying my hair green was a lot easier.”
“Yeah. It sure is different,” Milton said. “You were thinking on your own. No one told you to do it.”
Randy smiled. “Hey, you want to go to the holoplex tomorrow night?”
A holoplex was a place that showed holographic movies on a stage to the public.
Milton said, “I don’t know. What are they showing?”
“Pain Posse 6.”
“Okay, sure. I been wanting to see that.”
Then Randy asked, “Hey, where were you today?”
“Haz.”
“Haz? What do you mean? You went to Haz? That school computer place?”
“Yeah, so?”
“Why would you go there?”
Milton exhaled an industrial strength sigh. “Does it really matter? Will you care in a hundred years what I did this morning?”
“No. I guess not. I kinda would like to know now though.”
Milton exhaled another massive sigh. “Fine. I went to see . . .”
Randy said, “Hey! Was there a guy behind the curtain that said on the loudspeaker, ‘Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!’?”
“Yeah, in a way, I guess. His name was sleepy. But it seems like he told me a bunch of nothing and told me to ask human people myself; but that no one would want to talk to me about it.”
“That makes sense. What did you ask him?”
“I asked him if God was real.”
“You seriously asked him that? Everyone says we’re not supposed to talk about that. Especially at Haz. Who made you do it?”
“Wha . . . no one! Anyway, I might as well ask you. What do you think?”
“I think it was maybe not so smart to go there.”
“No, I mean, do you think God is real?”
Randy looked up at the shuttle’s ceiling for his answer. Then he said, “When I’m in school, I don’t really think so. I was at a funeral once, and when I was there I did kinda think that God was real.”
Milton said, “Well that’s no help. That sounds like a whole lot of . . . hey! That’s subjective criteria!”
“Really,” Randy said. “Wow.”
Milton said, “So I guess when you are in school, you have more faith that evolution is true and I guess when you think about dying you have more faith that God is real.”
“I guess so,” Randy said.
“Well,” Milton asked, “is what I said true or not?”
“I think it is,” Randy said.
Milton smiled. “Randy, you’re a genius.”
“Yeah. I get that a lot.”
Milton slowly turned to look at Randy who was staring out the shuttle window as if he was all-knowing, green hair and all. Milton was pleased at his breakthrough in understanding subjective criteria. Milton thought that perhaps now he could build upon what he knew, to find out more about God.