"Echoes of the Past"
Chapter 5: «Masculinity»
— Quit sleepin', loser! — Ronnie-Anne said. Lincoln stood up abruptly and began gathering his bedding, putting it back in the closet.
— It's the weekend, I can afford sleeping that much, — Lincoln said back, — Isn't it only morning, anyway?
— Let me check the time, — she said thoughtfully, turning around and looking at her watch. It was nine in the morning, which was relatively early, at least for him.
— What? You don't even know what time it is and you're already telling me to quit sleeping? — Lincoln asked, surprised, and then laughed.
— Oh, come on, — Ronnie said, and added, — In our uni, we're all awake after six, so don't complain much!
— Yeah-yeah, — Lincoln heard a lot about her university, which she quit later on and about which the following story would be about.
— I left some tacos for you. Go eat 'em.
— Tacos? But the fridge is empty!
— I already went grocery shopping and made some tacos while you were sleeping. The local prices are terrible! In Mexico, you could live on that for a month.
— Well, what can I do about that? — said Lincoln, shrugging his shoulders and going to the bathroom. After doing his business, including the daily water procedures, he went to the kitchen. Two tacos and a cup of hot coffee were on the table.
— So, how do you like my cooking?
— Thanks, Ronnie-Anne! It's yummy.
— Oh, really? You gotta be kidding me!
— No, I'm not. It's really good.
— Well, you're welcome, loser! How about some walking today?
— Today? It's too cold. Why?
— I'm so bored, there's nothing to do here in your flat. Also, I've never been to the Yukon, I only read about it in books. I've been dying to see it. So whaddya think?
— Okay, why not, — Lincoln said after a brief pause, suspicious of something wrong with Ronnie's words. He couldn't believe she had come here just to «see the Yukon». He simply couldn't believe she had come here just to see the places around, but he didn't see anything wrong with it, and agreed to go with her on a walk to Whitehorse.
Dressed warmly, they left the apartment and then the building. They saw almost no people on the streets, which Lincoln was accustomed to, but Ronnie-Anne did not understand at all.
— So weird no one is out here today. Is it always like this?
— Well, not always, of course. For example, in summer, when it's more or less warm, tourists come and visit the local nature.
— Are there any arcade halls here? — she asked with some disappointment.
— I haven't seen one here. Most people come to the Yukon either for work or for studies, so it's usually quiet here. It's Yukon, far north, so yeah.
— I see you got quiet too, didn't ya? — Ronnie-Anne teased him and laughed. Lincoln paid no attention to it.
Walking through the Yukon to get to know the city in the far north of Canada was just an excuse. Ronnie just wanted to spend as much time with Lincoln as she could, since it had been a long time since they had seen each other in person. Much longer than one could imagine. Lincoln was thinking about separate schooling at this particular moment, looking at Ronnie-Anne at the same time. He absolutely agreed that girls and boys should be educated separately to avoid debauchery which could potentially replace the whole educational process with itself and bring all sorts of unpleasant and sometimes horrible stories that should not be mentioned here. Such stories often occurred and still occur in some particularly liberal institutions.
But what about Ronnie-Ann? She was not at all fragile and weak to begin with, and she was far from conforming to the stereotype imposed on all women. It was quite the opposite: she could and can stand up for herself and never let anyone offend neither her nor her friends.
On the other hand, she was not a slutty girl, but quite modest and restrained, (but not with her friends, who she had a blast with, in a friendly way, of course). She was still light-hearted and still full of femininity, despite her temper and character.
They kept walking through the city, and when it became quite cold and the icy howling wind began blowing aggressively in their faces, they decided to go to the nearest cafe and stay there for a while to warm up. When they got in, undressed, and took a table, they were approached by a good-natured waiter, from whom they asked for two cups of black tea and a few pieces of chocolate cake.
While they were waiting for their order, Lincoln remembered another story from high school. He remembered sharing it with Ronnie-Anne once during their video call. He couldn't stand studying separately with boys, so he'd made a decision and asked his parents to change it to the co-educational school after only one year of studies in the separate one. He wanted to pour his heart out to someone (or tell the story to someone), and he poured it out to Ronnie-Anne, for Clyde, his best friend, was very busy at the time.
When he was just entering high school, his parents had suddenly decided that he lacked masculinity, because he was spending too much time with his sisters. This situation reminded Lincoln of another story from his childhood, when he (yes, he himself, by his own choice) wanted to become a «real man» and went with Clyde into the woods to spend one night in the complete wilderness. This whole idea apparently failed, and they managed to escape the dangers only with the pieces of advice given by Lincoln's sisters. Right after this story ended, he made some fundamentally flawed conclusions that he lived with until one day his parents intervened and decided to send him to a high school with single-sex education.
The problem of that story was that Lincoln decided to «become manly» on his own and chose a knowingly wrong approach to it, considering his idea to be a real standard of manliness. I hasten to assure the reader in advance that a trip in extreme conditions has absolutely nothing to do with manliness, but only with experience in organizing such trips, knowledge of the correct model of behavior in the wilderness, survival skills in these very extreme conditions, and so on and so forth.
The second error I will highlight here lies in Lincoln's conclusions themselves. To illustrate: «I, an 11-year-old child, did not stand an extreme camping trip with an overnight stay in the forest, in which there is always a risk of death even for an experienced tourist, and therefore was able to survive only by a happy accident, using my sisters' advice, which just as accidentally came in handy for me. Hence, there is no such thing as manly or girly».
It would be unnecessary to point out the fallacy of this judgment, but we can understand and forgive Lincoln for this mistake for he was just a child. His parents should have explained this topic and discussed it with him.
