The Transmuted (Chapter 4)

The words on the page had stopped making sense a few minutes ago and I finally closed the book to look around the room. The walls were an almost muted white and everyone had taken its cue, sitting silently and flipping through phones or falling into reveries. In most situations, this would be the ideal time to read but my mind kept wandering elsewhere, specifically to the desk a row over and one seat ahead of mine where Mary sat with the countenance of a goddess gazing out in front of her. Her head lay gently on her fist and was cocked slightly to the side while my imagination furiously tried to piece together how her face must’ve looked at the moment. In the meantime, I mused upon her hair, brown curls that stretched down to about her shoulder blades. It bounced almost imperceptibly as she moved her head or stretched and then slowly moved back to a quiet stillness waiting to shake once again. Inspecting closer I could see a couple individual hairs standing out and rebelling against the monolith and fraying out to the sides. Those strands made her more beautiful, they were humanizing, creating a being with the perfection of a deity and the minute imperfections of a mortal; making her simultaneously divine and tangible. Waves of conflicting emotion passed over me, racking my body with a roaring fire of poignant desire and the icy pain of an unreachable dream. Is this what love is, a beautifully tragic blend of passion and pain? For at that moment that’s what I felt, watching for the movements of a girl’s hair as my soul racked against itself, unfinished thoughts and plots of derring-do racing through my mind. My body writhed; it was the same feeling I got when I threw my hands near a fire after they froze outside in the cold, a numb pain that made me wonder whether I had hands at all. Now, the pain was diffused from the soles of my feet to the top of my head, a pervasive yet more distant pain that made me wonder whether I was there at all. My eyes searched wildly around the room trying to find something to rip my attention away but was pulled back immediately to her amber tresses.

‘Mary! Mary!’ I screamed in my mind.

I wanted to scream to the world, to release these feelings that threatened to tear me apart and to finally let her know how I feel. However, I know this was a fantasy that only ended with Mary accepting my love and neglecting her own and even in a fantasy that scenario made me uneasy. So I continued to call out to her in my head, until, like picking up on some signal, she turned around and smiled at me. I forgot all the pain for a moment and smiled back.

“Hey, do you know what time it is?” She asked.

I fumbled my phone out of my pocket and quickly woke it up,

“2:20.”

“Oh, so five minutes until this class gets out?”

“Yeah.”

“Great, five more minutes to kill,” she said turning back around her hair flinging back into place.

My heart was racing the whole time and was only just starting to return to normal. Mary and I’d been friends for a long time, and we were to a certain extent still friends, but obviously, things changed when she started dating Zack. In fact, she used to be a big part of our group but has since ascended to her rightful place higher up the food chain. Now at lunch, she sat alone with Zack away from the company of round tables yet completely occupied by the companionship of true love, or at least that what it looked like. I looked once again at her, hoping she could understand telepathically what I felt, but that was asking for too much considering I didn’t know myself what it was.

“Hey, Mike why the long face my man?” A pestering voice asked.

I turned to John, sitting on my left,

“Nothing just thinking about some stuff.”

“Oh cool. Have you checked out that new fidget spinner app? I cracked the high score in the region yesterday, it was a crazy spin like a hundred something revolutions. O.K. exactly 160 revolutions but hey who's counting? I mean I guess the rest of the region but whatever. I’m not getting a big head or anything but it’s like objectively an amazing accomplishment you know like this is a job application level achievement right here.”

He tilted the phone over towards me showing a heavily embroidered and decorated three-pronged spinner with red and purple flames running down the prongs.

“No, I don’t have it.”

“Oh. Well, you really should it's like the third highest grossing fidget spinner game in the app store.”

“Grossing? That app wasn’t free?”

“Oh yeah, it was totally free. But they give you some bland ass spinner so obviously, I put down some paper to get a spinner of this quality, here let me spin it for you.”

I watched John tap the center of the spinner and it started to spin around rapidly, a tracker at the top counting the revolutions as red and purple flames dizzyingly made their way around and around. My eyes rose up to John’s as he watched the spinner go around with a content gaze, like a father watching his little girl teetering on her infant legs.

“Oh cool.”

He watched intently as the spinner finally rounded out to 135,

“$17.50 well-spent man. I’m not saying you’re going to be world spinner material off the bat but I’m sure you’ll get there one day.”

“Yeah, maybe I will.”

He pressed the spinner again as I slumped back in my seat and reopened my book to pass the last minutes of class.