“You’ll never get away with this, Captain Noface,” screamed Penelope. Lashed to the mainmast of a fantastically outfitted galleon, she struggled against the rough rope of her bonds as the lavish red plume from her buccaneer cap and her linen clothes bustling in the sea breeze. She needed to get away. She needed to stop him. If Captain Noface made it to Banshee Bay, nothing could stop him from stealing the spyglass. Once he had that, the world would be his.
Interrupting her train of thought was the pungent sound and aroma of vomiting at the edge of the ship rail. There, bent over the side, dressed head to toe in mangy, half-rotten black leather clothes vomited Captain Bradford “Noface” Nolander. Finished of his sickness, he wiped his mouth and replaced the white porcelain mask over his face and turned to his captive. “Yes, actually, I will. See, I suppose you say that because you’re dear friend Eon Wilder will save you.”
He held his hand up to his face and dashed to the rail once more, where he lifted the mask and spewed the remnants of his breakfast back into the sea. Wiping his mouth and replacing his mask, he muttered to himself, “Blast the eggs benedict. Such a succulent dish.”
“A captain of the most feared pirate ship in all the seas and you get seasick?” Penelope asked with a faint hint of a snicker in her voice.
Furious, Captain Noface turned to his captive and slashed his dagger across her face, leaving a fine thin cut in her cheek. “That’s enough!” Captain Noface roared. Then he stepped closer to Penelope and stuck his freakish masked face right into hers. Ghostly white, the mask took the appearance of a rotted skeleton skull. Penelope could hear his breath under the mask and see the dead flesh around his eyes swiveling underneath the mask.
“Your friend is dead, missy,” he told her. “I chained him to that rock myself and watched my crew shove it over the side. Unless he’s romancing a mermaid on the side, sweetie, he’s shark food.”
Captain Noface took out a compass from the inside pocket of his long coat and read its heading. “In one short day, the ghosts of Banshee Bay will have their human flesh, I’ll have the spyglass, and the world will have a new king.”
“Not if I have anything to say about it,” yelled a young, brave voice.
Captain Noface turned away from Penelope to see a rival galleon crashing through the sea alongside his and at the bow, Eon Wilder, brandishing a gleaming cutlass in one hand and a rope in the other.
“It can’t be!” yelled Noface. “I watched the sea swallow you whole! That rock weighed as much as our anchor. It’s impossible!”
Eon swung over on the rope and landed in front of Noface with a thud. Reaching into his shirt, Eon pulled out a small key on a lashing of string. “Ironic. A skeleton key. Works on every lock known to man.”
Livid in anger, Noface drew his cutlass and swatted at Eon, who dodged and parried away from the captain. Across the ship they dueled. Their swords rang against each other as Noface pushed Eon up the stairs and to the upper deck. Noface was vastly more skilled than Eon, but Eon had his own strengths. For every move Noface made, Eon was able to counter. Each swipe that Noface slashed through Eon’s shirt, eon countered with a scratch to the face or arm. They had made their way to the stern rail, when Noface extended himself too far and Eon swatted him over the edge.
But before Noface fell over, Eon grabbed the captain’s fancy purple scarf and kept him from falling.
“You won’t let me fall, Eon,” the captain said. “I know you. Your heart is too good. You can’t leave a man to die in the sea, even if he is your mortal enemy. Help me up and you can take me to the brig. You’ll be victorious, as usual.”
Noface reached up with a hand.
As much as Eon hated it, the captain was right. How could he let him die in the sea? No man or woman deserved that death. Eon grabbed it and pulled with all his strength. When he had the captain almost back over the rail and onto the ship’s deck, Eon heard the cocking of the captain’s pistol and felt its barrel rammed against his ribs.
“See, Eon. You could never do this.”
“Rancid half-cooked pork fat,” Eon said.
Across the ship, the entire crew could hear the wheezy grumbling in the captain’s belly, the sick churning of seasickness, the tossing of hollandaise sauce, poached eggs and ham. Slowly it bubbled, frothed and curdled until the captain could stand it no further. When the captain turned to vomit, Eon kicked him in the backside and sent him vomiting into the sea.
