“Tuck in your shirt,” he commanded, “and find your shoes.”
When his son was presentable, Professor Hay drove him to the police station and saw that he confessed to his crimes.
—
Grand theft, for an eight-year-old, carried a penalty of one year’s probation. At Hay’s urging, the court also stipulated that Milo wear a Dawson mole, a tiny electronic bug that nulled his telekinetic abilities. Milo made sure to wear it right between his eyes whenever his father was around. If this made Hay feel guilty, it didn’t show.
—
For the next several years, Milo focused on school, setting a high bar for his own achievement. He read and learned, took tests and won prizes, and grew older. A lot of the energy he would have used moving things with his mind, he focused through the more-traditional lens of his intellect.
This focus paid off. At the tender age of fifteen, he enrolled at King’s College on a faculty scholarship and blew the placement exams out of the water. He was permitted to major in subspace physics.
His father raised his eyebrows and said, “Hmmph!” as if Milo had impressed him. Not made him proud necessarily but impressed him.
He was not permitted to major in neuroapplications. Wearing a Dawson mole had rewritten his synapses, and those talents were gone. It was like losing a limb or a form of sight, but Milo swept the loss under his considerable mental rug and pressed on.
A faint, ancient voice way down in Milo’s soul whispered, Oh, wow, we might actually make it this time.
—
College was a turbulent time for Milo. It’s a turbulent time for most people, but Milo had to contend with being far younger than his fellow freshmen, as well as with being a faculty brat. Most of the King’s College student body were smart kids from wealthy families, whereas Milo was merely smart. Fortunately for him, his intellect won him respect, and he was still somewhat legendary for stealing the Froosian Goose.
He faced the same challenges that bedevil every adolescent schoolboy. He struggled to be cool and handsome and to not go touching his penis every five minutes. There were girls at King’s College, but not the girly kind he knew from middle school. College girls terrified him.
College girls terrify me! he appealed to his older, wiser self, a self he was getting to know and depend on.
His wiser self was no help with the college girls. The voices were afraid of them, too.
His fortunes became more interesting the day he tried to show off by challenging Professor Basmodo Ngatu in Literature 232, the Poetry of Colonial Resistance.
Professor Ngatu, a thin black man with a ponderous, imperial head, was not a lecturer. He was a discusser and a question-asker.
“Why,” Ngatu asked one day, pacing before the chalkboard, “do you suppose Zachary Heridia wrote his attack on the oxygen cartel in verse rather than in an epistolary form? Was he trying to fly under the radar by having his attack appear where allies of the cartel were unlikely to stumble on it?”
Most students peered into their books, while their fish levitated slightly above their left shoulders, recording notes.
It was dangerous to make eye contact with Ngatu. But Milo did.
“Mr. Hay?”
“Sir, I wonder if Heridia’s choice of form was more of an artistic decision. What if he wrote in verse and published in a literary forum not as a rhetorical tactic but simply because it was more beautiful?”
Ngatu strode up into the gallery, his own gold-plated fish swooping behind him, and peered down at Milo over antique glasses.
“?‘The Suffocation of Emeline K,’?” said Ngatu, “was written three days after the oxygen embargo against the Ganymede terraformers and published a week after that. Four thousand people died in that embargo. Six hundred were shipped downplanet to the Europa prison islands. But you suggest that Heridia, whose own sister died in the Jovian monoxide ‘accident,’ was more concerned with art than with raising consciousness?”
The other students had their heads out of their books now.
Milo shook his head. “That’s a false choice,” he answered. “Art can encompass both social responsibility and questions of beauty. ‘Themself are one,’ to quote Emily Dickinson. And I think that’s where Heridia was, at this decision point. He realized he could make the most of his message by making it beautiful and by presenting it to an audience who would appreciate that irony and be grieved by it.”
“Grieved?” asked Ngatu, eyes narrowing. “You believe this writer chose to elicit an emotional response rather—”
“People are complicated,” someone interjected.
All heads turned. The speaker was a female student, Ally Shepard.
“Miss Shepard?” asked Ngatu.
Ally Shepard shrugged. “Heridia might have written in verse for more than one reason. I think that’s where…he…was going.”
She waved her hand in Milo’s direction. A wonderful hand! Ally Shepard was like an island girl, imported from the tropics. She fit into her King’s College uniform like so many sleeping kittens. There was no place on her body that Milo didn’t imagine his hands, petting. Indeed, the wide majority of King’s College males and a number of females shared these imaginings. Ally Shepard was both president and premier talent of the Hasty Pudding Club, the vaunted campus theater organization. She was perhaps the closest thing King’s College had to a celebrity.
A brainy celebrity at that.
“It’s dangerous,” Ally was saying, “applying hindsight to something as complex as why someone wrote a poem, because the temptation is to try and make it make sense. We can apply reason, but what we can’t do is apply the storms and variations that govern a human mind moment to moment.”
She looked Milo’s way and winked.
“I would say,” said Ngatu, descending again to his chalkboard, “that your point bears consideration. So let’s hear about that. How did the artist affect the political chess player within the same mind, and vice versa?”
Milo barely listened. His entire universe was nailed to Ally Shepard—he didn’t dare look. Hard as he tried to be cool, to be more than the sum of fifteen years, he could only sit there blushing, with a vacant look in his eyes and growing discomfort in his pants.
—
In the week that followed, Milo suffered a sort of identity crisis.
Was he a cute little phenomenon, like an ornament the freshman class wore with quiet amusement? Or had he made his age immaterial? Was he, in fact, a brooding future Lord Byron? He imagined himself being photographed in black and white or filmed without his knowledge.
Soon enough, he would know which of these was his true self. Any day, the intramural clubs would issue their fall invitations, and that would tell all. At King’s College, future greatness was invited into clubs; mediocrity and cuteness were not.