Henry Rising

“Looks like rain.”

Someone Henry could not identify said.

“Snow.”

Miss Madigan choked.

“It would be good if they cancelled it. For Henry.”

“We’ve never cancelled.”

Principal Lawrence called out from the doorway.

Henry crouched with his back against the cold brick and his hands knitted together in a tight ball. Something was falling from the sky. It could have been snow three hundred feet ago.

“Doesn’t matter. He’s just not going to make it. It’s like sea turtles. You know.”

The cigarette smoke curled in the air as Miss Madigan spoke. It crept around the corner right into Henry’s face.

“What do you mean it’s like sea turtles? It’s not like sea turtles at all.” Mr. Prost said, “Most of the sea turtles get eaten before they make it to the water. This is the opposite.”

Some of the other teachers mumbled things Henry strained to hear. The sweat building in his palms felt sticky.

“There’s one or two each year.”

Miss Madigan took another drag.

Henry’s daddy was in the habit of smoking a pack a day, so Henry was no stranger to the sensation of being blasted by the hazy fronts. Still, he held his breath and waved his hand in front of his face. Miss Madigan smoked like a chimney. She tried to cover it up with a coconut scented oil that made her hands slick. They left greasy marks on the graded papers. A little spot at the corner of every page.

“No future.”

Piped up Mrs. Gray, matter of factly.

“No.” Mr. Prost snapped firmly, “Just because they can’t rise now that doesn’t mean they’re somehow doomed.”

A few hums of from the rest of the horde. It was hard to tell whether they were hums of affirmation or disagreement.

“Name one.” someone said.

“Excuse me?”

Asked Mr. Prost.

“Name one student who couldn’t rise up now who ended up okay later in life.” Miss Madigan again.

“Or one who lived past the age of thirty five.”

The old Principal Lawrence added.

Mr. Prost let out a slight cough, probably to make a show about the cigarette smoke. He didn’t approve of smoking.

“That’s ridiculous.”

“I’ve been here as long as you, Charles. They’re right. I can’t remember one. I only remember the worst ones. Arthur Neville for example.” Ms. St-Germain said.

“Everyone uses him as an excuse!”

Arthur Neville had been a student twelve years previously. He had quickly adapted a life of crime after graduation and attempted a large scale bank robbery that made national news. They shot him down in an incredibly dramatic fashion. He had become the most spoken about student in the school’s history, surpassing everyone with a success story.

“Arthur was a nice boy.” Ms. St-Germain said with a warning sort of tone.

“He was not.”

“He was.”

“No.”

Then the real petty arguments started in. Henry tried to follow all the different threads in conversation and got lost. They all spoke over one another. Other names were thrown around as possible examples of people who had been alright after their failure at the rise up challenge.

“What about Grant? Grant Powers.”

Mr. Prost seemed to have them all stumped. Then slowly Ms. St-Germain reminded them all,

“No, he died two years ago. Liver failure. Messy.”

Mr. Prost did not know. It was a terrible way to go.

For a moment no one spoke. Then Miss Madigan said,

“Poor Henry.”

None of it had bothered Henry much until then. That familiar tinge of pity that made his stomach churn. Or maybe all this time it had been his liver giving him pain and not his stomach. Maybe he would die of liver failure too. He felt around the bottom of his stomach, wondering where exactly it was the liver was supposed to be.

“He still has one more chance. The final is today.”

Mr. Prost said, not backing down. Which to Henry, didn’t make any sense. Mr. Prost wasn’t known for his positivity, and he definitely had never spoken words of encouragement to Henry. In fact, Henry had recently failed the monthly physical exam. The one where you had to do push ups.

He had heard enough, and the cigarette smoke had stopped which meant the break was coming close to an end. It would be too great an embarrassment if they saw him now.

He took off from his hiding spot and made his way back into the courtyard. There were spatterings of groups of kids running around. A few stragglers here and there. Loners, like Henry, poking at the dirt, avoiding eye contact. The loners never came together even though they tried time and time again. It was too hard and too sad to forge friendships based on desperation alone.

Henry watched Oscar B. across the way pick his nose and stick the findings onto the school’s brick walls. He wondered how it was possible that a kid like Oscar, who everyone had silently agreed was a total freak, had managed to pass the rise up challenge preliminaries. The ones that Henry had failed so terribly.

The Dunlap twins, a pair of girls with matching long red braids paused in their skipping long enough to stare Henry down. There was a sort of silent rule that the loners didn’t belong on the section where the blacktop started. They were supposed to remain on the surrounding dirt or in their remote secret spots.

Henry tried to stare back at the Dunlap twins. But there were four eyes to keep up with and the knack the twins had for channeling pure disgust was too powerful for him to stand. Especially after the conversation he’d just heard.

It was an obvious place, yet anytime Henry retreated to the enclosed space under the slide, no one bothered him.

Henry cried some bitter tears there in the mulch. The teachers' conversation didn’t come as a surprise. He couldn’t remember a different time, a time when people didn’t speak about him the way they did. He was ‘Poor Henry’ the less fortunate child of Dennis Blinder.