Wasting no time, Eon snapped to Penelope’s side and cut her lashings off. She immediately turned and gave him a long-deserved hug. For the briefest of moments, they looked into each other’s eyes and both felt a sudden twinge to move their lips closer. With the entire crew watching and the pirate seas behind them, they both leaned in closer until their lips eagerly and imperceptibly touched.
“You were really going to kiss me, weren’t you?” Penelope said.
Eon opened his eyes from the potential kiss and gone were the pirate crews, their vile captain, the fantastic rustic galleons, the buccaneer clothes rippling in the salty breezes. Only Penelope’s shoddy tree-house built from mismatched wooden planks stuck out all around them. Eon turned and below them ran a stained plank fence that divided their yards and on the other side of the fence was a matching tree with an equally shoddy tree-house perched atop it.
It took Eon a few double-takes to realize they were back in reality, where his father ran a small insurance brokerage and his mom worked part-time at St. Francis Catholic church down the block. He looked back at Penelope. She no longer wore a grand buccaneer cap with a long red plume jutting out the back. Her linen shirt, dark cotton pants and black leather gloves had been replaced by a Green Valley Middle School sweatshirt and a pair of faded jeans.
Reality was always a downer.
He thought about Penelope’s retort. Of course he wanted to kiss her, he just didn’t know when. He thought after saving her from Captain Noface would have been a great time for a heroic kiss. Had he imagined her moving closer to him, her face slowly inching, millimetering toward his lips? He felt defensive and embarrassed. Unlike his alter ego, the REAL Eon Wilder wasn’t brash, out-going and spontaneous. The REAL Eon was exactly the opposite: timid, shy and calculating.
Most of the time, he over thought everything and that made him miss out on a lot of opportunities. At Claire Stuman’s party, he bailed out of spin-the-bottle. Down at Lake Magalinet, when Suzie Cobbs and Pete Stamdahl jumped in and everyone else followed. Eon did not. All the nights over at Penelope’s watching movies, noticing her get closer and closer to him during a scary movie. Not making a move was his best move.
“Naw,” he told her. “Unless you wanted to.” The conversation always turned awkward with Eon. He had no gauge or filter between his brain and mouth.
“Have you ever had bad thoughts?” Penelope asked.
Eon felt warm. He didn’t know what she was getting at, but he had thoughts on where he wanted it go. “What do you mean?”
“Just dark thoughts. Death and hell and all that. See, sometimes, when I’m daydreaming, I’m whisked away to this dark, dark world where everything is rotting and falling apart. Cities lie in ruins. Forests reach to the sky with dead branches and the people. They’re all dark smudges, inky thumbprints of what people used to be. And they talk in this guttural, squabbling language I don’t understand.”
“Is there fire and evil?”
“No. It just seems like the world was forgotten by life and it’s slowly falling apart, decaying into a crumb of itself. And every time I have this dream, I find one of these lifeless smudges and hold it. These things have these small weak arms and legs that barely move. And when I look into the dirty nose-less face of this thing, I can sense it is me and then the smudge closes its dirty little eyes and dies in my arms.”
“No way.”
“Yeah. And remember. That little smudge is me. In that crumbling falling-apart world, I die. That’s when I usually shake out of my day dream or wake up, or come back to reality. Jiggers, scary, isn’t it?”
“That is weird.”
“What’s stranger is I think about that little smudge of me all the time now. I can’t NOT think about it. You know what I mean? I’m eating my mini-pancakes in the morning. There it is. At lunch at school – there it is. Even now, I see it just beyond you. I’m starting to worry, Eon. Am I sick? Am I crazy? Some nights I can’t get to sleep because I fixate on the smudge. I feel its last breath in my arms as I hold it. I feel it growing cold against my chest.”
“You’re not crazy, Penelope,” Eon said. “Just think of a happier place with waterfalls, swans and bunnies hopping around.”
Penelope turned away from him. “Figures a boy would recommend that,” she said. “I’m being serious, here. I’m telling you I have dark thoughts, bad thoughts, feelings I just can’t not think about. They’re there and I’m starting to feel like they’ll consume me.”
Eon felt bad for what he said, he looked down at Penelope’s hands. She was fidgeting with her charm bracelet. She only did that when something was really bothering her. He remembered giving her that bracelet. He picked out all the charms himself. Each one meant something different – a feeling each one had for the other. “Listen,” Eon said. “Maybe we should—“
“Penny!” called her mother.
