Deconstructing Dylan by Lesley Choyce Read Free Book Online

feel?”
    â€œIt broke my heart.”

C HAPTER N INE
    After Robyn had continued to get flak from both teachers and students at Emerson, she asked her parents to transfer her to Brevard High.
    And now she was going to get hassled by kids here, too. She would not come out and say she was straight. She would not give the losers like Vanderhague the satisfaction. She said the only good thing about homo-phobes is that they usually came right out and said what they felt. “The same isn’t true with racists,” she said. “And I know that from experience.”
    â€œI’ve decided that I’ll go to Tibet with you whenever you are ready.” I think I meant it.
    We were walking back in the front door of the school. The security guard stopped us this time. She didn’t say anything but did a quick once-over with her wand to see if we had any weapons or out-of-boundselectronic devices on us. I don’t know how Miles was able to smuggle his Veriscan in but I guess he had ways.
    â€œYou’re clean,” she said after a sweep of Robyn and then me.
    I had one of those funny flashbacks of entering a school, an older school where there were no detection devices at all. You just walked in through an open door. There was no scan arch, no hand-helds, nothing. You just walked in and went to class. I guess I had a quizzical look on my face just then.
    â€œWhat’s that about?” Robyn asked.
    â€œNothing,” I said. “Let’s get to Gillis’s class before the bell rings.
    Mercifully, Mrs. G did not call on Robyn or me to answer her questions about poetic devices. At the end of class, Robyn passed me a note. On the note was a quote she had written down by someone with the crazy name of Teilhard de Chardin who said, “Some day, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides, gravity&hellips; we shall harness&hellips;. the energies of love. Then for the second time in the world, man will have discovered fire.”
    A visual image of that very fire haunted me for the rest of the day as we went our separate ways. I couldn’t find her at the end of the school day but I knew that she was weaving her way into the fabric of my life and I would not lose track of her. Was I willing to find myself being labelled gay or even “lesbian lover” by continuingmy relationship with her? I decided I could handle it. I had a powerful feeling this beautiful dark girl had some very potent wisdom to teach me and I was going to be an A student if she was the teacher.
    On the news that night, I was appalled to hear a self-satisfied British so-called expert posing before some kind of a boat declaring the non-existence of the Loch Ness monster. “This finally puts to rest several centuries of hogwash that has been foisted on the public by charlatans,” he said. “We’ve mapped every inch of the loch and there is no monster.”
    â€œThen what is it that people claim to have seen down through the centuries?” the sexy news lady asked.
    The expert held up a hand-held vidscreen with a fuzzy image on it — a dark blob, nothing more. “Here’s your Loch Ness monster, I’m sorry to say.” But he was not sorry about anything. He was smug. “It’s a mass of vegetation, a tangle of roots and leafy material that forms in these waters. Gases form within, creating almost sealed pockets. At intervals the entire mass rises to the surface and then as the gases are released — and from our analysis, you would not want to be around to smell this event — the mass sinks again to the bottom. Sometimes this happens slowly, sometimes quickly.”
    He pointed again to his vidscreen image that proved nothing to me. “There’s your Loch Ness monster,” he repeated.
    I switched the TV off. My gut instinct told me he was wrong. I knew I was not alone with my beliefs. Here was just another conceited asshole who wanted to rob the world