Chapter 1 (an excerpt from Potentially Harmful Material: a Novel)

“Nobody was really surprised when it happened, not really, not at the subconscious level where savage things grow.”

– STEPHEN KING, Carrie

Back in the spring of '98, Lydia Chen would always see them everywhere, but most especially when she'd make her way down the hallways of Stevenson High’s English Building that semester. She'd see Marcus and Karen as they seemed fused and pressed together against one of their lockers, usually his. Either they thought no one noticed or cared, but he'd have his hand up her shirt and over one of her still brassiered B cups. Most likely, they were the ones who gave no fucks about what they looked like. He was dressed in his customary uniform of unbelievably baggy jeans and an oversized band t-shirt. That day, it read “TOOL” in big bold letters, and Lydia wondered if the irony of such a statement was lost on Marcus. Karen had on her black flight jacket with the orange lining that she always wore. It was a size or two sizes too large for her, which probably made it easier for her to get groped without too many people noticing.

Lydia made an effort not to stare at them, but they were painfully in the periphery of her vision. She tried to act that they were just faces in the crowd as did they, but they surely knew that it was Lydia passing them by. Of course, their coolness made for the perfect pretense to act like they didn't. It was the same frigid indifference that they held towards everyone.

If any kids decided to be that bold and level an old cliché on them like “Get a room” or something of that nature, then they'd have to deal with the physical repercussions. It wasn't just Marcus they had to worry about either, Karen was known to be a bit of a scrapper herself. Red-hot misanthropy radiated off of them and bluntly cautioned everyone to stay away or at least clear a path if anyone saw them coming.

Lydia tried to hide from them and everyone else with her bleached and then Kool-Aid dyed hair, black wife beater, plaid skirt, fishnets, and combat boots. Lydia's ensemble was all armor though, a protective carapace that kept her safe inside. Karen and Marcus used to be allowed in, but she didn't like to think about it too much; besides, she was almost going to be late for 4th period Honors English with Mr. Savage.

The walls and floors of the school shared the same color scheme with such glamorous institutions as an old folk's home or maybe even a prison. Dull and drab beiges, muted blues, and soul-sucking-grays contrasted harshly against a giant golden rod banner that read "Go, Buccaneers, Go!" in big bubble letters, which Lydia presumed was drafted by equally bubbly cheerleader.

She looked at her watch and decided to get a move on and got into class right by the skin of her teeth. The bell rang and seconds later, Chen's sixteen-year-old frame barely crossed the threshold when Savage called out to her as he scrawled the day’s agenda on the blackboard.

"Ms. Chen, what time does class start?"

"Now," she deadpanned.

"Right, but you should be in your seat by now. Not rolling in like a listless tumbleweed right as the bell rings." He said with a smile, pleased with his own use of figurative language.

Lydia liked Savage a lot, mostly because he assigned good books to read and had a very modernly progressive viewpoint. Also, he was young. Probably barely out of grad school for about two to five years and hadn't had the fight beat out of him like all her other stale and stodgy mentors that she was forced to study under.

She was more than annoyed that he was putting her on the spot like this. She was the one to sit in the back of class and didn't say anything unless called on, and she liked the anonymity of that understood status. None of the other teachers questioned it, but Savage liked to push the envelope.

He'd make the wannabe gangsta kids write essays about the history of sagging when their pants drooped almost past their asses and broke the dress code. The minute someone called someone else a derogatory name, he'd call their parents and ask that they could stay after school to watch movies like Roots and Schindler's List. They would stay and watch the whole thing for the entire 2-3 hours. Afterwards, he'd ask them what it must've been like for African slaves and Jews in the camps to be discriminated against so fiercely then he'd ask these kids to really, truly, and deeply think critically about what language meant and what happens when it is abusive. He was that teacher. One of those often lampooned Dead Poets-style ones, but he got results. He had a reason to be kind of smug and in your face because that's what worked for him in the confines of Stevenson High.

