They Were Dolphins, Chapter 2 part II

The students were again tasked with various painting and drawing exercises. This time, the boy was feeling properly chastised and so he participated in the activities without causing problems. One might even say he was a model student without knowing he was just a dolphin pretending to be a human.

Robert, however, seemed aloof and it was his turn to misbehave. He sat casually on the top of a desk with his feet resting on the chair. He wasn’t even pretending to wear the smock he was given. He was calling out to other students with jests and jeers about their artistic merits and abilities. At one point, he leaned over and whispered something to Mia, which the boy dolphin hadn’t heard.

Mia struck Robert so hard across the face that his glasses flew off. Robert’s face turned bright red and he gripped the side of his face where Mia had struck him. Slowly he began to wail and the whole class stopped to see what was happening. The teacher separated the two children at the back of the class and encouraged the other children to continue painting. The boy dolphin wanted to go talk to Mia to find out what Robert had said to her.

As the teacher counselled and consoled Robert who wailed and cried loudly, a student representative came into the class and made an announcement. Several other students from the fake government filed in carrying boxes of clothing. The children in the class assembled behind their desks and listened as the substitute teacher read a piece aloud from a piece of paper.

The school that the students attended (the boy dolphin included) were considered “at risk” and “disadvantaged”. The announcement never made clear what they were “at risk” of or “disadvantaged” from. The announcement did, however, state that the generosity of the state and city had provided the students with second-hand clothing that the students could choose from the boxes that had been brought in.

The substitute teacher read off a list of students’ names and surprisingly, (because the boy dolphin’s name usually came last alphabetically even though “that” name was not his “real” name Usagi), he was called first. The boy went up and rifled through one box, and beamed upon seeing a prized possession there: an orange leather jacket with epaulets and a breast pocket. He pulled it out triumphantly and put it on.

The class clapped and the next student picked an item of clothing, and so on. The boy admired his jacket which fit quite poorly actually, and it had a certain plastic smell that real leather should not have. The boy did not know all of this, of course, so he was extremely pleased. The jacket provided yet more armour for his fragile ego and body, hidden as it was in a human boy body. The dolphin felt like he was really coming into his element.

He spotted Mia across from him and noticed that tears stood out on her cheeks. He tried to get her attention to no avail. She was either ignoring him and his jacket or else she couldn’t see his gestures. He looked around and Robert was gone.

Later at recess, the boy grabbed Mia by the elbow and led her to his hiding spot behind the hedges along the back of the school buildings. He wordlessly showed her the principal’s hall pass from the day before. Sensing the gravity of the moment, she wordlessly starting burying it until it was nearly invisible under the dirt.

The boy asked about Robert and Mia shook her head. The sat cross-legged facing each other in the cramped space between the concrete bricks and foliage. The way that her dress hiked up stirred some unusual sensation in his groin. The boy told her a story of two men who were on fire, walking along the street. The two men would set fire to everything around them as they walked. The trees, the houses, the buildings, and even the cars would be ablaze as they walked past.

Mia wasn’t listening. Eventually, the boy trailed off. He wanted to speak of being a dolphin which was something he had never told anyone about. He decided not to. They climbed out of the hiding place to the taunts and jeers of one of the groups of boys. They were making fun of the two children for fraternising, for it is expressly forbidden in schoolyard rules that boys and girls should not mix.

The boy dolphin valiantly runs at the group of gibers to defend the girl’s honour. He feels emboldened by the shy Mia’s demeanour and his armour of orange pleather. He chased the other boys off and went back to Mia who brushed the dust off her skirt. He gave her a brotherly and awkward sideways hug.

They separated and the boy went to drink from the school fountain. The water tasted of mould and metal.

After school, the boy walked home by the slowest route possible. He stopped first at the library and climbed into the trash skips at the back of the building. This was a favourite pastime of some of the children and the adults disapproved of it greatly. The adult disapproval made it all the more enjoyable for the children.

The bins were particularly empty of trash this time, and playing in the bin just reminded him of how much he missed Robert. He jumped out of the bin and walked toward the bridge. He stayed on the library side of the street and climbed down the embankment to the stream bed.

The stream flowed over large rocks and pebbles that were difficult and slippery to walk on. It was no deeper than one’s ankle except for a pool on the other side of the tunnel under the street which was perhaps as deep as the boy was tall. The boy grabbed a good skipping rock, flat and small, and hunted the shallow pools for polliwogs. The boy was walking along the stream in the middle of the tunnel when he spotted a crawdad walking along the rocky bank.

The boy froze, as did the crawdad. The crawdad seemed to sense the danger and it turned to face the boy. It raised both claws in the air defiantly. The boy dropped his polliwog rock and used two hands to heft up a large rock the size of his own head. He lifted it up with great difficulty over his head. Both warriors faced each other with their arms raised and ready to battle to the death. In the wild, of course, a dolphin would not throw rocks at their prey. But the boy decided it was best to use what tools he had available to him.

The boy finally dropped the rock on top of the crawdad several feet away and delighted in the loud noise that resounded and echoed in the tunnel. He ran forward to investigate his slain opponent. The crawdad was turned into red and white mush. The boy hooted, hollered, and screamed triumphantly at his kill. After a long while of ranting and running in circles, he tired of this fun as well.

He climbed back up to the road and wandered over to the shopping centre. There was a grocery store on one side, a McDonald's, a Pizza Hut, and a beauty salon. The Pizza Hut was the boy’s main objective. The pizza hut had several arcade games like Galaxian, Space Invaders, and Asteroids. The games were magical to watch and the boy could spend hours “playing” the demos. One particularly fun game was an American football game that doubled as a table, with a television top. The X’s and O’s would move around the screen just like in real life, and it was fun to sit in a chair and spin the rolling control ball like a maniac.

There were several drawbacks, namely that the establishment served alcohol and frowned on minors being around. The establishment especially frowned on children that were unattended, as the boy dolphin often was. The boy “played” a few games without any money and then left when he felt conspicuous and noticed the waiters watching him closely.