October 8, 2007
The hallways of Northlake Middle school
were active with students running to shove some stuff in their bags,
then to homeroom, over to their friends, homeroom once more, and
back to their lockers. The Sixth Graders were going on a field trip
today to NoTech, a facility working to improve the human race. It
was said that there, there were beasts and experiments never before
thought of by human kind and that they were created to help remove
deficiencies of man.
“Hey Hey! Lisa!” A redhead, Lisa, stopped packing for a moment and
turned around. “Lisa, Lisa did you hear?” It was Arpeggio, a black
haired, olive skinned boy that was just a few inches shorter than her.
“Did I hear what, Arp?” Arpeggio didn’t usually smile like this, he
was normally a shyer kid that only smiled under quite specific
circumstances. This wasn’t one of those circumstances...
“I heard the teacher, Mrs. Tumpson, was talking to my parents,
talking about my legs. According to her, the scientists will be able to
fix them!”
“Arpeggio, that’s great!” Lisa glanced down at his crutches and the
braces on his legs. As a child, he had gotten polio in the lower half of
his body. Now it was shriveled up and he couldn’t walk without aid.
Although she knew she shouldn’t and that it would make him mad if he
knew, she had always felt sorry for him. Sure, he could move fast
and participate in Phys Ed, but he could never run freely without
having to drag those crutches around, or walk barefoot through a
meadow of wildflowers and feel the tall grasses tickling his feet. True,
being handicapped wasn’t all that bad for the boy, but there was so
much he was missing out on.
“I Know!” He beamed and the only thing Lisa could do was smile for
him.
When he smiles...She thought, he seems so happy when he smiles.
It’s like, like all of his problems. They’re just gone! The school bell
echoes down the hallways as many sixth graders looked up in
surprise and hurried their packing.
“Okay kids!” That was Mrs. Tumpson, “The buses are here! Put
your coats on a lets go!” The children rushed out in a storm of
madness and crowded around the buss doors. Lisa wondered why the
sliding doors of school buses always had to be so small so that one
person could fit in. It would be so much faster if they made them like
the grown-up buses, ones where the sides just lifted up and you
could walk on right away, it would be so much faster.
She and Arpeggio Pushed through the crowd and ran to the back of
the bus. They liked waving to the cars that drove behind them. But
once the bus started moving, Lisa found it peculiar that there were
less and less cars as they rode.
“Hey, Lisa?” She looked up. “Why do you think, why do you think
nobody’s following us this time?” Arpeggio looked out the back widow
and up at his friend. The landscape was vast and you could see for
miles, yet there were no cars to be found. No signs of life at all.
“Couldn’t tell ya, I don’t know. Maybe it’s because we’re going to a
top secret place that doesn’t have many visitors?”
“Then why are we going? If it’s so top secret then why are they
showing it to sixth graders?”
“ Dunno…maybe...maybe you need an appointment, like at the
dentist. Mom always complains about how hard it is for her to get me
a dentist appointment.” Arpeggio covered his mouth.
“You don’t think this is the dentist, do you Lisa?”
“No way, schools don’t like paying for that kind of stuff.”
“I don’t like the dentist Lisa, their drills hurt.”
“Maybe if you didn’t eat so much candy.”
“I don’t like hurt.”
“You don’t like pain, Arpeggio.”
“What?”
“…never mind.” Arpeggio had a relatively small vocabulary and a
knack for bad grammar. When he had first moved to Northlake from
Japan, it was horrid. At his school they had not taught English as a
required language. By now Spanish was almost the dominant
language in America so foreign schools were getting ahead and
teaching that to children instead of the usual English. Now Arpeggio
could speak Spanish like it was his birth language but had trouble
with English.
October 9, 2007
Lisa though back to the time when she was
first teaching him the language.
“Why they must sound weird?!”
“Come now Arupejio, if you study it will get easier.”
“But it strange! Why can mean two things when can’t mean
one? Why there noting rhyme with silver, or Buick and Quick no
rhyme?”
“Just ignore that, it’s tough, I know. But in order to pass third
grade, you need to speak English at least semi-fluently!” Arpeggio
(Arupejio at that time) stared down at his sneakers. Eventually they
got the hand of it and Arpeggio managed to successfully learn a few
hundred words for daily use. They still had a long way to go, but they
would manage.
The bus pulled up to an old iron gate that, surprisingly, opened
without a sound. Lisa and Arpeggio scrambled to the side window and
gazed out at the laboratory. It was big, with 13 or 14 buildings of
many different shapes and sizes. They passed one made of glass, all
glass, and it was dome shaped. Inside it was a large maze crafted
with hundreds, maybe thousands of tall green hedges. On their left
they passed a grey, square building. It was very large and had no
windows, no doors, or at least none that the pair could see.
“I wonder what’s inside…” Whispered Arpeggio. They passed
many other buildings too. Some large, some small. All strange.
The buses finally came to a halt at one building that was shaped
like a sphere and the children tumbled out. Mrs. Tumposn’s cries for
the children to settle down was drowned out by shrieks of excitement
and laughter. Like a storm of antelope they approached the great
doors and slowed when they actually opened.
Slowly, steadily, an elderly woman stepped out of the building.
Arpeggio and Lisa gasped, they had never seen anyone this old
before. Lisa studied her features, watching as she took one step after
another. Her skin was deathly white for staying inside so long. Her
long, skinny arms showed every bone, every joint. The top of her
head was almost bald, almost. A thin whisp of hair surrounded her
head, sort of like a cloud. Lisa decided that this was a rare beauty,
something only one that has been very careful in life could possibly
accomplish.
“Boys, girls,” Her voice was like the wind, soft, flowing, yet
heard over the hundred kids, “Children of Northlake Middle school. I
welcome you to NoTech. Today you will experience a one in a
lifetime change, a free-for-all pass to exhibit A9, that would be this
building right behind you. Here you will see many of our latest
experiments. Go ahead, tap on the glass. They don’t mind. Some of
the test subjects here are so friendly we have them behind a special
kind of force field, one where you can reach in and touch them but
they can’t get out. So I ask you all, enjoy your day here. The
curiosity of a child’s mind is a wonderful thing.” She finished with a
pearly white smile and slowly crept back inside. The children waited
until she was gone, then they all screamed and ran in.
Lisa and Arpeggio rushed right along with them, staring up at
the ceiling like turkeys one they entered the building. Scientists rode
around on square hover crafts and inspected the experiments one by
one. The experiments were in large, cylindrical glass rooms that
hovered about. In each room sat people with strange genetic
enhancements. Cat ears, green skin, super strength, the likes. They
seemed to be pampered and loved with something to entertain them
at some time.
“C’mon, lets go!” Arpeggio grabbed his friends hand and they
rushed to one of the hovercrafts on the floor. Within moments, the
two of them were up in the air and soaring around the room.
‘It’s just like a magic carpet ride…just like Aladdin!” Lisa
laughed and looked around. Arpeggio smiled. It really was fun,
soaring around like this. Was this how Aladdin had felt when he rode
the Magic Carpet? Maybe, but if not, he was missing out on so much.