Right then though, Lydia could care less about all of that. She just wanted to get into her seat, which Savage silently pointed to with a smile. Her vintage Care Bears metal lunchbox was plopped down on the hard wooden tabletop with a thunk, which drew looks of derision from all those around her. She tuned them out and opened her makeshift purse, pulling out a pen and a small spiral notebook then closed it quickly, so that no one could sneak a peak at what else was inside it. Savage finished writing on the board, which were flanked by posters that implored onlookers to read.

"Alright, you little monsters, who did the reading over the weekend?"

No one raised their hands. Savage pretended to sob uncontrollably, then flung his open hands that looked up to the ceiling and screamed, "Why God, why?!!?"

It eased the slight tension of the room that often came with students potentially not doing their homework. Hands slowly started to be raised and his faux pathos gave way to his usual cocksure demeanor. Even Lydia raised her hand, while looking down at her notebook where she doodled a drawing of a sunflower with a smiling cartoon skull in the middle of it. She was almost done with it when she heard her name being called.

"Lydia, sorry to be a bother, but would you mind halting your artistic expression for a second and share with the class your overall impression of the Twain essay?" She did as he asked, looked up, and said, "It sucked."

At that, the class tittered and some even gave her what amounted to a golf clap.

"Well, you're one of our great critics in this class. So why don't you expostulate on what you mean by 'sucked,' won't you?" said a nonplused Savage.

"Both of the main characters are liars."

"Oh, how so?"

"The mesmerizer is a conman and the kid pretends to be hypnotized for what reason? Because he just wants people to notice him? That's dumb."

"Why is that dumb then?"

"Because it is dishonest and conceited."

"Do you mean thinking that your life has more value than anyone else's is?"

"They just both seem full of themselves."

"Well let me ask you and the rest of the class as well. Do you feel cheated when you go to the movies or watch a play? A magic show?"

No one really said anything but a lot of heads began to shake.

"No, right? You just accept that it is simply nothing more than an act. A piece of fiction. An illusion and what is a synonym for that?"

"A trick." A voice behind Lydia said.

She turned around to see Jack Kessler, who quickly caught her gaze and looked away. There was an empty seat between them. She looked at Savage and said,

"So?" with a shrug.

"Well, Jack my boy, it's your turn to have your feet put to the fire. Do you mind?"

"No, I don't." Jack said with an uneasy smile.

"Of course, he didn't. He's just like the boy in the story." Lydia thought.

Jack squirmed in his seat and cleared his throat.

"People just wanted to believe in what they were seeing. They just wanted to escape."

"Interesting observation and I'd expand on that by saying that Twain still lived in a time of supreme superstition, meaning that people were scared of everything and anything and yet science was at the very beginnings of a bunch of the technological advancements that we take for granted today. So show business was just about how well you could play on the psychological weirdness of your audience and their need for some hocus-pocus. Like Jack said, people just wanted someone who could make them believe for even an hour. That's why movies became so popular when they were invented." Savage said, surveying the classroom to make sure he hadn't lost anyone before continuing,

"Anyway, Jack, do you want to escape sometimes?"

"Uh yeah, right now I do. I don't like being under the microscope."

"No one forced you to speak up."

"I had something to say though, so I could muster up at least some courage, I guess."

"Where would you go then?"

"Excuse me?"

"Where would you be if you weren't here right now?"

"Promise not to laugh?"

"I promise, but I can't say the same for your classmates though."

Everyone laughed a little bit, even Jack and Lydia, who let out a chuckle under her breath.

"I'd be on the Millennium Falcon."

The room was quiet as if no one had seen Star Wars ever.

"Han Solo's ship?" Savage asked to which someone yelled out, "Nerd!" and another made a trilling Wookie noise.

"Quiet," he continued "why?"

"Adventure, friendship, having a reason to be alive, a cause, a purpose. Sometimes, it just feels like being a teenager is like trying to find your way out of a desert without a map or a compass."

