Welcome to Gaia! ::

The blond boy, who for all his athletic frame had an oddly prim look to him, squatted to pick up the big metal sphere where Charys had thrown it. Well, perhaps not thrown -- perhaps abandoned. Forgotten. Forsaken. Where Charys had dumped it by the side of the road like a trucker might dump a hitchhiker who refused to put out.

"Well," he said with a stiff frown, "maybe if you could separate your ear from that cellular mobile phone -- " (apparently Charlie Boyle was one of those people who asked other people if they were on "the drugs" or had ever smoked "the crack" or "the chronic" or found things on "the world wide web") " -- for more than five minutes a day, you'd have more luck with gym." He eyed her pale blue hair just like he had eyed it every time before that he'd seen her, as though in accusation of some mortal sin that he simply could not prove: that Charys's hair was dyed.

"Did you know that seizures, dizziness, motor problems, weakness, and lack of coordination are all symptoms of brain cancer? Brain cancer being caused by your mobile cell." (Where he had gotten the phrase 'mobile cell,' no one knew, but its presence in his vocabulary was sort of telling.)

He stared at her weightily for a few more minutes, then -- in a more ominous voice, repeated: "Brain cancer."

"Charboyle sounds like evidence of Bubonic Plague," he complained tiredly. 'Chazter' had apparently not been the breaking point, but 'Charboyle' was somehow too much.

Turning from the repetitiveness of gym class seemed to annoy him considerably, but he did it anyway -- contenting himself with gathering up the stray lead puts while Charys scattered them again.

"If this is going to involve your dying wish, I'm just going to warn you in advance: I'm not jumping out of a giant vat of pudding, or anything else that comes from the cafeteria. Or being fired out of a cannon. Or playing Dance Party Revelations." He began stacking the puts into a square-base pyramid.

Charlie was several inches taller than Charys, so if anything, his attempts to stand balanced on a shot put were even less successful: he tried one under each foot instead. Clearly while Dance Party Revelations was beneath him, standing on -- or repeatedly falling off of -- a pair of lead spheres was perfectly good fun and worth spending time on.

(Charlemagne Boyle had questionable priorities.)

"Vaguely, same as you, I'd guess," he ventured. "A real bleeding heart type -- kind of a pushover, the kind of good student that does all her work because she's too much of a doormat not to? Or, I don't know, it seems like it. Everyone's seen her a million times, though, she's always selling brownies and cupcakes at those Save the Shoeless Orphan Stray Puppy Heart Cancer Diabetes Third World Factory Workers Hospital bake sales." It was hard to tell if this assessment had anything to do with having met or spent time with Sidra Winters, or if Charlie had simply taken one good look at the bake sale worker and decided everything he needed to know about her on the spot. "She tutors at least one of the runners on the track team, and they're always sticking her with transfer students and having her show them around."

He got down off the shot puts after a gym aide yelled something about Proper Phys Ed Safety at them, and settled for just rolling one around under his heel. "And she's one of those Wiccan Witch-worshippers, and she sacrifices mice and buries them in the ground before every big test. One of her legs is an inch and a half longer than the other. She was born with a prehensile tail about a foot long and had to have it surgically removed, and she claims the scar is from a tattoo that she got lasered off. And she owns three sports cars from a law suit because she was hit in a car accident in elementary school. Why do you ask -- plotting her wholesome, stuffed-animal demise, Charybdis?"

(Charlemagne Boyle had an interesting sense of humor that, to the untrained ear, really just sounded like he could be kind of a jerk sometimes.)

He didn't answer right away.

At first, it seemed as though he were sincerely thinking about the question. Then, after a few seconds of the grumpy scowl that passed for 'thinking deep thoughts' on Charlie's particular face, he looked back at her, suspicious again. 'You dye your hair, don't you,' Charys really sincerely was expecting this time.

Instead, out came the words, "I don't think I like where you're going with this, Nancy Drew. I mean, in terms of things that exist in the realm of possibility, Sidra Winters going all Carrie on the school and attacking it with a giant robot is, uh, not in it. Not in the realm of possibility, errr, you know what I mean."

