Chill

  Chill

  Colin Frizzell

  Orca Soundings

  Copyright © 2006 Colin Frizzell

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Frizzell, Colin, 1971-

  Chill / Colin Frizzell.

  (Orca soundings)

  ISBN 1-55143-670-1 (bound) ISBN 1-55143-507-1 (pbk.)

  I. Title. II. Series.

  PS8611.R59C45 2006 jC813’.6 C2006-903258-0

  Summary: How far will Chill and Sean go to expose a teacher’s deception?

  First published in the United States, 2006

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2006928469

  Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

  Cover design: Lynn O'Rourke

  Cover photography: Getty Images

  Orca Book Publishers Orca Book Publishers

  PO Box 5626, Station B PO Box 468

  Victoria, BC Canada Custer, WA USA

  V8R 6S4 98240-0468

  www.orcabook.com

  Printed and bound in Canada

  09 08 07 06 • 5 4 3 2 1

  In memory of my dad, Art.

  Acknowledgments

  There are too many people to thank them all by name, so I’d like to give a blanket thanks to all my friends, family and the many teachers who encouraged and supported me along the way. Especially Dad (Art), who gave me a love of storytelling; Mum (Peggy), who gave me a love of words; and my sister, Trish, for her encouragement and endless proofreading.

  Also I’d like to thank Andrew Wooldridge for taking a chance by giving me one.

  Finally, and most importantly, thanks to my wife, Jordann, for her love, encouragement and patience.

  “And these children that you spit on

  As they try to change their worlds,

  Are immune to your consultations,

  They’re quite aware

  of what they’re going through.”

  —David Bowie

  Chapter One

  Chill’s foot dragged behind him like a murder victim being taken to a shallow grave by a killer too weak to do the job, but he still stood straighter than any other kid in school.

  His presence far exceeded his wiry five-foot-nine, fifteen-year-old body. Chill’s size didn’t matter because he was fast, and the speed was made twice as powerful because no one expected it from a guy with a bum leg.

  He held his head high and no one made fun of him. Well, except for that one kid.

  It was back in grade five. He was a big guy, new to Glendale Elementary. Kids are like wolves when they arrive at a new school; they look for the weakest in the pack and try to take ’em down. This—they hope—will get them the much-needed acceptance of the pack. You can’t survive in school on your own.

  It was the first recess and the new kid, Shane or Wayne, something like that, spotted Chill. Once he saw Chill’s leg, he made his move.

  “Hey, hop-a-long,” he called out, though Chill didn’t hop. Hopping would have meant he was trying to appear normal, and Chill didn’t try to be anything but what he was, and what he was, was Chill.

  “Hop-a-long,” the kid yelled out again.

  Chill stopped. He shook his head like he’d been waiting for it. Like somehow he knew, from the moment he laid eyes on this kid, that it was going to come to this.

  He sighed and turned but didn’t say anything.

  Chill wasn’t much of a talker. He didn’t have to be. His sharp eyes and multitude of expressions could speak volumes. On the other hand, I was a talker and often spoke for Chill.

  “What do you want?” I said, sticking close to Chill’s side.

  “I’m not talking to you. I’m talking to Hoppy here,” he said, nodding at Chill.

  “I don’t think he wants to talk to you,” I told him.

  “What’s the matter?” he said. “His tongue as dead as his leg?”

  The kid laughed. He looked around, hoping others would join him. No one did. He turned back to Chill.

  “So what happened? Your leg fall asleep in class and you couldn’t wake it up?” he laughed again and looked around again—nothing.

  The lameness of the attempted jokes aside, he should have picked up on the lack of reaction from the crowd. He should have realized that no one appreciated what he was doing and that this wasn’t going to gain him any friends.

  Chill shook his head and turned to walk away.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” the kid asked. “Nowhere fast, that’s for sure,” he added.

  As Chill walked away, so did everyone else.

  The new kid was losing his audience. He grabbed Chill by the shoulder and spun him around. Chill lost his balance.

  I went to catch him, but he caught himself before I could and straightened up proudly. Chill stared at the kid with a warning glare that would have made anyone with a lick of sense back off. This kid was not good at picking up on subtleties.

  “You shouldn’t walk away when people are talking to you,” the kid threatened. “Didn’t your mom teach you that? Or did she give up teaching you anything when she saw you couldn’t even learn to walk?”

  It took a lot for Chill to lose his cool, but it was definitely going. He turned away again. This time the kid swung Chill back around with all he had, determined to take him down.

  But Chill was ready. He didn’t so much spin as pirouette, with his bad leg swinging like a club.

  Chill only meant to sweep his attacker’s legs out from under him, but the kid had stiffened his leg so he could get the full momentum in his pull. When Chill’s leg connected with the kid’s knee, it gave a sickening pop that made everyone in the yard stiffen. The kid dropped like a gummy bear from the ceiling after the saliva dries.