"Well said and on that note, everyone pull out your composition notebooks and get ready to do some free writing for the next 15-20 minutes."

This was met with the requisite moans and groans, but they did what they were supposed to.

Savage continued, "Write your thoughts about the story and what you think it might truly be about. I don't want a summary. What do I want?"

"Commentary." The class mumbled in unison.

***

Lydia wrote in her journal in other classes and had already written about "The Mesmerizer" when she had gotten done reading it the night before.

While everyone else feebly scribbled down their two-dimensional thoughts about their homework, she scrawled a line from one of her favorite Tori Amos songs into the margin of her notebook in all caps, "DIDN'T KNOW OUR LOVE WAS SO SMALL." She etched it so deeply into the page that its imprint would be present on the blank pages that followed for the rest of the semester.

She wrote out some more lines from that song and hoped that how the words resonated with her at that moment would fade like the inverted embossments would as she flipped through the spiral as she filled those pages with homework assignments and what she hoped was poetry.

She stared at the Amos lyric and flashed on Marcus and Karen in the hallway. Why wouldn't they talk to her, and why had they kicked her out of their little club? She didn't get it and didn't get them. They spread lies and gossip mostly about her sexual orientation to anyone that would listen. Since they were her best friends from 8th grade until this past winter break in the middle of 10th, it felt like she had no one to really listen or take her side.

***

Mr. Savage stood up. He had been grading at his desk. Lydia was jolted out of her memory trance as he started to speak. She wasn't really catching anything other than keywords. It sounded something like,

"Open. Book. Page 213. Work. Partner. Comprehension questions. Twain. Discuss."

She blinked and saw everyone partnering up except her. Almost everyone as she felt someone standing behind her with their eyes gently boring into the back of her off-red head of ratty bobbed hair.

Lydia turned to see Kessler standing over her. He wasn't fat but wasn't the athletic type either. He had almost shoulder length rust-colored hair, a Muppet-looking striped shirt, and a pair of corduroy shorts that came down to his shins and hard-shell Adidas on. If he slapped on some bondage pants and a pyramid stud belt then he might be halfway decent, Lydia thought as he towered over her.

"So I guess we're partners by default, huh?" Jack said.

"Yeah, I guess so. So what're we supposed to be doing? I zoned out."

"He wants us to answer these questions," Jack said pointing into his textbook.

"Oh right, comprehension questions. Alright."

She found the page that everyone else was on when Jack said,

"Oh, do you like NIN?"

Lydia cocked her head at him like a slightly annoyed yet inquisitive puppy.

"You know, Nine Inch Nails?" He said motioning to something else she had scribbled into the margin of the textbook.

She looked down to see where it said, "MADE MY OWN PRETTY HATE MACHINE."

"Oh yeah, of course, I do. I mean, look at me? I'd crawl into Trent's pants anytime. Especially if they were the burgundy leather ones he wore in the 'March of the Pigs' video."

They both laughed a little before she continued,

"Actually, that's a line from a Tori Amos song."

"Is she that redhead who sings about rape and stuff?"

"Not all her songs are about rape." She shot back sharply.

"I didn't mean anything by it. Anyway, is that a NIN reference?"

"Yeah, it is an N-I-N reference. Trent did a song with her on one of her records and is friends with her."

"Oh, that's cool."

They sat there not saying anything for about thirty seconds or maybe it was a million years while all the other kids were a blur of either diligence or goofing off. It was apparent from the look on his face that Jack most likely didn't get why she was so perturbed by him just asking a simple question. She was being judgmental, which seemed to her to be maybe a tad hypocritical considering that people were treating her like a pariah. When she had learned that word in class earlier in the semester, she had thought that Pariah Carey would make a great band name, and that comedic tidbit popped into her head at that moment.