His half sister Gina and her golden hair, her big blue eyes, she was built for great things. He and his father didn’t see her all too often. Gina’s mother was still alive and hated Henry, but more than anything hated Henry’s father, Dennis. Gina loved their father and Dennis loved Gina. It wasn’t fair.

Henry stared into the chrome of the slide. His dark eyes and complexion stared back at him.

“Hi mom.”

He said in a whisper to the little ghostly image in the slide. If Emerald had lived, she would have told him he could do it. She would have kicked Henry’s good for nothing daddy in the butt and told him to hit the road. To go try and get Gina's fat mom back and forget all about her and Henry.

Henry’s dirty sneakers pushed the mulch around until he hit something of a different shape. There tucked under a pile of the stuff, was a sparkly purple notebook. It was fluffy which told him that the pages were filled. Welcoming the distraction from his own misery, he greedily opened it and saw etched on the corner the signature of Elaine Chestnut. Elaine was somewhere in the clusters of the kids on the blacktop.

Elaine was a nice girl who lived on the edge. She was a little too smart and a little too strange to ever be wholly accepted. And her parents didn’t have money. Henry had seen the truck her father dropped her off in. An old Ranger that rivaled the degradation of his own father’s ancient Volvo with the duct taped mirrors.

It was wrong to read someone’s personal diary. But in that moment, Henry thought of it more like a library book. It was in a public place after all. And he wouldn’t read the whole thing. Just a few pages.

It was boring. She talked about how much she hated riding the bus on Fridays. She talked about how jealous she was of the rich kids. She drew little sketches of typical things like cats and rainbows.

She talked about how her parents liked her less now that she was older,

"They always seems sad. Like I used to be better. But I don't remember how good I was. Maybe it wasn't me. "

Henry wondered if it hurt more. To have someone love you and stop loving you. Or to have someone never love you and you just love them back forever. He'd never considered there being multiple options before.

Then, just as he was done asking and ready to stop snooping , he came to a page which was taken up entirely by a phrase scrawled in red crayon.

“Henry Blinder knows something we don’t know.”

He read the line over and over again. It sounded right to him, but what it was he knew that Elaine or any of the other kids didn’t know was a mystery. There must be something though, he felt that deep down.

The bell sounded and Henry dropped Elaine’s notebook back in the dirt, making sure to cover it just the same way she had in the flakes of mulch.

Everyone assembled on blacktop now. Teachers and staff helped hand out the lanterns to the assigned students. Most of the lanterns were the same, but each person had signed theirs and a few of them had a bigger size to accommodate their own larger height or weight.

The flying instructor dressed in her standard black jumpsuit stood next to Principal Lawrence looking stern instead of excited.

Principal Lawrence was handed a microphone which squeaked terribly when he turned it on. Miss Madigan dashed to his aide, twisting the cord around and giving the thing a few taps. No doubt getting it coated in coconut oil in the process.

Principal Lawrence gave a canned speech about the power of positive self talk and the endless possibilities the future held for them. Henry hardly made out a word of any of it. First he was disturbed by the gazes of Mr. Prost and Miss Madigan. Both their gazes were locked on Henry as though he were the only person standing there. And in a few moments, he would be.

When he managed to tear away from them, he found himself searching for Elaine Chestnut. She was on the short side, and the lanterns large gaits blocked most of the students faces.

They were all supposed to lift off and then set down in a nearby field. Everyone had seen the field with their own eyes except for Henry. A nearby farmer had agreed to let them on. Henry had wanted desperately to sneak in and see it for himself, if only to know exactly what it was they were all so excited about.

One of the other loners, Glenn Butler, told him that the farmer owned a lot of guns and had signs warning against trespassers. It wasn’t worth it.

Parents weren’t allowed at the school, only at the field. It made no difference to Henry. His father would never come. For once in his life, his father’s lack of participation was a good thing. If Dennis knew about Henry failing to rise up there was no telling what worse punishments would be in store.

It was as expected. And at the same time it wasn’t. Henry watched the kid next to him, and the kid next to that kid, start to rise. Their lanterns lifted them. The whole row in front and the whole row behind. The paper white lanterns billowed with the small flames keeping the visage of each person a secret. But all the teachers; Miss Madigan and Principal Lawrence and Mr. Prost knew that he wasn’t going anywhere. There were no illusions that of the 200 children rising up that day, Henry was not amongst them.

It was the first time he understood his parents. He understood Emerald dying on the bridge. He understood his father soaking up pity like a sponge, sucking the bitter end of sympathy from each cigarette. How Gina meant that Dennis would get more of what he wanted and how Henry meant Dennis would get less of what he wanted.

There was a lot he didn’t understand. But he knew something. Something none of them floating in the sky knew.

All he could see were the white bubbles that used to be his peers. He could see the outline of the bottoms of their shoes. Pulsing and leaving the ground. They rose slowly with the drifting wind.

Miss Madigan with her oily hands made a crude gesture in his direction. Like she was asking him to come to her. But her body language told him that’s the last thing in the world she wanted. If someone had ever truly gathered him up in their arms, he’d be up there with the rest. He understood that too.

Henry closed his eyes there looking stupid with his limp lantern. He felt himself float up. He’d be dying soon, but not any quicker than anyone else. The sky around it all unfolding was clear now. The snow fell truly, in big chunks. And Emerald smiled.