Tap, tap, tap. From her seat, it was easy to get distracted, especially during a lesson she didn't like. Tap, tap, tap. Her eyes fell on a pearl of rain that slowly rolled down the window, gathering dust and dirt on its path, until a tiny nick cut it in half. One drop remained comfortably nestled in the nick, the other kept going, joining the same trickle one of its companion had embarked on. Tap, tap, tap. Her attention as drawn beyond the frame of the window, towards one of the few old trees that dotted the playground. They were so ancient their roots had managed to make the hard concrete crack and to break free from its tight lock. The many rifts were overflooded with rain, and the water followed the same pattern as the one steadily dripping over the foggy glass. Tap, tap, tap. She felt she could relate to that water. A free element that led a steady life when the weather was nice. The smooth surface of a lake, the lazy stroll of a stream in its riverbed, the soft ripples that coursed through the blue expense of a sea. Tap, tap, tap. An angry, ruthless element that had to submit to the caprices of Jupiter when the God fancied producing a storm from the tip of his fingers. The lakes would stir into small waves that crashed over the shores of white pebbles, the seas would run riot and the ripples would turn into giant jaws that could swallow people alive, the rivers would evolve into torrents that could rip and uproot everything in its wild chase towards the ocean. And there was absolutely nothing water could do about it. Tap, tap, tap. She was a bit like that. An element that was going through a pretty rough storm and had lost to the last drop of freedom it had possessed. She could only find comfort in the knowledge that every storm was bound to come to an end, at some point.
Tap, tap… She looked down at the pencil she had been drumming on the edge of her small desk for long minutes, and a weary sigh left her lips when the pink rubber bounced on her desperately blank piece of paper, came to a stop, then initiated a slow descent she didn't try to stop. She simple stared at it as it fatally reached the edge of the worn desk and fell on the floor. She sniffed, unconsciously wiping her nose with the back of her sleeve, and took a quick peek at her watch. Thirty more minutes to go. She looked at her maths teacher - an old, disheveled scarecrow with a bad habit of spraying too much cheap perfume all over her clothes, one of the reasons why her classroom had been given the sweet nickname of polecat burrow. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn't find it in her to focus on any of her classes. Her voice was to monotonous, dull, her explanations were shadowy at best, indecipherable at worst, and her red pen seemed to never have enough ink left to write anything more than monosyllabic comments on their papers. Good. Poor. Weak. She had long abandoned the wishful desire of getting anything better than a poor, and had long given up the idea of pursuing anything maths-related anyway. She sniffled again and rubbed her nose a bit more forcefully.
"Tyler. Psst, Tyler!"
She looked at the boy her age that had probably missed a few steps in his development, given he was at least two heads shorter than anyone else in the class. Shorter, yes, but also the most formidable bully the class counted in its ranks - a mention of his name or of the muscles he had probably grown to compensate for his height was enough to make anyone frown in disgust or cower in fear. He bent toward her with a snicker falling from his rosy lips and he threw a small blue package on her desk, which rewarded him with a few giggles from his posse - or so he liked to call the bunch of stupid boys that could have licked the mud he left in his wake with his soiled sneakers. She picked up the packet and turned it over in her hands.
"Your snout's on its period again," the curly-haired boy chuckled silently. "Might want to stick a tampon up there."
She looked down at her sleeve and noticed the bright red stain that was spreading along the coarse meshes of her woolen jumper. Another blot of blood crashed over her blank piece of paper when she blew an annoyed sigh through her nose. With a resigned shake of her head, she shoved the blue packet in her pencil case and zipped it a bit more forcefully that she intended to. She was quick to stuff the few items she had deemed necessary to take out in her tiny backpack along with her raincoat, slung it over her shoulder and walked towards the door with purposeful strides, not bothered in the least that the lesson was only half-way through.
"Where are you going in such a hurry, Miss Tyler?" the old scarecrow asked with a frown of irritation.
"Infirmary," she answered with a shrug, the blood-stained paper fluttering down on her desk. "Cerebral hemorrhage from all that crap that drips into my ears every time I walk in here. Sorry 'bout that."