  Despite the pain, the kid tried to get to his feet to save face, but he could only move himself along the ground like a lame toad.

  “Who’s Hoppy now?” I yelled.

  This got a laugh from everyone—except Chill.

  When I turned to congratulate him on his victory, he’d already disappeared around the corner.

  I found Chill tucked out of sight with his sketchpad in the far doorway of the school.

  “That was cool!” I excitedly told Chill.

  “No,” he told me, coldly and firmly, looking up at me from his drawings. “It wasn’t.” He lowered his head, returning to his sketching. We never spoke of it again.

  Well, he never spoke of it again. I told anyone who’d listen. I know violence is wrong, but that kid had it coming. Well, maybe not the six weeks on crutches and the endless teasing until he finally got a transfer—but still.

  Chill got two weeks’ suspension and was on probation when he got back, but that wasn’t much of a problem. Chill never caused trouble, not real trouble, anyway.

  The story—with as much help as I could give it—went through the school and the county, and by the time we got to high school it was told with the kid getting two broken legs—both broken in three places. Nobody bugged Chill about his leg again. That is, until the new teacher came. What Chill did to that teacher would be a story to shadow the other one into obscurity.

  It was the second year and the second semester of our four-year high school sentence, and we lucked out and got art for
homeroom. I wasn’t much of an artist, but it was an easy way to start your day if you didn’t take it seriously and worry about things like color and contrast, light and shadow, lines and perspective—and I didn’t. Chill did, though, so to get through I’d just mimic him as well as I could.

  It’s all right because in art it’s not called cheating, it’s called being heavily influenced by another artist. According to Chill, all the greats did it. It’s like in film when everyone copied Tarantino after he copied the Hong Kong and Japanese directors. None of them were cheating or stealing. They were being “influenced by” filmmakers that they admired and respected. And I admired and respected Chill. (I also admired and respected Susie Jenkins’ math skills, but we’ll keep that between us.)

  The teacher, Ms. Surette, couldn’t tell that I was copying anyway. My projects looked nothing like Chill’s no matter how heavily he influenced me.

  Ms. Surette was the other reason that art was a great way to start your day.

  There are three types of teachers. First, there are the teachers who just want to do as little as they can and go home. These are the ones who give you an assignment at the beginning of class that will take you the whole class to complete. They sit and mark work from their other classes so that they will have their nights and weekends free. They’re easy teachers to have. As long as you’re quiet, you can do just about anything you want with that hour—after you get the assignment done, of course. We’ll call them type A.

  Then there’s type B. They’re the ones who end up teaching, who think themselves better than it and are bitter at everyone for having to do this job that’s so obviously beneath them. These teachers pick their favorites, who are always the students who are most easily controlled, and grind the rest down, crushing every dream you’ve ever had before the “real world” does it.

  Type Bs are the ones who sparked the stereotype “Those who can’t do, teach.” They’re not the majority, but they do the most damage, sticking with you as a little voice that cuts you down every time you dare think yourself worthy.

  Finally, type C. Ms. Surette. A teacher who loves teaching.

  A teacher who talks to you, not at you. A teacher who tells you that you can do whatever you want to if you put your mind to it. A teacher who understands that the “real world,” which we’re supposed to be frightened of, doesn’t have wedgies, swirlies, people threatening to beat you up, constant put-downs and unbearable pressure from all sides to conform.

  “If you can survive until university with just a little bit of yourself still intact, the ‘real world’ will be a much better place than the one you’re in now,” Ms. Surette said.

  Ms. Surette was big on the “staying true to yourself” thing, which is why she liked Chill so much because Chill was Chill. She also liked him because he was a heck of an artist.

  “Chill,” she said, looking at his rendition of the bowl of fruit that she’d had us painting all class, “I want you to work on something else this semester.”

  “Sure,” Chill said.

  “You haven’t heard what it is yet.”

  “That’s okay,” he said.

  This made Ms. Surette smile. She had told us that when opportunities and challenges arise, saying yes opens doors; saying no closes them.

  “Does that go for drugs too, Ms. Surette?” Pete Moss had asked. We had called him Pete since the time, for a dollar, he drank the water we rinsed our brushes in. It turned his teeth and tongue green for a week. His drugs comment got a small laugh from everyone.

  “Yes,” Ms. Surette replied, silencing Pete and the class. “The challenge and opportunity there is for you to show your willpower, your ability to think for yourself and not give in to the pressures around you. And to keep all your brain cells intact. And you should say yes to all those things.”

  “Yeah, Pete Moss, you don’t have any brain cells to spare,” I had said. The class laughed. Pete Moss showed me his iq score by holding up a middle finger in my direction.

  Ever since that day, Chill agreed to do whatever Ms. Surette asked of him, often before she could finish asking.

  “Because,” Chill said, “if she’s asking it, it’s going to be a challenge or an opportunity.”

  And in this case, it was both.