He now had two shot puts held precariously in the palm of one hand, and was attempting to circle them around each other like Chinese stress balls. They were gigantic and not at all meant for this purpose, so naturally it wasn't going well. One narrowly missed Charys's foot when he dropped it.

"Sorry," he rattled off with the sort of half-sincere reflexive manners boys probably had to learn to make Eagle Scout. The only thing left to do was hope he didn't get bored enough to try and learn to juggle.

"If you ask me," he said, ignoring the obvious that she had asked him, "it was some kind of, you know, like a publicity stunt. For a movie or something, maybe. But I wouldn't believe everything you hear. The newspaper hasn't printed anything like that, or not any quality newspaper, anyway. I'm sure the tabloids are claiming it was Son of Batboy! or something. What've you heard?"

(There was that look, again: You dye your hair, don't you. You got this information from the world wide web, didn't you.)

If an attempt were made to transcribe Charlie's reply to this ineloquent apology, the most likely spelling would be somewhere along the lines of 'Aaaauuuaaaauuuaaaauuuuugh.'

"Aaaauuuaaaauuuaaaauuuuugh!" replied Charlemagne Boyle, falling backward into the grass -- and probably bruising his tailbone in the process. "Oh, God, Jesus, those things weigh like twelve pounds and they -- are -- metal -- " He seemed compelled to provide some exposition for his own injury.

He brought up his knee to his chest so he could better cradle his precious foot between both hands. "I think you broke my foot," he griped, flexing it carefully. Considering the human foot was full of all sorts of tiny, breakable bones and Char's had not currently become as useful as a shoeful of pudding, it was probably not actually broken.

"Was there a purpose to your demonstration of your very failed powers of telekinesis?!" he demanded.

This took Charlie a few minutes to process. He looked at Charys: you dye your hair! Confess! was by now just running on autopilot, as looks went. He looked at the talking cat. He looked at his injured foot.

When, after all this, he seemed to have gotten the full measure of the situation, he sat back a little with his weight balanced on his hands. "Charys," he said very very calmly, "I think it's great that you got the newest Furby or whatever, and I'm really happy for you and all, seriously, congratulations, but is this really the time? Like, could it not wait? This does not qualify as 'a life-changing experience' or 'the best thing you could do for me' under pretty much any circumstances.

"I mean, if I made a list of circumstances, and I made another list of things you could do to better my life, and I put those lists together in any possible way, I can't predict the future perfectly but I'm going to have to say this, this right here," he gestured with both hands and a nod of his head at the gray cat, then at his foot with the icepack smooshed over it, "does not remotely qualify."

Charlemagne Boyle would pretty much go on like this till sundown if you let him.

Char looked very pale and sort of Post-It Note colored, which was generally not a healthy hue for human skin -- he looked sort of like he might faint, but fortunately Charys had already brought him to the nurse's office and he was already sitting on a bed, and the curtain was already drawn. If he was going to faint, he didn't want Charys Murphy to have to drag him across the soccer field, and he didn't want to have to crumple daintily to some floor like a Victorian woman (or, conversely, crack open his skull on the nearest desk), and most of anything, he definitely did not want there to be any witnesses to him fainting. Small favors.

He managed to keep steady, though, and remained staring at the big, plastic-looking pen in his lap -- the pen he was definitely never going to be able to be caught dead writing with, which he had every suspicion could write in a rainbow of colors and possibly glitter.

"Make-up?" he repeated, like this was the most important part of anything that had just transpired. Not magical powers, not talking cats, not sailor senshi. Make-up.

Charlie now looked over at his classmate with question marks practically glowing in his eyeballs. He gave every sign that at this moment, there was no one that Charlemagne Boyle could trust in the whole of the world to reassure him that make-up was not going to be involved except for Charys Murphy.

"Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, you're my only hope. Tell me there's no eyeshadow involved, or lipstick, or -- blush, or whatever." He was holding the pen in his hand now, looking like he was going to try it, so long as he could be assured he wouldn't come out of it looking like he'd just made out with Wuzzles the Clown. (Charys could already see his American Girl book writing itself before her eyes: Changes For Charlemagne!, an illustrated adventure.)