She didn't wait for an answer, ignored the cheers that followed her cheeky comment, and fled the classroom before the almost senile teacher could do anything about it. Her brand new chucks squeaked on the dull green linoleum of the corridor as she made her way towards the nearest toilets. It would be ill-advised to wander in the school during lesson hours and the last thing she wanted was to get stuck in the headteacher's office pleading for a case she was bound to lose. She dropped her backpack on the counter next to the sink and fetched some toilet paper in a stall. The sound of the running tap drowned the one of the rain lashing at the thin window as she cleaned the remnants of blood that had dried on her upper lip. She stuffed her nose with a bit of the rough paper and leaned against the counter with a heavy exhale that created a thick layer of condensation on the mirror. Her own eyes stared back at her, and she wondered if this truly was the image of a fifteen year-old girl. She certainly had a penchant for make-up - the more visible, the better. The smoky eyes were something she had always been drawn to, and she had to admit it made the deep whiskey colour of her irises stand out in the most beautiful ways. That was the only thing she liked about her face. The only thing she was proud of. Her nose was okay, when blood-soaked toilet paper wasn't peeking out of her nostril. But her mouth was too full and her jaw too square, and that was something make-up couldn't hide.
She went to the window after making sure the bleeding had completely stopped, and hopped on the counter to get a better look at the same trees she had been observing back in the classroom. When the sun wasn't drowned by dark, threatening clouds, she usually could see the birds caper from one branch to the other or fly in lazy circled above their crowns of bright green leaves, hear their merry chirps and tweets. She liked to imagine what it would feel like, to just go up there in the sky, feel the wind in her hair and the cold air on her skin. Sometimes, her reveries took her even further away from that boring earth she treaded everyday. Beyond the sky, through the stars, roaming around a universe for the rest of her days. That was dream she'd had on more occasions than one. Ever since her mother had given her that telescope for her tenth birthday, not a single night went by without her staring through the lense and trying to map all the constellations she carefully catalogued in a notepad.
It must have had something to do with that recurring dream she had of travelling the immensity of space in her very own spaceship. The best part about that dream was that she never was alone. There always was this young man with ginger curls and dark green eyes travelling alongside her. A figment of her imagination that had become one of the few sources of comfort she could nestle into when her burdens became too heavy to bear on lonely nights. A figment of her imagination she had grown fond of over the years, something she prayed would grace her dreams every night before she slipped under her duvet. A figment of her imagination that was staring at her from the corner of a building on the other side of the playground, a goofy smile spread over his weird features.
Her heart missed a beat in her chest, then burst into a wild gallop that threatened to crack her ribs. Her eyes widened, so did his, with a disconcerting simultaneity. He had seen her looking back at him.
"Fuck," she cursed under her breath when he disappeared into a back alley.
She rushed to grab her bag and dashed through the door, up the corridors, hurtled down the three flights of stairs that led to automatic door opening on the playground. She winced when the cold rain drenched her jumper within seconds and tried to limit the damage, holding her backpack protectively over her head. Her chucks were far from waterproof, and the puddles her heavy steps inevitably fell into were deep enough to make dirty water splash on the thin fabric of her shoes, seeping through the eyelets and soaking her socks. Her inner soles squished as she spurred her legs to run faster, despite the jeans that were now glued to her skin and hampered her movements. Soon, she reached the same corner of the decrepit building where he'd been standing, but he was nowhere in sight. The alley was a dead-end, there weren't any doors, not even a sewer drain he could have crept into to hide from her. He had simply vanished into thin air.
She could have believed her imagination had once again played vicious tricks on her eyes, if it weren't for the large piece of paper whose corners fluttered in the gentle wind, lying in the middle of the alleyway. She looked up to the corrugated sheet that hung low between the two buildings and thanked whoever might be listening that it protected the paper from the heavy rain. She crouched next to it and tucked the wet strands of her blond hair behind her ears to prevent any drops of water from maring the deep blue ink running over the page. She pinched one of the corners to get a better look at it, but that single contact was enough to make her gasp, a searing burn coursing through her forearm so unexpectedly she had to let go of the parchment. Her head shot to the side when she heard the bell ring, and she knew that, soon, the playground would be submerged by a crowd fighting to get a premium spot under one of the few covered areas. Such as the one where she was.