Back to the flashback. Lincoln immediately disapproved of his parents' idea of sending him to a segregated school, remembering the above experience and his dream, in which he had eleven brothers instead of sisters, who treated Lincoln with great contempt and offended him in every way possible.
«These were my siblings. What to say about other people's boys?» — he thought, but did not take into account that such cases are isolated and do not happen to everyone.
In any case, after much arguing, he could not convince his parents that this idea would not end well, so he ended up enrolling in the Toronto high school with separate education.
It was early August, but now it was September, and with it came the beginning of the new school year. Gathering all the necessary things in his backpack, including school supplies, he wandered towards his new school, but he couldn't even think about his new school. The circumstances prevented him from doing so because of the noise, bustle and people everywhere, which made up the daily life of such a typical metropolis. He used to think that the noisiest place in the world was his home in Royal Woods, and the noisiest people were the Loud family, but it turned out to be the opposite.
Here he approached the school building and, without looking at it for a long time, went inside. There were two boys standing in front of the entrance, and they greeted Lincoln as soon as they saw him and answered his question about where to go, explaining the route. Not bad, he thought.
First impressions are crucial because they lay the groundwork for how we feel about something. Over time, our experiences and interactions build upon this initial impression, forming a strong set of beliefs that can either support or challenge our first judgment.
The first day, the first week and the first few months of Lincoln's studies in this truly masculine school, where everyone, from students to teachers, was male, went well enough. During this time he became even more relaxed as he became more aware of people, including his peers, stopped being ashamed of things normal for his gender and became more sociable, even making a friend or two there.
However, this quiet life did not last long and finished when one fine, or rather terrible, day a toxic boy showed up in their class. He was always causing trouble for his classmates, always breaking the rules, disregarding them, and he especially disliked Lincoln, harassing him. Lincoln, being a non-conflicted child, tried to solve everything peacefully, and when he began to realize that it was pointless, he turned to his teachers for help, and they always promised to hold a preventive conversation with him and that it would not happen again. But whether he was such a skillful pretender and was able to become white and fluffy at those moments when teachers talked to him and asked about the reasons for this or that particular conflict, about which his classmates complained, or whether he somehow managed to negotiate with them about it, somehow bribed or simply intimidated, no one knew. The only thing that was known was that he was from a family that wasn't exactly well off, and that he needed professional help, which they couldn't afford, and the only therapy available was to cause suffering to others, which he never shied away from.
It was already the second month since Alfred (that was the guy's name) had entered both school's and Lincoln's lives. It was winter and Lincoln was walking home after class in the dark, which was risky enough that he could run into trouble at any moment. And the problem occurred. When Lincoln turned into a back alley and from there he stepped out into the sparsely populated passage between buildings, as he usually did to take a shortcut home from school, he met Alfred. Linc had a premonition of imminent trouble, but instead of running away, he stood like a stiff-necked man.
— Well, here you are, sucker? — said the aggressor after a short pause and an exchange of glances.
— What do you want, Alfred? — asked the frightened Lincoln.
— Do you remember how you snitched on me to Graham?
Lincoln's mind flashed back to an episode when he had to complain to Mr. Graham (the school principal) about Alfred because he had once again extorted small change from someone. He didn't, however, know what happened after that incident.
— Do you know what happened after that?
Lincoln nodded his head negatively from side to side.
— He made me scrub the entire classroom! Pretty cool, huh? — After asking the last rhetorical question, he began to walk slowly towards Lincoln.
— That day, just so you understand, I wanted to visit my sick mother, who has been in the hospital for a month.
Lincoln didn't answer anything out of fear, but his thought process went into overdrive and produced one objection after another, saying, «If you had thought about your mother, you wouldn't have harassed anyone then, so you wouldn't have been punished for it!» But he was silent and could not say a word.
— Do you want to know what happens to those who set me up like that? — At that moment, something appeared in his hand that Lincoln couldn't see clearly in the darkness, but he vaguely guessed that it was a knife. In any case, he clearly wanted to traumatize Lincoln and had brought a weapon with him to do so.
When he saw this very «something», Lincoln's instinct for self-preservation kicked in, his heart raced in his chest, and he ran away as fast as he could. Alfred chased after him, but at some point stopped abruptly, and... cried. Lincoln heard his crying and stopped, looking back and being greatly surprised by it. After all, he clearly wanted to traumatize him! What happened now, why did he stop? This was strange and couldn't be explained.
As he got closer to Alfred, he wanted to talk to him, but the latter only pushed Lincoln away from him and then walked away in an unknown direction. Lincoln would have remained standing there for a long time, but then his mother called him and asked where he was. He told her that he would be home soon, and he started walking, but took a completely different and safer route.
When he returned home, the first thing he did was that he told both his parents and his sisters about the problem and ask them to transfer him to another class or maybe even school, sharing his concerns and fears.
— Hello? — said Ronnie-Anne, kicking him out of trance. He was too engaged in his memories.
— Huh? Oh, yeah, tea… — he said, sipping from his cup.
— What's in your mind?
— Well, there's nothing much I can share with you.
— Come on! I'm sure there is. Go on.
— I just remembered Alfred.
— Oh. I see… — said Ronnie sadly, — yeah, I remember this story. I also remember that you told me what happened with him after school. Well, let's not raise the bad memories…
Then they were silent, and were so for quite a long time, and no one dared to break this silence first. The icy northern wind was still blowing and one could hear its howl even from inside of the cafe. It wouldn't stop and it seemed to be carrying on for long months.