Penelope scrunched her face up. She always hated being called Penny.
“Time for dinner!”
Penny shook her head, trying to forget it all. “What were you going to say, Eon?” As usual, Eon shook his head and said, “It’s nothing. I’ll tell you on the bus in the morning.”
“Okay,” she said and she reached out and pecked his cheek with her lips. “See you tomorrow.” She climbed down the ladder to the tree-house.
Eon watched her jog into her house and then she was gone. His cheek felt afire. Had she just moved to the side a little bit they would have kissed on the lips and everything wrong in this slow, dumb reality would have been righted. As he climbed down the ladder and slipped through the wiggly planks in the fence to his own yard, Eon smiled. Even though things hadn’t gone how he wanted them, he felt lucky to escape the fray with a kiss to the cheek. Stepping stones, he thought. Every small movement was a movement towards a larger event, a bigger reward. Keep on those stepping stones.
The next morning, Eon sat at the table and ate his breakfast – one handful of Cinnamon Toast Crunch, one handful of Golden Grahams and a handful of his dad’s bran flakes for a good heart. Spooning the mixture into his mouth, Eon thought about what he had wanted to tell Penelope in the tree-house. The Smudge World didn’t matter. What mattered was that he would always be around for her, no matter what. And as long as they were together, they could create a better world, one without inky thumbprint smudges for people, one where the sun still shined, where the grass and forests were still green, where water fell from full rivers with a clarity so crystal when you drank it, it cleansed you from the inside out.
She didn’t have to worry. Everything would be all right. It made him feel good to have thought about something nice to say to her, for thinking about something that would lift her spirits from the previous day. For once, he thought perhaps his calculating, shy manner would score points on this move. He was sure of it. He was so sure of it, he dazed off, thinking about the perfect world for him and Penelope. They had just found a field of Volkswagon-sized strawberries, when his mother said, “Eon! The bus will be here any second! Get going.”
Eon shook his head and grabbed his back-back from the rail-post. As he exited the front door, he could hear the deep whine and squeak of the bus brakes. By the time he turned the door had closed on the bus, so he ran. The bus had lurched only a few feet before stopping for him. The door opened and he bolted in, looking for Penelope’s standard pony-tail swinging from the backseats.
But she wasn’t there.
He sat down in his normal seat, all the way to the back and left. The bus chugged forward and Eon felt left out. She must have been sick, he thought. To tell the truth, he was so disappointed about not being able to tell her what he had planned to tell her, that his mind never considered anything more than her being sick. Then again, he had no idea to think otherwise. It was selfish in reality. That whole morning and stretching into the day, as he scoped out Penelope’s empty desks in all their classes, he practiced his speech to her over and over again.
He planned on telling her straight away when he got home, after he told her about Zak Falinn accidentally farting and soiling himself in biology. He had to lead with that. So on the bus ride home, he was brimming with the day’s events and his speech as they made the turn down his street, Burlingame Way. He was so excited to tell her everything; he caught himself laughing a few times at Zak Falinn’s expense.
The power of flatulence humor.
His face sodden with a smirk over Zakk’s messy, musical accident, Eon leaped from his seat and ran down the center of the bus. But when he got to the door, something was different. Something was wrong. His neighborhood had been drowned in flashing red and blue lights. It’s truly amazing how the mind works. Even when placed in front of numerous clues, signs and warnings, the mind never reads them properly. Sure deep down, in the taproot of the brain, it understands. But through the layers and layers of human cognitive power, that root never sees the surface, until reality grabs it with both hands, leans back and rips it from the soil. Only then, can the human mind grasp the complexities of subtle warning signs.
Eon was no different. He heard Penelope’s thoughts. He saw her fidgeting. He noticed she didn’t go to school. And now an ambulance and two police cars were on her front lawn, spinning with lights and he still hadn’t put it together. Don’t worry. He would. It only took a quick look to his house as he stepped off the bus, to rip the taproot of thought from his brain. There on the driveway stood his mother. The sight of her son coming off the bus drove her to tears. That deep thought in his brain was ripped to the surface and he knew exactly what had happened.
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