She quickly fetched her raincoat from her backpack and carefully folded it around the piece of paper. She got back to her feet, brushed the dirt from her knees, and she rushed back to the toilets she had come from. She locked herself away in a stall after making sure no one was already using any other and let herself fall on the closed toilets with a sigh of defeat. She wished she had been fast enough to see him, meet him, because she was sure he was real. That young man from her dreams existed, somewhere out there, and while she couldn't explain how he appeared with so much accuracy in her dreams, or why she had felt an instantaneous connection the moment their eyes had met, it filled her with an effervescent happiness to know she wasn't alone.
She carefully unfolded her raincoat and observed the large piece of paper with avid eyes. She poked it with the tip of her finger, just one quick brush, lest the same burning sensation would inflame her arm again. But nothing happened. So, she trailed her fingers over the many circles that were drawn with meticulous precision, following the lines with a feathery touch not to smear the ink around. She supposed the circles had a meaning, might even be some kind of cryptic language, but she had not a single clue what they all could mean. The only thing she recognized was a detailed drawing of a planisphere - a wonderful achievement given the thickness of the lines and its ridiculously small size. That, and the single circle that was of a different colour, emerald green, and whose sharp lines seemed to have been drawn in a hurry. A smile tugged at the corner of lips when she realized this might very well have been some kind of paper about Earth, a test she liked to imagine the mysterious man had passed with brio.
She turned the parchment around and her breath hitched in her throat when her eyes fell on the few lines scribbled on the bottom of the page.
Helo.
Hou you are?
Nice to met yuo.
Tanx you.
The letters were oddly shaped, some slanted, some too long, some too big, some swallowed by tiny blots of ink. Obviously, whoever had written this was not familiar with the concept of the Roman alphabet, even less so with the English language itself. Among the dozens of reasons she could have found to explain this poor - but nonetheless noble - attempt at writing her own language, there was one she particularly fancied. An unreasonable reason, but a reason she wanted to believe in.
A ray of light pierced a hole through the thick clouds and fell over the paper. Her jaw dropped, not because the sun had appeared like a divine intervention after weeks of rain and rough winds, but because that light was enough to draw a few light shadows on what she thought to be a smooth surface.
"This can't be…" she started under her breath, rummaging through the bottom of her backpack to find the pencil she knew was sleeping there.
She splayed the paper over the wall of the stall with her trembling hands and the lead of her pencil swiftly stroked the paper to make the shallow relief stand out and the words, the same three words, appear all over the page. Jagged letters, hesitant lines, awful spelling mistakes and words that randomly switched places. But the meaning was there. A whole page, filled from top to bottom with that one expression that made her stomach swoop in her belly and her heart gallop in her chest.
I love you.
He didn't know where this sudden obsession for that small, dull planet they called Earth was coming from. For weeks, all of his papers had been revolving around it. From the thermodynamics of the oceans and the atmosphere, to the botany of the forests and the social anthropology of the tiny inhabitants, he probably knew more about the humans and their world than anyone else - more than most of the aforementioned humans themselves, he believed. Everything about it was too easy to understand, and that should have been enough to bore him and his brain that always seeked to dive deeper into the most complex mysteries the universe had to offer. But the fascination and the thrill never faded, never went away.
He pushed the broken door to the tiny shack he had moved to when the hole to the cave had become to small for him to go through and settled behind the rudimentary desk he had set up. Dozens of different papers were spread before him, and a dozen more would soon join them. But that wasn't something he was keen on working on in that moment. Instead, he picked up a blank page of parchment, opened the small bottle of ink in which he dipped his precious quil - that had deteriorated a bit after more than two centuries of intensive scribbling.
He cracked the joints of his fingers, repositioned the candle further away to prevent any kind of impromptu fire in his wooden shack. And he finally drew the heavy volume he had borrowed from the library from the folds of his deep red robe. He opened it to the very first page, and his lips stretched into a smile as his eyes read the title of his brand new acquisition.
Introduction to Earthian Languages.