  “The school is going to be doing a mural this semester,” Ms. Surette told him. “I’d like you to design an entry, something that will inspire your fellow students. Are you interested?”

  “Yes,” Chill said.

  “You’ll be going against the seniors, but I think you’ve got a great chance if you work hard at it, and I know you will.”

  Chill humbly lowered his head while nodding thanks.

  “You should do a self-portrait,” I told him. He didn’t hear me. He’d already taken out his sketchpad and started to work.

  What he didn’t know, what neither of us knew, was that his true inspiration had yet to arrive, but when it did, it would change the face of the school in ways no one could have foreseen.

  Chapter Two

  Second period was English. Because I wanted to be a writer I should have loved English, but I didn’t. I couldn’t understand why schools say that they want kids to read more and then make us study books that are guaranteed to turn any kid off literature for good.

  They make us study the plays of a guy who’s been dead for a few hundred years, written in a language that might as well be Klingon. If we rent the movie, it’s considered cheating, which is ridiculous because plays were written to be performed and watched, not read.

  The other books we’re made to study don’t have anyone near our age in them and don’t take place in a time anywhere near our own. How can I relate to the 1930s when I’m still trying to figure out how to relate to the time I’m living in?

  Replace Shakespeare with film study, poetry with lyrics, Steinbeck with Rowling— then maybe you might keep our interest. But we all know that’s not going to be happening anytime soon.

  Sometimes you’ll get a teacher, one of those teachers like Ms. Surette, who finds a way to take the works of dead people and bring them back to life. Our English teacher was new to the school, and as Chill and I walked through the hall, nodding to the kids we hadn’t seen since last semester, I hoped the new teacher would be just such a teacher.

  “Have you heard anything about the new English teacher?” I asked Chill, who was sketching while he walked.

  “Uh-uh,” he mumbled.

  “Maybe he’ll be a teacher with a passion for the written word and pop culture,” I dreamt out loud. “The mentor I’ve been looking for,” I added.

  “Yeah, maybe,” Chill said as we turned into the class.

  We’d discover—not soon enough—that he was not going to be my mentor, but Chill’s muse.

  Chapter Three

  When we entered the room, the new teacher was nowhere in sight, just a briefcase sitting in the teacher’s chair. I thought it was a good sign that the teacher was late. Maybe it meant he was a relaxed, laid-back kind of guy; the kind who would joke around with the students and be forgiving when they were late. This was not to be the case.

  The teacher came in the door just as the bell rang. He was a big man. His shoulder-length hair covered his face as he walked with his head down. He carried a handful of books under his arm. His pale purple tweed jacket with pink elbow patches meant he was either totally out of touch or a little eccentric. I needed to see more before I could make a determination.

  He turned to face the class, revealing a gray beard that masked his face and made it obvious that his hair was colored. The orange hair color that he’d chosen to help him hang onto his youth matched his bow tie. A bow tie!

  “Crap,” I said under my breath. “That’s not good.”

  He glanced my way.

  Fortunately, after years of practice, I’d mastered a speech level that most teachers couldn’t distinguish, with any certainty, from the voices in their heads.

  Mac Webble helped in my cover-up. Mac was a li
ttle guy to begin with, but he had been truly dwarfed by the teacher when he’d followed him in. Mac was trying to find a seat when the teacher noticed him.

  The new teacher slammed his books onto the table.

  “Boy standing!” he yelled.

  Mac spotted a chair on the far side.

  “Boy standing,” the teacher repeated, picking up his books and slamming them down again.

  Mac, realizing that he was the only one standing, looked around to be sure, then looked to the teacher and pointed to himself just to be absolutely certain, hoping to be wrong—a wish rarely made when called upon by a teacher.

  “Yes, you,” the teacher said slowly, as if he thought Mac was having difficulty with the language. “Why are you late?”

  “Late?”

  “Yes, that’s what you call it when someone doesn’t arrive on time. I see I’ve got my work cut out for me if you’re any representation of the class’s abilities.”

  “I followed you in.”

  “And I was right on time, which would make you...?”

  “Late?” asked Mac.

  “Very good,” said the teacher. “Since we have made some progress today, I will let you take a seat and only put you on probation. If you’re late again, you’ll be going to the office. Now sit.”

  Mac stood for less than a second in fear and confusion.

  “Now!” the teacher yelled.

  This sent Mac stumbling over one desk before falling into another. He finally took his seat while rubbing his shin.

  “Well, class,” the teacher said, turning his back to us. He picked up a piece of chalk. “My name is...” and he sounded it out as he wrote on the board in big block letters.

  “MR. S...F...I...”

  He put extra emphasis on the I, making sure we understood that it was pronounced I, as in I hate my name. I will unleash a great wrath on any who mispronounce it. I still have nightmares over the locker it got me thrown into and the beatings I took. And then he quickly finished. “...NKTER.”

  As he finished writing Mr. Sfinkter on the board, a collective snort went up as the class tried to hold back a giggle.