Her epiphany though at that instant could've manifested itself as a big, neon green sign that sizzled the words, "Lighten up, Chen" right over her head. This guy obviously liked Nine Inch Nails, which upped his coolness factor to at least a seven, which was pretty good considering most of her other classmates rated in more of the 0-5 range. So Kessler hadn't heard much Tori Amos. He was just trying to find an in, a way to relate to her, and maybe even become her friend. He was just being nice because that's probably what he genuinely was. But nice people were a rare commodity, especially in high school. Was he a wolf in baggy clothing like the rest of the dips at Stevenson? Also, he had openly made a Sci-Fi reference in a high school class. Again, she heard the buzz of the neon and just when she was about to take her own advice, the beautiful silence that had allowed her to reach more of an enlightened clarity was interrupted.

"Are you two getting along and getting the questions done?" said Savage who must've been in earshot of the whole interchange.

Lydia wanted to say, "What do you think?" Instead, she just nodded and smiled. Kessler did the same. With that, their teacher walked over to another table to basically recycle half of the same question with a group of jocks loudly reciting lines from Dumb and Dumber.

Jack read the first question out loud,

"Number one, what does Twain as Tom do to get the mesmerizer to notice him?"

"He volunteers. He offers himself up." Lydia said, without even looking up from her book. She scratched some excess eyeliner away from the edge of her almond eyes. Jack just stared at her. Noticing, she quickly asked if he agreed or not and he simply nodded and smiled.

Lydia read the next one,

"Two, why did Tom/Twain's feelings change after the mesmerizer left town?"

Looking directly at her, Jack said, "Life went back to being boring. Maybe because he just couldn't recapture that same rush..."

Lydia cut him off,

"Have you ever seen the Basketball Diaries?"

"That movie with Leonardo DiCaprio? Isn't Marky Mark in that?"

"Yeah, he is." Lydia said with a laugh before moving on with what she was going to say,

"It's based on a book by a guy named Jim Carroll. It's like his autobiography about being a hooligan and getting addicted to heroin or something. I read it, but I like the movie more. Anyway, he says the first time he shot up was '...like a long heat wave through [his] body. Any ache or pain or sadness or guilty feeling was completely flushed out.' They show DiCaprio running through a field of poppies," Lydia almost quoted the line verbatim.

"Like that scene in Wizard of Oz?" Jack asked.

"Yeah, totally like that field, but yeah... he spends the rest of the movie trying to get back to that place and has to get clean instead because he realizes he'll never be able to."

"That's a cool connection right there. You could totally turn that in as part of an essay probably." "Shut up, I just like that movie a lot."

"Should I rent it?"

"I own it."

Jack said nothing. Things were quiet for a moment and just when either of them thought that another awkward silence might hang in the air, the bell rang and everyone began to pack up. Jack went back to his seat to grab his stuff as Savage yelled above the maelstrom of adolescent rambunctiousness,

"Read the next story, it's by Poe. Have a spooky Monday night, boils and ghouls. Be ready to talk and write about it tomorrow."

Lydia eyed Kessler, looked him up and down. She thought to herself that he wasn't that bad and even though he was grossly nice and maybe just maybe, she could distract herself with him for a little while. Either way, it was better than the alternative— being alone some more.

Jack was out the door by then when she ran up and tapped him on his shoulder. It was obvious that he was more than a little surprised to see Lydia again so soon.

"Hey?" Jack said.

"I wanted to tell you to wait up. My shrink says I have to broaden 'my friend spectrum' or something like that."

"You go to a psychologist?"

"Not anymore. I had a shrink not too long ago. But whatever, hey!"

"What?" Jack said tensing up as if he was expecting her to punch him or something.

"Do you want to come over and...um, watch Basketball Diaries after school?"

He looked genuinely astonished, but he agreed and she began to talk more than he had ever heard her before in his life.

She told him that she lived with her godfather, Ken, who was a "super busy lawyer" and, "like, never home on week nights."

Lydia told him to be by the Robert Louis Stevenson statue out by the front gate and they'd walk from there.