Jack
Jack Pepper lived in the Northern Californian suburb of Sunvale and attended eponymous Sunvale Jr. High School. Once a thriving agricultural community, fruit orchards had long been replaced with microchip manufacturers, strip malls and tract homes. Still, not a bad place to grow up, if he had been allowed to grow up like most kids.
Jack had a photographic memory and an IQ sixty points higher than the majority of his teachers. He could have taken college courses—probably could have taught college courses, but the school system was gravely underfunded and programs for gifted students were cut years earlier. It was just as well for Jack who didn’t really like to draw attention to himself for any reason, but he had a hard time fitting in with his peers just the same. He was treated as an intellectual pariah, an outcast even among the nerdy kids.
He tried to play it cool at the start of 8th grade but his plan quickly fell apart when Ms. Ackley’s social studies class watched The Time Machine, based on the H.G. Wells novel. After the movie was over, the students got into an animated discussion about time travel. What would they do if they could travel to the future? How far back in the past would they like to go? What major event would they try to change? Jack usually stayed out of these group discussions but having read the latest paper from the theoretical physicist Dr. Michio Kaku on the multiverse theory, he couldn’t contain himself and jumped right in.
He questioned whether the time machine in the movie had actually traveled in time, but rather, may have traversed an alternate universe existing in a different frequency. He had some other theories, of course, but that one seemed the most plausible. About twenty seconds into his dissertation, he realized two things: 1) everyone was staring at him, including his teacher; 2) there was a small handful of people in the world (think Steven Hawking) who could actually understand what he was talking about—and none of them were in the classroom.
Jack never knew his father and his mother, Emily, never spoke of him. From what he could piece together, his father was an officer in the military. He once found a picture of a man who shared similar physical attributes, wearing an army uniform with the Green Beret insignia. When asked about it, his mother snatched the picture from his hand and refused to discuss it further. Before Jack was even born, his father left them. His mother never gave him the full story but it had something to do with Emily’s mother. Jack never met his grandmother nor did his mother ever discuss her either.
Whatever happened left Emily severely depressed. When Jack was a young child, she was a loving and devoted parent but she became more sullen and withdrawn over time. She was also extremely controlling when it came to her son and she projected her own fears onto Jack which left him with several phobias. Among other issues, he had a horrific fear of heights and was a staunch germaphobe. He carried hand-sanitizer at all times.
Though Jack was small and wiry for his age, he had good hand-eye coordination and probably would have been adept at sports—had Emily allowed his participation. She was terrified he’d get hurt so she restricted him from playing kick ball, soccer, football … any sport with a ball … basically any sport.
By the time Jack entered elementary school, his mother had taken to drinking a glass or two of wine after work and on weekends to “relax.” By his first year in junior high, she drank half a bottle of vodka a day. When he awoke in the morning, he often found her passed out on the living room couch. Jack wanted desperately for her to get help but she refused it. With no one to turn to, he endured the situation as best he could.
He instead lost himself in movies, especially adventure films. He lived vicariously through the main characters, traveling to strange lands and surviving near-death experiences despite the crippling odds against him.
Jack was also a voracious reader. Of all he read and studied, one subject stood out as his favorite—Atlantis, the ancient island continent that allegedly sunk into the ocean in a single day due to a natural catastrophe.
As far back as 360 B.C., learned men like Plato had written about Atlantis, but with no real evidence of its existence, scholars throughout the ages concurred that Atlantis was a made-up place, perhaps a metaphor for something the Greeks had aspired to become, an enlightened society. Real or not and much to his mother’s chagrin, Jack was inexplicably obsessed with it.
Jack looked over his notes one last time before presenting in front of Ms. Ackley and the class. Each student was required to give a five- to ten-minute presentation on something related to Ancient Greece. A week earlier when assigned the project, Jack convinced Ms. Ackley to let him do it on Atlantis. She preferred students stick to Greece itself, but after Jack explained how he would “establish an allegorical context from which then to draw factual initiatives based on …” Ms. Ackley stopped Jack mid-plea. She saw how much it meant to him and she really couldn’t understand what he was saying anyway so she capitulated.
Jack’s PowerPoint presentation covered Plato’s description of Atlantis in his two dialogs Timeaus and Critias, how Plato’s work regarding Atlantis guided Ancient Greece in its socio-political evolution, scientific and speculative theories about its disappearance and the significance of Atlantis to our modern age. Jack considered that he risked further ostracizing by presenting something so detailed. Most of the other students were doing their presentations on subjects like Greek yogurt and toga parties. Already alienated with no real friends, Jack figured he’d have nothing to lose so why not enjoy it.
As Jack suspected, his presentation went over like a lead balloon. Some of his classmates fell asleep, others hit him with spit balls and the rest looked at him as though worms were crawling out of his ears. Yawning uncontrollably, Ms. Ackley stopped his presentation midway making the excuse they were running short on time. “Well, Jack, you certainly did your research!” she said sweetly, attempting to assuage his disappointment for cutting his presentation short.
“I could finish it later,” offered Jack.
Ms. Ackley waved off his plea. “And the idea Atlantis existed is quite romantic.”
“Romantic?” Jack was confused. “I don’t understand.”
Ms. Ackley completely redirect Jack’s presentation. “Well, yes, romantic! Imagine if you were a Greek princess back then!”
“They didn’t really call them ‘princesses,’” asserted Jack. Ms. Ackley ignored him. He had seen that glazed look in her eyes before. Ms. Ackley was an incurable romantic, notorious for straying from any topic into a discussion about love—unrequited love, lost love, enduring love, ever-lasting love …
Even though Ms. Ackley was a reasonably attractive woman in her early thirties, she was chronically single. She lived in a one-bedroom apartment with her tabby cat Mr. Whiskers. He had his own stroller and she regularly walked him around the park and talked to him like he was her child. This scared men. Her last boyfriend tolerated her eccentric behavior for a while but liked dogs better and left her a week before their one-year anniversary for a woman who bred Dalmatians.
“And what if you met a handsome, charming prince from Atlantis?” soliloquied Ms. Ackley. The girls in the class were glued to every word. The boys were clueless.
“There’s really no reference to any princes in Atlantis,” said Jack to no avail.
Ms. Ackley continued, “But your father, the king, didn’t like this Atlantis prince and started a war.”
Jack conceded a little, “Plato did refer to a war between Atlantis and Athens—”
Ms. Ackley cut him off. “Your prince is forced to choose between you, the woman he loves, and his homeland.” The girls sighed.
“Did you say how they met?” asked Jack trying his best to get involved in the story.
Ms. Ackley headed for the finish line. “He chooses you!” The girls sighed again. “He heads back to tell his father but is ambushed by the enemy and killed.” The girls in the class went wide-eyed. One shrieked, startling the boys.
Ms. Ackley’s eyes welled up. “The love of your life is dead. He died for you! And now you can never be together.” Some of the girls started crying. The boys just sat there petrified, stupefied, and had they been covered in batter, deep fried.
Ms. Ackley turned to Jack, tears streaming down her face, looking for a word of comfort, some indication this tragedy had redemption. Jack had nothing. He grabbed the box of tissues on the edge of the desk and handed it to her. “I’ll go back to my desk now.”