Julia From Brockton Bay: Heroica Part Two
DISCLAIMER: Worm and its characters are the creation of John "Wildbow" McCrae. The Galactic Milieu was the creation of the late Julian May. I own neither, and neither expect nor deserve any sort of financial remuneration for this work of fiction. I wrote this story for my own amusement. I do like reviews.
Individuals wishing to learn more about the Worm web serial may search for it on the Internet. Julian May's Intervention and Galactic Milieu series are available on Kindle, although hard copies can be found here and there.
ADVISORY: This chapter rated T for foul language and situations. If either offends you, please don't read it.
Julia from Brockton Bay*Julia from Brockton Bay*Julia from Brockton Bay
The weekend sucked. It started off with me doing detention after school. The teaching assistant they had there watched us like a hawk, so we couldn't talk or pass notes to each other. I had nothing to do stare at my textbooks. What was galling was knowing that the library and the computer lab stayed open until late on Fridays. I could have gone on-line and caught up with Madison and see if there was anyone else I knew from the old days either in Maine or New Brunswick.
Dad picked me up after school. He wasn't much happier with me than he'd been that morning. When I complained about detention, he totally lacked sympathy.
"You put yourself in that situation, Julia," he said, "so you'll have to face the consequences."
We rode home in silence. I thought about when my detentions would be over: probably around Labor Day. I wondered about the cool things I could do during Labor Day weekend, then I remembered: Labor Day isn't a holiday on Earth Showa. I was screwed.
Being grounded was no fun. While my parents did allow me to walk around the house and yard, I wasn't allowed to go out on the street. Worse, we didn't yet have a TV, so I couldn't zone out on the tube.
To make things more annoying, the Brats had lucked out: Mark and Lisa had bought raffle tickets at Kellman Middle School. Mark had won a video player and I got to watch him binge-watch a mini-series about some guy named Shackleton who tooled around Antarctica a hundred years ago.
I did my chores on Saturday then holed up in my room for the evening. I mostly spent it looking at my old pictures from Earth Bet. I looked back on my old life with sadness and worry: I still didn't have any way to upload my old pictures from my old drive onto a Milieu machine and I was afraid that my phone would crap out and that I'd lose all my pictures before I could save them.
Shit!
I didn't do much on Sunday. I did get permission to do a walk around the neighborhood. I didn't go very far: just a few blocks so I could better feel for where I lived. I did swing by a corner store a few blocks away and bought a soda: an Ultra-Cola, can you believe that? I did see a couple of older guys from school and said hello, but they blew me off in that oh-so-polite Canadian way. I decided that Fredericton sucked and that I looked forward to leaving it.
There was little to do on Sunday evening except help with dinner and do homework. I would have loved to have watched television, but the only working video machine was Mark's video player, and he'd lent it to Lisa. She was watching a movie I'd never heard of called The Goonies.
-Worm—Milieu—Worm—Milieu—Worm-Milieu
Dad drove me to school again on Monday. He told me that it was getting near time for me to start thinking about how I was going to get there. He said that he'd been sending out resumes and had gotten responses. He gave me two choices: I could either take a city bus or the school bus.
The morning went much as I thought it would. Madame Chapelle gave us the results of our quiz: I tanked, just as I thought I would. Earth Science was Earth Science: Mr. Stone talked less about other planets and more about Earth. Meditation was meditation, although a couple of the local girls asked me why I was so uptight around the aliens. I'd listened to Dad, so I lied. I said that I didn't like them without saying why.
After lunch I had Language Arts with Mr. O'Neill. By now I'd decided that I definitely disliked him. Timmy was still on his hero thing and we'd have to put up with it. I thought about Timmy trying to teach back at Winslow: even with just the old clique and without the guys from the Empire and the ABB, we'd have eaten him alive before he could let out a squawk.
Timmy stopped talking and gesticulating. He picked up a stack of papers that looked like our homework we'd turned in on Friday. He looked sad. "I have read your essays and while I was very happy with what a couple of you turned in, most of you could have done better," he said.
I'd learned to read the sub-titles. Most of what we turned in sucked. Poor Timmy, I thought.
"However, a couple of you wrote some moving stuff," he said. "Rory, why don't you come up here and read your essay?"
The Red Bishop looked horrified. I decided that there was something to be said about remaining in the middle of the pack: you didn't get noticed and you didn't have to go through this sort of humiliation.
Rory stood up and walked to the front of the class and read his essay. I'd expected him to write about one of the capes or maybe one of the cops or Emergency Medical Technicians who went out and tried to pull the injured out from gang or Cape attacks, but Rory had chosen a different topic: he'd written about his Dad. His family's story read much like mine: they'd left the Bay before Leviathan hit town, then left town and drove through the Portal. The difference was that Rory's Dad had pulled over on the way there and had picked up a strange woman and her kid. He thought that was very heroic.
I wasn't so sure, but I got to see the other Bishop in the class making goo-goo eyes at Rory. I brought my hand up to my mouth and sneered at her. He wasn't even the guy who rescued that woman, I thought. That was his Dad. Rory was only along for the ride.
Timmy made a couple of other people read their essays out loud; one was Wendy from the Bay, who'd written about an EMT, and one of the Canadians, whose brother had rescued a boy from drowning during a fishing trip.
Timmy took his place at the front of his classroom after his last victim sat down. His expression changed from his usual happy self to something more serious. "These were all very good essays and I hope to see you guys continue to write that well this year. But one of you turned in an extra essay which didn't quite fit the assignment. It was rather dark and I thought about just grading it and handing it back, but I think you guys should hear it, too. Keith, would come up here?"
Keith walked up to the front of the class, essay in hand. He shot me a shit-eating look. I was tempted to get up and walk out of the classroom but decided against it. While I had a suspicion as to what Keith wrote about, maybe the twerp got side-tracked and went off in a different direction. Keith took a deep breath and started reading. I decided that I was really tired of Keith's nasal voice.
"Sometimes You Need A Hero, by Keith Ortner," he read.
"Sometimes you need a hero. You don't just need one when there's a Cape villain trashing a neighborhood or when some gang-member is mugging some citizen or when a first responder is pulling someone out of a burning house, but also when smaller things were happening.
"I learned that back when I was a student at Winslow High School back in January. It was the first day of class. Everybody was back from Christmas break."
Oh, shit, I thought. He's not going there, is he?
"There was this girl named," he paused, "Named Barbara Herbert. She'd been bullied by a clique of girls for over a year and a half and nobody had done anything about it."
"There were smells at my old high school and there were really bad smells. I remember one time when a user OD'd in one of the upstairs bathroom and," he paused. "The smell was awful."
A couple of the Canadians chuckled while a couple of the other Bay people looked at each other and nodded. They'd probably seen or heard of that incident.
"But someone had really gone the extra distance," Keith continued. "They'd filled up Barbara's locker with some really nasty stuff. Then they waited."
"I think we heard enough," I said.
"Calm down, Marcotti," said Trevor, one of the local jocks. "I think we can hear some more without panicking." Several of the other kids chuckled. Keith nodded thanks to Trevor and kept reading.
"Barbara came out of the classroom and passed by her locker. Then her bullies shoved her into the locker, padlocked it, and left her there. One of her bullies told her she was garbage and deserved to be left to rot."
"Nobody did anything. I think maybe a couple of people took pictures with their cell-phones, but nobody did anything. Nobody got a teacher. Nobody went to the Principal's Office, nobody got a janitor."
"Barbara was stuck in her locker for over three hours. Some teacher finally noticed and got a janitor. Someone else got the EMTs. They got her out, she was screaming and yelling and you could hear it in the classrooms behind locked doors. She spent weeks in a hospital before she came back."
"Good Lord," said O'Neill. "How could they be so cruel?"
"That didn't happen," I said. Maybe I could trick O'Neil into shutting Keith down. "He made it up."
"Yes, it did," said JT. I locked eyes with JT and gave him my best glare. He glared right back. What, the gang-banger was going to rat out on me?
"I was there," said Wendy. "So were you, Julia, right in the middle of it along with the rest of the clique."
"It's all bullshit, lies," I said.
"We all know better," said Robert, who hadn't said anything. "So did Taylor, I mean Barbara."
"Well so what?" I said. "Who cares? She was a nobody. So someone shoved her in a locker. Big deal." I decided that I would try to play it cool and tough it out.
They were all looking at me, their looks running from incredulity to loathing to disgust. I realized that I was in a place where I was alone, everybody hated me, and where I had no control. and I realized with fright that there was nothing I could say or do to make them change their minds.
I lost it. I sprinted to the door, opened it, and ran out of the building.
Julia From Brockton Bay*Julia From Brockton Bay*Julia From Brockton Bay
Authors Notes:
Labor Day is an American holiday created to honor labor. Due to most 19th century American politicians' hostility to socialism and other political currents, Labor Day was set in early September. Just before the Great Intervention, Labor Day was set at the first Monday in September. It is not an official holiday on Earth Showa.
The Locker Incident is canon from Wildbow's Worm web serial. It occurred on Taylor Hebert's first day of school in January of 2011.
Julia was not a direct participant in the locker incident. The perpetrators were Emma Barnes and Sophia Hess, with Madison Clements as an accomplice. But she was there that day.